When asked who have been the greatest military leaders in Western history, most people would say Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon. Not many would mention Scipio Africanus (235-183 B.C.), who defeated Hannibal at Zama (in modern-day Tunisia) and eventually conquered the Mediterranean world, establishing Rome’s worldwide hegemony. Dexter Hoyos’s new biography, Scipio Africanus: The First Imperator, recounts the story told by Livy of Scipio asking Hannibal whom he thought the greatest of military leaders.

Hannibal names Alexander as the greatest, Pyrrhus the next greatest and himself as the third. Scipio laughs, and asks: “So what would you say if you had defeated me?” Hannibal urbanely replies, “That I was ahead of Alexander and Pyrrhus and all the other commanders.”

In the anecdote, “Scipio is impressed by the Carthaginian’s ready response and delighted by the implicit praise.”

The military historian B.H. Liddell Hart gave his biography Scipio Africanus (1926) the subtitle Greater than Napoleon. For Liddell Hart, Scipio may “be termed the founder of Roman civilization.” At his death “Rome was the unchallenged master of the whole Mediterranean world, without a single possible rival on the horizon. This period saw by far the greatest expansion in the whole of Roman history, and it was made possible by him.”

Liddell Hart examines Scipio’s performance on the various aspects of military leadership, including as a tactician, a strategist, a logistical strategist, and a diplomat. He compares him to Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. Unlike Alexander, Scipio secured his victories, whereas Alexander’s expired upon his death. Unlike Caesar, Scipio fought chiefly against barbarians and trained generals, never against fellow Romans. And unlike Napoleon, Scipio’s military career did not end in defeat—in fact, he was never defeated. Liddell Hart is unstinting in his praise, writing that “Scipio showed an understanding of war in its three spheres—mental, moral, and physical, and of their interplay, such as is just dawning on the most progressive politico-military thought of to-day.”

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Hoyos, a historian recently retired from the University of Sydney in Australia, on the other hand, is stinting. On the first page of his preface he informs us that “Scipio’s career and fortunes were stamped with paradox.” The first such paradox is that, after his successful military life, “he found it hard to achieve the eminent role in the state that admirers expected and critics feared.” Later Hoyos tells us that Scipio is not “recorded as interested in philosophy,” whereas Liddell Hart reports that “Scipio’s influence on social history rests on his love for and introduction of Greek literature and philosophy.” Whom are we to believe?

The two main sources of information about Scipio Africanus are the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200-118 B.C.) and the Roman historian Livy (59/64 B.C.-A.D. 17). Another ancient Greek, Appian, supplies some rather shakier information, as does the Roman Cassius Dio. Hoyos is hard on all these sources, not least on Livy. Liddell Hart is more confident of Polybius, of whom he notes that “he had the family archives of the Scipios at his disposal for research, and he had been over the actual battlefields while many of the combatants were still alive.” What’s more, “being a Greek, his views are less suspect than those of Livy of being coloured by Roman patriotic bias, while modern historical criticism is unanimous in its tribute alike to his impartiality, his thoroughness of research, and the soundness of his critical insight.”

Still, one is impressed, as so often in classical biography, with how much one cannot know, owing to, among other things, writing that has not survived. Hoyos almost specializes in reporting on what cannot be reported: “What had become of the Carthaginian cavalry cannot be known.” “Polybius’ account of the aftermath of Ilipa no longer exists.” Plutarch’s life of Scipio did not survive. “The Spaniards were encamped on a slope of a narrow valley we cannot identify.” “Livy says…the king [Antiochus] had a bond of great friendship with the Scipio family. When that bond was formed it would be interesting to know.” “The details of what happened are not easy to work out.” “[N]othing survives of the speech itself.” “The date and details are thoroughly disputed.” And so it goes—or, rather, often doesn’t go.

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What we do indisputably know about Scipio is his precocity. Publius Cornelius Scipio came of an aristocratic family with a long history of service to Rome. When his father, also Publius Cornelius Scipio, and his uncle Gnaeus went off to fight Hannibal’s troops in Spain, they took the 17-year-old Scipio along, assigning him to a cavalry unit. There, when Scipio saw his father in grave danger, he rode over to rescue him. (Not long after his father and uncle would both die in Spain.) At only 22, Scipio put himself forward for the office of aedile—one of the four magistrates in Rome responsible for maintaining city buildings as well as funding and hosting public festivals. When objections to his youth were made, he is said to have responded, “If the citizens in general are desirous of appointing me aedile, I am old enough.”

Scipio also subtly cultivated an image of himself as born of the gods. The story was circulated that his true father was not a man but a snake. (A similar story was circulated about Alexander the Great.) Although Scipio never told the story himself, neither did he deny it. He also spent an inordinate amount of time “communing,” as Hoyos puts it, “with Jupiter in the god’s Capitoline temple before making important decisions,” thereby giving off the notion that he had a special relation with the god. In doing so, as Polybius wrote, Scipio “strengthened the confidence of men under his command and their readiness to face dangerous enterprises by instilling into them the faith that his plans were divinely inspired.”

At the early age of 24, Scipio was given command of the Roman army in Spain. At the time, Spain was largely under the control of the army of Hasdrubal, brother of Hannibal. A year later, Scipio engaged the troops of Hasdrubal in the city of what was then known as New Carthage (now Cartagena). Before doing so, Scipio carefully trained his own troops. Addressing his men before battle, along with setting out his subtle plan of attack by land and sea, he told them that Neptune had appeared to him in a dream, promising to give the Romans aid. “This shrewd combination of accurate calculation with the promise of gold coins and the assurance of the help of Providence,” Polybius writes, “created great enthusiasm among the young soldiers and raised their spirits.” They were superbly trained, too. Hoyos notes that Scipio “trained his troops to levels of skill in manoeuvre and coordination not seen before in Roman warfare and not renewed for generations.”

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In Livy’s description of Scipio, it was “his long hair that lent him grace; his whole aspect and bearing, which owed nothing to studied elegance of dress or toilet, were truly virile and soldierly, and he was just of the age when his physical powers were at their height, seeming to be fuller and brighter by a sort of flowering, after his illness, of his youthful bloom.” Livy describes Hannibal, who was twelve years older than Scipio, as seen by his troops as resembling his father Hamilcar “in his youth given back to them; the same bright look, the same fire in his eye, the same trick of countenance and features.” Hannibal, in defeat, would take his own life after the end of the second Punic War, dying the same year as Scipio.

Some historians prefer their heroic figures neat, others, like Hoyos, add qualifications that detract from their heroism. More than once he refers to Scipio’s “pride and self-confidence, verging on arrogance”; “self-confidence—not far off arrogance”; and “[s]elf-confidence could become [in him] open arrogance.” Elsewhere he brings up Scipio’s “good luck,” noting that “good luck, felicitas, was (as Cicero would later stress) an essential element in a great general’s formula for success. Its reward at [the battle of] Ilipa to Scipio and Rome was total: Carthage on that day lost Spain.”

Dexter Hoyos is not alone in denigrating Scipio. Marcus Porcius Cato, in his day a famous orator and author, was a consistent critic. Liddell Hart cites the proverb “Ingratitude towards their great men is the mark of strong peoples.” Cato was, in Hoyos’s words, “firmly traditionalist—which meant critical and even suspicious of foreign (especially Greek) tastes and those attracted to them.” Cato would later go on to accuse Scipio of corruption, of too lavishly conferring rewards on his troops, of receiving bribes, and more. Perhaps above all, he contemned Scipio for his popularity.

That popularity was immense. Upon his return from Africa, Scipio was given a triumph, a parade in his honor along with public games and festivals in which all of Rome joined in. He now took up the cognomen “Africanus.” He would eventually be appointed princeps senatus, or primus inter pares, first among equals, at only 34 years old.

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Scipio did not have a good run in peacetime. He was elected consul at the early age of 30, and held other high offices, but, as Livy would write, in peace “no scope was offered to his talents.” His military services no longer required, he was open to attack by his enemies, not least among them that “persistent hater,” in Hoyos’s phrase, Marcus Porcius Cato. The attack initially came through, or on, Scipio’s younger brother, Lucius. A soldier, too, he had won some battles in Asian campaigns, and wished, in the manner of his brother, to take on the cognomen “Asiagenes.” Back in Rome he was accused by Cato & Co. of embezzling booty won in treaty with King Antiochus of the Seleucid Empire. When Lucius brought his account book to the Roman Senate, Scipio was so outraged by the charge that he tore the book up and departed. Later, similar financial aspersions of stealing funds were cast upon Scipio, though he was never brought to trial. One has to imagine after World War II if Dwight Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur were charged with similar crimes. Unthinkable.

And so Scipio Africanus, the hero of his country, found it. Supreme on the battlefield, he returned home from his many wars to calumny and disappointment generally. He departed Rome for his country home in Liternum, where he lived out his days, dying at age 52. He chose not to be buried in Rome. Not easy sometimes for heroes to find happy endings to their lives.