Scipio Æmilianus, PUBLIUS CORNELIUS, surnamed AFRICANUS MINOR, born 185 B.C., was a younger son of that Lucius Æmilius Paulus who conquered Macedon, but was adopted by his kinsman, Publius Scipio, son of the great Scipio Africanus. He accompanied his father on his expedition against Macedon, and fought by his side at Pydna (168). In Greece he made the acquaintance of Polybius the historian, who afterwards became one of his most valued friends. In 151 he went to Spain as military tribune under the consul Lucius Lucullus, and two years later began the third and last Punic war, which mainly consisted in the siege of Carthage. Scipio still held the subordinate position of military tribune; but the incapacity of the consuls, M. Manilius and L. Calpurnius Piso, (149-148), and the brilliant manner in which he rectified their blunders, drew all eyes to him. The favourite both of the Roman army and the Roman people, Scipio was at length in 147, when only a candidate for the ædileship, elected consul by an extraordinary decree of the Comitia, and invested with supreme command. Even the aged Cato, who was not liberal with his praise, marked his opinion of the relative worth of the young Scipio and his comrades by quoting the Homeric line, 'He only is a living man; the rest are gliding shades.' The story of the siege of Carthage, the despairing heroism of its inhabitants, the determined resolution, the sleepless vigilance, the incessant labours of Scipio belong to history. The city was finally taken by storm in the spring of 146; and by the orders of the senate it was levelled to the ground, and the ploughshare driven over its site. Scipio, a man of noble and refined soul, steeped from his youth up in the culture of Greece, obeyed the savage command with sorrow, even with horror. As he gazed on the ruin he had wrought, the thought flashed across his mind that some day Rome too might perish, and the words of the Iliad rose to his lips: 'The day shall come when sacred Troy shall perish, and Priam and his people shall be slain.'
Scipio, though probably the most accomplished Roman gentleman of his age, was rigorous in his observance of the antique Roman virtues; and when holding the office of censor in 142 he made fruitless efforts to follow in the footsteps of Cato. In 139 he was accused on the charge of majestas by the tribune Tiberius Claudius Asellus, but was acquitted, and soon after was sent to Egypt and Asia on a special embassy. Meanwhile affairs had gone badly in Spain. Viriathus, the Lusitanian patriot, had again and again inflicted the most disgraceful defeats on the Roman armies, and his example had roused the hopes of the Celtiberian tribes, who also rushed to war against the common foe. The contest continued with varying success; but the interest centres in the city of Numantia, whose inhabitants displayed amazing courage in the struggle with Rome. For long it seemed as if the Numantines were invincible—one consul after another finding their subjugation too hard a task; but at length in 134 Scipio, re-elected consul, went to Spain, and after a siege of eight months forced the gaunt and famished citizens to surrender, and utterly destroyed their homes. He then returned to Rome, where he took a prominent part in political affairs as one of the leaders of the aristocratic party, and, though one of the more moderate, his popularity with the populace greatly declined. Although a brother-in-law of Tiberius Gracchus, whose sister Sempronia he had married, he disclaimed any sympathy with his political aims; and when he heard of the murder of his kinsman quoted his favourite Homer: 'So perish all who do the like again.' The Latins, whose lands were being seized by the commissioners in their unwise haste to carry out to the full the Sempronian law, appealed to Scipio for protection, and he succeeded (129) in getting the jurisdiction suspended until the consuls should determine what were domain lands and what private property. But his action caused the most furious indignation among the party of reform, and shortly after Scipio was found dead in his bed, doubtless mur- dered by some unscrupulous member of the Gracchan party. Scipio was neither a rigid aristocrat nor a flatterer of the people. Inferior in splendour of genius to his adoptive grandfather, he surpassed him in purity of character, in simplicity of patriotism, and in liberality of culture. 'The history of Rome,' says Mommsen, 'presents various men of greater genius than Scipio Æmilianus, but none equalling him in moral purity, in the utter absence of political selfishness, in generous love of his country, and none, perhaps, to whom destiny has assigned a more tragic part. . . . It was his lot to fight for his country on many a battlefield and to return home uninjured, that he might perish there by the hand of an assassin; but in his quiet chamber he no less died for Rome than if he had fallen beneath the walls of Carthage.'