The grand tomb of Scipio Barbatus, built on a monumental scale, was used for the remains of about 30 descendants over 150 years, including some of Rome’s most celebrated military leaders. Surviving epitaphs commemorate famous achievements and those who died young or failed to attain high office. One inscription defensively explains that a 20-year-old was denied political responsibilities only because of his age. Inscriptions were sometimes overblown: Barbatus’s son claimed to have “captured Corsica and the city of Aleria, and in gratitude dedicated a temple to the Gods of Storms” (169), an overstated claim.

The tomb likely housed memorials to Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, a great-grandson of Barbatus who secured Hannibal’s final defeat at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, aided ironically by Hannibal’s elephants trampling their own forces. Other probable occupants included Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, who defeated King Antiochus of Syria in 190 BCE; Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispallus, consul in 176 BCE; and Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, who destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, selling most survivors into enslavement. These surnames—Africanus, Asiaticus, Hispallus—reflect Rome’s expanding geographical reach.

The Scipios also championed Rome’s literary revolution, symbolized by a statue of the poet Quintus Ennius displayed on their tomb’s façade. Roman literature emerged in the mid-third century BCE through contact with Greek culture. In 240 BCE, Livius Andronicus staged the first Latin tragedy, adapted from Greek, and translated Homer’s Odyssey. Fabius Pictor wrote Rome’s first history in Greek. The surviving comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus and Publius Terentius Afer are Romanized versions of Greek predecessors, featuring Roman elements like togas and public baths mixed with Athenian settings.

Scipio Africanus sponsored the poet Ennius, while Scipio Aemilianus had close ties to the playwright Terence and flaunted his literary interests in both Latin and Greek. The historian Polybius witnessed the General Aemilianus quoting Homer’s Iliad as Carthage burned at his own orders, reflecting that Rome might suffer the same fate. Polybius, a Greek hostage-turned-observer would become the first to systematically examine how and why Rome conquered the Mediterranean world so rapidly.

From Pyrrhus’s invasion of Italy in 280 BCE—the first overseas enemy Rome faced, whose costly victories gave rise to the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” (174)—to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE, Rome engaged in nearly continuous warfare. The First Punic War (264-241 BCE) ended with Sicily under Roman control, followed by Sardinia and Corsica. The Second Punic War (218-201 BCE) brought Hannibal’s invasion and his victory at Cannae in 216 BCE, where estimates suggest 40,000-70,000 Romans died in a single afternoon. The conflict spread to Spain and Greece, ending with Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeating King Perseus of Macedon in 168 BCE. Rome also fought Gauls in northern Italy and crushed Antiochus the Great in 190 BCE.

This warfare demanded enormous resources, with 10-25% of adult males serving annually, unprecedented for any preindustrial state. The human cost was staggering, though exact figures remain uncertain. Victory brought vast wealth in bullion, enslaved people, and commercial opportunities. By 167 BCE, the treasury overflowed sufficiently to suspend direct taxation on citizens.

Beard argues that the turning point at Cannae illustrates Rome’s resilience, not its defeat. While Livy imagined Hannibal’s officer Maharbal complaining that his general knew “how to win a victory… [but not] how to exploit it” (181), the truth was more complex. Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator (“the Delayer”) advocated guerrilla tactics and a scorched-earth policy, while Scipio Africanus pursued more aggressive engagement. Rome’s ability to absorb massive casualties and continue fighting, thanks to vast citizen and allied manpower reserves, ultimately proved decisive. After Cannae, financial crisis forced Rome to sharply devalue coinage and require wealthy private citizens to fund the fleet directly.

Polybius, detained in Rome after 168 BCE as one of 1,000 Greek hostages, became close to Aemilianus and analyzed Roman politics from a unique insider-outsider perspective. He characterized the Roman system as a “mixed constitution” combining monarchical (consuls), aristocratic (senate), and democratic (people) elements through checks and balances. He observed how elite funerals, with family members wearing ancestor masks, inspired emulation in the young.

While the wealthy dominated politics, the popular vote remained crucial. The Syrian king Antiochus IV (Epiphanes), who lived in Rome as a hostage, adopted Roman-style canvassing when he returned home, shaking hands and asking for votes in the marketplace, behavior that baffled his subjects. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica lost an election after joking about a farmer’s calloused hands, demonstrating that the poor could punish aristocratic contempt.

Roman expansion was less a master plan than an ad hoc response to a violent eastern Mediterranean world of warring states. Local powers like the people of Abdera sent lobbyists to Rome seeking support against King Kotys, as recorded in an inscription from Teos describing daily house calls on senators. Rome imposed its will through varied means—indemnities, taxation, hostage-taking, military presence—creating an “empire of obedience” (197) rather than systematic annexation. The concepts of imperium (power to issue orders) and provincia (an assigned responsibility, not a territory) reflected this approach. When the Roman envoy Gaius Popilius Laenas drew a circle in the dust around Antiochus Epiphanes to demand an immediate answer about withdrawing from Egypt, he embodied this style of power.

The empire created massive population movements. Enslaved people poured into Italy at an estimated 8,000 per year in the early second century BCE. Romans traveled throughout the Mediterranean as soldiers, traders, and adventurers. The architect Decimus Cossutius worked in Athens. A delegation from Spain represented over 4,000 sons of Roman soldiers and Spanish women who, being legally stateless, were settled at Carteia in a colony, an improvised status the Romans devised for them. More than half of adult male Roman citizens would have experienced military service abroad.

Triumphal processions exposed Romans to foreign lands through elaborate paintings, models of conquered cities, exotic animals, and defeated kings in national dress. Aemilius Paullus’s triumph in 167 BCE required three days to display the loot, including 250 truckloads of art and enough silver that 3,000 men carried it in 750 vessels.

Plautus’s comedies challenged audiences to see themselves through outsiders’ eyes. His self-deprecating claim to have deliberately roughened Greek originals forced Romans to imagine how they might appear to Greeks. This cultural encounter helped create the image of the “old-fashioned Roman,” (203) championed by Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato “the Elder”), who attacked Greek influence as corrupting despite being well-versed in Greek rhetoric himself.

The arrival of the monument of the Great Mother goddess Cybele from Asia Minor in 204 BCE encapsulated these paradoxes. The Great Mother was the patron goddess of Troy, Rome’s mythic predecessor, and a Roman oracular source recommended she be absorbed into Rome’s pantheon of gods. Rome welcomed the goddess as part of their own heritage and “the best man in the state” (207) Scipio received her image. This was relayed by women to the city and housed in Victory’s shrine until her temple—Rome’s first known concrete building—was completed. The goddess arrived, however, with conspicuously “un-roman” priests, and was revealed to be a black meteorite, not a conventional marble statue in Classical style, posing uncomfortable questions about where the boundaries of Roman-ness truly lay.