Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage

1

Fabius Petronius Secundus strode purposefully down the Sacred Way through the old Forum of Rome, the Capitoline temple behind him and the aristocratic houses on the slope of the Palatine Hill to his right. He was carrying a bundle containing the bronze greaves that his master Scipio Aemilianus had forgotten to take that morning to the Gladiator School, where the old centurion Petraeus was due shortly to supervise training for the young men who would be appointed as military tribunes later that year. Scipio was the oldest of the pupils at the school, almost eighteen now and in charge of the others while the centurion was absent, so it would be double the humiliation, and more than double the punishment, if the centurion found that he was missing any of his equipment.

But Fabius knew the old centurion’s movements exactly. Every morning with military precision he spent half an hour in the baths, an amusing indulgence for a hoary old soldier, and Fabius had seen him enter his favourite bathhouse behind the Temple of Castor and Pollux only a few minutes before. It was not the first time that Fabius had saved Scipio’s skin, and Fabius knew the value of becoming indispensable. But his feelings towards Scipio were those of a friend rather than a servant: in future he might be destined to be a legionary while Scipio became a general, but they had first met on equal terms on the streets of Rome when Scipio had wanted to shed his aristocratic grandeur for a night and run with the gangs, and that was how it stayed between them, even though convention dictated that in public the one must be master and the other a servant.

An official with the rod of a lictor was waving an olive branch to signal a procession and stopped him as he was about to cross the road. Fabius stood behind the crowd of onlookers and glanced up and down to see if there was a way across, but then thought better of it. If it was a religious procession the lictors would chase him down and beat him for it, and he could not afford a transgression that might jeopardize his position in the Scipio household. His friendship with Scipio Aemilianus after Fabius had saved him from being beaten up that night had been the big break of his life, the chance to escape the slums of the Tiber bank and honour his father’s memory. He remembered the last time he had seen his father in full armour, near this very spot, marching in triumph after the first Celtiberian War, a centurion of the first legion resplendent in his corona civica and the silver arm bands he had been awarded for valour. But that had been followed by years of peace, and when the legions were called up again he had been too old, too dissipated by his weakness for wine, and after that the hard times had only got worse. Fabius knew that his father’s name was one reason why Scipio’s father Aemilius Paullus had accepted him into his household as a servant, and had put his name forward for the first legion when he came of age. Had Aemilius Paullus and Scipio’s adoptive grandfather, the great Scipio Africanus, been given the power by the Senate, then Rome would not have let his father down; they would have ensured that experienced soldiers remained in the ranks and were not thrown back into civilian life where their skills were wasted and they could never settle down.

Fabius peered over the heads of the people to see what was passing. It was the twelve Vestal Virgins, garlanded in laurel and wearing white, followed by a group of girls who served as their retainers, spreading incense and flower petals over the bystanders. Among the retainers he spotted Julia, her flaxen hair visible above the others. She should have been with him today, secretly joining the boys to study battle tactics while the old centurion was out. It was Fabius’ job to escort her into the academy and then to spirit her out again by a back entrance as soon as they heard the clunk of the centurion’s staff in the corridor. Julia’s greatest dread was that she would be forced to spend so much time with the Vestals that she would become one herself, but to have missed today’s procession would have been to upset the tolerance her mother showed towards the time she spent with the young men in the academy, which was the one thing that made life as an aristocratic girl in Rome with all of its conventions and restrictions tolerable for her.

Julia saw him, flashed a smile, and he waved. Once, months before, she had come to him in the servants’ quarters of Scipio’s house and had stroked his hair, admiring its auburn curls. He had been momentarily taken aback, his heart pounding, and had told her that his hair colour came from his mother, the daughter of a Celtic chieftain imprisoned in the Tullianum dungeon under the Capitoline Hill and guarded by Fabius’ father. He had sensed Julia’s breathing quicken, excited perhaps by the exotic, by a boy who was not from her own social class and not even fully Roman, who opened out the possibilities of the world for her. But he had come to his senses and had moved out of her reach. It was not as if he were innocent of the pleasures of women; on occasion he had spent the few asses that he made on the prostibulae in the bathhouse, and he had his admirers among the girls of his own neighbourhood. But he knew there could be no hope with Julia. As a servant boy, little better than a slave, he would be whipped out of the house if they were found out, or worse. And, above all, he had known that Scipio was in love with Julia, a love that had blossomed secretly in the months that followed after Julia had become aware of his feelings, despite her own betrothal since childhood to Scipio’s distant cousin Metellus. If Fabius lost the patronage of Scipio he would never rise above the streets again. But it was Scipio’s friendship that mattered most: a friendship that had enriched his life, that had introduced him to Polybius and a world of books and knowledge that had lit his imagination and made his dream the same dream as Scipio’s, to see a world his father had seen as a soldier that he yearned to explore himself.

The procession passed, and Fabius hurried over the road towards the Gladiator School, making his way through the warren of alleyways and wooden houses until he came to the two-storey building that surrounded the practice arena. He pushed past the crippled old soldiers begging at the entranceway, past the mound of sand that was used to mop up the blood, and then the stable where they kept Hannibal, the gnarled old war elephant who was the last survivor of his namesake’s march over the Alps almost fifty years before — the final Carthaginian prisoner left alive in Rome. Fabius ran along a dark passageway and up the stairway to the closed door, careful not to brush against the sputtering tallow candles that lined the walls. Officially, the academy was a private school for the instruction of sons of senators in philosophy and history, staffed by professors recruited from the hundreds of Greek captives taken to Rome since the war with Macedonia had begun. Unofficially, it was a training school established by the elder Scipio before he died to ensure that the next generation of Roman war leaders were more skilled than the last, and better able to hold their own against the agitations of the Senate. It was this last fact that made the elder Scipio keep the academy as private as possible, away from the eyes of those who were suspicious of anything he did. In theory, the old centurion Petraeus was there only to instruct the boys in swordplay, but for two mornings of the week behind closed doors they were allowed to simulate the great battles of the past, battles that the centurion or other veterans brought in for the purpose would mastermind for them based on their own experience of tactics and combat.

He pushed the door open and crept inside, shutting it quietly behind him. The room was large, windowless where it faced the street outside but with an open gallery on the other side overlooking the arena in the courtyard below. Two slaves stood in attendance against the back wall, holding trays with fruit and water pitchers, beside an open passageway coming up from the courtyard where the old centurion would make his entrance. In the centre of the room was a large table, some three arms’ breadths in length, covered with the diorama of a battlefield; the terrain was represented by sand and stones and tufts of grass, and the opposing armies by coloured wooden blocks arranged in rows. Fabius knew exactly which battle was being represented. When Polybius had taught him Greek he had read him a passage on the battle from the history of the war against Hannibal that Polybius had been writing ever since he had arrived from Greece as a willing captive who had always been a great admirer of Rome. And the old centurion had told Fabius about it, an eyewitness who had fought there beside the elder Scipio himself. Fabius had gone to the tavern one evening with him and had spent hours drinking wine and listening to the stories. It was the Battle of Zama, the final confrontation with the Carthaginians in North Africa that had forced Hannibal to surrender and the city of Carthage to lay itself at Scipio’s mercy, almost thirty-five years ago now.

The table was lit by four candles at each corner, and by an open skylight in the roof. In the gloom Fabius could make out a dozen or so figures standing back in the shadows, including the bearded figure of Polybius, taller than the rest and some fifteen years older, attending today as their professor in order to better his understanding of Roman tactics for a special volume in the Histories that he was writing.

Scipio was leaning forward with his hands on the table, staring intently. Fabius quietly passed him the bronze greaves he had been carrying, and Scipio put them on, deftly tying them behind his legs and nodding acknowledgement to Fabius before looking at the table again, concentrating. Fabius knew the protocol. They had finished reconstructing the actual battle, and now were entering the realm of speculation. Each one in turn would come up to the table and alter a series of variables, and the next would suggest possible outcomes. It was a game of tactics and strategy to show how easily the course of history could have been altered. Scipio as leader of the group was the last player, and Polybius as the previous player had set him the challenge.

‘You’ve taken away the Celtiberians,’ Scipio muttered.

‘They’re mercenaries, remember?’ Polybius replied. ‘Almost the entire Carthaginian army is mercenary. I’ve imagined that on the eve of battle they’ve demanded their pay, and Carthage has no gold left. So they’ve melted away into the night.’

Another voice piped in. ‘Have you heard the rumour that the Carthaginians have revived the Sacred Band? An elite unit made up entirely of Carthaginian noblemen. They say it’s been resurrected in secret, for the last defence of Carthage, should we attack again.’

Scipio looked up. ‘My friend the playwright Terence told me that too. He was brought up in Carthage, so should know. But it’s irrelevant to the game. At Zama it’s the year 551 ab urbe condita, and the Sacred Band was annihilated years before.’ He turned back to the diorama. ‘So, removing the Celtiberians makes Roman victory even more assured.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Polybius replied. ‘Look at your food supplies.’

Scipio glanced at a cluster of coloured counters behind the Roman lines, and grunted. ‘You’ve depleted it by three quarters. What happened?’

‘In the lead-up to the battle the Romans ravaged the land, taking all of the crops at once instead of foraging carefully with a view to a long campaign. For three weeks before the battle the legionaries have lived on half-rations.’

‘So, morale plummets. And physical ability. An army lives on its stomach.’

‘And I’ve made another change, the third one I’m allowed. Scipio Africanus, your grandfather, has told the legionaries that there will be no looting in Carthage if they take the city. All of the treasures stolen by the Carthaginians from the Greeks in Sicily will be returned.’

‘Even worse,’ Scipio muttered. ‘No food, no loot.’

‘But there is one saving factor,’ Polybius said.

‘What’s that?’

Polybius came forward out of the shadows. ‘Another change: my fourth and final one. Five years before, Scipio Africanus has been allowed by the Senate to create a professional army. He has set up an academy for officers, the first ever in Rome, in the old Gladiator School, identical to the academy here today. As a result, when the legionaries go to war they have the pride and solidarity of a professional army. They fight for one another, for their honour, and not for loot. And the officers have simulated past battles just as we are doing, they’re always one step ahead of the enemy. So they win the battle, as we would.’

‘And then they go on to destroy Carthage,’ Scipio said, grinning at Polybius. ‘Without the interference of the Senate.’

Polybius cocked an eye at him. ‘So what do you do, then? You’ve won the battle, and the campaign. But have you won the war? When are wars ever over? Do you return to Rome for your triumph and rest on your laurels, or do you capitalize on your victory and seek out the next threat to Rome, the next region ripe for conquest?’

‘It would depend on the will of the Senate and the people of Rome,’ one of the others said.

‘And on who was consul,’ another added. ‘Consuls are in office for only one year, and if the next consuls see little in it for themselves they may order the legions to return to Rome.’

Scipio pursed his lips. ‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘The constitution of Rome puts a lid on any attempt at a wider strategy.’

‘Constitutions are made by men, not gods,’ a figure with a deeper voice said. He stepped up beside Polybius, and Fabius saw that it was Metellus, a man closer in age to Polybius. He was already a serving tribune, at home on leave from the Macedonian war to recover from wounds; he already bore the scars of an eagle’s talons from his youth, where a hunting bird had missed his wrist and landed on his face. ‘Rome has already changed her constitution once, when she got rid of the kings and created the Republic,’ he said. ‘She could do it again.’

‘Dangerous words, Metellus,’ Polybius said. ‘Words that smack of dictatorship and empire.’

‘If that’s what we need to keep Rome strong, then so be it.’

Polybius leaned his hands on the table, looking at the diorama pensively. ‘It will be up to those of you here, the next generation of war leaders, to navigate the best course for Rome. All I would say is this. The course of history is not a matter of chance, nor a game in which we are pieces like these wooden blocks, moved about on a whim by the gods. In the real world, you are not the gaming piece; you are the player. You follow the rules of the game, yes, but you bend them, you press against them. The rules will not win the game for you: you must do it yourselves. History is made by people, not by gods. Scipio Africanus was not a slave to some divine will, but was his own master and his own tactician.’

‘And what of empire?’ Metellus asked. ‘Could Rome have an empire?’

‘Imperialism must be built on moral responsibility for the governed. Outrageous behaviour will bring retribution. An empire must not grow beyond the capacity of its institutions to manage it.’

‘Then we have done so already,’ Metellus said. ‘We already have provinces, but we do not yet have the organization to administer them. We are an empire in all but name, yet Rome persists in behaving like a city-state. Something must change. Someone must rise above it all and see the future. As you have taught us, Polybius, history is made by individuals, and it is they and not institutions that cause change. That is what this academy is about. It’s about creating future emperors.’

‘I don’t think that was exactly what my grandfather intended,’ Scipio said, looking at Metellus coldly.

‘Should we not look to the past?’ one of the others said. ‘The lessons for wars of the future are in the wars of our ancestors.’

Polybius stood back from the table. ‘That is the Roman way, to feel that the busts of the ancestors you all have in the tablinae of your houses are constantly looking over you, guiding you,’ he said. ‘But sometimes we need to make our obeisances to the past and then shut that door, and look solely to the future. Studying history is about learning from the past, but not always about seeking a precedent from it. Strategy and tactics in war are built on experience of past wars, but each new one is unique. The world is not static. If you choose to look forward, and do so aggressively, and you learn all of the lessons that you have been taught in the academy, then you may change history. History is not laid out for us like some ever-rolling rug. You may weave your own thread in it, or you may twist the rug sideways, and send it tumbling down the steps into the unknown. That’s my lesson for today. We end with a final thought from each of you, as usual. Ennius?’

‘Keep your word. Only then will cities surrender to you.’

‘Good. Scipio?’

‘In a new province, define your borders,’ Scipio said. ‘Otherwise war is inevitable.’

Polybius nodded. ‘When Carthage was allowed to keep some of her territory in Africa after the Battle of Zama, the borders were ill defined. It was a recipe for war. Lucius?’

‘Exploit superstition. If your army feels they have divine guidance, then encourage them to believe it.’

‘Brutus?’

‘Punish savagely those you have conquered who are not yet obedient, to inspire fear and terror.’

‘Zeus above,’ Polybius murmured. ‘That sounds like something from Sparta.’

‘My father taught it to me,’ Brutus said, his massive forearms folded over his chest. ‘He said there would be more to the academy than swordplay, and that I should be ready with some ideas.’

‘Maybe you’d better stick to your strengths,’ Polybius muttered. ‘Fabius?’

Fabius was discomfited. ‘I’m only here as Scipio’s servant, Polybius. I will never lead an army.’

‘You may not lead an army, but men like you will be the backbone of the army. What do you say?’

Fabius thought for a moment. ‘Cowardice must not go unpunished.’

Polybius nodded slowly, and then smiled. ‘All right. That’s enough gravitas for today. Hippolyta’s offered to teach you how to use a Scythian bow. See you all in the arena in half an hour.’

Scipio said, standing up and stretching, ‘Twenty minutes’ rest before the centurion arrives. Drink some water and eat some fruit. You’ll need it if we’re going out on to the arena.’

Polybius pointed at the diorama. ‘If Julia had been here, she could have told us more. Her father Sextus Julius Caesar was at Zama as a junior tribune. She knows the battle like the back of her hand.’

Scipio looked around, suddenly missing her. ‘Has anyone seen Julia?’

‘She’s not coming today,’ one of the others said. ‘She’s accompanying her mother to the Temple of the Vestal Virgins for some kind of ceremony.’

‘Let’s just hope the Virgins don’t take her,’ someone else sniggered. ‘That would deprive us of some fun. That is, if Scipio will let us have it.’

‘Shut it, Lucius,’ Polybius said tiredly. ‘Or Scipio will have his friend Brutus here hack off your manhood.’

Fabius saw Scipio clasp the amulet around his neck that he knew Julia had given him, an ancient Etruscan device of an eagle passed down through her gens, and then look down in annoyance. He knew that Scipio hated himself for showing his feelings for Julia. He saw Metellus staring at Scipio, questioningly, and he suddenly remembered. Metellus had been away in Macedonia for almost two years, so would have no idea of Scipio’s affection for Julia. Scipio shook his head dismissively, as if Julia was of no consequence to him, and then stood square and folded his arms over his chest, nodding at the diorama. ‘I’m expecting all of you to memorize the entire order of battle, down to the last maniple and rag-tag auxiliary unit. You can spend the next twenty minutes doing that instead. When the centurion returns, he’ll test you on it. Get one thing wrong, and you know what will happen. I can assure you that the pain from his vine staff will be greater than anything Brutus might be likely to mete out. Now get on with it.’

In the silence that followed, Fabius scanned the room. Most of them were sixteen or seventeen years old, on the cusp of manhood, several a year or two younger. When the trumpets of war sounded, when the centurion deemed them ready, they would be appointed as military tribunes in the Roman army, the first rung in the ladder that might lead those who survived to command legions, to lead armies, even to the consulship, the highest office in the Republic. They were scions of the greatest patrician families of Rome: the gens Julii, the gens Junia, the gens Claudia, the gens Valeria, and Scipio’s adopted branch of the gens Cornelia, the Scipiones. In their sprawling houses on the Palatine were shrines filled with wax busts of ancestors who had gained glory in war, some dating back to the time of Romulus and the foundation of the city almost six hundred years before, and many from the succession of devastating wars that Rome had fought in recent centuries: against the Latin tribes and the Etruscans near to Rome, against the Celts to the north, against the Greek colonies of Italy and Sicily, and above all in the titanic struggle against Carthage, a conflict that had begun almost a hundred years before and still haunted them all, a war that should have ended with the Battle of Zama if the senators had allowed the act of destruction that would have secured Rome’s dominance in the west Mediterranean and allowed her to focus her whole might on Greece and the riches of the east.

And they were not all men. Fabius let his eyes linger on a dark corner of the room and saw her, taller than any of them except Polybius, watching everything intently, her eyes briefly catching his. Her red hair was woven into a long tail behind her head, and she had dark kohl rings around her eyes. In the arena she took off her gold neck torque and bracelets and fought without armour, wearing only a white tiger skin wrapped tightly around her midriff and chest. They had been astonished at the tattoo on her back, an eagle with wings outstretched from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. They knew her by her Greek name, Hippolyta, meaning ‘Wild Mare’, but the centurion had told them before she arrived that her name in her own language was Oiropata, meaning ‘Killer of Men’. They had scoffed at it, but everyone had gone silent when she had walked through the door and they had seen her physique. She was a Scythian princess, the daughter of a client king from the steppe lands to the north of the Black Sea, and the centurion had explained that there were more of them, expert female horse riders and archers, and that one day she might lead an ala of Scythian cavalry alongside a Roman army. Polybius spoke her language and had questioned her at length about Scythian history, and had helped to improve her Latin. The others kept their distance, fearful of being singled out by the centurion to fight her in unarmed combat and endure the humiliation of almost certain defeat.

And then there was Julia. She was from the Caesares branch of the gens Julia, the daughter of Sextus Julius Caesar who had fought as a tribune at Zama. She was no warrior princess like Hippolyta, but she had a shrewd tactical mind and would have swept the floor that day with her knowledge of the battle that had made her father’s name. Fabius had seen how Julia had made Scipio’s pulse quicken, how when she was watching him in the arena fighting he was possessed by a force that seemed to come from the gods. Fabius himself had felt a stab of pain when he first saw Julia’s affection for Scipio, casting his mind back to that night when she had come to him in the servant’s quarters, but it had quickly passed. He remembered the look that Metellus had given Scipio. Fabius knew that Scipio had been dreading the arrival of Metellus, and welcoming it at the same time: dreading it because it might break the bond between him and Julia, welcoming it because it might help to suppress the feelings he had for her which could threaten his career. Metellus had been betrothed to Julia since she had been a small child, and he was Scipio’s second cousin on his mother’s side.

Scipio himself was enmeshed in social obligations; he was the son of Aemilius Paullus of the gens Aemilii but also the adoptive son of Publius Cornelius Scipio, eldest son of the great Scipio Africanus, who was also Scipio’s great-uncle on his mother’s side. He had been given up for adoption only because he had two elder brothers, and because the third son was never accorded the same privileges in his career; without adoption he would never have been poised to become a military tribune as he was now. It had been a huge honour to be adopted by the son of Scipio Africanus, but it had come with the burden of his own betrothal to Claudia Pulchra of the gens Claudia, a girl he profoundly disliked who hardly lived up to her cognomen, yet whom he knew was counting down every day with bated breath until his eighteenth birthday and the formal beginning of the marriage rites. Every time that he and Fabius had to go near her house on the Esquiline Hill they made elaborate detours to avoid being spotted from the bower where she sat with her slave girls overlooking the city, looking forward to the kind of future doing the social rounds and scheming with the matrons of the other gentes that Scipio dreaded far more than the worst enemy on the battlefield.

But to go against these obligations, to pursue his feelings for Julia, would be to betray the memory of Scipio Africanus and the trust of his own birth father, to risk being outcast and losing everything. Once, when he and Fabius had been lying side by side at night on the slopes of the Circus Maximus, staring at the stars and sharing a flagon of wine, Scipio had confided his feelings for Julia to him, had shown him the amulet and had talked of his frustration. He had told him how he imagined a time when as a victorious general he would throw off the shackles of Rome and take her with him, but they both knew that in the cold light of morning it could be little more than a dream; even if it came about it could only be many years ahead when Scipio would be a battle-hardened soldier and his love for her might be a distant memory. Fabius knew only too well what was at stake for Scipio, how the career he was watching unfold would be driven by knowledge of the sacrifice he was making to honour his father and the elder Scipio, and to satisfy his own burning ambition to lead the greatest army Rome had ever seen back to Carthage to finish a conflict that could still threaten to destroy their world.

Fabius had stopped earlier that morning in the Forum and looked at the consular fasti, the list of the names of past consuls who represented all of the great patrician gentes of Rome, the forefathers of the boys in the academy. He remembered the first time he had overheard the Greek professors in the academy lecture the boys about morality: they must have courage, and they must have fides, be true to their word, and be temperate in their personal lives. He had smiled to himself when he heard that; he had seen what the boys got up to at night in the taverns and the brothels around the Forum. But that was before he had met Scipio. He was able to fight and brawl like any of them, and relish it; Fabius knew that only too well from his first encounter with him years before in the back alleys by the Tiber. But Scipio did not indulge in the vices like the other boys. It was as if something were restraining him, holding him back. Fabius knew from studying the fastes that Scipio was the noblest of them all, a boy whose birth gens was elevated enough but whose stakes were stacked even higher by being adopted into the family of Scipio Africanus, a name that still sent tremors through Rome more than thirty years after his victory in the war against Hannibal. Fabius had wondered whether history weighed too heavily on the younger Scipio, and whether he took that burden too seriously. A boy who could only excel in his own eyes if he equalled the achievements of his father and his adoptive grandfather, both of them illustrious generals, could not afford to indulge his base desires in the taverns and whorehouses of the city, if one day he might need to exert his moral authority to lead Rome to victory.

But Fabius knew there was more to it than that. Scipio was shy and could seem aloof; that had already earned him the scorn of those without the imagination to see the strength within but with the power to humiliate and torment him while he still had the vulnerabilities of adolescence. Scipio was Roman to the core, a true exemplar of Roman morality rather than one who simply paid lip service to it as so many of the others did, but he had also benefited from the intellectual rigour of a Greek education and could see where Rome had become self-absorbed, where the lives that aristocrats were expected to lead no longer had the hard edge of the old ways. He hated the oratory and sophistry that they were expected to learn in the law courts, the skills that would see the sons of patricians climb steadily through the cursus honorum, the step-by-step sequence of magistracies that were essential to rise to the highest office, to the consulship. Above all, he hated the fact that the cursus honorum was also the route to army command, rather than military experience itself. Scipio had to endure the critical eye of those who questioned the ability of a young man to rise to high office and honour his gens — a young man who, instead of being in the law courts, spent his days studying military strategy and learning swordplay, and his leisure time hunting in the mountains as far away from Rome as he could get.

But Fabius had overheard Scipio’s father Aemilius Paullus talk to his mother about him one day in their house, about how Scipio was living up to the hopes that Africanus had expressed for his successors, for the next generation of Roman war leaders. He had said that morality was the key, a personal code of honour. Aemilius Paullus had known that his son would suffer for it, but that his sensitivity to the criticism of others would be the seedbed of his strength. Scipio already had a reputation for keeping his word, for fides, and his abstinence from debauchery was also a good sign. It was then that Fabius had made it his own mission to watch out for Scipio, not only protecting him physically but also keeping him from being ruined by his own sensitivities, and from developing a resentment of Rome that would be self-destructive. Seeing him here at the head of the boys in the academy was an important step in the right direction, although there were many challenges ahead.

He glanced at the sand-timer on the table, seeing that the twenty minutes of study were nearly up and the boys were becoming restless. Ennius had been working on something in the corner that Fabius hoped would keep them preoccupied until Petraeus arrived. What happened then would depend on the old centurion’s temperament that day, on whether the baths had soothed the fire that raged within. Fabius had smiled wryly to himself when he had seen the newest arrival in the academy, Scipio’s cousin Gaius Paullus, go white at the mention of the centurion’s imminent arrival, his fearsome reputation having preceded him. Whether or not Petraeus was in an indulgent mood, there could be no doubt that the next big challenge confronting the boys was not some distant enemy on a Macedonian battlefield but the very embodiment of all that was strong about Rome herself. The old centurion Petraeus was about to bear down on them and mete out wisdom and toughness that one day might make some of them the equal of such a man on the battlefield.