Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus learned the art of war in the hardest and bloodiest of all forums—on the battlefield against Hannibal. As a 17-year-old, he followed his father, Roman consul Publius Cornelius Scipio, into Northern Italy on Rome’s first engagement against the Carthaginian military genius at the Ticinus River. Though it would be the first of Rome’s many defeats at Hannibal’s hands, Scipio personally distinguished himself by charging a superior force of the Carthaginian cavalry to save his father’s life. Over the next three years Scipio probably fought at both the Battles of Trebia and Lake Trasimene, where Hannibal annihilated two more Roman armies, and was certainly present to witness Rome’s greatest defeat at Cannae, where some 60,000 Romans perished in a single day’s fighting.

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At the end of that horrific day Scipio found himself amid a body of survivors who had cut their way through the Carthaginian center and regrouped a few miles away at Canusium. Hearing that a group of young Roman patricians was planning to desert, 20-year-old Scipio burst into their meeting place. One by one, he forced the waverers, at sword-point, to swear an oath never to desert Rome. After that he exacted a second oath that they would kill anyone else attempting to forsake the empire.

Scipio had performed exactly as expected of him. Facing defeat, a Roman leader was expected neither to die gloriously with his troops nor to consider surrender. Instead, he was to reconstitute whatever forces could be salvaged from the fiasco and ready them for the next effort. There was no shame in defeat, only in giving up.

On the other side, Hannibal was being handed a lesson in Roman perseverance—one that should have been absorbed by his father during the First Punic War. Despite suffering three successive routs at Hannibal’s hands, Rome never considered surrender or a negotiated end to the Second Punic War. What’s more amazing, though Hannibal’s army continued to rampage through Italy for a dozen years and was to win several more major battles, Rome had the strategic wisdom to send many of its best legions to fight in other theaters. Roman legions’ presence in Macedonia and Sicily, for instance, ensured that Hannibal was unable to draw upon those regions for supplies or reinforcements. It was from Spain that Hannibal drew the core of his strength, so Rome concentrated its major foreign push there. If the legions could strip Spain away from Carthage, Hannibal would be cut off from the mines that financed his army and from his most reliable source of fresh troops.

Though Roman armies made steady progress in Spain for a half-dozen years after Cannae, the strategy ended abruptly  in 211 bc when, on the eve of the Battle of the Upper Baetis, Rome’s Spanish allies deserted and went over to the enemy. The now overwhelming Carthaginian force nearly wiped out the Roman army, commanded by Scipio’s father. Both his father and uncle were killed. A remnant Roman force managed to hold out on a small patch of land in northeast Spain.

At this low ebb, the Roman senate called for a replacement to command the demoralized Roman force in Spain. As it was apart from the main theater facing Hannibal, and because Rome could not afford to send the Spanish legions much in the way of reinforcements, no senior Roman generals stepped forward. Finally, the senate called an assembly of the people to elect a proconsul for the “honor.” As Livy relates, “They [the Roman voters] looked round at the countenances of their most eminent men…and muttered bitterly that their affairs were in so ruinous a state that no one dared take command in Spain.” Spotting a unique opportunity, Scipio declared himself a candidate, though at 24 he was not officially old enough for the post. Age notwithstanding, he was unanimously elected.

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