Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage by David Gibbins Page A

That was what this trip had really been about, preparing them for this moment. Scipio stood up and spoke. ‘So this is it. Our time in the academy is finished.’
    The centurion placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘Now you must prove yourselves in blood. You must learn to kill like legionaries, winning the respect of the toughest soldiers the world has ever known. I do not know what the words of the Sibyl mean. But I do know this. Your right to order legionaries into battle must be earned. Then, you can heed the call of Cato and lead a Roman army back to Carthage.’
    â€˜And today, centurion?’
    â€˜Today, you march to war.’

PART TWO

    ROME
    167 BC
    The Triumph of Aemilius Paullus

4
    Fabius shut his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling his chest swell against his breastplate and smelling the heady aroma of incense that filled the air. He opened his eyes, and was dazzled by the view. All of Rome seemed to be on fire that night, not a fire of destruction but of celebration: a thousand basins of burning oil lining the processional route from the Ostia gate through the Forum to the Field of Mars. Here on the podium below the Capitoline Temple they were at the apex of the procession, at the end of the Sacred Way where the legionaries marching towards them veered west towards the open ground of the Field of Mars for the games and spectacles that would carry on through the night.
    He and Scipio had left the head of the first legion a few minutes before to bound up the steps so that Scipio could stand beside his father Aemilius Paullus as the procession reached its climax. Polybius was there too, standing behind Aemilius Paullus, and beside them was Marcus Porcius Cato, in his rightful position on the podium as elder statesman of the Senate, a former consul and censor who was one of Aemilius Paullus’ oldest friends and supporters. Fabius glanced at the general, who raised his right hand in salute and held it steady as each legion marched by. Beneath the burnished armour he was now an old man, gnarled and leathery skinned like Cato, both of them veterans who had stood here as young tribunes watching triumphal processions long before Fabius and Scipio had even been born. This day would be the last dose of glory for the generation who had fought Hannibal, for those who knew they would soon follow Scipio Africanus to Elysium but only truly rest once Carthage had finally been vanquished.
    Fabius cast his eye over the young men in armour and the older men in togas crowding the steps of the podium below. The patrician women were absent, waiting in the stands that each gens had erected at the end of the processional way to watch the execution of deserters, but Metellus and the young bloods among the tribunes were all thronged below, joined every few minutes by others who left the head of their legions and maniples as Fabius and Scipio had done to mount the steps and view the spectacle. The most conspicuous absence was the old centurion Petraeus, who had hung up his armour for good once Scipio and the others had gone off to war in Macedonia and the academy had closed. For him, war was in the past, and his pasturage in the Alban Hills had beckoned; it was November and he had needed to reap his corn and sow his winter wheat before the frost. He was a true Roman, farmer first and soldier second, more true to the roots of Rome than any of the patricians who vied with each other to claim the oldest gens and the strongest lineage from Romulus or some other semi-mythical warrior in Rome’s past.
    But there were others missing too. As he had marched past the consular fasti at the head of the Forum, Fabius had seen the marble plaque inscribed with the names of officers of the patrician gentes who had fallen at Pydna. Among them was Gaius Aemilius Paullus, temporary tribune in the fourth legion, still only sixteen when he had died. Fabius remembered the last time he had been with Gaius Paullus in Italy,