Scipio got an army command no Roman without a consulship had ever held
In 210 BC Rome handed its Spanish war to a man in his mid-twenties who had never been consul or praetor. Publius Cornelius Scipio took Carthage's Iberian empire, carried the war to Africa, and beat Hannibal at Zama. Rome's reward, eventually, was a bribery trial that drove him into bitter retirement.
Scipio was born in 236 BC into the Cornelii Scipiones, a patrician family crowded with consuls; his father held the office in 218, the year the Second Punic War began over Hannibal's siege of Saguntum. The young man followed him to the front. At the river Ticinus, Polybius says, the son rescued his encircled father from Carthaginian cavalry, though other sources give the credit to an unnamed Ligurian slave.
In 216 BC he came through the slaughter at Cannae, which claimed Lucius Aemilius Paullus, consul and his wife's father, and rallied survivors at Canusium. Livy adds that Scipio drew his sword on young nobles planning to flee abroad and made them swear loyalty to Rome, but the tale is missing from Polybius and is probably a later invention. Voters so adored him that when a tribune objected that he was too young to be aedile in 213, the tribune backed down.
Disaster in Spain opened his path. In 211 his father and uncle split their forces against three Carthaginian armies, two of them led by Hannibal's brothers, and both were killed. The assembly then gave Scipio proconsular command, the first time anyone had held such power without first being consul; modern scholars think the senate chose him and used the vote to legitimise the irregular step. He arrived with about 10,000 reinforcements, and his victory over Mago Barca at Ilipa in 206 brought Carthaginian Iberia under Rome.
Consul in 205, he invaded Africa, forcing Carthage to recall Hannibal, and after talks collapsed he broke Hannibal's army at Zama in 202, ending the war and earning the name Africanus. Political enemies, led by Cato the Elder, pursued him. In 187 he and his brother Lucius faced trial over bribes allegedly taken from the Seleucid king Antiochus III. Disillusioned, Scipio withdrew to his villa at Liternum and died there around 183 BC.
Source: Scipio Africanus
