Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus

Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus (* around 229 BC ; † 160 BC ) was a Roman general and politician.

His father was Lucius Aemilius Paullus , the consul defeated and killed in the battle of Cannae . Lucius Aemilius Paullus was the head of the patrician family of the Aemilii Paulli , an extremely influential group due to their fortune and their kinship with the Scipions .

After completing his military service as a military tribune , Paullus was named in 193 BC. Elected to the Curulic aedile . The next step in his cursus honorum was his election as praetor in 191 BC. With the end of this office he went to the Hispanic provinces, where he worked from 191 to 189 BC. Fought with varying success against the Lusitanians . 189/88 BC He was one of the ten members of a Senate Commission, which together with Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, the conditions in Asia Minor after the defeat of Antiochus III. rearranged. Paullus was born in 182 BC. Elected consul for the first time, with Gnaeus Baebius Tamphilus as a colleague. His next military command, now with a proconsular empire , was the campaign against the Ingauni in Liguria the following year .

In 171 BC The Third Macedonian War broke out when the consul Publius Licinius Crassus was defeated by the Macedonian king Perseus in the battle of Callicinus . After two years of undecided course, Paullus was reigned in 168 BC. Re- elected consul with Gaius Licinius Crassus as a colleague. He was appointed by the Senate to wage the war in Macedonia and shortly afterwards, on June 22nd, he won the decisive Battle of Pydna . Perseus was captured and the Third Macedonian-Roman War was over.

As a chilling example, Paullus endorsed the murder of 500 Aitolians who were known for their opposition to Rome. He sent many Greeks and Macedonians into exile in Italy, confiscated their property in the name of Rome, but - according to Plutarch - kept too much for himself. Through victory celebrations and monuments, Paullus also symbolically made it clear to the conquered that Macedonians and Greeks are now subject to Rome were.

On the way back to Rome in 167 BC His legions were dissatisfied with their share of the booty. In order to satisfy them, Paullus had the army interrupt their march in Epirus , a country suspected of sympathy with the Macedonians. Although the region was already subdued, Paullus ordered the sacking of seventy of its cities. 150,000 people were enslaved and the region devastated.

His entry into Rome was splendid. With the immense booty he had brought with him from Macedonia and Epirus, he celebrated a spectacular triumphal procession (although the popular assembly initially wanted to refuse to triumph), in which he also took the captured king of Macedonia with him. As a gesture of recognition, the Senate gave him the nickname Macedonicus .

This was the high point of his career. In 164 BC He was elected censor , he died during the five-year term in 160 BC. Chr.

With the death of Macedonicus, the happiness of Aemilii Paulli came to an end. His political and military success had no parallel in his personal life. He was married to Papiria Masonis, from whom he - again according to Plutarch - was divorced for undetermined reasons. From this marriage he had four children, two sons and two daughters, one of whom was married to the son of the elder Cato , the other to Aelius Tubero, a wealthy plebeian . Paullus Macedonicus married a second time and again had two sons. But since four sons were too many for him to finance a successful cursus honorum , he decided, as was customary in Rome, to give the two eldest families up for adoption , as was customary in Rome . One became the adoptive son of a Fabius Maximus as Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus . The other was taken in by Publius Cornelius Scipio , son of Scipio Africanus , and became Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus , Scipio Africanus the Younger, the conqueror of Carthage in the Third Punic War in 146 BC. With the two eldest sons in the most powerful patrician families in Rome, Paullus reckoned that the two younger sons would continue his own name. However, both died young, one shortly after the other, at the time when Paullus was celebrating his triumphal procession.

literature

• Alberto Barzanò: Biografia pagana come agiografia. Il caso della vita plutarchea di Lucio Emilio Paolo. In: Rendiconti dell 'Istituto Lombardo. Classe di Lettere. Scienze morali e storiche. 128, 1994, pp. 403-424.
• Michèle Ducos: Paullus (L. Aemilius). In: Richard Goulet (ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques. Vol. 5, Part 1, CNRS Éditions, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-271-07335-8 , pp. 188-191 (deals with his relationship to Greek culture and philosophy)
• Egon Flaig : Lucius Aemilius Paullus - military fame and family hapiness. In: Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp , Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp (ed.): From Romulus to Augustus. Great figures of the Roman Republic. Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-46697-4 , pp. 131-146.
• Lora Holland: Plutarch's Aemilius Paullus and the Model of the Philosopher Statesman. In: The Statesman in Plutarch's Works. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the International Plutarch Society, Nijmegen, Castle Hernen, May 1 - 5, 2002. Volume 2: The statesman in Plutarch's Greek and Roman "lives" (= Mnemosyne. Supplementum 250, 2). Brill, Leiden et al. 2005, ISBN 90-04-13808-0 , 269-279.
• Elimar Klebs : Aemilius (114) . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume I, 1, Stuttgart 1893, Sp. 576-580.
• William Reiter: Aemilius Paullus. Conqueror of Greece. Croom Helm, London et al. 1988, ISBN 0-7099-4285-0 .
• Manuel Tröster: ¿Una especie de hagiografía? Plutarco y la tradición histórica en la Vida de Emilio Paulo. In: Gerión. 28, 1, 2010, ISSN  0213-0181 , pp. 193-206.
• Manuel Tröster: Plutarch and Mos Maiorum in the Life of Aemilius Paullus. In: Ancient Society. 42, 2012, pp. 219-254.
• Rosanna Vianoli: Carattere e tendenza della tradizione su L. Emilio Paolo. In: Marta Sordi (ed.): Contributi dell'Istituto di storia antica. Volume 1. Vita e pensiero, Milan 1972, ZDB -ID 188683-6 , pp. 78-90.

Web links

Wikisource: Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus  - Sources and full texts

Remarks

1. ↑ Polybios , Historien 30,16 (15). See. Livy 45,34,6.