Scipio had served at Ticinus, where he saved the life of his wounded father Publius the consul; at Cannae as military tribune, he rallied survivors. He was aedile (213). In 218, Publius had sent his brother Gnaeus to Iberia; he himself returned to northern Italy to fight Hannibal. In Iberia, Gnaeus scored successes against the Carthaginian Hanno. Publius rejoined him in 217. They fought and negotiated successfully until killed in separate engagements (211). In 210, young Scipio was appointed with imperium to replace them and in 209 captured the important coastal city of New Carthage, allegedly with Neptune’s help. At Baecula (208, site recently identified), he defeated Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal (who however escaped to Italy) and another Hasdrubal (Ilipa, 206). On return, he was denied a triumph but elected consul for 205. The tradition, only in Appian, that he founded an Iberian city Italica is a myth from Hadrian’s time.

The chapter sketches an approach to a great challenge of contemporary ancient history, namely, the history whereby state power was extended into the ancient countryside. It commences with consideration of the operations that produced Roman taxonomies of city-states and villages: far from a simple consequence of recognition, the statuses of city-state and village alike were ascribed. The chapter directs attention to the decades when Rome ceased to treat with regions via networks of bilateral alliances and instead instrumentalized select city-states to dominate territories and peoples that were henceforth deemed non-political. On this basis, the chapter challenges the interpretive truisms that Rome “governed through city-states” or that it relied on preexisting institutions. What we should seek to bring into view is the political economics of republican empire: the related forms of fiscal domination and monopolies over law-making and law-applying institutions that the democratically constituted oligarchies of the ancient city exercised over others on behalf of Rome.

This chapter focuses on the period of Roman history in which the empire emerged. The famous historical personalities of Caesar and Cicero are sketched to contrast two prevailing methods of acquiring social power in ancient Rome: charismatic leadership of soldiers, as exemplified by Caesar, and rhetorical persuasion in accordance with formalistic rules, as exemplified by Cicero. In one published speech by Cicero we see very close counterparts to intellectual property in ancient Rome: a situation in which a foreign-born poet has been granted Roman citizenship in order to reward his poetic services to the state, described metaphorically as property. We then see how this basic pattern of granting privileges in order to inventivize valued behaviors was systematically utilized by Roman emperors, as they sought to transform the institutional structures of the republic into an institutional structure over which they exercised more autocratic levels of control. Within the classical, imperial framework of Roman law, jurists recognized important forerunners to intellectual property. Many centuries later, these would become the foundation for modern intellectual property.