North African Expeditionary Force (38.21 – 22). Polybius’s actual text is lost at
this point, and for a reconstruction we depend on three later sources, of which the
version of Diodorus Siculus is probably closest to what Polybius originally wrote
(32.24). Diodorus tells us that Scipio wept as he watched the city in flames; when
Polybius asked him why, he replied that he was struck by the mutability of for-
tune, reflecting that some time a similar fate would overtake Rome. Scipio then
quoted from Homer: e[ssetai h\mar o{tÆ a[n potÆ ojlwvlh/ ÒIlio" iJrh;ƒkai; Privamo"
kai; laov"(“There will be a day when holy Troy shall perish, and Priam, and his
people”).
The lines that Scipio quotes occur twice in Homer, spoken both by Agamemnon
(Il.4.164 – 65) and by Hector (6.448 – 49). Scipio, as the inheritor of Rome ’s com-
plex traditions, may be seen as quoting both of them: he is the conquering general
of the West crushing Asiatics, and he is the descendant of Asiatics foretelling the
doom of his own city. He sees the fate of Rome in the fate of Carthage, and Troy
is the model for both.^66 There is much more to Scipio’s whole utterance than the
mere idea of the changeability of fortune, important though that is.^67 In Polybius’s
work, Scipio’s words are part of a huge piece of ring composition, circling back to
the beginning of the Histories,where Polybius had sketched the various empires
treated by history so far, showing that the empires of the Persians, Spartans, and
Macedonians had fallen short of the scope of the Roman Empire (1.2). At the
beginning of the work the theme of succession is not explicitly present, but it cer-
tainly is toward the end, in book 29, when Polybius reflects on the catastrophe of
the Macedonian kingdom after Pydna (168 b.c.e.). Here he quotes, with awe, the
insight of Demeterius of Phalerum, who had written shortly after the Persian
empire had been replaced by the Macedonian: Demetrius had pointed out how
extraordinary it was that Macedonia should have taken over the power of Persia,
and prophesied that one day the Macedonian primacy would likewise pass (29.21).
A succession from Persia to Macedonia to Rome is clearly what Polybius sees as
the pattern of history, and Scipio at Carthage is made to reflect, as had Demetrius,
but with Troy as the prototype, that the primacy of the current occupant of hege-
mony cannot escape Fortune ’s changes.^68
The Romans, then, could be twinned with Carthage, even by the Romans them-
selves, in a mode of comparison that could stress likeness in constitution and impe-
rial fate. But for well over a hundred years the Romans were enemies of Carthage,
and from this point of view they could be represented as following in the steps of
Sicilian predecessors in the same role. It is highly likely that Timaeus had already
represented them as taking over the anti-Carthaginian burden from Sicilian
Rome, Carthage, and the Sicilian Paradigm. 55