Some people reading this have probably never heard of Scipio before, and I envy them because they have the pleasure of discovering a first rate human being awaiting them. Go to the library and get "Scipio Africanus: A Greater than Napoleon" by B. H. Liddal Hart.
Scipio was the young Roman general who defeated Hannibal and saved Rome from Carthage in the Second Punic War. According to Hart he never lost a battle, a record that even Napoleon couldn't match. Only Marlborough and Alexander could measure up to him, but Marlborough had material advantages and Alexander fought inferior generals. Scipio had to fight other geniuses like himself.
Poor Scipio. We have a good likeness of him (above) in the form of a surviving black marble bust, but the white eyes make him look like a zombie. If you can overlook that, then check out the face which is intelligent and and kind and fully human in the best sense of the word.
Roman historians Polybius (who I mistakenly identified as Procopius in another post) and Livy fall over themselves with praise for Scipio. When he was 17 or 18 he had his first leadership role when his father, who was a general, put him in charge of a reserve unit of cavalry and solemnly ordered him not to enter the fight without explicit orders. Scipio's dad expected to win and just wanted to give his son a glimpse of real battle.
Well, the enemy turned out to be much stronger than expected and the father was surrounded by hostiles bent on killing him. Never once did the father signal for help from Scipio. He was determined to die without bringing his son into it.
Seeing the situation the young Scipio ordered the cavalry to charge, but his men wouldn't do it. The odds against them were enormous, they had contrary orders, and Scipio was young and inexperienced. Scipio again shouted the order then with sword drawn charged down the hill alone. His men looked at each other in disbelief. Not knowing what to do they followed him and amazingly the enemy misunderstood it as a major cavalry attack and scattered. His father was saved.
Another time found Scipio, still a young officer, at the battle of Cannae...one of the ancient world's biggest battles and a massive defeat of the Romans by Hannibal. Surviving officers met at a farm house and talked about what to do. They all wanted to scatter to the four winds and offer their men and services to foreign kings. All agreed to abandon Rome. Theirs was the only army that could have stopped Hannibal, and the fall of that city was now a certainty.
Into this came the young Scipio and friend who with swords drawn ordered their superiors back to Rome under pain of immediate death if they hesitated.
As the years went by Scipio took command and won battle after battle against brilliantly led Carthaginian forces. Scipio won by attacking Carthage itself, rather than the armies of that city in Italy. He won by pioneering aspects of modern strategy, and by persuading potential allies of his own heartfelt conviction that Rome was the greatest force for civilization in the ancient world...a thought in the minds of the gods.
Here (below) are a couple of YouTube videos showing Romans in battle. Not entirely relevant to this discussion, but cool all the same.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppNaeek_qCA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzRnrV5ptgM
This post is already too long, but I can't resist mentioning another hero: Albert Einstein. What an imagination!
When he heard that the speed of light was a constant he became obsessed with understanding what made it a constant, what obstacle prevented travel at light speed, and what we could deduce about the universe from this. Reasoning backward from one bizarre but rock solid fact about light led him to deduce time relativity, energy/mass equivalence, and even other dimensions.
Is relativity true? Maybe not. The conclusions it leads to are so shocking that maybe it's easier to believe that the confirming experiments were flawed, but people who know more than I do say they were on the level, so I simply bow my head in admiration.
