They Called Him King
206 BC · Scipio, Rome's commander in Spain, as the chiefs who fought under him want to hail him king
The peninsula is his. He took the enemy's capital in a day, he has beaten three armies, and the Spanish chiefs who spent thirty years being bled by Carthage have decided what he is.
They have started calling him king. Not as flattery, as an offer. In their world a war leader who wins becomes one, and they want to attach themselves to a man rather than to a distant senate that has never done anything for them. If he takes the word, the tribes bind themselves to him personally, and the whole peninsula becomes something he holds.
He is not yet thirty. He has held no qualifying office. Every soldier here was recruited or paid or led by him, and several of them have said out loud that Rome does not deserve him.
In Rome, the word king has been the worst word in the language for three hundred years. There are men in the Senate already asking what exactly he is building out there.
The chiefs are waiting for an answer they consider obvious.
Accept the title
Refuse it: imperator, never rexOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Scipio refused it. He told the Spanish chiefs that the title they most valued was one his own people could not hear, and instructed them to call him imperator, the word his soldiers used, which is how a Roman general was hailed by his troops after a victory, and which two centuries later would become the emperor's title anyway. He went on to argue Rome into letting him carry the war into Africa, and beat Hannibal at Zama. Rome then spent twenty years becoming suspicious of him regardless. Accused of taking bribes, he refused to stand trial, left the city, and died at his estate, with an inscription later attributed to his tomb: ungrateful fatherland, you shall not even have my bones.
The philosophers weigh in
Accept it"He refuses one word and accepts another that means the same thing, and everyone agrees this is a great renunciation. The sacred tortoise is honored in the temple and is nonetheless dead."
Refuse it"They offered him a name. Names are the cheapest thing there is and the most expensive to carry. He noticed which of the two was in his power to refuse, and refused it."