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Lucius Aemilius Paulus

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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Surnamed Macedonicus (c. 229-160 B.C.), Roman general, a member of a patrician family of the Aemilian gens, son of the consul of the same name who fell at Cannae. As consul for the second time (168) he was entrusted with the command in the Macedonian War, which the incapacity of previous generals had allowed to drag on for three years. He brought the war to a speedy termination by the battle of Pydna, fought on the 22nd of June (Julian calendar) 168. Macedonia was henceforward a Roman province, and Paulus, having made a tour through Greece, with the assistance of ten Roman commissioners arranged the affairs of the country. He enjoyed a magnificent triumph, which lasted three days and was graced by the presence of the captive king Perseus and his three children. He lost his two sons by his second wife, and was thus left without a son to bear his name, his two sons by his first wife having been adopted into the Fabian and Cornelian gentes. Paulus was censor in 164, and died in 160 after a long illness. At the funeral games exhibited in his honour the Hecyra of Terence was acted for the second and the Adelphi for the first time. An aristocrat to the backbone, he was yet beloved by the people. Of the vast sums brought by him into the Roman treasury from Spain and Macedonia he kept nothing to himself, and at his death his property scarcely sufficed to pay his wife's dowry. As a general he was a strict disciplinarian; as an augur he discharged his duties with care and exactness. He was greatly in sympathy with Greek learning and art, and was a friend of the historian Polybius.

See Plutarch, Aemilius Paulus; Livy xliv. 17 - xlvi. 41; Polybius xxix. - xxxii.