Paulus in Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities

Lucius, afterwards surnamed Macedonĭcus, son of the last, was born about 230 or 229, since at the time of his second consulship (B.C. 168) he was upwards of sixty years of age. He was one of the best specimens of the high Roman nobles. He would not condescend to flatter the people for the offices of the State, maintained with strictness severe discipline in the army, was deeply skilled in the law of the augurs, to whose college he belonged, and maintained throughout life a pure and unspotted character. He was elected curule aedile in B.C. 192; was praetor in 191, and obtained Further Spain as his province, where he carried on war with the Lusitani; and was consul in 181, when he conquered the Ingauni, a Ligurian people. For the next thirteen years he lived quietly at Rome, devoting most of his time to the education of his children. He was consul a second time in 168, and brought the war against Perseus to a conclusion by the defeat of the Macedonian monarch, near Pydna, on the 22d of June. Perseus shortly afterwards surrendered himself to Paulus. (See Perseus.) Paulus remained in Macedonia during the greater part of the following year as proconsul, and arranged the affairs of Macedonia in conjunction with ten Roman commissioners, whom the Senate had despatched for the purpose. Before leaving Greece he marched into Epirus, where, in accordance with a cruel command of the Senate, he gave to his soldiers seventy towns to be pillaged because they had been in alliance with Perseus. The triumph of Paulus, which was celebrated at the end of November, 167, was the most splendid that Rome had yet seen. It lasted three days. Before the triumphal car of Aemilius walked the captive monarch of Macedonia and his children, and behind it were his two illustrious sons, Q. Fabius Maximus and P. Scipio Africanus the younger, both of whom had been adopted into other families. But the glory of the conqueror was clouded by family misfortune. At this very time he lost his two younger sons; one, twelve years of age, died only five days before his triumph, and the other, fourteen years of age, only three days after his triumph. The loss was all the severer, since he had no son left to carry his name down to posterity. In 164 Paulus was censor with Q. Marcius Philippus, and died in 160, after a long and tedious illness. The fortune he left behind him was so small as scarcely to be sufficient to pay his wife's dowry. The Adelphi of Terence was brought out at the funeral games exhibited in his honour. Aemilius Paulus was married twice. By his first wife, Papiria, the daughter of C. Papirius Maso, consul 231, he had four children-two sons, one of whom was adopted by Fabius Maximus and the other by P. Scipio, and two daughters, one of whom was married to Q. Aelius Tubero, and the other to M. Cato, son of Cato the censor. He afterwards divorced Papiria; and by his second wife, whose name is not mentioned, he had two sons, whose death has been recorded above, and a daughter, who was a child at the time that her father was elected to his second consulship.