The Comic History of Rome

The excitement of an encounter with some ferocious animal furnished the continual source of a sauce piquante to what he took to eat, which formed food for his courage as well as for his appetite. He was well versed in physics, which he was continually imbibing at the hands of his enemies, and, in accordance with the saying fas est ab hoste doceri, he turned the dosing to good account by studying the power of antidotes. He became a master of languages, and taught himself; so that he was, in fact, his own master and his own pupil. His object appears to have been to save the trouble and expense of diplomatic agents, by qualifying himself to talk with all foreign ambassadors, and to prevent the chance of matters being misinterpreted through the mouth of an interpreter.

Those historians who have built up a considerable fabric on inconsiderable grounds, do not hesitate to add to their fabrications another story, by describing Mithridates as a giant in growth, and as a lad so tall that he might have overlooked an ordinary ladder.

Such had been the education and pursuits of the young man whom we find occupying the throne of Pontus, and interfering in the affairs of Cappadocia, to which he undertook to supply a king, from his own family, whenever a vacancy happened. Rome, also, began to take an interest in Cappadocia, and the only party without a voice in the affair, consisted of the Cappadocians. They were assailed with the offer of freedom and a republic at the point of the sword, on one side, – while, on the other, they were asked to pin their faith to a monarchy which would otherwise be pinned to them by the blades of a foreign army. The Cappadocians had a wholesome horror of republican freedom, especially when imported from abroad; and Rome, therefore, sent them a king, who was accepted until his throne was overthrown by Mithridates – the Cappadocians having to pay a heavy fine on each change of government.

The king, who was thoroughly put out by Mithridates, applied to Rome, which raised an army in three divisions; but the Romans were so hated in Asia Minor, that they encountered every opposition from the inhabitants. Appius and Aquilinus, who were leaders of two of the divisions, soon fell into the hands of Mithridates, and it is said that he punished their avarice by pouring melted gold down their throats; but this is more than any one could swallow.

The Roman Senate, irritated by defeat, called upon L. Cornelius Sulla – or Sylla, as, by an alteration of the first syllable, he is sometimes called – to take the command of the army. The family boasted of its antiquity, though one family must be quite as old as another, if everybody's pedigree could be traced; and the real wonder would be to find a man whose ancestors had a beginning, instead of the ordinary case of one with an apparently endless line of progenitors. The family of Cornelius Sulla claimed connection with that of Cornelius Rufinus, who, in the year of Rome 540, instituted the Ludi Apollinares, in honour of Apollo, and in conformity with the directions of the Sibylline books, from which he had taken the name of Sibylla. This had, according to the interpretation put upon it by family pride, been corrupted into Sulla; and such is the empty boast of ancestry, that even corruption is eagerly acknowledged as a proof of ancient lineage. The father of L. Cornelius Sulla had left little – not even an unsullied name – to his son, but had been equally wasteful of fortune and character. The boy was clever and quick, but his speediness speedily degenerated into fastness. Having neither morality nor means, he took a cheap apartment, where he entertained a low set, and there was nothing to be envied either in his room or his company.

In early life he had distinguished himself as a soldier in the Jugurthine War; and he subsequently obtained the office of Prætor, in which he won the affections of the people, by introducing into the entertainments of the amphitheatre the extraordinary attraction of 100 real lions.

These noble animals had been the gift of a Mauritanian king, and as Sulla might have wished the present absent, if he had been saddled with the cost of the keep of no less than one hundred monarchs of the forest, the donor forwarded a band of Moors, who were to serve as food for the lions, by being turned into the arena with them when occasion required.

Sulla had excited the jealousy of Marius during the Jugurthine War, and the latter, though now a man of seventy, still cherished his old animosity with all the obstinacy of a most inveterate veteran. He was still ambitious of the laurel, though he should have been thinking only of the cypress; and with one foot in the grave, he was anxious to march with the other at the head of an army. Limping into the Campus Martius, where the soldiers were being drilled, he placed himself by the side of the youngest, and hobbled through the exercise with an air of ill-assumed juvenility. His feeble evolutions excited a mixed feeling of ridicule and disgust among the lookers-on, instead of obtaining for him the command to which he aspired. Having been disappointed of producing the effect he had anticipated, he had recourse to his friend, the tribune P. Sulpicius, who exercised a sort of reign of terror by means of 3000 gladiators, whom he always had about him. This formidable band of armed ruffians went by the name of the Anti-Senate of Sulpicius, who employed them to carry any measure he proposed, by showing the point of the sword to those who did not see the point of his argument. In order to gain time, the Senate appointed a series of holidays, or Feriæ, during which all business was suspended for the celebration of public sports, which often enabled the authorities to play a game of their own, by delaying any measure that was opposed to their interests. After a brief interval, the Senate appointed Sulla to the chief command, whereupon the Anti-Senate appointed Marius; and the former had no sooner heard the news, than he marched upon Rome with the whole of his army. The utmost consternation ensued; for no army having been expected at Rome, there had been no preparations for defence; and though the gates were closed, they were almost as crazy and unhinged as the terrified inhabitants.

A feeble attempt was made to bolt the doors against Sulla and his soldiers, but it was impossible to bar their entrance. As they marched through the streets, they were assailed from the houses with showers of brick, which, though very destructive, could not have been so damaging as the modern mortar. Some of the inhabitants were armed with slings, and now and then an arrow was discharged from a bow window. Orders were immediately given to set fire to the quarters whence the annoyance proceeded, and the directions were acted upon with that indiscriminate ferocity which is too often displayed by an incensed soldiery against an unarmed populace. The anger excited by the few was vented on the unoffending many, and the troops performed, with savage alacrity, the most humiliating service on which they could have been employed – the butchery of their defenceless fellow-citizens.

The leaders, or, rather, the mis-leaders of the people in this miserable conspiracy, were the first to seek their own safety in flight, and the tribune P. Sulpicius, who had set the example of employing brute force, evinced the most cowardly haste in running away from it, when he seemed likely to become one of its victims. Marius made for the marshes near Minturnæ, where he stuck in the mud, and covered his reputation with a number of stains that are quite indelible. On being discovered in his ignoble retreat, by those who had pursued him through thick and thin, he was dragged to the town and lodged in the nearest station. A price had been put upon his head, but the article does not seem to have been worth much, for he had shown very little sense in the part he had been playing. His gray hairs, or, perhaps, rather, his total baldness, still commanded so much of sympathy, that nobody evinced a disposition to become his executioner, until a Cimbric soldier undertook the discreditable office. He approached the veteran with a drawn sword, but Marius had got into a dark corner, and succeeded in frightening the man-at-arms by putting on a voice of the most dismal character. The soldier fancying himself in the presence of a ghost, failed in plucking up a sufficient spirit; and when a moan was heard – inquiring, "Who dares kill Caius Marius?" the would-be assassin, having flung down his sword, ran away, exclaiming – "Not I, for one, at any rate!" The soldier, of course, exaggerated the cause of his fears, and declared that the eyes of Marius had appeared to him like two candles burning in their sockets. The inhabitants of Minturnæ became as nervous as the panic-stricken soldier, and put Marius on board a ship, which, after being tossed about for several days, came to an anchor, or ran aground, high and dry, on the fine old crusted port of Carthage. Here he rambled about the ruins, and rested his aching head upon its broken temples. The Roman Governor, Sextilius, not knowing what to do with such an embarrassing visitor, sent a messenger to request him to "move on;" but the exile, with a dignified air, claimed his right to repose upon the dry rubbish. "Tell thy master," he observed to the officer on duty, who had respectfully told him he must "come out of that," in compliance with the orders of the authorities, – "Tell thy master that thou hast seen Marius, sitting on the ruins of Carthage." The intelligence was not new, but it seems to have been rather startling, for it had the effect of causing Marius to be allowed to remain; and we will, therefore, leave him there, while we proceed with the march of our history.

Sulla having reduced the city to the most complete subjection, made a merit of not pursuing his vengeance farther against the defenceless inhabitants; and so great was his confidence in the efficacy of his work, that he acquiesced in the appointment of L. Cornelius Cinna, a partisan of Marius, to the consulship. Sulla proceeded to Greece, where he blockaded Athens, whose inhabitants he plundered, as a practical acknowledgment of their worth; and he spared their lives, to show how he valued their ancestors. He manifested his respect for their arts by robbing their city of its chief ornaments; and he paid their learning the compliment of stealing their principal libraries.

In the meantime Cinna had entered on the duties of the consulship at Rome, but there the truth of the maxim, that two heads are better than one, was rendered extremely doubtful by the constant dissensions between himself and his colleague. The latter was Cn. Octavius, who opposed whatever the former recommended; and while one tried to carry his measures by brute force, the other endeavoured to defeat them by armed violence. Cinna appealed to the mob, and Octavius trusted to the army, both forces being the principal movers under a republican rule or misrule, and both being equally repugnant to the spirit of constitutional government. The arms of such a republic might have for its supporters the bludgeon and the sword, with the figure of Liberty battered and bleeding, slashed and sabred, gagged and fettered, in the middle. Octavius and the sword had, on this occasion, got the upper hand; and Cinna, the clubbist, was glad to break his bludgeon or cut his stick, in flying from the city.

The Senate decreed that he had forfeited the consulship, and Cinna, having been well received in the Italian towns, decreed that the Senate had forfeited their authority. The Government was thus reduced to two negatives, which could not make an affirmative; and in the midst of a theoretical perfection of republican forms, there existed only the substance of practical anarchy. The inhabitants of the Capitol, with the sword at their throats, elected a Consul, who was, of course, declared by the executive to be their free choice; while the people in the provinces protested, as loudly as they dared, against the violence that had been done to all the principles of law and liberty. Cinna, who had possessed himself of large sums of public money, employed bribes and promises to get himself acknowledged as the lawful Consul, for it is customary with despotism, acting under the name of freedom, to rob the people with one hand, in order to corrupt them with the other.

The veteran Marius, who, after making his bed on the ruins of Carthage, was not too anxious to lie there, had been wanted to join the party of Cinna, and the great captain of the age was received with enthusiasm, in consideration of the great age of the captain. Papirius Carbo and Q. Sertorius also gave in their adhesion; but Cn. Pompeius, who was stationed with an army at Umbria, waited to see which side would pay him best, and of those who would bid the highest, he was prepared to do the bidding. Marius, in the meanwhile, landed in Tuscany with a few friends; but to excite commiseration, he dressed himself in rags, which was, indeed, putting on the garb of poverty. He spoke so repeatedly of his reverses, and touched so frequently on his old clothes, that the subject was completely threadbare. Rags are seldom attractive, but in this instance, they were successful in obtaining for the wearer a large crowd of followers.

Cn. Pompeius had at length consented to espouse the cause of the Senate, but the alliance was one of interest on his side, for he would not espouse anything without a very large pecuniary settlement having been made in his favour. He met the army of Cinna under the walls of Rome, but both forces were enfeebled by sickness. Each party proceeded to do its best, but the soldiers on both sides were so wretchedly ill, that none of them could, for one moment, stand at ease; and all were much fitter to be in bed than in battle. A storm did sad havoc among the defenders of Rome, and a flash of lightning falling naturally upon the conductor of the army, caused the death of Cn. Pompeius. The gates of the city were thrown open, Cinna was restored to the Consulship, and though there had been an understanding that no blood should be shed, Marius set a band of slaves and mercenaries upon the defenceless people.

Under the pretence that he would only act according to law, this sanguinary impostor, declaring himself an exile, pretended that he would not enter the city until the sentence should be repealed; and with a sword at every throat, he demanded an expression of the voice of the people. The decision need scarcely be told, and Marius entered the city, where, standing behind Cinna's consular chair, he made a series of savage grimaces at his intended victims. Among these was the Consul, Octavius, who, soothed by the soothsayers into the belief that he had nothing to fear, boldly refused to fly, until some hired assassins executed their task, by executing the unhappy officer. He met his death while still maintaining his seat, and expired in the arms of his armchair of office.

Marius being now master of the situation, did all he could to make the situation vacant by a system of indiscriminate murder. The heads of the nation were not only imprisoned, but struck off. The two Cæsars were savagely seized and killed, while Marc Antony – an orator of considerable mark – had concealed himself in a place that was made known to Marius. The tyrant was at supper when he heard the news, and as if determined to sup full of horrors, he started up with a determination to witness the murder, which he desired should immediately take place; but his friends pacified him with the assurance that the head should be brought in to him.

If the chroniclers are to be credited, Marc Antony owed his detection to his fastidiousness as to the sort of wine that was placed before him. While in concealment, his daily supply was procured from a neighbouring tavern, by a messenger who was in the habit of tasting several bottles before he was satisfied. This excited the curiosity of the landlord, who became anxious to know the name of his very particular customer. The messenger, on one occasion, had taken so much of the wine in, that he let the truth out, when the wine-merchant treacherously proceeded to betray the hiding-place of Marc Antony. Soldiers were sent to his lodgings; but he grew so eloquent over his generous wine, that he excited among the guards a generous spirit. His life would probably have been spared, had not the tribune Annius rushed up-stairs, and himself struck off the head of the unhappy Antony.

Several men of consideration, in the most inconsiderate manner, killed themselves, to avoid the fate which was intended for them by Cinna, and that still greater sinner, Marius. Q. Lutatius Catulus proceeded to the temple, and getting into a corner among the statues of the gods, placing himself opposite Pan, perished by the fumes of charcoal. Merula, the Flamen of Jupiter, may be said to have snuffed himself out, or extinguished his own vital spark; for, seating himself in the portico of the Capitoline, he calmly made preparations for suicide, and took off his flame-coloured cap, in which it was not lawful for him to expire. Producing some surgical instruments from his pocket, he sat ruminating over his case, and taking out a lancet, he showed that he was no longer in the vein to live, but quite in the vein to die, for he opened an artery. The tyrant himself took to drinking in his old age, and frequently rolled about in a state of frenzy, under the impression that he was commanding an army against Mithridates. He ultimately drove himself to delirium tremens, and he contracted a constant shake of the hands by his frequent use of cordials. He died after a short illness, on the 15th of January, B.C. 86, without having devoted himself to that sober reflection, which would have induced him to repent of his numerous enormities. Such was the end of a man, whose faults have been sometimes glossed over with the varnish of flattery, though at the hands of truth they can only receive an appropriate coat of blacking.

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH.

DEATH OF CINNA. RETURN OF SULLA TO ROME. C. PAPIRIUS CARBO. DICTATORSHIP OF SULLA

Liberty being now established on a republican basis, by the massacre of all who had a word to say against the military usurper Cinna, that individual began the task of consolidating his power. He nominated L. Valerius Flaccus to the consulship; and those of the aristocracy who wished for freedom, were free to leave Rome if they did not like living under a tyrannical government. To speak openly in the forum or the courts of justice, was prohibited; and the scantiness of the reports that have come down to us of the events of the times, can be no matter of surprise, when we consider that the reporters were not permitted to give an account of actual occurrences.

It was necessary to amuse the masses by what are termed liberal measures, and as an excess of liberality, it was proposed that every debtor, paying one fourth of his debt, should be released from all further liability to his creditor. This was sure to be a popular act in a country already ruined by political agitation, and the despotism to which it frequently leads; and, as the debtors were by far the most numerous class, a sort of general Insolvent Act was hailed with acclamations by a bankrupt community.

Sulla, who was still in Greece, refused his allegiance to the despot at home, and L. Valerius Flaccus was sent to supersede him in the command of the army. Flaccus was not popular with his soldiers, and as the head of the Government had set the example of setting aside all law by a coup d'état, an imitator was soon found in the person of one Flavius Fimbria, a lieutenant, who, by a coup de tête, got rid of his obnoxious general. Flaccus being thus disposed of, Fimbria promoted himself to the chief command; but, cowardice and cruelty going hand in hand, he took his own life on hearing that Sulla was setting out against him. The soldiers of Fimbria, with the most revolting faithlessness, revolted to Sulla, who was now master of Asia. He called upon the conquered nation for 20,000 talents, and as the subdued people had not so large a sum by them, they were obliged to borrow it with one hand at enormous interest, in order to pay it with the other. The Roman capitalists lent the cash, and the Roman soldiers assisted them with their swords to draw a ruinous per-centage from the unfortunate borrowers. Sulla now prepared to march upon Rome, where Cinna had re-elected himself as Consul, in conjunction with one Papirius Carbo, a political incendiary, who acted like so much touch-paper and coal upon the flame of discord. Intending to meet their rival, they proceeded with an army into Italy; but the soldiers no sooner found themselves on the Italian soil, than they declared their determination to remain there. Cinna called them together, and endeavoured to persuade them to go forward, but even when he gave the word of command there was no advance on his bidding. From passive resistance they proceeded to active insubordination, and, denouncing him as a tyrant whom it was high time to see through, they perforated him with their swords in several places.

On the death of Cinna, legal authority began to raise its humbled head, and Carbo was summoned to hold a Comitia at Rome; but on the day appointed, the attendance of voters not promising a satisfactory result, the augurs declared the auspices unfavourable, and dissolved the meeting.

A deputation had been sent to Sulla to endeavour to make terms, but the members of the deputation were forced to return without any terms having been agreed upon. Sulla did not march immediately upon Italy, but went to Ædepsus, in Eubœa, for the benefit of the hot baths, though he did not limit himself to the waters, for he addicted himself to the spirits abounding in the neighbourhood. He amused himself in the society of those who are sometimes said to live upon their wits, though their existence is really derived from the want of wit in others. Sulla, however, had a counterpoise to any demerits of his own, in the still greater demerits of those who were opposed to him.

The new Consuls were L. Cornelius Scipio, a highly respectable man, and C. Julius Norbanus, a mere creature of Carbo. Against these leaders Sulla marched from Greece in the rudest health and the most exuberant spirits. His pockets, however, were as light as his heart; but this signified little, for the troops were so devoted to him that there was not an officer unattached; and so far from making any difficulty about their pay, they undertook to raise money among themselves, if necessary, for the use of their leader.

The expedition landed at Brundusium, where the inhabitants received Sulla with open arms, or rather without any arms at all, for they permitted him to occupy the place without opposition. Passing through Calabria and Apulia, he approached the encampment of Norbanus, in the neighbourhood of Capua, and sent ambassadors to treat; but their treatment was anything but courteous. They were insulted by all kinds of abuse, and it is said that they had a great deal more thrown in their face than mere reproaches. When Sulla heard of their reception, or rather their rejection at the enemy's camp, he fell upon it with such force that everything fell under him.

He next turned his attention to L. Scipio, whose army went over in a body to the side of Sulla, while Scipio and his son were sitting together, talking over general matters in the tent of the general. L. Scipio had despatched his son with directions for the right division, when the youth returned to say, that of the right division, there was not one man left; and when Scipio himself went to look after his men, he found there was not one remaining, even for the look of the thing, to mount guard at the tent of their commander. He, of course, proposed a series of strong resolutions, seconded by his son, that all those who had joined Sulla were enemies to the state; but the state in which he then was, rendered his denunciations idle, if not ridiculous. The position of Sulla was becoming rather alarming to the party of Carbo, who caused himself to be appointed Consul, for the year B.C. 82, in conjunction with young C. Marius, who, as the heir of his father, had inherited a large stock of wickedness. Cn. Pompeius had already sent in his adhesion to Sulla, who had received him as a very promising young man, for he had a fair share of popularity, and a good amount of property. Young Pompey was opposed to old Carbo, and the former so harassed the latter, that his temper, always sour, became equal to carbonic acid in its inflammable tendency.