The History of Rome, Book IV

Ferment in Rome

The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations

Secondary Effect of the Political Prosecutions

Marius

Rome was in a fearful ferment. The attack of Drusus upon the equestrian courts and his sudden downfall brought about by the equestrian party, followed by the two-edged Varian warfare of prosecutions, had sown the bitterest discord between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie as well as between the moderates and the ultras. Events had completely justified the party of concession; what it had proposed voluntarily to bestow, men had been more than half compelled to concede; but the mode in which the concession was made bore, just like the earlier refusal, the stamp of obstinate and shortsighted envy. Instead of granting equality of rights to all Italian communities, they had only expressed the inferiority in another form. They had received a great number of Italian communities into Roman citizenship, but had attached to what they thus conferred an offensive stigma, by placing the new burgesses alongside of the old on nearly the same footing as the freedmen occupied alongside of the freeborn. They had irritated rather than pacified the communities between the Po and the Alps by the concession of Latin rights. Lastly, they had withheld the franchise from a considerable, and that not the worst, portion of the Italians—the whole of the insurgent communities which had again submitted; and not only so, but, instead of legally re-establishing the former treaties annulled by the insurrection, they had at most renewed them as a matter of favour and subject to revocation at pleasure.182 The disability as regarded the right of voting gave the deeper offence, that it was—as the comitia were then constituted—politically absurd, and the hypocritical care of the government for the unstained purity of the electors appeared to every unprejudiced person ridiculous; but all these restrictions were dangerous, inasmuch as they invited every demagogue to carry his ulterior objects by taking up the more or less just demands of the new burgesses and of the Italians excluded from the franchise. While accordingly the more clear-seeing of the aristocracy could not but find these partial and grudging concessions as inadequate as did the new burgesses and the excluded themselves, they further painfully felt the absence from their ranks of the numerous and excellent men whom the Varian commission of high treason had exiled, and whom it was the more difficult to recall because they had been condemned by the verdict not of the people but of the jury-courts; for, while there was little hesitation as to cancelling a decree of the people even of a judicial character by means of a second, the cancelling of a verdict of jurymen bythe people appeared to the betterportion of the aristocracy as a very dangerous precedent. Thus neither the ultras nor the moderates were content with the issue of the Italian crisis. But still deeper indignation swelled the heart of the old man, who had gone forth to the Italian war with freshened hopes and had come back from it reluctantly, with the consciousness of having rendered new services and of having received in return new and most severe mortifications, with the bitter feeling of being no longer dreaded but despised by his enemies, with that gnawing spirit of vengeance in his heart, which feeds on its own poison. It was true of him also, as of the new burgesses and the excluded; incapable and awkward as he had shown himself to be, his popular name was still a formidable weapon in the hand of a demagogue.

Decay of Military Discipline

With these elements of political convulsion was combined the rapidly spreading decay of decorous soldierly habits and of military discipline. The seeds, which were sown by the enrolment of the proletariate in the army, developed themselves with alarming rapidity during the demoralizing insurrectionary war, which compelled Rome to admit to the service every man capable of bearing arms without distinction, and which above all carried political partizanship directly into the headquarters and into the soldiers' tent. The effects soon appeared in the slackening of all the bonds of the military hierarchy. During the siege of Pompeii the commander of the Sullan besieging corps, the consular Aulus Postumius Albinus, was put to death with stones and bludgeons by his soldiers, who believed themselves betrayed by their general to the enemy; and Sulla the commander-in-chief contented himself with exhorting the troops to efface the memory of that occurrence by their brave conduct in presence of the enemy. The authors of that deed were the marines, from of old the least respectable of the troops. A division of legionaries raised chiefly from the city populace soon followed the example thus given. Instigated by Gaius Titius, one of the heroes of the market-place, it laid hands on the consul Cato. By an accident he escaped death on this occasion; Titius was arrested, but was not punished. When Cato soon afterwards actually perished in a combat, his own officers, and particularly the younger Gaius Marius, were—whether justly or unjustly, cannot be ascertained—designated as the authors of his death.

Economic Crisis

Murder of Asellio

To the political and military crisis thus beginning fell to be added the economic crisis—perhaps still more terrible—which set in upon the Roman capitalists in consequence of the Social war and the Asiatic troubles. The debtors, unable even to raise the interest due and yet inexorably pressed by their creditors, had on the one hand entreated from the proper judicial authority, the urban praetor Asellio, a respite to enable them to dispose of their possessions, and on the other hand had searched out once more the old obsolete laws as to usury183 and, according to the rule established in olden times, had sued their creditors for fourfold the amount of the interest paid to them contrary to the law. Asellio lent himself to bend the actually existing law into conformity with the letter, and put into shape in the usual way the desired actions for interest; whereupon the offended creditors assembled in the Forum under the leadership of the tribune of the people Lucius Cassius, and attacked and killed the praetor in front of the temple of Concord, just as in his priestly robes he was presenting a sacrifice—an outrage which was not even made a subject of investigation (665). On the other hand it was said in the circles of the debtors, that the suffering multitude could not be relieved otherwise than by "new account-books," that is, by legally cancelling the claims of all creditors against all debtors. Matters stood again exactly as they had stood during the strife of the orders; once more the capitalists in league with the prejudiced aristocracy made war against, and prosecuted, the oppressed multitude and the middle party which advised a modification of the rigour of the law; once more Rome stood on the verge of that abyss into which the despairing debtor drags his creditor along with him. Only, since that time the simple civil and moral organization of a great agricultural city had been succeeded by the social antagonisms of a capital of many nations, and by that demoralization in which the prince and the beggar meet; now all incongruities had come to be on a broader, more abrupt, and fearfully grander scale. When the Social war brought all the political and social elements fermenting among the citizens into collision with each other, it laid the foundation for a new resolution. An accident led to its outbreak.

The Sulpician Laws

Sulpicius Rufus

It was the tribune of the people Publius Sulpicius Rufus who in 666 proposed to the burgesses to declare that every senator, who owed more than 2000 -denarii- (82 pounds), should forfeit his seat in the senate; to grant to the burgesses condemned by non-free jury courts liberty to return home; to distribute the new burgesses among all the tribes, and likewise to allow the right of voting in all tribes to the freedmen. They were proposals which from the mouth of such a man were at least somewhat surprising. Publius Sulpicius Rufus (born in 630) owed his political importance not so much to his noble birth, his important connections, and his hereditary wealth, as to his remarkable oratorical talent, in which none of his contemporaries equalled him. His powerful voice, his lively gestures sometimes bordering on theatrical display, the luxuriant copiousness of his flow of words arrested, even if they did not convince, his hearers. As a partisan he was from the outset on the side of the senate, and his first public appearance (659) had been the impeachment of Norbanus who was mortally hated by the government party.184 Among the conservatives he belonged to the section of Crassus and Drusus. We do not know what primarily gave occasion to his soliciting the tribuneship of the people for 666, and on its account renouncing his patrician nobility; but he seems to have been by no means rendered a revolutionist through the fact that he, like the whole middle party, had been persecuted as revolutionary by the conservatives, and to have by no means intended an overthrow of the constitution in the sense of Gaius Gracchus. It would rather seem that, as the only man of note belonging to the party of Crassus and Drusus who had come forth uninjured from the storm of the Varian prosecutions, he felt himself called on to complete the work of Drusus and finally to set aside the still subsisting disabilities of the new burgesses—for which purpose he needed the tribunate. Several acts of his even during his tribuneship are mentioned, which betray the very opposite of demagogic designs. For instance, he prevented by his veto one of his colleagues from cancelling through a decree of the people the sentences of jurymen issued under the Varian law; and when the late aedile Gaius Caesar, passing over the praetorship, unconstitutionally became a candidate for the consulship for 667, with the design, it was alleged, of getting the charge of the Asiatic war afterwards entrusted to him, Sulpicius opposed him more resolutely and sharply than any one else. Entirely in the spirit of Drusus, he thus demanded from himself as from others primarily and especially the maintenance of the constitution. But in fact he was as little able as was Drusus to reconcile things that were incompatible, and to carry out in strict form of law the change of the constitution which he had in view—a change judicious in itself, but never to be obtained from the great majority of the old burgesses by amicable means. His breach with the powerful family of the Julii—among whom in particular the consular Lucius Caesar, the brother of Gaius, was very influential in the senate— and withthesectionof the aristocracy adhering to it, beyond doubt materially cooperated and carried the irascible man through personal exasperation beyond his original design.

Tendency of These Laws

Yet the proposals brought in by him were of such a nature as to be by no means out of keeping with the personal character and the previous party-position of their author. The equalization of the new burgesses with the old was simply a partial resumption of the proposals drawn up by Drusus in favour of the Italians; and, like these, only carried out the requirements of a sound policy. The recall of those condemned by the Varian jurymen no doubt sacrificed the principle of the inviolability of such a sentence, in defence of which Sulpicius himself had just practically interposed; but it mainly benefited in the first instance the members of the proposer's own party, the moderate conservatives, and it may be very well conceived that so impetuous a man might when first coming forward decidedly combat such a measure and then, indignant at the resistance which he encountered, propose it himself. The measure against the insolvency of senators was doubtless called forth by the exposure of the economic condition of the ruling families—so deeply embarrassed notwithstanding all their outward splendour—on occasion of the last financial crisis. It was painful doubtless, but yet of itself conducive to the rightly understood interest of the aristocracy, if, as could not but be the effect of the Sulpician proposal, all individuals should withdraw from the senate who were unable speedily to meet their liabilities, and if the coterie-system, which found its main support in the insolvency of many senators and their consequent dependence on their wealthy colleagues, should be checked by the removal of the notoriously venal pack of the senators. At the same time, of course, we do not mean to deny that such a purification of the senate-house so abruptly and invidiously exposing the senate, as Rufus proposed, would certainly never have been proposed without his personal quarrels with the ruling coterie-heads. Lastly, the regulationin favour of the freedmen had undoubtedly for its primary object to make its proposer master of the street; but in itself it was neither unwarranted nor incompatible with the aristocratic constitution. Since the freedmen had begun to be drawn upon for military service, their demand for the right of voting was so far justified, as the right of voting and the obligation of service had always gone hand in hand. Moreover, looking to the nullity of the comitia, it was politically of very little moment whether one sewer more emptied itself into that slough. The difficulty which the oligarchy felt in governing with the comitia was lessened rather than increased by the unlimited admission of the freedmen, who were to a very great extent personally and financially dependent on the ruling families and, if rightly used, might quite furnish the government with a means of controlling the elections more thoroughly than before. This measure certainly, like every other political favour shown to the proletariate, ran counter to the tendencies of the aristocracy friendly to reform; but it was for Rufus hardly anything else than what the corn-law had been for Drusus—a means of drawing the proletariate over to his side and of breaking down with its aid the opposition against the truly beneficial reforms which he meditated. It was easy to foresee that this opposition would not be slight; that the narrow-minded aristocracy and the narrow-minded bourgeoisie would display the same stupid jealousy after the subduing of the insurrection as they had displayed before its outbreak; that the great majority of all parties would secretly or even openly characterize the partial concessions made at the moment of the most formidable danger as unseasonable compliances, and would passionately resist every attempt to extend them. The example of Drusus had shown what came of undertakingto carry conservative reforms solely in reliance on the majority of the senate; it was a course quite intelligible, that his friend who shared his views should attempt to carry out kindred designs in opposition to that majority and under the forms of demagogism. Rufus accordingly gave himself no trouble to gain the senate over to his views by the bait of the jury courts. He found a better support in the freedmen and above all in the armed retinue—consisting, according to the report of his opponents, of 3000 hired men and an "opposition-senate" of 600 young men from the better class—with which he appeared in the streets and in the Forum.

Resistance of the Government

Riots

Position of Sulla

His proposals accordingly met with the most decided resistance from the majority of the senate, which first, to gain time, induced the consuls Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Quintus Pompeius Rufus, both declared opponents of demagogism, to enjoin extraordinary religious observances, during which the popular assemblies were suspended. Sulpicius replied by a violent tumult, in which among other victims the young Quintus Pompeius, son of the one and son-in-law of the other consul, met his death and the lives of both consuls themselves were seriously threatened—Sulla is said even to have escaped only by Marius opening to him his house. They were obliged to yield; Sulla agreed to countermand the announced solemnities, and the Sulpician proposals now passed without further difficulty. But this was far from determining their fate. Though the aristocracy in the capital might own its defeat, there was now—for the first time since the commencement of the revolution—yet another power in Italy which could not be overlooked, viz. the two strong and victorious armies of the proconsul Strabo and the consul Sulla. The political position of Strabo might be ambiguous, but Sulla, although he had given way to open violence for the moment, was on the best terms with the majority of the senate; and not only so, but he had, immediately after countermanding the solemnities, departed for Campania to join his army. To terrify the unarmed consul by bludgeon-men or the defenceless capital by the swords of the legions, amounted to the same thing in the end: Sulpicius assumed that his opponent, now when he could, would requite violence with violence and return to the capital at the head of his legions to overthrow the conservative demagogue and his laws along with him. Perhaps he was mistaken. Sulla was just as eager for the war against Mithradates as he was probably averse to the political exhalations of the capital; considering his original spirit of indifference and his unrivalled political nonchalance, there is great probability that he by no means intended the coup d'etat which Sulpicius expected, and that, if he had been let alone, he would have embarked without delay with his troops for Asia so soon as he had captured Nola, with the siege of which he was still occupied.

Marius Nominated Commander-in-Chief in Sulla's Stead

But, be this as it might, Sulpicius, with a view to parry the presumed blow, conceived the scheme of taking the supreme command from Sulla; and for this purpose joined with Marius, whose name was still sufficiently popular to make a proposal to transfer to him the chief command in the Asiatic war appear plausible to the multitude, and whose military position and ability might prove a support in the event of a rupture with Sulla. Sulpicius probably did not overlook the danger involved in placing that old man—not less incapable than vengeful and ambitious—at the head of the Campanian army, and as little the scandalous irregularity of entrusting an extraordinary supreme command by decree of the people to a private man; but the very tried incapacity of Marius as a statesman gave a sort of guarantee that he would not be able seriously to endanger the constitution, and above all the personal position of Sulpicius, if he formed a correct estimate of Sulla's designs, was one of so imminent peril that such considerations could hardly be longer heeded. That the worn-out hero himself readily met the wishes of any one who would employ him as a -condottiere-, was a matter of course; his heart had now for many years longed for the command in an Asiatic war, and not less perhaps for an opportunity of once settling accounts thoroughly with the majority of the senate. Accordingly on the proposal of Sulpicius Gaius Marius was by decree of the people invested with extraordinary supreme, or as it was called proconsular, power, and obtained the command of the Campanian army and the superintendence of the war against Mithradates; and two tribunes of the people were despatched to the camp at Nola, to take over the army from Sulla.

Sulla's Recall

Sulla was not the man to yield to such a summons. If any one had a vocation to the chief command in the Asiatic war, it was Sulla. He had a few years before commanded with the greatest success in the same theatre of war; he had contributed more than any other man to the subjugation of the dangerous Italian insurrection; as consul of the year in which the Asiatic war broke out, he had been invested with the command in it after the customary way and with the full consent of his colleague, who was on friendly terms with him and related to him by marriage. It was expecting a great deal to suppose that he would, in accordance with a decree of the sovereign burgesses of Rome, give up a command undertaken in such circumstances to an old military and political antagonist, in whose hands the army might be turned to none could tell what violent and preposterous proceedings. Sulla was neither good-natured enough to comply voluntarily with such an order, nor dependent enough to need to do so. His army was— partly in consequence of the alterations of the military system which originated with Marius, partly from the moral laxity and the military strictness of its discipline in the hands of Sulla—little more than a body of mercenaries absolutely devoted to their leader and indifferent to political affairs. Sulla himself was a hardened, cool, and clearheaded man, in whose eyes the sovereign Roman burgesses were a rabble, the hero of Aquae Sextiae a bankrupt swindler, formal legality a phrase, Rome itself a city without a garrison and with its walls half in ruins, which could be far more easily captured than Nola.

Sulla's March on Rome

On these views he acted. He assembled his soldiers—there were six legions, or about 35,000 men—and explained to them the summons that had arrived from Rome, not forgetting to hint that the new commander- in-chief would undoubtedly lead to Asia Minor not the army as it stood, but another formed of fresh troops. The superior officers, who still had more of the citizen than the soldier, kept aloof, and only one of them followed the general towards the capital; but the soldiers, who in accordance with earlier experiences185 hoped to find in Asia an easy war and endless booty, were furious; in a moment the two tribunes that had come from Rome were torn in pieces, and from all sides the cry arose that the general should lead them to Rome. Without delay the consul started, and forming a junction with his like-minded colleague by the way, he arrived by quick marches—little troubling himself about the deputies who hastened from Rome to meet and attempted to detain him—beneath the walls of the capital. Suddenly the Romans beheld columns of Sulla's army take their station at the bridge over the Tiber and at the Colline and Esquiline gates; and then two legions in battle array, with their standards at their head, passed the sacred ring-wall within which the law had forbidden war to enter. Many a worse quarrel, many an important feud had been brought to a settlement within those walls, without any need for a Roman army breaking the sacred peace of the city; that step was now taken, primarily for thesake of the miserable question whether this or that officer was called to command in the east.

Rome Occupied

The entering legions advanced as far as the height of the Esquiline; when the missiles and stones descending in showers from the roofs made the soldiers waver and they began to give way, Sulla himself brandished a blazing torch, and with firebrands and threats of setting the houses on fire the legions cleared their way to the Esquiline market-place (not far from S. Maria Maggiore). There the force hastily collected by Marius and Sulpicius awaited them, and by its superior numbers repelled the first invading columns. But reinforcements came up from the gates; another division of the Sullans made preparations for turning the defenders by the street of the Subura; the latter were obliged to retire. At the temple of Tellus, where the Esquiline begins to slope towards the great Forum, Marius attempted once more to make a stand; he adjured the senate and equites and all the citizens to throw themselves across the path of the legions. But he himself had transformed them from citizens to mercenaries; his own work turned against him: they obeyed not the government, but their general. Even when the slaves were summoned to arm under the promise of freedom, not more than three of them appeared. Nothing remained for the leaders but to escape in all haste through the still unoccupied gates; after a few hours Sulla was absolute master of Rome. That night the watchfires of the legions blazed in the great market-place of the capital.

First Sullan Restoration

Death of Sulpicius

Flight of Marius

The first military intervention in civil feuds had made it quite evident, not only that the political struggles had reached the point at which nothing save open and direct force proves decisive, but also that the power of the bludgeon was of no avail against the power of the sword. It was the conservative party which first drew the sword, and which accordingly in due time experienced the truth of the ominous words of the Gospel as to those who first have recourse to it. For the present it triumphed completely and might put the victory into formal shape at its pleasure. As a matter of course, the Sulpician laws were characterized as legally null. Their author and his most notable adherents had fled; they were, twelve in number, proscribed by the senate for arrest and execution as enemies of their country. Publius Sulpicius was accordingly seized at Laurentum and put to death; and the head of the tribune, sent to Sulla, was by his orders exposed in the Forum at the very rostra where he himself had stood but a few days before in the full vigour of youth and eloquence. The rest of the proscribed were pursued; the assassins were on the track of even the old Gaius Marius. Although the general might have clouded the memory of his glorious days by a succession of pitiful proceedings, now that the deliverer of his country was running for his life, he was once more the victor of Vercellae, and with breathless suspense all Italy listened to the incidents of his marvellous flight. At Ostia he had gone on board a transport with the view of sailing for Africa; but adverse winds and want of provisions compelled him to land at the Circeian promontory and to wander at random. With few attendants and without trusting himself under a roof, the grey-haired consular, often suffering from hunger, found his way on foot to the neighbourhood of the Roman colony of Minturnae at the mouth of the Garigliano. There the pursuing cavalry were seen in the distance; with great difficulty he reached the shore, and a trading— vessel lying there withdrew him from his pursuers; but the timid mariners soon put him ashore again and made off, while Marius stole along the beach. His pursuers found him in the salt-marsh of Minturnae sunk to the girdle in the mud and with his head concealed amidst a quantity of reeds, and delivered him to the civic authorities of Minturnae. He was placed in prison, and the town-executioner, a Cimbrian slave, was sent to put him to death; but the German trembled before the flashing eyes of his old conqueror and the axe fell from his hands, when the general with his powerful voice haughtily demanded whether he dared to kill Gaius Marius. When they learned this, the magistrates of Minturnae were ashamed that the deliverer of Rome should meet with greater reverence from slaves to whom he had brought bondage than from his fellow-citizens to whom he had brought freedom; they loosed his fetters, gave him a vessel and money for travelling expenses, and sent him to Aenaria (Ischia). The proscribed with the exception of Sulpicius gradually met in those waters; they landed at Eryx and at what was formerly Carthage, but the Roman magistrates both in Sicily and in Africa sent them away. So they escaped to Numidia, whose desert sand-dunes gave them a place of refuge for the winter. But the king Hiempsal II, whom they hoped to gain and who had seemed for a while willing to unite with them, had only done so to lull them into security, and now attempted to seize their persons. With great difficulty the fugitives escaped from his cavalry, and found a temporary refuge in the little island of Cercina (Kerkena) on the coast of Tunis. We know not whether Sulla thanked his fortunate star that he had been spared the odium of putting to death the victor of the Cimbrians; at any rate it does not appear that the magistrates of Minturnae were punished.