by Will Durant
A member of the aristocracy paid with his life for trying to improve this situation. M. Livius Drusus was the son of the tribune who had rivaled Tiberius Gracchus; since his adopted son became the father-in-law of Augustus, the family bound the beginnings of the revolution with its end. Elected tribune in 91, he proposed three measures: (1) to divide more state lands among the poor; (2) to restore to the Senate its exclusive jury rights, but at the same time add 300 equites, or businessmen, to the Senate; and (3) to confer Roman citizenship upon all the freemen of Italy. The Assembly passed the first bill with pleasure, the second with indifference; the Senate rejected both and declared them void. The third never reached a vote, for an unknown assassin stabbed Drusus to death in his home.
Aroused to hope by Drusus’ bill, and convinced by his fate that neither the Senate nor the Assembly would ever peaceably consent to share its privileges, the Italian states prepared for revolt. A federal republic was formed, Corfinium was named the capital, and the government was vested in a senate of 500 men chosen from all the Italian tribes except the Etruscans and Umbrians, who refused to join. Rome at once declared war upon the secessionists. All parties in the capital co-operated in what seemed to them a defense of the union; and every Roman dreaded the revenge the rebel states would take if they won this fratricidal “Social War.”I Marius emerged from his solitude, took command, and won victory after victory while all other Roman generals but Sulla met defeat. In three years of war 300,000 men fell, and central Italy was devastated. When Etruria and Umbria were on the verge of going over to the rebels, Rome pacified them by a grant of full Roman citizenship; and in 90 the Roman franchise was offered to all Italian freemen or freedmen who would swear fealty to Rome. These belated concessions weakened the allies; one town after another laid down its arms; and in 89 this ferocious and costly war ended in a sullen peace. The Romans nullified the franchise they had granted by enrolling the new citizens in ten new tribes, which voted only after the existing thirty-five, and therefore usually to no use; besides, only a few of the new citizens could attend the assemblies in Rome. The deceived and desolate communities bided their time. Forty years later they would open their gates in welcome to a Caesar who offered them citizenship in a democracy that was dead.
VI. SULLA THE HAPPY
After a few years of peace the strife of Italians against Italians was resumed, merely changing its name from “Social” to “Civil,” and its scene from the towns to Rome. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was chosen one of the consuls for 88, and took command of the army that was being prepared to march against Mithridates of Pontus. Sulpicius Rufus, a tribune, unwilling to put a conservative like Sulla in charge of so powerful a force, persuaded the Assembly to transfer the command to Marius, who, though fat and sixty-nine, was still rumbling with military ambition. Sulla refused to let his long-awaited chance for leadership slip by through what seemed to him the whim of an assembly spellbound by a demagogue and bribed, he was sure, by the merchants who liked Marius. He fled to Nola, won the army to his support, and marched at its head against Rome.
Sulla was unique in his origins, character, and fate. Born poor, he became the defender of the aristocracy, as the aristocratic Gracchi, Drusi, and Caesar became leaders of the poor. He took his revenge upon life for having made him at once patrician and penniless; when he conquered money he made it serve his appetites without qualm or restraint. He was unprepossessing—glaring blue eyes in a white face mixed with rough blotches of fiery red, “like a mulberry sprinkled over with flour.”17 His education belied his looks. He was well versed in Greek as well as Roman literature, was a discriminate collector of art (usually by military means), had the works of Aristotle brought from Athens to Rome as part of his richest spoils, and found time, between war and revolution, to write his Memoirs for the misguidance of posterity. He was a jolly companion and a generous friend, devoted to wine, women, battle, and song. “He lived extravagantly,” says Sallust, “yet pleasure never interfered with his duties, except that his conduct as a husband might have been more honorable.”18 He made his way rapidly, above all in the army, his happiest medium; he treated his soldiers as comrades, shared their work, their marches, and their dangers; “his only effort was not to allow anyone to surpass him in wisdom or bravery.”19 He believed in no gods, but many superstitions. Otherwise he was the most realistic as well as the most ruthless of the Romans; his imagination and his feelings were always under the control of his intellect. It was said of him that he was half lion and half fox, and that the fox in him was more dangerous than the lion.20 Living half the time on battlefields, spending the last decade of his life in civil war, he nevertheless preserved his good humor to the end, graced his brutalities with epigrams, filled Rome with his laughter, made a hundred thousand enemies, achieved all his purposes, and died in bed.
Such a man seemed chemically compounded of the virtues and vices needed to subdue revolution at home and Mithridates abroad. His 35,000 trained men easily overcame the haphazard cohorts that Marius had improvised in Rome. Seeing his situation helpless, Marius escaped to Africa. Sulpicius was killed, betrayed by his servant; Sulla had the head of the tribune affixed to the rostrum that had lately rung with its eloquence; he rewarded the slave with freedom for his services, and death for his treachery. While his soldiers dominated the Forum he decreed that henceforth no measure should be offered to the Assembly except by permission of the Senate, and that the order of voting should be as in the “Servian constitution,” which gave priority and advantage to the upper classes. He had himself chosen proconsul, allowed Cnaeus Octavius and Cornelius Cinna to be elected consuls (87), and then marched off to encounter Mithridates the Great.
He had hardly left Italy when the struggle of the plebeian populares and the patrician and equestrian optimates was resumed. The conservative supporters of Octavius fought in the Forum with the radical followers of Cinna, and in one day 10,000 men were killed. Octavius won, and Cinna fled to organize revolt in the neighboring towns. Marius, after a winter in hiding, sailed back to Italy, proclaimed freedom to slaves, and led a force of 6000 men against Octavius in Rome. The rebels won, slaughtered thousands, adorned the rostra with the heads of slain senators, and paraded the streets with noble heads on their pikes as a model for later revolutions. Octavius accepted death calmly as he sat in his robes of office on his tribune’s chair. The carnage continued for five days and nights, the rebel terror for a year. A revolutionary tribunal subpoenaed patricians, condemned them if they had opposed Marius, and seized their property. A nod from Marius sufficed to send any man to death, usually by execution there and then. All of Sulla’s friends were slain; his property was confiscated; he was deposed from his command and was declared a public enemy. The dead were refused burial and were left in the streets to be devoured by birds and dogs. The freed slaves plundered, raped, and killed indiscriminately, until Cinna gathered 4000 of them together, surrounded them with Gallic soldiery, and had them butchered to death.21
Cinna was now (86) chosen consul for the second time, Marius for the seventh. In the first month of his new term Marius died, aged seventy-one, worn out with hardships and violence. Valerius Flaccus, elected in his stead, passed a bill canceling seventy-five per cent of all debts, and then left for the East with an army of 12,000 men to depose Sulla from command. Enjoying undivided power at Rome, Cinna changed the Republic into a dictatorship, nominated all successful candidates for major offices, and had himself elected consul for four successive years.
When Flaccus left Italy, Sulla was besieging Athens, which had joined Mithridates in revolt. Receiving nothing from the Senate for the pay of his troops, he had financed his campaign by pillaging the temples and treasuries of Olympia, Epidaurus, and Delphi. In March, 86, his soldiers broke through a gate in Athens’ walls, poured in, and revenged themselves for the city’s long-delayed welcome by a riot of slaughter and robbery. Plutarch tells us that “there was no numbering the slain; . . . blood flowed through the streets and far out into the subu
rbs.”22 At last Sulla called a halt to the massacre, remarking generously that he would “forgive the living for the dead.” He led his refreshed troops northward, defeated a great force at Chaeronea and Orchomenus, pursued its remnants across the Hellespont into Asia, and prepared to meet the main army of the Pontic king. But meanwhile Flaccus and his legions had also reached Asia, and Sulla was again informed that he must give up his command. He persuaded Flaccus to let him complete the campaign; thereupon Flaccus was killed by his lieutenant, Fimbria, who now declared himself commander of all Roman armies and advanced north against Sulla. Faced with this folly, Sulla made a peace with Mithridates (85), by which the King was to restore all the conquests that he had made in the war, surrender eighty galleys to Rome, and pay an indemnity of 2000 talents. Then Sulla turned south and met Fimbria in Lydia. Fimbria’s soldiers went over to Sulla, and Fimbria committed suicide. Master now of the Greek East, Sulla exacted 20,000 talents as indemnities and accrued taxes from the revolted cities of Ionia. He sailed with his army to Greece, marched to Patrae, and arrived at Brundisium in 83. Cinna tried to stop him but was killed by his troops.
Sulla was bringing to the Treasury 15,000 pounds of gold and 115,000 pounds of silver, in addition to money and works of art which he credited to his personal account. But the democratic leaders, still in power in Rome, continued to brand him as a public enemy, and denounced his treaty with Mithridates as a national humiliation. Reluctantly Sulla led his 40,000 troops to the gates of Rome. Many of the aristocracy went out to join him; one of them, Cnaeus Pompey, brought a legion recruited entirely from his father’s clients and friends. The son of Marius led an army out to encounter Sulla, was defeated, and fled to Praeneste, after sending instructions to the populares praetor to put to death all leading patricians still left in the capital. The praetor convoked the Senate, and the marked men were killed in their seats or their flight. The democratic forces then evacuated Rome, and Sulla entered it unhindered; but meanwhile a Samnite army of 100,000 men intent on avenging the Social War, marched up from the south and joined the democratic remnants. Sulla went out to meet them, and at the Colline Gate his 50,000 men won one of the bloodiest victories of ancient times. Sulla ordered 8000 prisoners shot down with arrows, on the ground that they could make more trouble alive than dead. The severed heads of the captured generals were displayed on pikes before the walls of Praeneste, where the last democratic army was standing siege. Praeneste fell, the young Marius killed himself, and his head was nailed up in the Forum—a procedure which frequent precedents had now made constitutional.
Sulla had no trouble in persuading the Senate to make him dictator. At once he issued a proscription list condemning to death forty senators and 2600 businessmen; these last had supported Marius against him, and had bought in at bargains the property of senators slain during the radical regime. He offered rewards to informers, and prizes up to 12,000 denarii ($7200) to those who should bring him the proscribed men, alive or dead. The Forum was adorned festively with the heads of the slain and with periodically renewed proscription lists which the citizens had to read at frequent intervals to know if they might still live. Massacre, banishment, and confiscation spread their horrors from Rome to the provinces and fell upon Italian rebels and the followers of Marius everywhere. Some 4700 persons died in this aristocratic terror. “Men were butchered in the embraces of their wives,” says Plutarch, “sons in the arms of their mothers.” Many persons who had been neutral, or even conservative, were proscribed, exiled, or slain; Sulla, it was said, needed their money for his troops, his pleasures, or his friends. Confiscated property was sold to the highest bidder or to Sulla’s favorites, and became the foundation of many fortunes, like those of Crassus and Catiline.
Using his powers as dictator, Sulla issued a series of edicts—known from his clan name as the Cornelian Laws—by which he hoped to establish a permanently aristocratic constitution. To replace dead citizens he enfranchised many Spaniards and Celts and some former slaves. He weakened the assemblies by adding these new members indebted to him and by again ruling that no measure should be put before the Assembly except by consent of the Senate. To stop the flocking of poor Italians to Rome he suspended the state distribution of corn; at the same time he eased the pressure of population in the city by distributing land to 120,000 veterans. To prevent the use of successive consulships as in effect a dictatorship, he re-emphasized the old requirement of a ten-year interval before the same office could be held a second time by the same man. He lowered the prestige of the tribunate by limiting its right of veto and making ex-tribunes ineligible for any higher office. He took from the business class, and restored to the Senate, the exclusive right to serve as jurors in the higher courts; and he replaced the farming of taxes to publicans with direct payments from the provinces to the Treasury. He reorganized the courts, increased their number for quicker trials, and carefully specified their functions and fields. All the legislative, judicial, executive, social, and sartorial privileges enjoyed by the Senate before the Gracchan revolt were returned to it, for Sulla was certain that only a monarchy or an aristocracy could wisely administer an empire. To renew the full membership of the Senate he allowed the Tribal Assembly to promote to it 300 members of the “equestrian” class. To show his confidence in this thoroughgoing restoration, he disbanded his legions and decreed that no army should be permitted in Italy. After two years of dictatorship, he resigned all his powers, re-established consular government, and retired to private life (80).
He was safe, for he had killed nearly all who could plan his assassination. He dismissed his lictors and guards, walked unharmed in the Forum, and offered to give an account of his official actions to any citizen who should ask for it. Then he went to spend his last years in his villa at Cumae. Tired of war, of power and glory, perhaps of men, he surrounded himself with singers, dancers, actors, and actresses; wrote his Commentarii, hunted and fished, ate and drank. Men had long since called him Sulla Felix, Sulla the Happy, because he had won every battle, known every pleasure, reached every power, and lived without fear or regret. He married five wives, divorced four, and eked out their inadequacy with mistresses. At 58 he developed an ulcer of the colon so severe that “the corrupted flesh,” says Plutarch, “broke out into lice. Many men were employed day and night in destroying them, but they so multiplied that not only his clothes, baths, and basins, but his very food was polluted with them.”23 He died of intestinal hemorrhage, after hardly a year of retirement (78). He had not neglected to dictate his epitaph: “No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.”24
* * *
I This is the time-honored mistranslation of Bellum Sociale—the War of the Allies (socii) against Rome.
CHAPTER VII
The Oligarchic Reaction
77-60 B.C.
I. THE GOVERNMENT
NEVERTHELESS, Sulla had erred twice on the side of generosity. He had spared the son and nephew of his enemies, the gay and brilliant Caius Julius Caesar, who was entering his twenties in the proscription years; Sulla had nominated him for death, but let him go on the importuning of their common friends; his judgment, however, was not mistaken when he remarked, “In that young man go many Mariuses.”1 And perhaps he erred in resigning too soon and enjoying himself to an early end. Had his patience and insight equaled his ruthlessness and courage, he might have saved Rome a half century of chaos and given her in 80 B.C.. the peace and security, order and prosperity, that Augustus would bring back from Actium. He restored the old when he should have created the new.
Within a decade after his death his work was in ruins. Relaxed in the arms of victory, the patricians neglected the tasks of government to seek wealth in business and spend it in luxury. The struggle between the optimates and the populares continued with a bitterness that passionately awaited another opportunity for violence. The optimates, or “best people,” made nobilitas their creed; not in the sense of noblesse oblige, but on the theory th
at good government required the restriction of major magistracies to men whose ancestors had held high office. Anyone who ran for office without such forebears was scorned as novus homo—a “new man,” or upstart; such were Marius and Cicero. The populares demanded “career open to talent,” all power to the assemblies, and free land for veterans and the poor. Neither party believed in democracy; both aspired to dictatorship, and both practiced intimidation and corruption without conscience or concealment. The collegia that had once been mutual-benefit societies became agencies for the sale of great blocks of plebeian votes. The business of vote buying reached a scale where it required a high specialization of labor: there were divisores, who bought votes, interpretes, or go-betweens, and sequestres, who held the money until the votes had been delivered.2 Cicero describes candidates as going about purse in hand among the electors in the Field of Mars.3 Pompey had his mediocre friend Afranius made consul by inviting the leaders of the tribes to his gardens and there paying them for the ballots of their groups.4 So much money was borrowed to finance candidacies that the campaigns raised the interest rate to eight per cent per month.5