The history of Rome. Book IV

by Theodor Mommsen

  Subjugation of Campania As Far As Nola - Sulla in Samnium

  The Roman southern army, which was now under the command of Lucius Sulla, had at the same time assumed the offensive and had penetrated into southern Campania which was occupied by the enemy. Stabiae was taken and destroyed by Sulla in person (30 April 665) and Herculaneum by Titus Didius, who however fell himself (11 June) apparently at the assault on that city. Pompeii resisted longer. The Samnite general Lucius Cluentius came up to bring relief to the town, but he was repulsed by Sulla; and when, reinforced by bands of Celts, he renewed his attempt, he was, chiefly owing to the wavering of these untrustworthy associates, so totally defeated that his camp was taken and he himself was cut down with the greater part of his troops on their flight towards Nola. The grateful Roman army conferred on its general the grass-wreath - the homely badge with which the usage of the camp decorated the soldier who had by his capacity saved a division of his comrades. Without pausing to undertake the siege of Nola and of the other Campanian towns still occupied by the Samnites, Sulla at once advanced into the interior, which was the head-quarters of the insurrection. The speedy capture and fearful punishment of Aeclanum spread terror throughout the Hirpinian country; it submitted even before the arrival of the Lucanian contingent which had set itself in motion to render help, and Sulla was able to advance unhindered as far as the territory of the Samnite confederacy. The pass, where the Samnite militia under Mutilus awaited him, was turned, the Samnite army was attacked in rear, and defeated; the camp was lost, the general escaped wounded to Aesernia. Sulla advanced to Bovianum, the capital of the Samnite country, and compelled it to surrender by a second victory achieved beneath its walls. The advanced season alone put an end to the campaign there.

  The Insurrection on the Whole Overpowered

  The position of affairs had undergone a most complete change. Powerful, victorious, aggressive as was the insurrection when it began the campaign of 665, it emerged from it deeply humbled, everywhere beaten, and utterly hopeless. All northern Italy was pacified.

  In central Italy both coasts were wholly in the Roman power, and the Abruzzi almost entirely; Apulia as far as Venusia, and Campania as far as Nola, were in the hands of the Romans; and by the occupation of the Hirpinian territory the communication was broken off between the only two regions still persevering in open resistance, the Samnite and the Lucano-Bruttian. The field of the insurrection resembled the scene of an immense conflagration dying out; everywhere the eye fell on ashes and ruins and smouldering brands; here and there the flame still blazed up among the ruins, but the fire was everywhere mastered, and there was no further threatening of danger. It is to be regretted that we no longer sufficiently discern in the superficial accounts handed down to us the causes of this sudden revolution.

  While undoubtedly the dexterous leadership of Strabo and still more of Sulla, and especially the more energetic concentration of the Roman forces, and their more rapid offensive contributed materially to that result, political causes may have been at work along with the military in producing the singularly rapid fall of the power of the insurgents; the law of Silvanus and Carbo may have fulfilled its design in carrying defection and treason to the common cause into the ranks of the enemy; and misfortune, as has so frequently happened, may have fallen as an apple of discord among the loosely-connected insurgent communities.

  Perseverance of the Samnites

  We see only - and this fact points to an internal breaking up of Italia, that must certainly have been attended by violent convulsions - that the Samnites, perhaps under the leadership of the Marsian Quintus Silo who had been from the first the soul of the insurrection and after the capitulation of the Marsians had gone as a fugitive to the neighbouring people, now assumed another organization purely confined to their own land, and, after "Italia" was vanquished, undertook to continue the struggle as "Safini" or Samnites[18]. The strong Aesernia was converted from the fortress that had curbed, into the last retreat that sheltered, Samnite freedom; an army assembled consisting, it was said, of 30,000 infantry and 1000 cavalry, and was strengthened by the manumission and incorporation of 20,000 slaves; five generals were placed at its head, among whom Silo was the first and Mutilus next to him. With astonishment men saw the Samnite wars beginning anew after a pause of two hundred years, and the resolute nation of farmers making a fresh attempt, just as in the fifth century, after the Italian confederation was shattered, to force Rome with their own hand to recognize their country's independence. But this resolution of the bravest despair made not much change in the main result; although the mountain-war in Samnium and Lucania might still require some time and some sacrifices, the insurrection was nevertheless already substantially at an end.

  Outbreak of the Mithradatic War

  In the meanwhile, certainly, there had occurred a fresh complication, for the Asiatic difficulties had rendered it imperatively necessary to declare war against Mithradates king of Pontus, and for next year (666) to destine the one consul and a consular army to Asia Minor. Had this war broken out a year earlier, the contemporary revolt of the half of Italy and of the most important of the provinces would have formed an immense peril to the Roman state. Now that the marvellous good fortune of Rome had once more been evinced in the rapid collapse of the Italian insurrection, this Asiatic war just beginning was, notwithstanding its being mixed up with the expiring Italian struggle, not of a really dangerous character; and the less so, because Mithradates in his arrogance refused the invitation of the Italians that he should afford them direct assistance. Still it was in a high degree inconvenient. The times had gone by, when they without hesitation carried on simultaneously an Italian and a transmarine war, the state-chest was already after two years of warfare utterly exhausted, and the formation of a new army in addition to that already in the field seemed scarcely practicable. But they resorted to such expedients as they could. The sale of the sites that had from ancient times[19] remained unoccupied on and near the citadel to persons desirous of building, which yielded 9000 pounds of gold (360,000 pounds), furnished the requisite pecuniary means. No new army was formed, but that which was under Sulla in Campania was destined to embark for Asia, as soon as the state of things in southern Italy should allow its departure; which might be expected, from the progress of the army operating in the north under Strabo, to happen soon.

  Third Campaign - Capture of Venusia - Fall of Silo

  So the third campaign in 666 began amidst favourable prospects for Rome. Strabo put down the last resistance which was still offered in the Abruzzi. In Apulia the successor of Cosconius, Quintus Metellus Pius, son of the conqueror of Numidia and not unlike his father in his strongly conservative views as well as in military endowments, put an end to the resistance by the capture of Venusia, at which 3000 armed men were taken prisoners. In Samnium Silo no doubt succeeded in retaking Bovianum; but in a battle, in which he engaged the Roman general Mamercus Aemilius, the Romans conquered, and - what was more important than the victory itself - Silo was among the 6000 dead whom the Samnites left on the field. In Campania the smaller townships, which the Samnites still occupied, were wrested from them by Sulla, and Nola was invested. The Roman general Aulus Gabinius penetrated also into Lucania and gained no small advantages; but, after he had fallen in an attack on the enemy's camp, Lamponius the insurgent leader and his followers once more held almost undisturbed command over the wide and desolate Lucano-Bruttian country. He even made an attempt to seize Rhegium, which was frustrated, however, by the Sicilian governor Gaius Norbanus. Notwithstanding isolated mischances the Romans were constantly drawing nearer to the attainment of their end; the fall of Nola, the submission of Samnium, the possibility of rendering considerable forces available for Asia appeared no longer distant, when the turn taken by affairs in the capital unexpectedly gave fresh life to the well-nigh extinguished insurrection.

  Ferment in Rome - The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations - Secondary Effect of the Political Prosecutions - Mariu
s

  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[20]. 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 usury[21] 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[22]. 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.