Thwarted in his political career, Sulla decided to go to Nearer Spain as the legate of its warlike governor, Titus Didius. Scaurus had won. Before he left, Sulla made advances to Aurelia, wife of Gaius Julius Caesar, and was rejected; furious, he went to see Metellus Numidicus (just returned from exile) and murdered him. Far from blaming Sulla for his father’s death, Metellus Pius the Piglet continued to admire and trust him.
The family Caesar was prospering. Both of old Caesar’s sons, Sextus and Gaius, had advanced under Marius’s patronage, though this meant Gaius was away from home most of the time. His wife, Aurelia, managed her apartment house and efficiently saw to the welfare and education of her two daughters and her precious little son, Young Caesar, who from a very early age demonstrated startling intelligence and ability. The one aspect of Aurelia which caused misgivings in all her relatives and friends was her liking for Sulla, who visited her because he admired her.
Still in political eclipse, Gaius Marius took his wife, Julia, and his son, Young Marius, on a long holiday to the east, there to visit various parts of Anatolia.
Having reached Cilician Tarsus, Marius learned that King Mithridates of Pontus had invaded Cappadocia, murdered its young monarch, and put one of his own many sons on its throne. Leaving wife and son in the care of nomads, Marius rode virtually alone for the Cappadocian capital, where fearlessly he confronted King Mithridates of Pontus.
Captious and cunning, Mithridates was a curious mixture of coward and hero, braggart and mouse; he commanded vast forces and had expanded his kingdom mightily at the expense of all his neighbors save Rome. By forging a marital alliance, Mithridates had arrived at complete agreement with Tigranes, the King of Armenia; the two kings planned to unite, defeat Rome, and end in ruling the world between them.
All of these vaunting plans disintegrated when Mithridates met Marius, a solitary figure who yet had the confidence to order the King of Pontus out of Cappadocia. Though he could have had Marius killed, instead Mithridates clipped his tail between his legs and took his army back to Pontus, while Marius rejoined his wife and son and resumed his holiday.
Matters in Italy were coming to a head. Rome was suzerain over the various semi-independent nations which made up the checkerboard of peninsular Italy. Her Italian Allies, as they were called, had long existed in an unequal partnership with Rome, and were well aware Rome considered them inferiors. They were called upon to provide and pay for soldiers whom Rome used in her foreign wars, yet Rome had ceased to reward the Italian Allies with gifts of the Roman citizenship, and denied Italians parity in trade, commerce, and all the other benefits accruing to full Roman citizens. The leaders of the various Italian peoples were now clamoring with increasing vigor and resolution for equal status with Rome.
Marcus Livius Drusus had a friend, Quintus Poppaedius Silo, who was an Italian of high estate; the leader of his people, the Marsi, Silo was determined to see all the Marsi become full Roman citizens. And Drusus sympathized with him. A great Roman aristocrat of enormous wealth and political clout, Drusus was sure that with his assistance the Italians would gain the longed—for franchise and equality.
But matters within Drusus’s own family were to undermine Drusus’s resolve. His sister, Livia Drusa, was unhappily married to Drusus’s best friend, Quintus Servilius Caepio (Caepio had taken to physically abusing her); then she met Marcus Porcius Cato, fell in love with him, and began an affair. Already the mother of two girls, Livia Drusa became pregnant by Cato and bore a son who she managed to convince Caepio was his child. Then her eldest girl, Servilia, accused Livia Drusa of infidelity with Cato, and precipitated a family crisis. Caepio divorced Livia Drusa and disowned all three children; Drusus and his wife stood by her. Livia Drusa then married Cato and gave him two more children, Porcia and Young Cato (the future Cato Uticensis). While all this was going on, Drusus had struggled to convince the Senate of the justice of Italian claims to the citizenship, but after Livia Drusa’s scandal he found his task far more difficult, thanks to Caepio’s sudden and bitter enmity.
In 96 B.C. Drusus’s wife died. In 93 B.C. Livia Drusa died. Her five children passed fully into Drusus’s care. In 92 B.C. Cato died. Only the estranged Caepio and Drusus were left.
Though considered too old for the office, Drusus decided the only way to obtain equality for the Italians was to become a tribune of the plebs and coax the Plebeian Assembly into granting the franchise against obdurate opposition from the Senate. An impressively patient and intelligent man, he did very well. But some of the senatorial diehards (including Scaurus, Catulus Caesar and Caepio) were absolutely determined he would not succeed. On the very eve of victory, Drusus was assassinated in the atrium of his own house. The time was late in 91 B.C.
The five children of Livia Drusa plus his own adopted son, Drusus Nero, witnessed the horror of his lingering death. Only Caepio was left to those young people, but Caepio refused to have anything to do with them. So they passed into the care of Drusus’s mother and his younger brother, Mamercus Aemilius Lepidus Livianus. In 90 B.C. Caepio died, and in 89 B.C. Drusus’s mother died. Now only Mamercus remained. When his wife refused to shelter the children Mamercus was forced to leave them to grow up in Drusus’s house. He put them in the charge of a spinster relative and her formidable mother.
Sulla had returned from Nearer Spain in time to be elected urban praetor for 93 B.C. In 92 B.C. (while Drusus struggled to bring about the franchise for all of Italy) Sulla was sent to the east to govern Cilicia. There he discovered that Mithridates, emboldened by five years of Roman inertia, had once again invaded Cappadocia. Sulla led his two legions of Cilician troops into Cappadocia, ensconced them inside a superbly fortified camp, and proceeded to run military rings around Mithridates, despite the King’s overwhelming superiority in numbers. For the second time Mithridates was forced to look a solitary Roman in the eye and hear himself curtly ordered to go home. For the second time Mithridates clipped his tail between his legs and took his army back to Pontus.
But the son-in-law of Mithridates, King Tigranes of Armenia, was still at large and intent upon war. Sulla led his two legions to Armenia, becoming the first Roman to cross the Euphrates on a military mission. On the Tigris near Amida, Sulla found and warned Tigranes; then on the Euphrates at Zeugma he hosted a conference between himself, Tigranes and ambassadors from the King of the Parthians. A treaty was concluded whereby everything to the east of the Euphrates was to remain the concern of the Parthians and everything to the west of the Euphrates was to become the concern of Rome. Sulla was also the subject of a prophecy by a famous Chaldaean seer: he would be the greatest man between Oceanus Atlanticus and the Indus River, and would die at the height of his fame and prosperity.
With Sulla was his son by the dead Julilla. This boy–in his middle teens–was the light of Sulla’s life. But after Sulla’s return to Rome (where he found the Senate indifferent to his deeds and to his magnificent treaty), Young Sulla died tragically. The loss of the boy was a terrible blow to Sulla, who severed the last vestige of his relationship with the Caesars, except for his sporadic visits to Aurelia. On these visits he now encountered her son, Young Caesar, who impressed Sulla.
The Italian War broke out with a series of shattering defeats for Rome. At the beginning of 90 B.C. the consul Lucius Caesar took over the southern theater of war (in Campania), with Sulla as his senior legate. The northern theater (in Picenum and Etruria) was commanded by several men in turn, all of whom proved to be woefully inadequate.
Gaius Marius hungered to command the northern theater, but his enemies in the Senate were still too strong. He was forced to serve as a mere legate, and to suffer many indignities at the hands of his commanders. But one by one these commanders went down in defeat (and, as in the case of Caepio, died), while Marius plodded on training the troops, very raw and timorous. Waiting his chance. When it came he seized it immediately, and in association with Sulla (loaned to him) won for Rome the first significant victory of the war. Then on the day f
ollowing this victory Marius suffered his second stroke—far worse than his first—and was forced to withdraw from the conflict. This rather pleased Sulla, for Marius refused to take Sulla seriously as a general, though Sulla generaled all the victories in the southern theater—always in the name of someone else.
In 89 B.C. the war took a better turn for Rome, especially in the southern theater. Sulla was awarded Rome’s highest military decoration, the Grass Crown, by his troops before the city of Nola, and most of Campania and Apulia were subjugated. The two consuls of 89 B.C., Pompey Strabo and a Cato, fared very differently. Cato the Consul was murdered by Young Marius to avoid a military defeat; Marius procured his son’s freedom by bribing the commander left in charge, Lucius Cornelius Cinna. Cinna, an honorable man despite this bribe, was to remain Marius’s adherent ever after—and Sulla’s enemy.
The senior consul of 89 B.C., Pompey Strabo, had a seventeen-year-old son, Pompey, who adored his father and insisted on fighting at his side. In 90 B.C. they had besieged the city of Asculum Picentum, wherein the first atrocity of the Italian War had taken place. With them was the seventeen-year-old Marcus Tullius Cicero, a most inept and unwilling warrior whom Pompey sheltered from his father’s wrath—and contempt. Cicero was never afterward to forget Pompey’s kindness, which dictated much of his political orientation. When Asculum Picentum fell in 89 B.C., Pompey Strabo executed every male inhabitant and banished every female and child with no more than the clothes they wore on their backs; the incident stood out in the annals of a terrible war.
But by 88 B.C., when Sulla was finally elected consul with a Quintus Pompeius Rufus as his colleague, Rome was victorious in the war against her Italian Allies. Not without yielding much she had gone to war to prevent: the Italians were—in name at least—given the full Roman franchise.
Sulla’s daughter by Julilla, Cornelia Sulla, was very much in love with her cousin Young Marius, but Sulla forced her to marry the son of his colleague in the consulship; she bore this young man a girl, Pompeia (later the second wife of the great Caesar), and a boy.
Now ten years old, Young Caesar was sent by his mother to help his Uncle Marius recover from the effects of that maiming second stroke, and eagerly learned whatever he could from Marius about the art of war. Well aware of the prophecy, Marius’s exposure to the boy only reinforced his determination to curtail Young Caesar’s future military and political career.
Angered by an innocuous remark made by his boring wife Aelia, Sulla suddenly divorced her–for barrenness. Old Scaurus had died, so Sulla then married his widow, Dalmatica. Most of Rome censured Sulla for his conduct toward Aelia (who was much admired), but Sulla didn’t care.
Knowing that Rome was fully occupied in her war against the Italian Allies, King Mithridates of Pontus invaded the Roman province of Asia in 88 B.C. and murdered every Roman and Italian man, woman and child living there. The death toll was eighty thousand, plus seventy thousand of their slaves.
When Rome heard the news of this mass slaughter, the Senate met to discuss who would lead an army to the east to deal with King Mithridates. Deeming himself recovered from his stroke, Marius shouted that the command against Mithridates must be given to him. A peremptory demand which the Senate wisely ignored. Instead, that body awarded the command to the senior consul, Sulla. An affront Marius did not forgive; Sulla now joined the list of his declared enemies.
Understanding that he was capable of defeating Mithridates, Sulla accepted the command with great content, and prepared to leave Italy. But the Treasury was empty and Sulla’s funds far too slender, even after much public land around the Forum Romanum had been sold to pay for his army; the wealth Sulla needed to pay for his war was to come from plundering the temples of Greece and Epirus. Sulla’s army was relatively tiny.
In that same year, 88 B.C., another tribune of the plebs of enduring fame arose – Sulpicius. A conservative man, he turned radical only after the King of Pontus slaughtered the inhabitants of Asia Province – because he realized that a foreign king had not made any distinction between a Roman and an Italian – he had killed both. Sulpicius decided the Senate was to blame for Rome’s unwillingness to grant the full citizenship to all Italians, and decided the Senate would have to go. There could be no difference between a Roman and an Italian if a foreign king could find no difference. So Sulpicius proceeded to pass laws in the Plebeian Assembly which expelled so many men from the Senate that it could no longer form a quorum. With the Senate rendered impotent, Sulpicius then proceeded to boost the electoral and political power of the new Italian citizens. But all this took place amid bloody riots in the Forum Romanum, and the young husband of Sulla’s daughter, Cornelia Sulla, was killed.
Riding high, Sulpicius then allied himself with Marius and got the Plebeian Assembly to pass another law – a law stripping the command in the war against Mithridates from Sulla and awarding it to Marius instead. Almost seventy years old and crippled by disease he might be, but Marius was not about to let anyone else go to war against Mithridates – especially Sulla.
Sulla was in Campania organizing his army when he heard of the new legislation and his own disqualification. He then made a momentous decision: he would march on Rome. Never in her six hundred years of existence had any Roman done that. But Sulla would. His officers refused to support him except for his loyal quaestor, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, but his soldiers were fervently on his side.
In Rome no one believed Sulla would dare to make war upon his own homeland, so when Sulla and his army arrived outside the city walls, panic ensued. Unable to lay their hands on professional soldiers, Marius and Sulpicius were forced to arm ex-gladiators and slaves to resist Sulla. Who entered the city, trounced the motley opposition, took over Rome, and drove Marius, Sulpicius, Old Brutus and a few other men into flight. Sulpicius was caught before he could leave Italy and beheaded. Marius, after a terrible ordeal in the town of Minturnae, succeeded with Young Marius and the others in reaching Africa, where after many adventures they sheltered among the veterans Marius had settled on Cercina.
As virtual owner of Rome, Sulla’s worst act was to fix the head of Sulpicius on the rostra in the Forum Romanum in order to terrify (among others) Cinna into obedience. He repealed all of Sulpicius’s laws and put laws of his own into effect. These laws were ultra-conservative, aimed at fully restoring the Senate and discouraging future tribunes of the plebs with radical ideas. Satisfied that he had done what he could to shore up traditional Republican government, Sulla finally departed for the east and the war against Mithridates in 87 B.C. But not before marrying his widowed daughter to Mamercus, brother of the dead Drusus and custodian of the orphaned children.
The exile of Marius, Young Marius, Old Brutus and their companions lasted about a year. Sulla had attempted one final measure to shore up his hastily drafted emergency constitution—he tried to have men loyal to himself elected consuls for 87 B.C. In the case of the senior consul, Gnaeus Octavius Ruso, he did succeed; but the pernickety electors returned Cinna as the junior consul, and Sulla knew this man belonged to Marius. So he tried to secure Cinna’s loyalty to the new constitution by making him swear a sacred oath to uphold it—an oath Cinna nullified as he swore it by holding a stone in his hand.
As soon as Sulla had sailed for the east in spring of 87 B.C., strife broke out in Rome. Cinna abrogated his worthless oath and openly opposed Gnaeus Octavius and his ultra-conservative backers—men like Catulus Caesar, Publius Crassus, Lucius Caesar. Cinna was ejected from Rome and outlawed, but the ultra-conservatives failed to make military preparations. Cinna did not; he raised an army and laid siege to the city. Marius promptly returned from exile and landed in Etruria, where he too raised an army and marched to the aid of Cinna and his confederates Quintus Sertorius and Gnaeus Papirius Carbo.
The ultra-conservatives, desperate, sent to Pompey Strabo in Picenum and begged that he come to their rescue, as he had not disbanded his army of loyal vassals. Accompanied by his son Pompey, Pompey Strabo marched to
Rome. But once he arrived there he did nothing to bring on a battle against Cinna, Marius, Carbo and Sertorius. All he did was to sit in a huge, insanitary camp outside the Colline Gate and antagonize the inhabitants of Rome’s northern hills by polluting their water and causing a frightful epidemic of enteric fever.
The Siege of Rome ground on for some time, but eventually a battle took place between Pompey Strabo and Sertorius. It came to no conclusion, for Pompey Strabo fell ill with enteric fever and collapsed. Shortly afterward he died. Aided by his friend Cicero, young Pompey prepared to bury his father; but the people of the devastated northern hills of Rome stole the body, stripped it naked, tethered it behind an ass, and dragged it through their streets. After a frantic search Pompey and Cicero found it. The outraged Pompey then quit Rome to take his father’s body and army back to Picenum.
Bereft of Pompey Strabo’s army, Rome was incapable of further resistance, and surrendered to Cinna and Marius. Cinna entered the city at once. Whereas Marius refused to do so, stating that he was still officially an outlaw and would not move from the protection of his camp and soldiers until Cinna had not only repealed the decree of outlawry, but had succeeded in having Marius elected consul for the prophesied seventh time. Sertorius also refused to enter the city, but not because of events; the cousin of Marius, he had realized that Marius was mad, his brain eroded by that second stroke.
Understanding that every soldier would if pushed serve Marius ahead of himself, Cinna had no choice other than to see himself and Marius “elected” consuls for the year 86 B.C., now only days away. And on New Year’s Day Marius entered Rome as consul for the seventh time; the prophecy was fulfilled. With him he brought five thousand ex-slaves fanatically devoted to his cause.
Masters of Rome Boxset: First Man in Rome, the Grass Crown, Fortune's Favourites, Caesar's Women, Caesar Page 244