Rome
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After faltering briefly, Marius’s career had resumed when Metellus, needing good officers, invited him to become his second-in-command in Africa in 109 BC. But when Marius returned to Rome in the winter of 108–107 BC, he campaigned for the consulship on a populist ticket, criticizing the conduct of the war and blaming military failure on the domination of Roman politics by an aristocracy of birth that was corrupt and incompetent. Marius was duly elected and awarded Africa as his province. So he returned to Numidia to displace his old commander and bring the war to a successful end.
Marius’s strategy was to increase the mobility of Roman forces by shedding baggage and marching light. In 107 BC he led a column through the desert to surprise, capture and destroy Jugurtha’s southern stronghold of Capsa. In 106 BC he repeated the feat, this time marching 600 miles to reach the western edge of Numidia, where he captured the king’s principal treasury in a near-impregnable fortress. When the Numidians and Mauretanians counter-attacked, the retreating column beat them off (albeit with heavy losses). Demoralized by the range and punitive power the Romans had acquired, and by his and Jugurtha’s inability to defeat them in the open field, King Bocchus resolved to abandon the struggle and betray his ally. Jugurtha was kidnapped, handed over to the Romans, and executed in Rome in 105 BC. By then, however, a more serious military crisis had arisen on the Roman Empire’s northern limits.
A rambling folk-movement by two large hordes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, perhaps a mixture of Celts and Germans, had been causing widespread disruption in central and western Europe for a decade. Several Roman armies had been defeated, either by the Cimbri and Teutones themselves, or by Celtic tribes in southern Gaul that the prevailing chaos had also set in motion. Finally, in 105 BC, the Cimbri and Teutones launched a full-scale invasion of the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis. This large segment of what the Romans called ‘Transalpine Gaul’ (Gaul beyond the Alps), roughly corresponding to modern Provence, had been annexed as recently as 121 BC; Roman control remained fragile. The response to the invasion was correspondingly robust: a second consular army was dispatched to Gaul to reinforce the one already there. But the two commanders bickered, action was not coordinated, and the combined Roman force was destroyed at the Battle of Arausio (Orange) in perhaps the worst military disaster since Cannae, resulting, the ancient sources say, in some 80,000 casualties. The way to Italy lay open, and if the victors did not immediately take it, Rome was nonetheless gripped by panic-fear at the prospect of an imminent onslaught by northern barbarians. Marius, the returning conqueror of Jugurtha, was immediately elected to a second consulship and given the command in Gaul; he would continue to be re-elected each year of the emergency from 104 to 100 BC, holding an unprecedented five consecutive consulships.
Repulsed from the parts of Spain and Gaul to which they had migrated after Arausio, the Cimbri and Teutones finally descended on Italy in 102 BC. They came in separate columns, and Marius planned to defeat them in detail; but first he manoeuvred and avoided battle, seasoning his own troops while sapping the energy of the barbarian hordes. Then he struck, bringing the Teutones to battle on unfavourable ground at Aquae Sextiae and defeating them utterly, so that hardly a man escaped slaughter or slavery. For a time the Cimbri remained at large, settling on the rich plains of the Po Valley for the winter. But the following year Marius repeated his success, first wearing his enemy down with long campaigning in the north Italian summer heat, then bringing them to battle at Vercellae and winning a second crushing victory.
Nor was this the only victory of Marian armies in 101 BC. One of Marius’s leading lieutenants, Manius Aquillius, had been dispatched with a force of veterans from the northern wars to suppress a new slave revolt in Sicily. As in the 130s BC, the rising had coincided with military crisis elsewhere. Concerned that the military manpower of allied states was being drained away by the activities of slave-raiders, the Senate had ordered the release of any allied subjects who had been enslaved. The consequent rush of slaves to Syracuse to demand their freedom in 104 BC overwhelmed the Governor of Sicily, who released 800 and then ordered the rest to return to their masters. Despite the memory of grisly retribution following the First Sicilian Slave War a generation before, the promise of freedom suddenly withdrawn, coupled with the crowding together of a great mass of the recently enslaved, was enough to detonate a second revolt. The slaves marched from Syracuse to the Shrine of the Palici. This was located at a small lake in the crater of an extinct volcano not far from Mount Etna. The water there still bubbles and exudes gaseous vapours; in antiquity it was livelier still, spouting two geyser-like jets, and the Palici, the ancient deities believed to reside in the lake, were considered the special protectors of the island’s native people. They had supported an anti-Greek resistance movement in the 5th century BC. Now they would give their support to slaves in revolt against Rome.
There were two major outbreaks and two leaders emerged, one called Athenion, who was from Cilicia in Asia Minor, the other Salvius, of uncertain origin. At first in conflict, the two leaders were reconciled and, as Eunus and Cleon had done, combined their forces. Also as before, the slaves established a proto-state, though this time it took on Roman form, Salvius wearing a purple toga and appointing lictors bearing fasces in the manner of a consul. Though many rural slaves joined the revolt, both men and women fighting in the rebel army, the urban slaves remained loyal to their masters, and the Romans retained their grip on all the towns. The highest figure cited in the ancient sources for the size of the slave army is 40,000, far less than in the previous revolt. Nonetheless, the rebels, facing incompetent commanders and demoralized soldiery, held the countryside for three years. It was only with the arrival of Manius Aquillius and his veteran legionaries in 101 BC that the Second Sicilian Slave War was ended. Betrayal was a hallmark of the Empire’s vengeance: urban slaves promised their freedom in return for loyalty during the war were kept in slavery; a thousand rebels promised their lives if they surrendered were sent to die in the arena.
In the space of five years, the soldiers of Gaius Marius had conquered Numidia, destroyed the Cimbri and Teutones, and crushed the Sicilian slaves. The Republic had been saved. The People’s faith in their champion had been vindicated. Marius found himself the greatest Roman of his age, elevated so far above his erstwhile peers that the edifice of the state tottered top-heavy under his weight. The conservative majority in the Senate could only view their new master with gloomy suspicion.
No doubt this self-made man, basking in the popular acclaim that his achievements had earned, regarded the snobbery of hereditary nobles with a mixture of contempt and irritation. Barriers to the advancement of parvenus like himself, barriers whose effect was to shield incompetence from the competition of better men, must have seemed unjust and detrimental to the public interest. Yet it would be wrong to see Marius as a revolutionary – or even a radical reformer – opposed to senatorial government. On the contrary, access to the Senate, and the offices and rewards in its gift, were the summit of his political ambition, as they would be that of other great populists, not least his nephew Julius Caesar. Marius’s faction included many of the senatorial elite, some from the oldest families, of which the Julii were merely the most prominent. The Roman aristocracy had always been divided into factions – alliances of great senatorial families and their networks of clients, competing for honour, power and wealth at the top of society. In the past, such clashes over policy as there had been rarely concerned matters of substance. The new wealth of empire in the 2nd century BC had encouraged some, like Scipio Africanus and his family, to adopt an ostentatious and luxurious lifestyle modelled on the Hellenistic East. And traditionalists like Cato the Elder had denounced them, the Scipiones in particular, speaking out against the supposed corruption of Roman public life, demanding a return to the imagined sobriety of the past. But a squabble about Greek art was hardly going to turn the world upside down.
Some have argued that the struggle between populares (populists: tho
se who took the side of the People) and optimates (the ‘best men’: those who supported oligarchy and order) was no different: that policy differences remained secondary to the scramble for office, and if the competition became more vicious – indeed, lethal – that was only because the stakes for which men played were higher. New wealth fed intra-aristocratic competition, the argument goes, but did not alter its essentially factional, self-serving character.
Yet it was not wealth as such that had escalated the intensity of conflict within the Roman elite. The whole arena of conflict had been enlarged, allowing political protagonists to forge more powerful weapons and deploy a repertoire of new tactics. Things had moved beyond dinner-party gossip and bath-house cabals. Politics had ceased to be the exclusive pastime of aristocratic plotters. Everyone was now involved, since the whole shape and future of Rome and its empire were at issue. Though confusion and chaos often characterized their interventions, decayed patricians, ‘new men’, equestrians, decurions, common citizens, non-Romans, even slaves, all now entered the political process. Here was a potential base (except for the slaves) for men like Marius, a base independent of senatorial favour, one that could lift them clear of the carve-ups and compromises of factional politics. Thus had Marius triumphed at the polls – as the People’s general against Old Corruption. But matters could not rest there. For Marius had become the over-mighty subject whose pre-eminence threatened the collegiate principles and closed shop of senatorial government. Traditionally, high offices had been shared out by agreement among the great families. Traditionally, policy had been consensual, and the ‘advice’ of the Senate had been as good as law. Not any more. The Gracchi had been vanquished, but, it seemed, their demon had been reborn as a military tyrant.
If so, his sprite was a radical tribune of the plebs called Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, who had emerged as a scourge of incompetent generals and a champion of the common soldier. The Senate resisted his measures and there had again been open clashes on the streets of the capital. The stakes were raised further when Marius and Saturninus formed an alliance in 101–100 BC to ensure a proper settlement for discharged soldiers and a new appointment for the general. Saturninus introduced a bill to provide land-allotments for military veterans in Gallia Narbonensis, and another authorizing new colonies in Sicily, Achaea (Greece) and Macedonia. Senatorial opposition was led by Quintus Caecilius Metellus, Marius’s former commander in Numidia, and it was motivated in large part by fear that the proposed communities of veteran-settlers would constitute a permanent bloc of Marian loyalists, further entrenching the general’s power. Saturninus’s measures therefore faced defeat. At that point something extraordinary and unprecedented happened: Marius brought his veterans into the city to drive the senatorial mob off the streets, pack the popular assembly, and vote through Saturninus’s bills.
Soldiers had entered the political arena. The populists had found a new weapon. It was one that Marius himself had forged. He had done so without conscious political intent; his famous army reforms were of strictly military purpose; yet their effect was to transform Rome’s soldiery into a force of semi-professional mercenaries with real power. Marius had reformed the Roman army to make it a more effective military instrument in his campaigns against Numidians and Germans. Effectively a career officer who rose to the top through personal achievement, he was perhaps less hidebound than generals from the hereditary nobility. Certainly he was prepared to break rules to deal with the inherited weaknesses of the army: lack of manpower; poor discipline and training; low morale; limited strategic mobility; and equally limited tactical flexibility. Some changes may have been introduced by other Roman commanders (our sources are hazy). Some may have been intended only as temporary measures (but then became permanent). What is certain is that the Roman army was substantially remodelled at the end of the 2nd century BC, and Marius was the dominant military figure of the period. The army of the Late Republic – the army destined to win the victories of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar and Octavian-Augustus – was, in effect, the army Marius created.
The single most important change was to abolish the property qualification and allow the proletarii – citizens without property counted by head in the census (capite censi) – to join the legions. This had occasionally been done in previous emergencies – after Cannae, for example – but this time, whether intentional or not, the change turned out to be permanent. The problem represented by the decay of the Italian peasantry was suddenly turned on its head. The legions were no longer formed of reluctant conscripts from a shrinking social class. Enlistment became voluntary and open to all able-bodied citizens, including the large and growing class of proletarii, for many of whom army pay and a military career were attractive alternatives to unemployment and poverty. At a stroke, Marius solved the problems of recruitment, training, discipline and morale that had plagued Roman military operations for so long. He created a large army of long-service soldiers willing to campaign in distant theatres for years at a time, and, as professionals, to train, march and fight harder. He thereby transformed the army’s strategic and tactical potential.
‘Marius’s Mules’ they came to be called: because their general, determined to increase mobility, slashed the size of the army’s baggage train and loaded essential equipment on to the backs of the soldiers. It was now that the marching Roman soldier became – when he needed to be: when the army had to move fast – a pack-animal. Henceforward, in addition to wearing heavy tunic and military cloak, legionaries bore more than 20 kg of arms and armour, and humped up to 30 kg of equipment, including cooking utensils, palisade stake, entrenching tool, several days’ rations, water flask, and personal belongings. Thus had Roman columns marched across 600 miles of North African wastes in the struggle against Jugurtha.
No less important was the abolition of the old distinction between hastati, principes and triarii, along with the division of the legion into maniples of 120 men. Instead, all legionaries were now equipped the same, with pilum and gladius, and the cohort, a battalion-sized unit of approximately 500 men, a tenth of a legion’s strength, became the basic tactical unit. Legionaries were still heavy infantry, wearing helmet and chain-mail, and carrying large oval or rectangular shields, but, instead of being anchored in a relatively static and essentially defensive line, they were now mobile shock troops organized in independent units. It was the new Marian legions’ combination of professional discipline, tactical flexibility and shock effect that had destroyed the northern hordes at Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae. The Roman army was fast approaching its zenith – and a period of military dominance that would last for 300 years.
But there was a political price. The soldiers fought for pay, and also, since many of the new recruits had no family plot to return to, an allotment of land to support them after discharge. They came to view their general as their patron (a conventional enough Roman view of the matter), and he regarded them (no less conventionally) as his clients. The soldiers looked to their patron to pay regularly and ensure adequate supplies while in service; to lead them to victory and bring them glory and shares of booty; and to provide farms and largesse at the end of their service. The general, for his part, found in his soldiers a powerful instrument for the advancement of his political career. One can hardly improve on the summary of the ancient historian Max Cary in 1935: ‘In the riots of 100 BC, the most ominous feature was the intervention of Marius’s soldiers. This incident revealed that the new army, which had proved itself the saviour of the Republic, might in turn become its destroyer. Composed mainly of proletarians without a stake in the country, and serving continuously with the colours for long terms of years, it gave its loyalty to the officer who enlisted and led it rather than to the Senate and People. The collision between Marius and the Senate over provision of land grants for his veterans also raised in an acute form the question of pay and pensions for the new army.’(8)
Rome’s new soldiers were no vanguard of democratic revolution. A privileged special interest group, they fou
ght for themselves alone. They would back the man who paid them regardless of politics. There was a foretaste of this in 99 BC. With political violence escalating, Marius broke with his new allies and redeployed his veterans in the cause of order. As Plutarch describes it: ‘At length, when the Senate and Equestrian Order concerted measures together, and openly manifested their resentment, he [Marius] did bring his soldiers into the Forum, and driving the insurgents onto the Capitol, and then cutting off the conduits, forced them to surrender by want of water. They, in this distress, addressing themselves to him, surrendered, as it is termed, on the “public faith”. He did his utmost to save their lives, but so wholly in vain that, when they came down into the Forum they were all basely murdered.’(9) It was the Gracchi again, but now the agents of reaction were military veterans. Though it was far short of full-blooded counter-revolution – Marius and the supporters of moderate reform were to remain the dominant force in Roman politics for a decade – it was evidence that soldiers, like the urban mob, were loyal to patrons not principles. The next great crisis in the history of the Late Republic would see soldiers fight as willingly for a conservative dictator as a popular reformer. Here was the germ of the civil wars.