The Storm Before the Storm

by Michael Duncan

  The uncertain defense of the northern borders also had another impact on Roman politics: defeated commanders started facing legal prosecution for their failures. After his defeat at the hands of the Scordisci in 114, Cato was hauled before the Assembly and only narrowly avoided exile—the common belief being that Cato had only dodged prosecution by bribing the jurors. Less fortunate was Gnaeus Carbo. In 111, the Assembly called Carbo to account for provoking, and then losing, the Battle of Noreia. Marcus Antonius led the prosecution and easily secured a conviction. Like his brother, Carbo committed suicide rather than depart for exile. With both brothers now dead after being hounded by the refined optimate orators Crassus and Antonius, their sons would bear the optimates a special hostility in the years to come.10

  DESPITE THE TROUBLE in the north, the people of Rome remained inflamed by the conduct of Jugurtha. After fleeing Rome in 111, Jugurtha returned to Numidia and raised an army. Unable to ignore Jugurtha’s insulting behavior, the Senate sent more legions across the Mediterranean in 110. In response to the invasion, Jugurtha launched a yearlong campaign of evasion, delay, and trickery to bog the Romans down. Finally, in January 109, Jugurtha lured the legions into a trap. With the Romans hopelessly surrounded Jugurtha offered simple terms: leave Numidia within ten days or you will all die. Adding insult to injury, Jugurtha also demanded the defeated legionaries “pass under the yoke,” a humiliating ritual of physically walking under a harness to acknowledge submission. The trapped Romans accepted the terms, passed under the yoke, and left Numidia.11

  The humiliating defeat only confirmed the belief back in Rome that the pathetic campaigns in Numidia needed fresh leadership. In the elections for 109, the Assembly elected the sixth and final Metelli cousin to the consulship: Quintus Caecilius Metellus. Stern and disciplined, Metellus was both honest and intelligent, but an aristocratic pride defined his worldview. As the youngest of the Metelli, he was raised in a world where his brothers and cousins controlled the levers of power. He marched up the cursus honorum with ease, serving as quaestor in 126, tribune in 121, aedile in 118, and then praetor in 115. Politically rigid and unyielding, Metellus had little use for populare agitation because as a Metellan prince, his aristocratic connections were more than enough to secure his future prospects. After being elected consul, Metellus was assigned to take over the frustrating war in Numidia.12

  With the previous year’s army defeated, it was clear Metellus was going to have to raise more troops from a population already stretched thin by continued economic dislocation and war. The historical record is vague, but we know Metellus secured an exemption from various restrictions on conscription, including lifting the six-year maximum on service and broadening the age range from which he could draw. Both exemptions would have allowed Metellus to draw from experienced veterans who had already done their time—every one of which was worth five raw recruits.13

  In his search for experienced soldiers, Metellus also made a point of enrolling the best officers he could find. The paucity of available talent goes a long way toward explaining what may otherwise be an inexplicable decision. Metellus asked Gaius Marius to serve as a legate. Though Marius had run afoul of the Metelli politically, there was no question that he was among the most capable officers in Rome. Marius did not hesitate to join the campaign. With the conflict in Numidia going so poorly and with the Senate clearly to blame, there would be plenty of opportunities for a mere novus homo to make a name for himself.14

  Back in Numidia, Jugurtha was well informed of these developments and he did not like what he heard. Not only were the Romans preparing to come back, but his informants were clear that Metellus was not a man who could be bribed. So when Metellus and his army arrived in Africa in the spring of 109, Jugurtha abruptly changed tactics. He sent envoys offering to surrender to Metellus with only one string: that he and his children be spared. But Metellus was not going to be taken in by the wily king. Turning Jugurtha’s tricks against him, Metellus bribed the envoys over to the Roman side. They were told to deliver a message of peace, but then to work secretly to arrest the king and deposit him at Metellus’s feet. But Jugurtha was cautious to the point of paranoia and evaded the subsequent plots. Recognizing that there would be no negotiation, Jugurtha resolved to defeat the Romans in battle. Again.15

  Jugurtha used his superior knowledge of the terrain to stay one step ahead of Metellus until he was able to lay an ambush in the late summer of 109. At the Muthul River, Jugurtha cut the Romans off from their source of water. But rather than forcing a quick surrender, Jugurtha found himself locked in a battle with Metellus that lasted all day. The legions managed to hold out until nightfall, at which point Jugurtha withdrew and the Romans built a network of fortified camps.16

  The Romans spent the next few days in camp, where Metellus got troubling news. Jugurtha was riding around the countryside raising thousands more men from the surrounding communities to replace the men he had just lost. Despite the casualties the Romans had just inflicted, the Numidians would soon be back stronger than ever. With Jugurtha fielding an almost unlimited number of men, Metellus determined this was not a war that could be won by a series of battles. It would instead require a steady envelopment of the entire country to eliminate Jugurtha’s access to men. The next phase of the war would offer few opportunities for glorious heroics, but Metellus was here to win the war.17

  BACK IN ROME, the ex-tribune Gaius Memmius used the debacles in Numidia to widen his crusade against senatorial misconduct. Just as Metellus left for Africa in 109, an allied tribune named Gaius Mamilius created a special tribunal later dubbed the Mamilian Commission to investigate corruption and treason. Memmius served as the principal prosecutor. Staffed by Equestrian jurors and run by populare leaders looking to settle old scores, the prosecution moved seamlessly from specific charges of bribery to a general attack on the Senate. Memmius and his fellow prosecutors “conducted the investigation with harshness and violence, on hearsay evidence and at the caprice of the commons.”18

  The first man hauled before the commission was Lucius Opimius, who had long been a bête noire of the populare—guilty of the uncompromising sack of Fregellae in 125 and the slaughter of the Gracchans in 121. Having avoided punishment for a decade, the time had come for Opimius to feel the wrath of the people. Opimius was charged with treason for his conduct leading the first embassy to Numidia. He was found guilty of accepting bribes from Jugurtha and exiled. Opimius departed Rome and “spent his old age in infamy, hated and abused by the people.”19

  Next up was the former consul Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, who had sailed off to Numidia in 111 to bring Jugurtha to heel and instead pocketed some cash and gave Jugurtha a slap on the wrist. The princeps senatus Scaurus personally defended Bestia before the commission, but Bestia too was convicted and exiled. Two men of consular rank had now been banished by the wrath of the populare.20

  The commission then continued its general attack on the optimates who had failed Rome. Gaius Porcius Cato was prosecuted on trumped up charges—his real crime being his defeats in the north back in 114. And of course the officers who had led the campaign in Numidia that ended with the legions passing under the yoke were accused of treason and exiled. In the end, the Mamilian Commission convicted four men of consular rank in an unprecedented strike at the alleged authority of the Senate.21

  The work of the Mamilian Commission was one of the key reasons that Sallust decided to write on the Jugurthine War: it marked the aggressive return of the populare as a force in Roman politics. A decade after the fall of Gaius Gracchus, the populare were returning with a vengeance. The populare assault on the Senate also cleared space for the rise of a new generation of novus homo. Men who could run for office and make their case on explicitly antisenatorial terms, to turn being novus homo from a negative to a positive. The chief beneficiary of this new environment would be Gaius Marius.22

  THE ROMANS WERE able to focus on the political drama swirling around Jugurtha in part because the northern border h
ad remained relatively quiet. The Macedonian frontier was silent and the Cimbri had departed for parts unknown after the Battle of Noreia in 113. But four years after that last contact, the Cimbri reappeared. They had apparently failed to find a permanent home and were now descending south through the Rhône valley, ready to try their luck in southern Gaul again.23

  With Metellus having departed for Numidia, the Senate ordered his colleague Marcus Junius Silanus to muster what forces remained in Italy. But with Metellus already requiring a special dispensation to raise recruits for Numidia, Silanus found himself drawing from an even thinner manpower pool. But the consul managed to dredge the last warm bodies out of that pool and march them through the Alps into Gaul. As the two sides squared off, a small party of Cimbric ambassadors traveled to Rome to say that “the people of Mars should give them some land by way of pay and use their hands and weapons for any purpose it wished.” The Senate refused to grant the Cimbris’ request—Rome made treaties with defeated enemies, not defiant tribes.24

  After the Cimbri received their answer, Silanus encouraged the Cimbri to move along, but that provoked a battle. Details of the battle are nonexistent and all we really know is the outcome: once again the Cimbri crushed the legions. The casualties were staggering. It was said that “after so many men had been killed, some were crying for sons or brothers; others, orphaned by the death of their fathers, lamented the loss of their parents and the desolation of Italy; and a very large number of women, deprived of their husbands, were turned into poor widows.” But beyond the individual suffering, the Cimbric victory meant that the road to Italy was now clear.25

  But, as before, the Cimbri showed no interest in pillaging Italy. Their new objective may have been to simply contain the Romans on the Italian peninsula as they set themselves up as the premier power in south-central Gaul. Their victories certainly upended the political situation in the region. Many of Rome’s allies in Gaul tore up their treaties now that a bigger bully had moved onto the block.

  BACK IN ROME, the plebs urbana were horrified by the failure of Silanus, and there was little happening in Numidia to take their minds off the looming menace of the Cimbri. Metellus’s decision to seek a more methodical reduction of Numidia was militarily sound, but it fed the general belief that the only thing the nobles did in Numidia was drag their feet. Though Metellus was not actually dragging his feet, his image still took a hit back in Rome.26

  In late 109, Metellus broke his army into smaller units and sent them out to ravage communities that remained loyal to Jugurtha. After he made a few brutal examples, communities started surrendering the minute the Romans arrived. To combat this war of intimidation, Jugurtha turned to guerrilla tactics. Allowing his peasant conscripts to go home, Jugurtha and his best cavalry units shadowed the legions wherever they went, harassing Roman communication and supply lines and picking off individual units if they ever strayed too far from the main force. They also rode ahead of the Romans to likely campsites, spoiling fields that might be used to feed Roman horses and poisoning any freshwater springs.27

  But as weeks turned into months, the inhabitants of Numidia tired of the crisscrossing armies and blamed Jugurtha for provoking the Romans to war. Metellus attempted to exploit that resentment. He opened clandestine talks with Jugurtha’s loyal lieutenant Bomilcar, who was last seen in Rome orchestrating the assassination of Massiva. After a mix of bribes and threats Bomilcar agreed to convince Jugurtha to surrender. Returning from the secret rendezvous, Bomilcar painted a dismal picture for Jugurtha: The Romans are going to win. The country is in ruins. The people are unhappy. It is time to give up for the good of all Numidia. Coming from such a close friend, Jugurtha relented and resigned himself to defeat. He sent an envoy to Metellus asking for terms of surrender.28

  Metellus was not going to let Jugurtha off lightly. Jugurtha was to be stripped of his wealth and the means to make further war. He was to promptly deliver “two hundred thousand pounds of silver, all his elephants, and a considerable quantity of horses and arms.” But with the darkness closing in, Jugurtha’s survival instincts kicked back to life. When Metellus ordered the king to present himself in person, Jugurtha balked. The king refused the final order to surrender and instead rode deep into the interior of Numidia, far from the Romans. There, in distant seclusion, he could plot his return.29

  Metellus was frustrated that his plan to end the war had been stymied at the eleventh hour, but he knew he had considerably weakened Jugurtha. Metellus was also gratified to learn shortly thereafter that the Senate had extended his command; he would have another year to capture the elusive king. But while Metellus focused on Jugurtha, an even greater danger lurked within his own ranks.30

  GAIUS MARIUS HAD always kept his eye on the consulship. Though the path of his political career had been uneven, he felt that it was his destiny to one day achieve high office. He was now approaching his fiftieth birthday and continued to carry those ambitions of power. Marius was convinced that if given the chance he could outshine the stagnant optimates and become the most dominant man in Rome.

  A year of fighting under Metellus had reminded everyone that Marius was an excellent soldier and popular with the men under his command. He was generous with spoils, mingled easily with the common legionaries, and joined in with camp labor. As Plutarch later wrote, “It is a most agreeable spectacle for a Roman soldier when he sees a general eating common bread in public, or sleeping on a simple pallet, or taking a hand in the construction of some trench or palisade. For they have not so much admiration for those leaders who share honor and riches with them as for those who take part in their toils and dangers.” Marius personified this type of leadership.31

  In early 108, Marius went to the port city of Utica to attend to some business and make a few necessary sacrifices to the gods. During these rituals, Marius asked a soothsayer to take stock of his own personal situation. The soothsayer told him “a great and marvelous career awaited him” and encouraged Marius to keep “trusting in the gods, to carry out what he had in mind and put his fortune to the test as often as possible.” There was only one thing on Marius’s mind at the moment, and the message from the gods could not be clearer. Marius resolved to return to the legionary camp and request Metellus grant him a leave of absence so he could return to Rome and run for the consulship.32

  However, Metellus wasn’t interested in letting Marius leave. He told Marius that such dreams were not for all men, that Marius really ought to content himself with the success he’d already won and not seek to rise above his station. But Marius refused to let it go, pestering Metellus until Metellus caustically put an end to the debate. “Don’t be in a hurry to go to Rome,” he said. “It will be soon enough for you to be a candidate when my son becomes one.” Since Metellus’s oldest son was then just twenty years old, the implication was clear: Metellus would never grant Marius’s request for leave.33

  Furious but undeterred, Marius activated the extensive network of support he had built up both back in Rome and among the soldiers and merchants in Numidia. Marius openly griped that Metellus was dragging his feet and that if he were in charge the war would be over in a matter of weeks. He also curried favor with the remnants of the Numidian royal family that had fled into exile. Another grandson of the long-dead King Micipsa named Gauda approached Metellus, requesting to be recognized as the rightful king when Jugurtha was dethroned. But Metellus refused to treat the young man with any royal honors. Marius tracked down the offended would-be king and promised that he would be king if Marius was in charge. Marius’s politicking in Numidia led to a steady stream of letters back to Rome claiming that Metellus was turning into a slow-moving tyrant who was now too much in love with imperious power to end the war properly. Marius boldly claimed that if “but half the army were put in his charge, he would have Jugurtha in fetters within a few days.”34

  AS THESE POLITICAL machinations unfolded in the Roman camp, King Jugurtha was himself back to work—rebuilding his treasury, recruiting soldier
s, and generally undermining the Roman occupation of Numidia. In the winter of 109–108, he made contact with the Roman-occupied city of Vaga and induced its people to revolt. With the revolt erupting on a holiday, the Roman garrison was caught off guard and slaughtered to a man. Well, almost to a man. The commander of the garrison, a well-liked officer named Titus Turpilius Silanus, somehow escaped unharmed.35

  When word of the revolt reached Metellus, he raced his army to Vaga, overwhelmed its meager defenses, and sacked it mercilessly. The fate of the garrison commander Silanus, meanwhile, was still up in the air. Hauled before Metellus to explain how he lost the city but not his life, Silanus had no clear answers. In the closed-door deliberations that followed, Marius allegedly urged Metellus to sentence Silanus to death for treason. Metellus was fond of Silanus but ultimately agreed. Silanus was scourged and executed.36

  But in the aftermath of the execution, Marius went around whispering that Metellus had done wrong by Silanus, and that his cruel punishment far outweighed the crime—doubly so because it was not even in Metellus’s power as consul to hand down such a sentence without right of appeal to the Assembly. The incident was depressing to Metellus, especially because now his men doubted him and looked openly to Marius for leadership.37

  Metellus likely hoped that all this carping and behind-the-back undermining of his authority would soon be irrelevant as his secret connection to the traitorous Bomilcar seemed about ready to bear fruit. But instead, Jugurtha discovered Bomilcar’s treachery and executed his once faithful lieutenant. Metellus’s latest plan to capture Jugurtha had failed, but it did help drive Jugurtha into paranoid isolation. From that point on Jugurtha “never passed a quiet day or night; he put little trust in any place, person, or time; feared his countrymen and the enemy alike.”38