CHAPTER 7
MARIUS’S MULES
The generals of this later time… who needed their armies for service against one another, rather than against the public enemy, were compelled to merge the general and the demagogue.
PLUTARCH1
THE MEN WERE GETTING RESTLESS. FOR THREE DAYS, THEY had sat in their camps along the Rhône river in southern Gaul, surveying a vast horde of barbarians. Eager to fight after nearly two years of anticipation, they could not understand why Marius did not give the order to attack. Was this not what they had been waiting for? Was this not what they had been training for? For three days, they endured the ferocious war cries and taunts from the enemy. They endured repeated attacks on the walls. They endured the enemy ravaging the countryside. But Marius refused to let them attack.2
The men’s indignation at their commander’s inaction soon turned to disgust. “What cowardice has Marius discovered in us that he keeps out of battle,” they asked. “Does he fear the fate of Carbo and Caepio, whom the enemy defeated? Surely it is better to do something, even if we perish as they did, rather than to sit here and enjoy the spectacle of our allies being plundered.” But Marius held fast, saying there was far more at stake than pride. “It was not,” he said, “triumphs or trophies that should now be the object of [your] ambition, but how [you] might ward off so great a cloud and thunder-bolt of war and secure the safety of Italy.” Instead of fighting, he ordered his soldiers to man the walls and observe the enemy. He told them to study their weapons and watch how their horsemen rode. Marius wanted his men to grow accustomed to the frightening war cries and painted faces of these northern warriors so that the legionaries understood they were facing ordinary men, not demons from the underworld.3
On the fourth day, the great mass of barbarians offered one last attack, coming hard at the walls of the Roman camps. They were predictably repulsed. Deciding these Romans would never come out of their hiding place, the barbarians elected to pull up stakes and keep moving. In a great procession, they marched past the Romans camps—an entire nation of men, women, and children continued their migration south down the Rhône. As the horde passed they shouted a final taunt at the Romans, asking if they had any messages for their wives, “for we shall soon be with them.” When the last of these northerners had passed and traveled a safe distance down the river, Marius finally ordered his men to break camp and follow.4
GAIUS MARIUS HAD not lingered long in Rome after celebrating his triumph over Jugurtha in January 104 BC. The disaster at Arausio was still just a few months old, and though the Cimbri had gone west, there was nothing to guarantee they would not turn around and come back. But Marius could not simply race north to take command of the legions in southern Gaul because there were no legions in southern Gaul—they had been wiped out at Arausio. Having left most of his Numidian forces behind in Africa to secure the post-Jugurtha peace, Marius was going to have to build a whole new army from scratch.
The core of this new army was a reserve legion that had been conscripted by the previous year’s consul, Publius Rutilius Rufus. When his ill-fated colleague Mallius had gone off to battle the Cimbri, Rutilius had stayed behind in Rome to continue raising reinforcements. Not wanting these reinforcements to sit idle, Rutilius kept them busy with a training regimen adapted from the gladiatorial schools. The men engaged in hand-to-hand combat, calisthenics, and physical conditioning. When Marius inherited this small force in early 104 he found it to be one of the best-trained groups of soldiers he had ever commanded.5
To build around this core, Marius canvassed for new recruits. As with the Numidian campaign, Marius secured an exemption from the property requirements and drafted men of every class and background. He had little difficulty raising recruits. Men who had watched their friends and neighbors win riches and fame in North Africa now wanted in on the action. Where once the hopeless underclasses had been left behind by the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean, they now stood to profit along with the nobility. We do not know exactly how many men Marius took with him to Gaul, but it was perhaps as many as thirty thousand Romans plus forty thousand Italian Allies and foreign auxiliaries. One thing we know for sure, however, is that Marius made sure Sulla stayed by his side. Though Marius was annoyed that Sulla happily took credit for capturing Jugurtha, he could not deny that Sulla was among the most talented officers in Rome. Having finished his term as quaestor, Sulla joined Marius as a legate and became his chief lieutenant in Gaul for the coming campaign.6
After Marius arrived in Gaul, he moved west beyond the frontier base at Aquae Sextiae and built up a fortified position along the Rhône river, probably near modern-day Arles. If the Cimbri came back from Spain along the southern coast or once again descended through the Rhône valley, they would have to pass through Marius’s army. After settling in, Marius began to train his legions, expanding the program pioneered by Rutilius the year before. Though the men trained with a sense of urgency, as it turned out the Cimbri would not return for two full years. But this reprieve did not mean the Republic was able to enjoy a moment’s peace; while the northern frontier was quiet, the island of Sicily was seized by another violent slave insurrection.7
THIRTY YEARS HAD passed since the great slave rebellion had erupted on Sicily in the 130s. After the slave armies of “King Antiochus” were finally defeated, the Senate had introduced a few reforms to mitigate some of the worst abuses of the slaves. But as the years passed, and memories of the First Servile War faded, most Roman owners slipped back into their old brutal habits. But the next slave rebellion was not merely a reaction to abusive treatment; it was also driven by an unkept promise that came directly from Marius.8
As Marius filled out his new army, he called for foreign auxiliaries. But King Nicomedes III of the allied Kingdom of Bithynia replied that the publicani tax farmers had been arresting and selling his subjects into slavery, so he could not meet his obligation. Closer to home, the Italians echoed the same complaint. The publicani tax farmers had apparently been seizing and enslaving anyone who fell short of meeting their tax obligations. Since this practice now affected Rome’s ability to fill the legions, the Senate issued a decree that henceforth no citizen of an allied nation, Italian or otherwise, could be held in slavery in a Roman province. They further decreed that any man, woman, or child so held was to be emancipated immediately. Ironically this decree of emancipation would end up triggering the second great slave revolt in Roman history.9
To enforce the decree in Sicily, a praetor named Publius Licinius Nerva set up a tribunal in 104 to go through the records and determine who among the hundreds of thousands of slaves on the island qualified for release. In the first week, the tribunal was able to identify and emancipate eight hundred slaves. But with their profits on the line, a coalition of Sicilian estate owners confronted Nerva and demanded he shut down the tribunal. Using a mixture of bribes and threats, the owners convinced Nerva to turn away future slaves petitioning for release.10
But by that point, the rumors of emancipation had taken on a life of their own. Every slave in Sicily now believed their ticket to freedom was in the mail. When the tribunal shut down after liberating just a few hundred men, slaves on estates across the island boiled with rage. Down on the southwest coast, an armed revolt broke out and a few hundred slaves occupied the heights of Mount Caprianus. Within a week, the rebel force was up to two thousand. A hastily raised Sicilian militia was sent to subdue to the slaves, but this militia dropped their weapons and ran at the first whiff of battle. Word of this victory spread and in no time the slave army had grown to more than twenty thousand.11
After this initial uprising, the Second Servile War followed the same course as the First Servile War. In fact, its course is so similar that some scholars believe ancient historians simply copied and pasted details of the second revolt to fill out the lost details of the story. So once again a Syrian slave prophet gathered the rebels and recast himself as a king—though this time his name was King Tryphon rather than
King Antiochus. Then—as before—a second revolt broke out on the other side of the island, this one led by a Cilician named Athenion. There was once again hope among the local Sicilians that the two slave armies would destroy each other, and once again deflation when King Tryphon and Athenion joined forces. But though all of these details are suspiciously similar, the Second Servile War was not an invention—it was a very real uprising that consumed Sicily for the next three years.12
MEANWHILE BACK IN Rome, the populares who had kept the Senate under siege and carried Marius to two consulships continued to feel their oats. In fact, the reelection of Marius was not the only unprecedented result of the election of 105. Joining Marius in the consulship was another novus homo named Gaius Flavius Fimbria. Never in Roman history had two novus homo served as colleagues in the consulship.13
The populare also filled the lower rungs of the magistracies. Though the evidence is thin, 105 was almost certainly the year Gaius Memmius—agitating tribune in 111 and principal prosecutor during the Mamilian Commission in 109—was elected praetor. Enemies of the optimates like Lucius Cassius Longinus * and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus were elected tribunes and would soon use their positions to prosecute grudges both personal and political. 105 was also the year another ambitious novus homo took his first step up the cursus honorum. More radical and with fewer scruples than the Gracchi, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was elected quaestor and would shortly be at the center of a political movement that almost toppled the old senatorial order completely.14
So while Marius was off preparing a defense against the Cimbri, this cohort of populares launched an offensive against the Senate. The now much-despised Caepio was obviously a prime target. The Assembly had already stripped Caepio of his consulship in the aftermath of Arausio, and now the tribune Longinus passed a law that expelled from the Senate any man who had had his imperium revoked by the Assembly. Booted from the Senate, Caepio then had to answer for the missing Tolosa gold. But much to the populares’ frustration, the ensuing trial proceeded with plenty of senators on the jury. Caepio was found not guilty of stealing the treasure. His acquittal only fueled populare wrath.15
The tribune Ahenobarbus then settled a personal grudge against Scaurus, who he believed blocked his chance at a priesthood. After tying up Scaurus in court with frivolous lawsuits, Ahenobarbus carried a law opening the college of pontiffs to popular election. Until now, the vacancies in a priesthood had been filled by the senior pontiffs, allowing the optimate nobility to keep the priesthoods as their own special preserve. Now priests would be elected by popular vote. The case of Ahenobarbus also demonstrates how difficult it is to separate the personal from the political in the Late Republic. Likely driven by a personal grudge, Ahenobarbus rammed through a bill that further strengthened the power of the Assembly and weakened the nobility.16
Also during this year of populare ascendency, another young tribune named Lucius Marcius Philippus introduced a bill aimed at wholesale land redistribution. We don’t know the details of Philippus’s bill, but we know that in the midst of the debate over this legislation, Philippus made his famous observation that “there were not in the state two thousand people who owned any property.” The anti-populare Cicero goes on to note that Philippus’s speech “deserves unqualified condemnation, for it favored an equal distribution of property; and what more ruinous policy than that could be conceived?” The legislation did not pass, but the fact that it was even introduced is proof that gains made during the Gracchan era had been reversed by the turn of the century.17
But while some of these populare attacks were carried out by ambitious men of noble rank simply looking to inflict as much damage as possible on their political rivals, many more were real populare radicals looking to burn down the world.
WHILE ALL OF this played out in Rome, Marius remained on alert in Gaul. While he waited, he introduced an array of strategic and logistical reforms that revolutionized how the Roman army functioned in the field. In the long arc of Roman military history, the last great transformation of the legions had occurred back in the 300s during the Samnite Wars. Fighting in the broken hill country of central Italy, the Romans abandoned the rigid Greek phalanx and developed more flexible formations. The organization of the legions then remained largely unchanged all the way down to the final conquests of 146. The years after 146 saw the legions transform once again, and the ancient sources credit Marius with many of the innovations that turned the legions as they had existed in the third century BC into the armies Pompey and Caesar would lead as they completed the conquest of the Mediterranean in the first century.18
The most important of Marius’s innovations was a heavy emphasis on the physical conditioning of the soldiers and the speed of their maneuvers. Concluding that the endless baggage trains that followed any Roman army hindered the mobility of the legions, Marius decreed that his men would now carry their own gear—their weapons, blankets, clothes, and rations would be hoisted on their own backs. Observing these self-sustaining soldiers, old-school officers took to derisively calling the men “Marius’s Mules.” But it was effective: speed and cohesion became vital assets to the legions. Marius also promoted a pan-legionary esprit de corps by ending the practice of each legion having its own animal symbol, ordering instead that the eagle—a bird that had special meaning for Marius—be the universal symbol of the legions.19
Marius also introduced tactical improvements to the weaponry his soldiers carried, most prominently developing a new type of spear. The standard weapon carried by every soldier was usually hurled at the enemy at the outset of any battle. But the hurled weapons were often then picked up and chucked back at the Romans. So Marius developed a new type of spear using lead to join the steel tip to the wooden shaft. When it hit its mark, the soft lead would buckle and bend and leave the spear of no use to the enemy, who now also had to disentangle themselves from the awkwardly protruding projectile.20
But though he is often credited with every military reform that took place during these years, Marius was not solely responsible for the changing face of the legions. He is, for example, often credited with changing the basic tactical unit of the army from the small maniple to the larger cohort. Since the larger tactical squares allowed for stiffer resistance to a mass barbarian charge, it became standard among historians to place the adoption of the cohort in the midst of the Marian reforms. But as it turns out there is not one shred of evidence to support the claim. So while Marius is critical to the transformation of the legions, it is important to remember he was also just one man working inside a much larger process.21
Marius wound up spending the entirety of 104 waiting for a Cimbric invasion that never materialized. But unwilling to allow any other man to take over the Gallic frontier, the Assembly once again bucked mos maiorum by electing Marius to a second consecutive consulship for 103. Only a few scattered times in the whole history of the Republic had a man ever served two consulships in a row—the last time being during the Second Punic War when the great Quintus Fabius Maximus served as consul in both 214 and 215. But Caepio and Mallius’s inability to work together meant that Rome could not risk another such division of authority. So the Assembly elected Marius to a groundbreaking second consecutive consulship—his third consulship in six years.22
While Marius waited patiently for the return of the Cimbri, he spent a great deal of time rebuilding Roman alliances in Gaul. He sent men under cover to gather intelligence on the local tribes, to learn what they wanted, what they feared, what their internal rivalries were. Then he dispatched Sulla on a diplomatic circuit to offer each tribe a unique package of carrots and sticks that would bring them back into the Roman fold. By the end of 103, the Romans once again had a network of allies they could count on when the Cimbri came back. If the Cimbri came back.23
By now, Marius had himself internalized the conviction that he must remain consul until he defeated the Cimbri, but since they kept not showing up, it seemed like the emergency atmosphere that had propell
ed him to consecutive consulships was fading. At risk of losing the coming consular election, Marius returned to Rome and forged an alliance with the unscrupulous young politician Saturninus to help maintain his iron grip on the consulship.
LUCIUS APPULEIUS SATURNINUS had been elected quaestor along with the other populare nobiles in the election of 105. Assigned to Ostia to monitor the grain supply, Saturninus took over just as the Second Servile War shut down the supply line from Sicily. Due to the crisis, the Senate took the extraordinary step of stripping Saturninus of his responsibilities. The princeps senatus Scaurus assumed his post for the duration of the year. Though the historian Diodorus attributes Saturninus’s humiliating censure to “laziness and his debased character,” it is just as likely that even the most active and virtuous quaestor would have been unable to cope with such a dire situation.24
Spurred by the insult, Saturninus returned to Rome and ran for tribune. Cicero, who held Saturninus in disdain, said that “of all the factious declaimers since the time of the Gracchi, he was generally esteemed the ablest: and yet he caught the attention of the public, more by his appearance, his gesture, and his dress, than by any real fluency of expression, or even a tolerable share of good sense.” But his performance was good enough—Saturninus won a tribunate for 103.25
Though a man like Marius used populare rhetoric to fuel his political rise, he also burned to be accepted by the nobility, to be recognized as their equal. Saturninus, on the other hand, was a bomb-thrower. Like many popular revolutions in history, the men who unlock the door are not always the same men who come bursting through. The men who had run populare programs the year before, like Ahenobarbus, Longinus, and Philippus, were all from ancient noble families who, like Marius, saw populare rhetoric as a path to power. Saturninus, on the other hand, really did seem to want to just burn the whole thing down.
The Storm Before the Storm Page 16