The Storm Before the Storm
Page 17
Now a tribune, Saturninus joined with fellow populare Gaius Norbanus to bring the despised Caepio back to trial. Two of their optimate-aligned colleagues tried to veto the trial, but with respect for mos maiorum running dangerously low, Norbanus instigated a riot that physically drove the rival tribunes out of the Assembly. Caepio was duly prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile. Violence once again proved to be the last word in Roman politics.26
But Saturninus did not stop with Caepio. The tribune turned his attention to the unfortunate Mallius. Until now Mallius had been a martyr of the populare, the novus homo who had been betrayed by an arrogant noble. But Saturninus was now wielding a more indiscriminate weapon and Mallius too was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile.27
After securing these convictions, Saturninus then passed a law establishing a new permanent court that would deal with cases of maiestas, crimes that damaged the prestige of the state. This law took the ad hoc corruption tribunals and made them a permanent fixture of public life. Any noble who took a wrong step could now expect to find himself brought before the new court and prosecuted before a panel of Equestrian jurors on the flimsiest of pretenses. The new court would not exactly be the Revolutionary Tribunal that became such a feared tool during the French Revolution. But it was close.28
Having established a means of destroying his enemies, Saturninus looked to consolidate his own base of popular support. He identified the veterans of the Numidian war as the perfect foundation. Many of the men who had served in Numidia were now back living in the vicinity of Rome and were a political force waiting to be organized. Saturninus began working the veterans, letting it be known that he planned to introduce a bill to award allotments of land in North Africa to every man who had fought Jugurtha. Unlike the Gracchan allotments, Saturninus’s allotments were meant to be a retirement bonus. The land would be a veteran’s to dispose of as he saw fit: he could keep it or sell it. The new land-for-veterans scheme was a novelty when Saturninus pitched it, but it set a precedent for the future that a legionary could expect land when he was discharged from service.29
But Saturninus’s land-for-veterans proposal was as much about currying favor with Marius as building a political army. Nearing the end of his second consecutive consulship, Marius wielded enormous influence. Saturninus wanted to exploit that influence. He calculated that Marius would be well disposed toward a program to enrich the Numidian veterans. But in addition to taking care of Marius’s soldiers, Saturninus also orchestrated some mutually beneficial political theater in the Forum. Marius wanted to be reelected consul, but having already served twice in a row, another campaign might seem arrogant and vain. So Marius returned to Rome in the lead-up to the election for 102 and announced that he was not interested in another consulship and that the people should elect another man. Right on cue, Saturninus accused Marius of treason for leaving the citizens of Rome defenseless and roused his audience to demand that Marius take back the consulship. Marius was reelected overwhelmingly and in January 102 entered an unprecedented third consulship in a row, now his fourth in total.30
WHILE ALL OF this was unfolding, the slave uprising in Sicily continued to rage. Ironically triggered by the urgent need to fill out the armies in Gaul, the Senate now had to redirect legionaries to deal with the revolt. In 103, the beleaguered Senate instructed praetor Lucius Licinius Lucullus to raise as many men as he could and go take back Sicily. No doubt able to draw from southern communities terrified of the rebellion spreading to the mainland, and augmented by Sicilians with nothing left to do but fight, Lucullus cobbled together a force of about seventeen thousand men. Spooked by the arrival of this army—a real army this time—King Tryphon and Athenion marched out to confront Lucullus, hoping their superior numbers would carry the day. But their nearly 2 to 1 numerical advantage was not enough. In the ensuing battle the slaves broke and fled, leaving behind a reported twenty thousand dead.31
But despite his victory, Lucullus made no concerted effort to consolidate his position. It was not until nine days later that Lucullus finally led his forces to the fortified slave capital of Triocala. Lucullus made one attempt to capture the city, but when it proved too tough, the praetor withdrew back to Syracuse. Lucullus’s baffling conduct caused a scandal back in Rome, where he was condemned as man who “either through sloth and negligence, or corrupted by bribes, neglected entirely the proper conduct of his duty.” Instead of crushing the revolt, Lucullus had allowed it to persist. So in early 102, the Senate dispatched a replacement to take over the campaign.32
Feeling slighted after losing his command, Lucullus made a shocking announcement to his troops. He said that they had done their duty to the Senate and People of Rome and were hereby discharged. In addition to demobilizing the seventeen thousand men he had arrived with, Lucullus also “burned his palisades and fortification works, so as not to leave to his successor any useful resources for the conduct of war. Because he was being accused of dragging out the war, he believed that he could exonerate himself by ensuring the humiliation and failure of his successor.” Having left his successor with no army and no fortifications, it should come as no surprise that upon returning to Rome, Lucullus was brought up on charges and exiled.33
WHILE SICILY CONTINUED to burn in the spring of 102, the moment Gaius Marius had been waiting for in Gaul finally arrived: the Cimbri were coming back. Marius’s intelligence network was strong and he was informed early of their imminent return. He also learned that at least three other tribes had joined them in a grand anti-Roman alliance. Besides the Cimbri themselves were the Teutones and the Ambrones, both of which we can also trace back to the North Sea. Also joining the alliance were the Tigurini, who once again sought to take advantage of perceived Roman weakness.34
Marius was also told that the objective of the anti-Roman alliance was to break into Italy on two fronts. The Teutones and Ambrones would move down the Rhône valley and enter Italy from the northwest while the Cimbri would swing east and enter Italy from the northeast, near where they had first clashed with Caepio at Noreia. The Tigurini’s job would be to secure the passes through the Alps. The division of the invasion meant the Romans would have to divide their own defenses. While Marius remained in southern Gaul to face the Teutones and Ambrones, his consular colleague Quintus Lutatius Catulus headed to northeastern Italy to prevent the Cimbri from passing through the Alps.35
Having scouted the landscape of southern Gaul for over two years, Marius knew exactly where he wanted to place his fortified camps for first contact with the enemy. Situated on high ground next to the Rhône, the camps would be nearly impregnable. When word came that the Teutones and Ambrones were about to appear, Marius led his legions north and built their camps. We have already seen what happened when first contact came. Marius refused to let his men leave the camps and forced them to wait until the great horde had moved on. When the Teutones and Ambrones departed, Marius finally ordered his men to break camp and follow. The antsy legionaries were baffled by their general’s seeming lack of nerve. They did not yet realize that Marius was executing a carefully laid-out plan.36
Using the superior speed of his legions, Marius raced along parallel to the barbarian horde until they all reached another location he had carefully selected near Aquae Sextiae. With the Teutones and Ambrones camped beside the river, the legions occupied a clearing in the forest that overlooked the barbarians’ camps. Marius told his thirsty troops that “they could get water there, but the price of it was blood.” The battle began with a preliminary engagement that saw Marius isolate and eliminate thirty thousand Ambrones. Then, a few days later, Marius arrayed his troops at the crest of a long slope and forced the Teutones to charge up to meet them. But as soon as contact was made the legions drove them right back down the hill. As the Teutones fell back under heavy assault, Marius ordered a hidden reserve unit to burst out of the woods into the exposed Teutone rear. By the end of the battle, Marius and his legions were not just victorious; they destroyed an entire
branch of this two-pronged invasion of Italy.37
The casualties of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae were massive: somewhere between one hundred and two hundred thousand dead, including plenty of civilians caught up in the bloody chaos. Rather than fall into slavery, mothers “dashed their children upon the rocks and then took their own lives by the sword or by hanging.” It was later said that the local inhabitants of the region “fenced their vineyards round with the bones of the fallen, and that the soil, after the bodies had wasted away in it and the rains had fallen all winter upon it, grew so rich and became so full to its depths of the putrefied matter that sank into it, that it produced an exceeding great harvest in later years.”38
WHILE MARIUS WON the greatest battle of his career to date, he did not have long to bask in the glow of victory. Reports came through that his colleague Catulus was having a hell of a time over in northeastern Italy. Catulus was an upstanding optimate senator, but he was more scholar and statesman than soldier. Catulus was “a man eminent for all the politer virtues, for wisdom and for integrity,” but revealed himself to be “too sluggish for arduous contests.” Marius read alarming reports from the east about failures to hold the Alpine passes.39
Catulus may not have been an experienced general, but he did have by his side the supremely talented Sulla. Chafing under years of subordination to Marius, Sulla managed to get himself transferred to Catulus’s command for the campaigns of 102. Sulla did signal work as the legions awaited the Cimbri, arranging alliances with native tribes and organizing stable supply lines. But with only about twenty thousand men at their disposal, no amount of preparation was going to make a difference against hundreds of thousands of Cimbri. An initial clash in the mountains proved that the numerical superiority of the slow-moving horde was too great. The Romans were forced into a fighting retreat.40
In danger of being enveloped in the mountains and destroyed like every other Roman army that had fought the Cimbri, Catulus declared the Alpine passes indefensible and pulled his legions out of the mountains, falling all the way back to the Adige River in northern Italy. It may have been a sound strategic judgment, but when Catulus abandoned the mountains he allowed the Cimbri an uncontested passage into Cisalpine Gaul. After a decade of knocking on the door, the Cimbri were finally in Italy.41
To hold the line, Catulus ordered heavily fortified camps built on both the near and far sides of the Adige, with a bridge connecting the two. But when Cimbric scouts located the Roman camp, their chiefs devised a clever strategy. A detachment of Cimbri headed downriver and began to construct a dam, “tearing away the neighboring hills, like the giants of old, carrying into the river whole trees with their roots, fragments of cliffs, and mounds of earth, and crowding the current out of its course.” Meanwhile, a second detachment went upriver and constructed floating projectiles, “heavy masses” that swept along the swift current and “whirl[ed] down the stream against the piles of the bridge… which made the bridge quiver with their blows.” With the banks of the river now flooding from the dam and the bridge being blasted with repeated projectiles, Catulus and his army began to suspect this was not going to end well.42
With the Roman camps flooded and broken, the Cimbri launched an all-out attack. By all accounts, the men holding the forward camp fought valiantly, but the legions on the far side of the river saw the situation as hopeless and ran. One cavalry detachment did not stop riding until they got all the way back to Rome—a story we know because among the riders was the son of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. When the young officer arrived in Rome, the princeps senatus refused to acknowledge him and cast him out of the family for his cowardice. After surviving the war with the Cimbri, the young man committed suicide in disgrace.43
Catulus’s own conduct during the battle became a matter of fierce debate. According to Catulus himself, when he discovered his army in flight, he sacrificed his own reputation for that of his men: “For finding that he could not persuade his soldiers to remain, and seeing that they were making off in terror, he ordered his standard to be taken up, ran to the foremost of the retiring troops, and put himself at their head, wishing that the disgrace should attach to himself and not to his country, and that his soldiers, in making their retreat, should not appear to be running away, but following their general.” But it is more likely that Catulus was trying to put a positive spin on a disorganized flight south.44
But even though the road to Rome now lay open, the Cimbri remained in the north. Apparently they fell under “the influence of a milder climate and of an abundance of drink, food, and baths.” They had always been looking for a home—perhaps this was it. But they may also have lingered because they were waiting to reunite with the Teutones and Ambrones, who should be coming through the western Alps any day now. They did not yet realize their cousins had already been wiped out.45
* No relation to the Lucius Cassius Longinus who was killed fighting the Tigurini in 107.
CHAPTER 8
THE THIRD FOUNDER OF ROME
Freedom, democracy, laws, reputation, official position, were no longer of any use to anybody, since even the office of tribune, which had been devised for the restraint of wrong-doers… was guilty of such outrages and suffered such indignities.
APPIAN1
WITH THE CIMBRI OCCUPYING CISALPINE GAUL AND slaves still rampaging through Sicily, politics in Rome took a radical turn. The emergency atmosphere allowed Saturninus and his cronies to push the political envelope. They had already reintroduced violence when the tribune Norbanus forced the prosecution of Caepio with the help of an angry mob. Now, after helping Marius secure reelection, Saturninus had at his disposal a small army of Marius’s ex-soldiers ready to flex their electoral and physical muscle.
Joining Saturninus at the head of this new populare political army was Gaius Servilius Glaucia. Glaucia was despised by most of his fellow senators. Cicero calls him “the most abandoned wretch that ever existed.” Cicero also later said that though he does not recommend vulgar metaphors, it would have been accurate to call Glaucia “the shit of the Senate.” But even the dismissive Cicero admitted Saturninus was “keen and artful, and excessively humorous; and notwithstanding the meanness of his birth, and the depravity of his life, he would have been advanced to the dignity of a consul.” But Glaucia would not advance to the dignity of a consul—instead the depravity of his life would lead to his ruin.2
To give their coming takeover of Rome a veneer of moral authority, Saturninus and Glaucia invoked the memory of the now legendary Gracchi brothers. Saturninus displayed busts of the martyred Gracchi in his home and spoke of the martyred brothers in his speeches. So important was owning the Gracchan legacy that Saturninus appeared in the Forum one day with a young man who he claimed was the long lost son of Tiberius Gracchus. The young man was about the right age, and Saturninus demanded he be officially registered in the census and recognized as the legitimate heir of the Gracchi.3
Anyone who knew the Gracchi family personally knew Saturninus was spinning a transparent fiction. Sempronia—the Gracchi’s still-living sister—refused to receive this alleged nephew, whom she had never met. But this was an age when a lie was not a lie if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true. For Saturninus the only thing that mattered was planting a seed in the minds of potential supporters that a son of the Gracchi sat in Saturninus’s inner circle.4
But the presentation of this lost Gracchi was also a trap for Saturninus’s optimate enemies, especially Metellus Numidicus. After being stripped of the Numidian command Metellus had returned to Rome and spent the next five years registering his disapproval of all populare measures. But though his name was sneered at in the streets, Metellus still commanded a large following, and his reputation among his fellow optimates was unimpeachable. So in the same election for 102 BC that returned Marius to his third consecutive consulship, Metellus was elected censor. The sudden appearance of “Tiberius Gracchus the Younger” shortly after Metellus entered office cannot have been a coincide
nce.5
The principal job of the censor was to maintain the citizen rolls, and Metellus predictably refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Gracchan imposter, setting off a firestorm in the streets. Then Metellus went even further: accusing Saturninus and Glaucia of crimes against the public morality, he announced his intention to expel both from the Senate. In no time, Saturninus and Glaucia organized a mob to protest Metellus’s conduct. The proud Metellus tried to stand firm against this angry rabble but was eventually forced to take refuge in a temple on the Capitoline Hill to escape the insults and bricks spewing from the crowd. After the mob dispersed, Metellus’s cousin and fellow censor convinced him to stop flagrantly poking the hornet’s nest and leave Saturninus and Glaucia in the Senate. But despite this concession, both censors refused to recognize Tiberius Gracchus the Younger. But that hardly mattered—the damage was done.6
Shortly after this incident, emissaries representing King Mithridates of Pontus arrived in Rome. Pontus was a far-off kingdom on the Black Sea coast, and Mithridates had recently slit the throat of the king of neighboring Cappadocia and placed his son on the throne. The Pontic envoys requested the Senate recognize the transfer of power. As would befit a delegation of this kind, the Pontic ambassadors arrived in Rome loaded with gifts, and Saturninus was able to revive that old antisenatorial theme of elite corruption by foreign powers. Reminding everyone of Jugurtha’s scandalous bribes, Saturninus lambasted both the Senate and the Pontic ambassadors for corruption and tried to physically intimidate the ambassadors into leaving the city.7
The physical intimidation was too much for the Senate to bear, and Saturninus was brought up on charges of violating the sanctity of a foreign embassy. Facing a capital charge, Saturninus used exaggerated theatrics to mobilize sympathy in the streets. “Throwing off his rich apparel, putting on poor and sordid clothes, and allowing his beard to grow, he ran up and down to the tumultuous throngs of people throughout the city… begging with tears that they would assist him in his present calamities.” Saturninus claimed the charges were trumped up and he was really being prosecuted for “the good will he bore the people.” When the day of the trial finally arrived, an angry mob packed the Assembly, making it difficult—even unsafe—to continue. Saturninus was released before the trial even began.8