No man had a bigger target on his back than Cinna’s colleague Octavius, who was furious the Senate had surrendered. Though he commanded no troops, Octavius refused to hide. But while Cinna had promised not to knowingly put anyone to death, what his men did of their own accord was beyond his control. It did not take long for a Cinnan soldier to track Octavius down, unceremoniously murder him, and deliver the head to Cinna. Far from condemning the murder, Cinna ordered Octavius’s head posted in the Forum for all to see. This was only the beginning.30
With the Cinnans running amok, the great optimate orator Marcus Antonius found himself targeted by Carbo, the son of the man Antonius had driven to suicide twenty-five years earlier. After tracking Antonius to an inn, a tribune loyal to Carbo sent some soldiers upstairs. But Antonius was “a speaker of much charm,” who had lost none of his persuasive talents. He “tried to soften [them] with a long discourse, appealing to their pity by recalling many and various subjects, until the tribune, who was at a loss to know what had happened, rushed into the house.” Furious to find Antonius nearly talking his way out of danger, the tribune “killed him while he was still declaiming.” Antonius’s head was posted in the Forum.31
But not all the killings were carried out in the street. The unfortunate priest-consul Merula was offered the dignity of a formal trial, but he elected to commit suicide rather than accept a sentence of death. He “opened his veins and, as his blood drenched the altars, he implored the gods to whom, as priest of Jupiter, he had formerly prayed for safety of the state, to visit their wrath upon Cinna and his party.” Marius’s old colleague Catulus—the man who always tried to take credit for the Battle of the Raudian Plain—was also offered the courtesy of a show trial. Aware that he was in mortal danger, he approached Marius and begged for his life. Marius merely replied, “You must die.” Catulus returned home and suffocated himself.32
Over the course of these bloody five days we know of fourteen named victims, including a shocking six former consuls. Lucius Caesar and his brother Gaius perished, as did Crassus Dives, who committed suicide along with his eldest son as they were on the verge of capture. One poor soul named Ancharius died because he greeted Marius in the street and Marius did not acknowledge him. The Spiked Boots chopped him down right there on the spot. Watching as heads mounted on the rostra, the people of Rome were mortified that “what their ancestors had graced with the ships’ beaks of the enemy was now being disgraced by the heads of citizens.”33
At this point, Marius himself is often portrayed as crazed with bloodlust, a man “whose anger increased day by day.” Painted as an old man driven mad with senile vengeance, he “thirsted for blood, kept on killing all whom he held in any suspicion whatsoever.” But if we stand back from the bloody chaos, Marius appears no better and no worse than any of the others; he settled personal vendettas and let his men run wild, but so did they all. That said, it does appear Marius was willing to carry on the terror longer than his colleagues, and he certainly did nothing to rein in his infamously brutal Spiked Boots. It was left to Cinna and Sertorius to finally restore order with one last brutal slaughter. In the middle of the night, they surrounded the Spiked Boots and massacred every last one of them. The slaughter of the Spiked Boots marks the end of the five-day terror.34
With the killing concluded, anyone who wished to depart Rome was now free to do so. This led to an exodus of families who may have survived the terror but still wanted no part of Cinna’s Rome. Sulla’s wife Metella and her children were among the refugees and they headed straight for Athens to bring Sulla the news that Marius had captured Rome, their friends were dead, and Sulla was an enemy of the state.35
MUCH TO SULLA’S great consternation, the siege of Athens was still ongoing over the winter of 87–86. The city should have fallen by now, but Lucullus had still not returned from his quest to gather a navy. It was while Sulla sat unhappily outside of Athens that his wife and children showed up. He was shocked to see them, and even more shocked by the news they bore: Rome had fallen to his enemies, all his property had been razed to the ground, and the Assembly had declared him an enemy of the state. Worst of all, Marius would almost certainly be voted commander of the war against Mithridates.36
Now cut off from cash and supplies from Italy, Sulla started pumping the local Greeks for money to fund his war not just against Mithridates, but also what looked like a looming civil war with Marius. Sulla’s brilliant expedient was to target well-endowed shrines like the Oracle at Delphi. The stiff tribute he imposed on these religious treasuries caused great moral agonizing, even for Sulla’s own agents, who were “loath to touch the sacred objects, and shed many tears… over the necessity of it.” But that didn’t stop them from taking the money and running.37
After a winter of bad news, Sulla vented his frustrations on Athens in March 86. As the winter drew to a close the city fathers came out to beg for mercy, but were so long-winded in their defense of Athens, the shining beacon of light and reason, that Sulla snapped, “I was not sent to Athens by the Romans to learn its history, but to subdue its rebels.” Out of patience Sulla ordered a daring gambit to capture the city. One night, a few cohorts of Roman soldiers used tall ladders to climb into Athens at an ill-attended corner of the wall. These advance cohorts successfully threw open the gates and let their comrades in. What followed was like a scene from the terror in Rome, only worse. Sulla did not restrain his men, giving them rein to rob, kill, and rape at their pleasure. A witness later said that “the blood that was shed in the market-place covered all the Cerameicus inside the Dipylon gate; nay, many say that it flowed through the gate and deluged the suburb.” Only after the desperate pleading from both Greek and Roman friends did Sulla allow himself to be persuaded to end the sack.38
After capturing Athens, Sulla turned his full attention to its port of Piraeus. The legions overwhelmed the defenses and forced Archelaus’s fleet to retreat out to sea. Sulla then ordered the famous docks of Piraeus burned and its walls destroyed. Consolidating his victory, Sulla made plans to conquer the rest of Greece before turning to face the armies of Marius.39
BACK IN ROME, Cinna spent the last few days of 87 arranging his own reelection to the consulship. To preserve the veneer of constitutional government, Cinna allowed elections to proceed but likely used his own powers as consul to disallow any other candidates. As had been arranged in advance, the only other man allowed to run was Gaius Marius. In January 86 Marius finally entered the seventh consulship he claimed was his destiny.40
The division of labor in the Cinna-Marius regime is clear. Marius would assume command of the war against Mithridates. He would raise an army, march to Greece, and depose Sulla. Cinna meanwhile would remain in Rome and see to the political and economic settlement of Italy. If all went well, Sulla could be pushed aside, Marius would win the war, and then return to a friendly regime that would divide up the spoils and make them the permanent masters of Rome.41
Unfortunately, it didn’t go like that. Though he had long denied it, Marius was an old man in bad health. He had recently undergone an operation for varicose veins, and just a few weeks after taking office, he contracted pneumonia. Before anyone realized how serious his condition was, Gaius Marius died. Just seventeen days after inaugurating his seventh consulship, with maps of Greece spread out on his desk and plans for a final showdown with Sulla in the works, Gaius Marius died one of the all-time anticlimactic deaths in history.42
Gaius Marius was a pivotal figure in Roman history. When he first embarked on his public career he was merely a novus homo Italian. But through steady persistence, he had climbed his way up the cursus honorum. As he climbed, he helped unlock the populare forces that challenged senatorial supremacy. He was connected to publicani merchants, a friend of the Italians, and patron to legions of poor veteran soldiers. He had fought and won wars against Jugurtha and the Cimbri, and at the peak of his power was hailed as the Third Founder of Rome. His spectacular career set an example for ambitious men of future generatio
ns, though this example was not uniformly positive. At the end of his life Marius came to embody the dark side of relentless ambition: “It can therefore be said that as much as he saved the state as a soldier, so much he damaged it as a citizen, first by his tricks, later by his revolutionary actions.” Above all Marius was a man whose ambitions could never be satisfied, for though he was the “first man to be elected consul for the seventh time, and was possessed of a house and wealth which would have sufficed for many kingdoms at once, he lamented his fortune, in that he was dying before he had satisfied and completed his desires.”43
CINNA NOW RULED alone. The presence of Marius in his coalition had always been uncomfortable, and the death of the old man was a welcome relief. Cinna was now able to claim the Marian standard without having to worry about Marius himself. The Marian partisans were an important pillar of Cinna’s coalition, which now included publicani merchants and moderate senators looking to keep the peace. But the most important pillar was the Italians, to whom Cinna owed his power. The army that captured Rome was mostly Italian, and led by a man who promised them full political equality. In a very real sense, Cinna’s regime represented the triumph of the Italians in the Social War.
While he consolidated his domestic regime, Cinna also reassessed his foreign policy. Marius’s death meant he needed new leadership for the war in the east. So Cinna took what would have been a single unified army under Marius and divided it between two men: Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus and Lucius Valerius Flaccus. Cinna induced the Senate to assign Asiaticus to the province of Macedonia, and induced the Assembly to elect Flaccus consul and assign him to the province of Asia.44
But Cinna was not as concerned about the war in the east as he was about the situation in Italy. The Italian economy was in shambles and things had only gotten worse since the murder of Asellio three years earlier. There were still no taxes from the east to augment the money supply, and estates across Italy were still ruined. So before he left for the east, Flaccus carried a measure through the Assembly that canceled three-fourths of all outstanding debts. The act was necessary medicine. Until Asia was retaken and money circulated in Italy again, there was nothing else to be done. But the law did have key points that kept the creditors from total ruin: First, the act guaranteed the publicani bankers would at least get something when it appeared possible they would get nothing. Second, most of them were themselves debtors; their own pressing burdens were canceled along with everyone else’s.45
After Flaccus and Asiaticus departed for the east in the summer of 86, Cinna inaugurated another measure to help stabilize the economy. During the Social War, debasement of coinage and massive counterfeiting had destroyed everyone’s faith in the money supply. Families took to hording their sound money, which further decreased the amount of good money in circulation. To restore faith in the coinage, a commission met to establish uniform metal ratios, exchange rates, and methods for testing suspect coins. We know all of this because one of the commissioners was another nephew of Gaius Marius, named Marcus Marius Gratidianus. Before the commission could announce the results jointly, Gratidianus snatched the plan, ran down to the rostra, and presented the whole thing as his own initiative. Everyone was crazy about the new system. The city fell in love with Gratidianus while the other commissioners were left sputtering inaudible protests.46
BY THE SPRING of 86, Sulla had heard of the death of his old rival Marius, and with some relief turned his attention to Archelaus. After departing Athens, the Pontic army finally put back to shore in northeastern Greece. Archelaus disembarked with an army of 120,000 men and marched into the interior. Racing up to meet them, Sulla maneuvered Archelaus toward Chaeronea, where the two armies finally ran into each other. Despite being outnumbered, Sulla’s legions destroyed the Pontic army without breaking a sweat. To give you a flavor of the typical exaggeration of the ancient sources, Sulla reported that at the Battle of Chaeronea over one hundred thousand Pontic soldiers died, while he himself lost only fourteen men. This is a bald-faced lie, but it does not mean Sulla did not win a stunning victory. Archelaus himself managed to escape, but with no army to command, it looked like the brief Pontic occupation of Greece was over.47
In the aftermath of his victory, Sulla turned his attention west. Flaccus had by now crossed two legions to Greece, though his intentions were not clear. Prior to his departure the new consul had sent advanced units across the Adriatic, but as soon as these units made contact with Sulla’s legions, they defected. Now in Greece himself, Flaccus was wary of letting the rest of his men anywhere near Sulla’s magnetic pull. So rather than confront Sulla directly, Flaccus kept marching straight to the Hellespont. While he marched, Asiaticus crossed with his own two legions and planted himself on the Macedonian frontier. With Sulla bogged down fighting Archelaus, Flaccus and Asiaticus might just be able to steal Sulla’s thunder by racing into Asia and capturing Mithridates.48
Despite the losses at Chaeronea, Mithridates’s Black Sea empire still had manpower left to draw on. Sulla was forced back on campaign when Archelaus sailed back over to Greece at the head of another army 120,000 strong. The two armies met at Orchomenus, and this time Sulla’s troops wavered in the early stages of the fight. But Sulla confronted a cohort in retreat and yelled, “For me, O Romans, an honorable death here; but you, when men ask you where you betrayed your commander, remember to tell them, at Orchomenus.” Shamed into action, the men turned and fought. The Pontic army was once again smashed. Even Mithridates did not have the resources to come back with a third army of 120,000 men. The Battle of Orchomenus marked the end of the war in Greece.49
Flaccus meanwhile was nearly to the Hellespont when he fell victim to an unnatural death at the hands of his legate, Gaius Flavius Fimbria. Why the two men began quarreling is a mystery, but as the legions approached the Hellespont, Fimbria was already deep into plotting a mutiny. To curry favor with the men he allowed them to plunder the countryside as they marched and was lax with camp discipline. With his preparations complete, Fimbria staged his mutiny. Flaccus tried to run, but he was hunted down and killed. Fimbria took control of the army.50
Now in command, Fimbria led the two legions into Asia on a campaign of punitive plundering. Far from entering as an army of liberation, Fimbria meant to punish the Asian cities for turning against Rome. With Fimbria’s army on the rampage and almost all his troops now lost in Greece, Mithridates was forced to flee Pergamum for Pitane, and even then Fimbria nearly captured him. At that moment, the long-lost Lucullus finally came sailing into the Aegean at the head of a fleet. Lucullus could have easily blockaded the harbor at Pitane and prevented Mithridates from escaping by sea, but ever the loyal legate, Lucullus was not about to let any enemy of Sulla get credit for capturing Mithridates. So Lucullus kept sailing and Mithridates got away.51
MITHRIDATES MAY HAVE gotten away but he could see the walls closing in. Calculating that he would get better terms from Sulla than Fimbria, Mithridates opened a channel through General Archelaus. Archelaus approached Sulla with an enticing offer: Sulla would get the full backing of Mithridates for his domestic wars if Sulla agreed to leave Asia in Pontic hands. But Sulla laughed this off and delivered his own terms: Asia would return to Roman provincial status; Cappadocia and Bithynia would be ruled by Roman client kings; and Mithridates would return to Pontus. But beyond simply restoring status quo ante bellum, Sulla did demand something for all the trouble Mithridates had caused: seventy warships and a heaping load of silver that Sulla would presumably use to subdue his enemies in Italy. Given the enormity of the crime that was the massacre of the Italians, this was an incredibly good deal for Mithridates.52
In early 85, Sulla and Mithridates finally met in person on an island in the northern Aegean. The meeting began with a battle of wills over who would speak first. Sulla finally broke the silence to say, “It is the part of suppliants to speak first, while victors need only to be silent.” Mithridates then went into a long and not entirely incorrect account of how he had been
provoked into war by the machinations of Aquillius and the other Romans. Sulla interrupted this story to tick off the list of Mithridates’s own crimes, up to and including the murder of eighty thousand Italians. Unable to deny these crimes, and without an army to hide behind, Mithridates agreed to all of Sulla’s terms. With the treaty complete, Sulla allowed the king to return to Pontus where Mithridates rebuilt his power and planned his next move, “just as fire not wholly extinguished bursts forth again into greater flames.”53
Sulla’s own forces could not believe the terms of the peace when they found out. Jugurtha had bribed a few old senators, and as punishment was paraded through the streets of Rome in chains and deposited naked in a dank cell to starve to death. Mithridates had been guilty of unconscionable aggression and mass murder. How was Mithridates not going to be at the head of Sulla’s own triumphal parade? Why was Mithridates allowed to return home? Why was he still a king? It was outrageous.54
The explanation for Sulla’s lenient terms are simple. They left him free to turn his attention to his domestic enemies. As soon as he left the meeting with Mithridates, Sulla moved against Fimbria’s legion in Asia. Leading his own army across the Hellespont, Sulla located Fimbria’s army and set up a camp nearby. Outnumbered by superior forces, Fimbria’s two legions had no intention of putting up a fight. Sulla was a great conquering warlord; Fimbria was a murderous renegade legate. When his officers told him they would not fight, Fimbria agreed to vacate his command and leave the country. Fimbria departed for Pergamum, where he killed himself.55
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