Chapter VI: The Gracchi, Marius, and Sylla (2)

Sylla restored order, prevented pillage, convoked the assembly of the people, justified his conduct, and, wishing to secure for his party the preponderance in the public deliberations, he recalled to force the old custom of requiring the previous assent of the Senate before the presentation of a law. The comitia by centuries were substituted for the comitia by tribes, to which was left only the election of the inferior magistrates.[703] Sylla caused Sulpicius to be put to death, and abrogated his decrees; and he set a price on the head of Marius, forgetting that he had himself, a short time before, found a refuge in the house of his rival. He proscribed the chiefs of the democratic faction, but most of them had fled before he entered Rome. Marius and his son had reached Africa through a thousand dangers. This revolution appears not to have been sanguinary, and, with the exception of Sulpicius, the historians of the time mention no considerable person as having been put to death. The terror inspired at first by Sylla lasted no long time. Reprobation of his acts was shown both in the Senate and among the people, who seized every opportunity to mark their discontent. Sylla was to resume the command of the army of Asia, and that of the army of Italy had fallen to Pompeius. The massacre of this latter by his own soldiers made the future dictator feel how insecure was his power; he sought to put a stop to the opposition to which he was exposed by accepting as a candidate at the consular comitia L. Cornelius Cinna, a known partisan of Marius, taking care, however, to exact from him a solemn oath of fidelity. But Cinna, once elected, held none of his engagements, and the other consul, Cn. Octavius, had neither the authority nor the energy necessary to balance the influence of his colleague.

Sylla, after presiding at the consular comitia, went in all haste to Capua to take the command of his troops, whom he led into Greece against the lieutenants of Mithridates. Cinna determined to execute the law of Sulpicius, which assimilated the new citizens to the old ones;[704] he demanded at the same time the return of the exiles, and made an appeal to the slaves. Immediately the Senate, and even the tribunes of the people, pronounced against him. He was declared deposed from the consulate. “A merited disgrace,” says Paterculus, “but a dangerous precedent.”[705] Driven from Rome, he hurried to Nola to demand an asylum of the Samnites, who were still in arms. Thence he went to sound the temper of the Roman army employed to observe Samnium, and, once assured of the dispositions of the soldiers in his favour, he penetrated into their camp, demanding protection against his enemies. His speeches and promises seduced the legions: they chose Cinna for their chief by acclamation, and followed him without hesitating. Meanwhile two lieutenants of Marius, Q. Sertorius and Cn. Papirius Carbo, both exiled by Sylla, proceeded to levy troops in the north of Italy; and the aged Marius landed in Etruria, where his presence was immediately followed by an insurrection. The Etruscan peasants accused the Senate as the cause of all their sufferings; and the enemy of the nobles and the rich appeared to them as an avenger sent by the gods. In ranging themselves under his banner, they believed that they were on the way with him to the pillage of the eternal city.

War was on the point of re-commencing, and this time Romans and Italiotes marched united against Rome. From the north, Marius, Sertorius, and Carbo were advancing with considerable forces. Cinna, master of Campania, was penetrating into Latium, while a Samnite army invaded it on the other side. To these five armies the Senate could oppose but one; that of Cn. Pompeius Strabo, an able general, but an intriguing politician, who hoped to raise himself under favour of the disorder. Quitting his cantonments in Apulia, he had arrived, by forced marches, under the walls of Rome, seeking either to sell his services to the Senate or to effect a conciliation with Marius. He soon saw that the insurgents were strong enough to do without him. His soldiers, raised in the Picenum and in the country of the Marsi, refused to fight for the Senate against their old confederates, and would have abandoned their general but for the courage and presence of mind of his son, a youth of twenty years of age, the same who subsequently was the great Pompey. One day the legionaries, snatching their ensigns, threatened to desert in mass: young Pompey laid himself across the gateway of the camp, and challenged them to pass over his body.[706] Death delivered Pompeius Strabo from the shame of being present at an inevitable catastrophe. According to some authors, he sank under the attacks of an epidemic disease; according to others, he was struck by lightning in the very midst of his camp. Deprived of its chief, his army passed over to the enemy; the Senate was without defenders, and the populace rose against it: Rome opened her gates to Cinna and Marius.

The conquerors were without pity in putting to death, often with refinements in cruelty unknown to the Romans, the partisans of the aristocratic faction who had fallen into their hands. During several days, the slaves, whom Cinna had restored to liberty, gave themselves up to every excess. Sertorius, the only one of the chiefs of the democratic party who had some feelings of justice, made an example of these wretches, and massacred nearly four thousand of them.[707]

Marius and Cinna had proclaimed, as they advanced upon Rome in arms, that their aim was to assure to the Italiotes the entire enjoyment of the rights of Roman city; they declared themselves both consuls for the year 668. Their power was too considerable to be contested, for the new citizens furnished them with a contingent of thirty legions, or about 150,000 men.[708] Marius died suddenly thirteen days after entering upon office, and the democratic party lost in him the only man who still preserved his prestige. A fact which arose out of his funeral, paints the manners of the epoch, and the character of the revolution which had just been effected. An extraordinary sacrifice was wanted for his tomb: the pontiff Q. Mucius Scævola, one of the most respectable old men of the nobility, was chosen as the victim. Conducted in pomp before the funeral pile of the conqueror of the Cimbri, he was struck by the sacrificer, who, with an inexperienced hand, plunged the knife into his throat without killing him. Restored to life, Scævola was cited in judgment, by a tribune of the people, for not having received the blow _fairly_.[709]

While Rome and all Italy were plunged in this fearful anarchy, Sylla drove out of Greece the generals of Mithridates VI., and gained two great battles at Chæronea (668) and Orchomenus (669). He was still in Bœotia, when Valerius Flaccus, sent by Cinna to replace him, landed in Greece, penetrated into Thessaly, and thence passed into Asia. Sylla followed him thither immediately, in haste to conclude with the King of Pontus an arrangement which would enable him to lead his army back into Italy. Circumstances were favourable. Mithridates had need to repair his losses, and he found himself in presence of a new enemy, the lieutenant of Valerius Flaccus, the fierce Flavius Fimbria, who, having by the murder of his general become head of the army of Asia, had seized upon Pergamus. Mithridates subscribed to the conditions imposed by Sylla; he restored all the provinces of which he had taken possession, and gave plate and money. Sylla then advanced into Lydia against Fimbria; but the latter, at the approach of the victor of Chæronea, could not restrain his soldiers. His whole army disbanded and passed over to Sylla. Threatened by his rival, the murderer of Flaccus was driven to slay himself. Nothing now stood in the way of Sylla’s projects on Italy, and he prepared to make his enemies at Rome pay dearly for their temporary triumph. At the moment of setting sail, he wrote to the Senate to announce the conclusion of the war in Asia, and his own speedy return. Three years, he said, had been sufficient to enable him to re-unite with the Roman empire Greece, Macedonia, Ionia, and Asia, and to shut up Mithridates within the limits of his old possessions; he was the first Roman who received an embassy from the King of the Parthians.[710] He complained of the violence exercised against his friends and his wife, who had fled with a crowd of fugitives to seek an asylum in his camp.[711] He added, without vain threats, his intention to restore order by force of arms; but he promised not to repeal the great measure of the emancipation of Italy, and ended by declaring that the good citizens, new as well as old, had nothing to fear from him.

This letter, which the Senate ventured to receive, redoubled the fury of the men who had succeeded Marius. Blood flowed again. Cinna, who caused himself to be re-elected consul for the fourth time, and Cn. Papirius Carbo, his colleague, collecting in haste numerous troops, but ill disciplined, prepared to do their best to make head against the storm which was approaching. Persuaded that Sylla would proceed along the Adriatic to invade Italy from the north, Cinna had collected at Ancona a considerable army, with the design of surprising him in the midst of his march, and attacking him either in Epirus or Illyria. But his soldiers, Italiotes in great part, encouraged by the promises of Sylla, and, moreover, full of contempt for their own general, said openly that they would not pass the sea. Cinna attempted to make an example of some of the mutineers. A revolt broke out, and he was massacred. To avoid a similar lot, Carbo, who came to take the command, hastened to promise the rebels that they should not quit Italy.

Sylla landed at Brundusium, in 671, at the head of an army of forty thousand men, composed of five legions, six thousand cavalry, and contingents from Peloponnesus and Macedonia. The fleet numbered sixteen hundred vessels.[712] He followed the Appian Way, and reached Campania after a single battle, fought not far from Canusium.[713] He brought the gold of Mithridates and the plunder of the temples of Greece, means of seduction still more dangerous than his ability on the field of battle. Hardly arrived in Italy, he rallied round him the proscripts and all those who detested the inapt and cruel government of the successors of Marius. The remains of the great families decimated by them repaired to his camp as to a safe place of refuge. M. Licinius Crassus became one of his ablest lieutenants, and it was then that Cn. Pompeius, the son of Strabo, a general at twenty-three years of age, raised an army in the Picenum, beat three bodies of the enemies, and came to offer to Sylla his sword, already redoubtable.

It was the beginning of the year 672 when Sylla entered Latium; he completely defeated, near Signia, the legions of the younger Marius, whose name had raised him to the consulship. This battle rendered Sylla master of Rome; but to the north, in Cisalpine Gaul and Etruria, Carbo, in spite of frequent defeats, disputed the ground with obstinacy against Pompey and Sylla’s other lieutenants. In the south, the Samnites had raised all their forces, and were preparing to succour Præneste, besieged by Sylla in person, and defended by young Marius. Pontius Telesinus, the general of the Samnites, finding it out of his power to raise the siege, conceived then the audacious and almost desperate idea of carrying his whole army to Rome, taking it by surprise, and sacking it. “Let us burn the wolves’ den,”[714] he said to his soldiers: “so long as it exists, there will be no liberty in Italy.”

By a rapid night-march, Telesinus deceived the vigilance of his adversary; but, exhausted with fatigue, on arriving at the foot of the ramparts of Rome, the Samnites were unable to give the assault, and Sylla had time to arrive with the choicest of his legions.

A sanguinary battle took place at the very gates of the town, on the day of the calends of November, 672, and it continued far into the night. The left wing of the Romans was beaten and took to flight, in spite of the efforts of Sylla to rally it; Telesinus perished in the fight, and Crassus, who commanded the right wing, gained a complete victory. At daylight, the Samnites who had escaped the slaughter laid down their arms and demanded quarter.[715]

More than a year still passed away before the complete pacification of Italy, and it was only obtained by employing the most violent and sanguinary measures. Sylla made this terrible declaration, that he would not pardon one of his enemies. At Præneste, all the senators who were the partisans of Marius had their throats cut, and the inhabitants were put to the sword. Those of Norba, surprised through treason, rather than surrender, buried themselves under the ruins of their city.

Sylla had scrupled at nothing in his way to power; the corruption of the armies,[716] the pillage of towns, the massacre of the inhabitants, and the extermination of his enemies; nor did he show any more scruples in maintaining himself in it. He inaugurated his return to the Senate by the slaughter, near the Temple of Bellona, of three thousand Samnites who had surrendered prisoners.[717] A considerable number of the inhabitants of Italy were deprived of the right of city which had been granted them after the war of the allies;[718] he invented a new punishment, that of proscription,[719] and, in Rome alone, he banished four thousand seven hundred citizens, among whom were ninety senators, fifteen consulars, and two thousand seven hundred knights.[720] His fury fell heaviest upon the Samnites, whose spirit of independence he feared, and he almost entirely annihilated that nation.[721] Although his triumph had been a reaction against the popular party, he treated as prisoners of war the children of the noblest and most respectable families, and, by a monstrous innovation, even the women suffered the same lot.[722] Lists of proscription, placarded on the Forum with the names of the intended victims, threw terror into families; to laugh or cry on looking at these was a crime.[723] M. Pletorius was slaughtered for having fainted at the sight of the punishment inflicted on the prætor, M. Marius;[724] to denounce the hiding-place of the proscripts, or put them to death, formed a title to recompenses paid from the public treasury, amounting in some cases to twelve thousand drachmas (about 11,640 francs [£460]) a head;[725] to assist them, to have had friendly or any other relations with the enemies of Sylla, was enough to subject the offender to capital punishment. From one end of Italy to the other, all those who had served under the orders of Marius, Carbo, or Norbanus, were massacred or banished, and their goods sold by auction. They were to be struck even in their posterity: the children and grandchildren of the proscripts were deprived of the right of inheritance and of being candidates for public offices.[726] All these acts of pitiless vengeance had been authorised by a law called _Valeria_, promulgated in 672, and which, in appointing Sylla dictator, conferred upon him unlimited powers. Yet, though Sylla kept the supreme power, he permitted the election of the consuls every year, an example which was subsequently followed by the emperors.

Calm re-established in Rome, a new constitution was promulgated, which restored the aristocracy to its ascendency. The dictator fell into the delusion of believing that a system founded by violence, upon selfish interests, could survive him. It is easier to change laws than to arrest the course of ideas.

The legislation of the Gracchi was abolished. The senators, by the law _judiciaria_, acquired again the exclusive privilege of the judicatory functions. The colony of Capua, a popular creation, was destroyed and restored to the domain. Sylla assumed to himself one of the first privileges of the censorship, which he had suppressed--the nomination of the members of the Senate. He introduced into that assembly, decimated during the civil wars, three hundred knights. By the law on the priesthood, he removed from the votes of the people and restored to the college the choice of the pontiffs and of the sovereign pontiff. He limited the power of the tribunes, leaving them only the right of protection (_auxilium_),[727] and forbidding their access to the superior magistracies.[728] He flattered himself that he had thus removed the ambitious from a career henceforward profitless.

He admitted into Rome ten thousand new citizens (called _Cornelians_),[729] taken from among the slaves whose masters had been proscribed. Similar enfranchisements took place in the rest of Italy. He had almost exterminated two nations, the Etruscans and the Samnites; he re-peopled their deserted countries by distributing the estates of his adversaries among a considerable number of his soldiers, whom some authors raise to the prodigious number of forty-seven legions,[730] and created for his veterans twenty-three military colonies on the territory taken from the rebel towns.[731]

All these arbitrary measures were dictated by the spirit of reaction; but those which follow were inspired by the desire to re-establish order and the hierarchy.

The rules formerly adopted for the succession of the magistracies were restored.[732] No person could offer himself for the consulship without having previously held the office of prætor; or for the prætorship before he had held that of questor. Thirty years were fixed as the age necessary for the questorship, forty for the prætorship, and forty-three for the consulship. The law required an interval of two years between the exercise of two different magistracies, and often between the same magistracy, a rule so severely maintained, that, for having braved it in merely soliciting for the consulship,[733] Lucretius Ofella, one of Sylla’s most devoted partisans, was put to death. The dictator withdrew from the freedmen the right of voting, from the knights the places of honour in the spectacles; he put a stop to the adjudications entrusted to the farmers-general and the distributions of wheat, and suppressed the corporations, which threatened a real danger to public tranquillity. Lastly, to put limits to extravagance, the sumptuary laws were promulgated.[734]

By the law _de provinciis ordinandis_, he sought to regulate the provinces and ameliorate their administration. The two consuls and the eight prætors were retained at Rome during their year of office by the administration of civil affairs. They took afterwards, in quality of proconsuls or proprætors, the command of one of the ten provinces, which they exercised during a year; after which a new curiate law became necessary to renew the _imperium_; they preserved it until their return to Rome. Thirty days were allowed to them for quitting the province after the arrival of their successors.[735] The number of prætors, questors, pontiffs, and augurs was augmented.[736] Every year twenty questors were to be named, which would ensure the recruitment of the Senate, since this office gave entrance to it. Sylla multiplied the commissions of justice. He took measures for putting a stop to the murders which desolated Italy (_lex de sicariis_), and to protect the citizens against outrages (_lex de injuriis_). The _lex magistratis_ completed, so to say, the preceding.[737] In the number of _crimes of high treason_, punished capitally, are the excesses of magistrates charged with the administration of the provinces; quitting their government without leave of the Senate; conducting an army beyond the limits of his province; undertaking a war unauthorised; treating with foreign chiefs: such were the principal acts denounced as crimes against the Republic. There was not one of them of which Sylla himself had not been guilty.

Sylla abdicated in 675, the only extraordinary act which remained for him to accomplish. He who had carried mourning into so many families returned into his own house alone, through a respectful and submissive crowd. Such was the ascendency of his old power, supported, moreover, by the ten thousand Cornelians present in Rome and devoted to his person,[738] that, though he had resumed his position of simple citizen, he was still allowed to act as absolute master, and even on the eve of his death, which occurred in 676, he made himself the executioner of pitiless justice, in daring to cause to be slaughtered before his eyes the prætor Granius, guilty of exaction.[739]

Unexampled magnificence was displayed at his funeral; his body was carried to the Campus Martius, where previously none but the kings had been inhumed.[740] He left Italy tamed, but not subdued; the great nobles in power, but without moral authority; his partisans enriched, but trembling for their riches; the numerous victims of tyranny held down, but growling under the oppression; lastly, Rome taught that henceforth she is without protection against the boldness of any fortunate soldier.[741]

[Sidenote: Effects of Sylla’s Dictatorship.]

VII. The history of the last fifty years, and especially the dictatorship of Sylla, show beyond doubt that Italy demanded a master. Everywhere institutions gave way before the power of an individual, sustained not only by his own partisans, but also by the irresolute multitude, which, fatigued by the action and reaction of so many opposite parties, aspired to order and repose. If the conduct of Sylla had been moderated, what is called the Empire would probably have commenced with him; but his power was so cruel and so partial, that after his death, the abuses of liberty were forgotten in the memory of abuses of tyranny. The more the democratic spirit had expanded, the more the ancient institutions lost their prestige. In fact, as democracy, trusting and passionate, believes always that its interests are better represented by an individual than by a political body, it was incessantly disposed to deliver its future to the man who raised himself above others by his own merit. The Gracchi, Marius, and Sylla, had in turn disposed at will of the destinies of the Republic, and trampled under foot with impunity ancient institutions and ancient customs; but their reign was ephemeral,[742] for they only represented factions. Instead of embracing collectively the hopes and interests of all the peninsula of Italy, they favoured exclusively particular classes of society. Some sought before all to secure the prosperity of the proletaries of Rome, or the emancipation of the Italiotes, or the preponderance of the knights; others, the privileges of the aristocracy. They failed.

To establish a durable order of things there wanted a man who, raising himself above vulgar passions, should unite in himself the essential qualities and just ideas of each of his predecessors, avoiding their faults as well as their errors. To the greatness of soul and love of the people of certain tribunes, it was needful to join the military genius of great generals and the strong sentiments of the Dictator in favour of order and the hierarchy.

The man capable of so lofty a mission already existed; but perhaps, in spite of his name, he might have still remained long unknown, if the penetrating eye of Sylla had not discovered him in the midst of the crowd, and, by persecution, pointed him out to public attention. That man was Cæsar.