Chapter XVIII: Marius and Sulla (2)

It now ventured to send a deputation to mollify the ferocity of the conqueror; on the other hand, it forbade the consuls to make preparations for their own defence. Cinna and Carbo, who had now succeeded to Flaccus, disregarded this feeble interference. They made new levies throughout Italy, and solicited the Samnites and Lucanians to wreak their vengeance upon Rome by arming once more against her victorious champion. The Italians promised their succours; but the troops they levied for the purpose could not be induced to embark, and the expedition which Cinna rashly undertook to lead against Sulla in the East was reluctantly abandoned. Cinna himself was soon afterwards massacred in his camp by his own mutinous soldiers. Carbo took advantage of the disturbed state of affairs to withhold the election of another colleague, and remained through the rest of the year 84 in sole occupation of the consulship. He strengthened himself by a further extension of the franchise, and enrolled large numbers of emancipated slaves in the thirty-five tribes of the city. His brief usurpation was a career of unbridled violence. He hurled his enemies from the Tarpeian Rock and expelled the tribunes from the city. He caused the terrified senate to decree that all the legions then in arms should be disbanded, hoping to fix upon Sulla a charge of disloyalty in refusing, as he of course expected, obedience to the command. Sulla had, by this time, assembled his troops at Dyrrhachium, and this decree was the signal for his crossing the sea with five legions of veterans. The invader was aware that he should have armies far more numerous than his own to encounter, but these he knew were for the most part new levies; while the old soldiers they had among them were dispersed in petty detachments and under unknown leaders: nor did he apprehend that any confidence or concert would exist among the host of generals, Carbo himself, the young Marius, Cælius, Carrinas, Brutus, Sertorius, and others, under whom they were arrayed. The Italians ranged themselves on the side of Carbo and Marius, but many tribes were at least lukewarm in the cause, the promises and bribes which Sulla could administer might be expected to find their way into the camp of the enemy. The north of Italy, the Cisalpines, the Picentines, and the Marsians were jealous of the Samnite confederacy in the south; and even the Samnites, in their implacable hostility to the Roman power, seem to have negotiated secretly with the assailant, in whom they, for their part, recognised only the enemy of the republic. Sulla’s address was equal to his valour. He was enabled to penetrate into the heart of Italy without striking a blow. One by one the most illustrious officers of the government brought over their troops to him. Metellus Pius raised his standard in Liguria; the young Pompey, already the idol of his own soldiery, levied three legions for him in Picenum, and defeated the Marians in various encounters. Crassus, the son of a victim of the late proscriptions, who had been compelled to conceal himself for the last eight months in a cave, Cethegus, Dolabella, and M. Lucullus, brother to Sulla’s lieutenant in Asia, gave to his cause the lustre of their noble names. The persecution which the young Marius presently renewed against the most distinguished senators, effected the complete identification of the interests of Sulla with those of the highest aristocracy of the city.

[Sidenote: [83-82 B.C.]]

At this crisis, an event, the origin or authors of which were never discovered, threw the city into consternation. On the sixth of July 83, the Capitol was consumed by fire; even the Sibylline volumes, stored away in its most secret recesses, were devoured by the flames. This destruction of the sanctuary of the republic, the site of its wealthiest and most august temples, and of the oracles which guided the most solemn decisions of the senate, seemed to many an announcement of a great change in the destinies of the state. It was the closing of the first volume of the fortunes of Rome.

From Apulia, Sulla had passed, as we have seen, without an obstacle into Campania. He was there met by the consul Norbanus, whom he defeated in the neighbourhood of Capua. Scipio, the other consul, commanded a second force at Teanum, a few leagues in the rear of his colleague. Sulla demanded a truce and employed the interval in tampering with the fidelity of the soldiers opposed to him, who speedily passed under his colours. At the commencement of the year 82, Carbo and the young Marius took possession of the consulate: the one undertook to close the passes of the Apennines, and check the threatened attack of Metellus and Pompey on the north; the other to cover the approach to Latium against the advancing legions of Sulla. The former gained some successes against Metellus, and was only reduced to the necessity of retreating by the critical position of his colleague. Marius had selected Præneste, an impregnable position on the frontiers of Latium, for his headquarters. There he assembled his military forces, and collected all the treasures he had amassed at leisure, including the plunder of many temples in the city, and a large mass of gold and silver drawn from the vaults under the Capitol. Confiding, perhaps, in the strength of this citadel, he had not attempted to prevent Sulla from seizing the passes of the Apennines, nor did he come forth to encounter his assailant till he had arrived at Sacriportus, four leagues in advance of Præneste. The complete defeat which Marius sustained at this spot opened the road to Rome; for Sulla could venture to leave his beaten enemy behind their impregnable walls, and push on towards the city which was ready, as he well knew, to open its gates. He arrived indeed too late to prevent the crowning massacre in which Marius caused the most illustrious of his remaining enemies to be slaughtered in the curia itself. Among the victims was Mucius Scævola, the grand pontiff, who had so narrowly escaped on more than one previous occasion, and who was now sacrificed before the altar of Vesta, whose eternal fires were not extinguished by the scanty drops of blood the old man’s veins could supply.

[Sidenote: [82 B.C.]]

Sulla masked Præneste with a detachment under Lucretius Ofella, while he swiftly traversed Rome, and threw himself into Etruria, where Carbo was advancing to the rescue of his colleague Marius, being himself unable to maintain his position in the Cisalpine against Metellus and Pompey. Carbo stationed himself near Clusium, behind the Clanis, with his Italian allies and some Gallic and Iberian troops. Of the Iberians, however, a portion passed over to the enemy, and the general in a fit of despair caused the remainder to be massacred. Engaging the enemy he obtained two trifling successes, and fought a bloody battle without a decisive result. But fortune became more favourable to Sulla, who cut off one large division of his adversaries, and now eagerly expected the arrival of Metellus and Pompey to surround Carbo with irresistible numbers. In this strait Carbo, instead of dashing forwards to relieve Præneste, returned on his steps to arrest the assailants from the north.

He contented himself with detaching a division of his army to effect a junction with the Samnites, now advancing, and thus create a diversion on the right of Sulla’s position. Sulla took measures to guard the defiles which lead towards Præneste, while Pompey, by a lateral movement, surprised and routed the detached division. The ground, however, was cleared around Carbo’s entrenchments. He had only a single enemy, Metellus, before him, and upon him he threw himself with desperate resolution. But a great battle fought at Faventia near Ravenna resulted in his total defeat, with the loss of ten thousand slain, and several thousands of deserters. His officers hastened to pillage and betray him. His quæstor Verres plundered his military chest, while Albinovanus massacred several chiefs of the army, whom he had invited to a banquet. Norbanus took ship and fled to Rhodes. Carbo, after raising another army in Etruria, and conducting for some time a war of guerillas in the mountains, abandoned his colleague to the fate which awaited him, and made the best of his way into Africa. Sertorius had already withdrawn from a contest which he judged to be hopeless, and was engaged in forming a new confederation in Spain. The Marian chieftains surrendered Italy to the senate, and sought to raise the provinces against it (82).

Sulla and his colleagues now directed their victorious legions upon the last of the Marian armies in their last stronghold, Præneste. But Pontius Telesinus, at the head of a combined force of Samnites, Lucanians, and Campanians, to whom the destruction or humiliation of Rome was a dearer object than the success of either party among the Romans, seized the opportunity to wreak the vengeance of their countrymen upon the capital of their common enemies. Adroitly evading the lines of the numerous legions which were now concentrating upon Præneste, they penetrated by night within ten or twelve miles of the city, which they hoped to surprise, and give to the flames. But they spent one day in the preparations for the assault, and in the interval the slender garrison within the city was enabled to communicate with Sulla. On the first of November the Samnites advanced, but Sulla was already at their back. At the Colline Gate he came up with them, and engaged them in a long and desperate encounter. Since the invasion of the Gauls Rome had never struggled against an enemy so near to her own walls, nor been brought so nigh to destruction.

The combat lasted a day and a night. The left wing commanded by Sulla himself was put to rout, and the fugitives running to the lines before Præneste, exclaimed that the battle was lost and their imperator himself slain. But Crassus meanwhile, with the right wing, had broken the enemy’s ranks, and pursued them as far as Antemnæ. Eight thousand of the Italians were made prisoners, and the Roman officers captured in their ranks were devoted to the sword. Pontius Telesinus, grievously wounded in the fight, was despatched by the conqueror on the field of battle. His whole life had been devoted to the hatred of Rome, and at the moment when she finally escaped from his murderous grasp he could no longer wish to live. He was the last Italian enemy of Rome. As the adversary of the Decii and Fabii he might have been the destroyer of the Roman name, and have changed the face of history. But in the age of Marius and Sulla he could only hope for one day of plunder and conflagration, and when this momentary triumph was snatched from him, what sweeter satisfaction could he covet than to fall among fifty thousand corpses, one-half of which were Roman?[93]

As soon as the Prænestines learned the result of this bloody day, and saw the heads of the Italians and Marians borne in triumph beneath their walls, they opened their gates to the victors. The young Marius had retired into a subterraneous apartment with the brother of Pontius Telesinus. Determined not to fall into the enemy’s hands, they challenged each other to the combat, and Marius, having slain his friend and confederate, caused himself to be despatched by the hands of a slave. A few cities still held out. At Norba in Latium, the inhabitants chose to consume themselves together with their city, rather than submit to the conqueror. Nola opened its gates after a long defence; Volaterræ resisted for two years. But the struggle in Italy was hopeless. Spain and Africa rose indeed against the Roman government; but the gates of the peninsula were securely closed against these foreign auxiliaries.

Events and circumstances had now fulfilled their part in developing Sulla’s policy, and moulding his character. Fond of literature, vain of his accomplishments, attached to frivolous pleasures and frivolous people, a man, it is said, of soft and even tender feelings, and easily moved to tears by a tale of sorrow, Sulla in his early years had surprised his countrymen, rather than alarmed them, by the success of his military career and his influence with the soldiers. The haughty jealousy of Marius had disposed him to take an opposite part in public life. The rivalry of the two great captains had been enhanced by the contrast of their manners, origin, and connections. In brooding over his personal resentments Sulla had insensibly come to identify himself with the cause of the oligarchy. The sanguinary violence of Cinna and Marius had irritated the champion of the persecuted faction, and he had vowed a bloody vengeance against the authors of the proscriptions. But the opposition he experienced in Italy expanded his views beyond the limits of party warfare. The Etrurians and the Samnites transformed him from the chief of a Roman faction into the head of the Roman nation. The vows of extermination they breathed against the sacred city of Quirinus sank deeply into his mind. He had displayed in the East his contempt for the just claims of the provincials. The cries of the miserable Greeks and Asiatics he had mocked with pitiless scorn, and had reimposed upon their necks, in its full weight and irksomeness, the yoke from which they had in vain invoked Mithridates to relieve them. The man who had reconquered the East had now reconquered Italy, and he determined to restore the supremacy of his countrymen at their own gates, which he had vindicated with triumphant success at the farthest limits of their empire.

The morning after the battle of the Colline Gate, Sulla was haranguing the senate in the temple of Bellona. As an imperator commanding a military force, the law forbade him to enter the city, and the senators attended his summons beyond the walls. Cries of horror and despair were suddenly heard outside the place of assembly. “Be not alarmed,” he calmly remarked to the affrighted senators, “it is only some rascals whom I have ordered to be chastised.” They were the death cries of the eight thousand Samnite prisoners, whom he had delivered to be cut to pieces by his legions in the Field of Mars. The first of his blows fell upon the Italian confederates; but he speedily launched his vengeance upon the Romans themselves. On his return from Præneste he mounted the rostra, and addressed the people. He vaunted his own greatness and irresistible power, and graciously assured them that he would do them good if they obeyed him well; but to his foes he would give no quarter, but prosecute them to the death, high as well as low, prætors, quæstors, tribunes, and whosoever had provoked his just indignation.

THE PROSCRIPTIONS

These words were a signal to his adherents, and before the names of the destined citizens were publicly announced many a private vengeance was wreaked, and many a claim advanced upon the conqueror’s gratitude. The family of Marius were among the first attacked. One of his relatives named Marius Gratidianus, who had signalised his prætorship by checking the debasement of the coinage, was pursued by Catiline, a brutal young officer, and murdered with the most horrible tortures. The assassin placed the bloody head upon Sulla’s banquet-table, and coolly washed his hands in the lustral waters of a neighbouring temple. The corpse of the great Marius himself, which had been buried and not burned, was torn from its sepulchre on the banks of the Anio, and cast into the stream. This desecration of the funeral rites was an impiety of which the contests of the Romans had hitherto furnished no example. It was never forgotten by a shocked and offended people. The troubled ghost, says the poet of the civil wars, continued to haunt the spot, and scared the husbandmen from their labours on the eve of impending calamity.

A great number of victims had already perished, when Catulus demanded of Sulla in the senate, “Whom then shall we keep to enjoy our victory with, if blood continues to flow in our cities as abundantly as on the battle-field?” A young Metellus had the boldness to ask when there would be an end to these miseries, and how far he would proceed before they might hope to see them stayed. “Spare not,” he added, “whomsoever it is expedient to remove; only relieve from uncertainty those whom you mean to save.” Sulla coldly replied that he had not yet determined whom he would spare. “Tell us then,” exclaimed Metellus, “whom you intend to punish.” Thereupon a list of proscriptions appeared containing eighty names. This caused a general murmur; nevertheless, two days after, 230, and the next day as many more, were added to the list. And this proscription, in which Sulla had consulted no magistrate, was accompanied with a speech in which he said that he had proscribed all he could think of for the present; by and by he might perhaps remember more. Rewards were offered for slaying the proscribed; it was rendered capital to harbour them. Their descendants were declared incapable of public office, and their fortunes were confiscated to the use of the state, though in most cases they were actually seized and retained by private hands. Nor were the proscriptions confined to Rome; they were extended to every city in Italy, and throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula neither temple nor domestic hearth offered security to the fugitives. From the first of December 82 to the first of June in the following year, this authorised system of murder was allowed to continue. Catiline, who had previously assassinated a brother, now got his victim’s name placed on the fatal list, in order to secure his estate. The favourites of Sulla, his slaves and freedmen, drove a lucrative trade in selling the right to inscribe the names of persons whom any one wished to make away with. The dignity of public vengeance was prostituted to mere private pique and cupidity.[94] One man was killed for his house, another for his gardens, another for his baths.[95] One unfortunate wretch, who had never meddled with affairs, examined the lists out of mere curiosity. Horror-struck on seeing his own inscribed, “My Alban farm,” he exclaimed, “has ruined me”; and hardly had he spoken the words before the pursuers smote him.

Sulla might smile to see the number of accomplices he had associated in his crimes, and he sought perhaps to render their share in these horrors more conspicuous by the rewards with which he loaded them. Upon Catiline, the boldest and readiest of his partisans, a man of blasted character and ruined fortunes, he heaped golden favours. The young Crassus, who had so narrowly escaped the sword of Marius, now laid the foundation of the wealth which earned him the renown of the richest of the Romans. Pompey had executed without remorse his master’s vengeance upon captives taken in arms; at his command he had consented to divorce his wife Antistia, and take in her stead Sulla’s step-daughter Metella; but he withheld his hand from the stain of the proscriptions, and scorned perhaps to enrich himself with the spoils of judicial massacre. Among the kinsmen of Marius was one whom Sulla himself vouchsafed to spare. Caius Julius Cæsar, then eighteen years of age, was connected by blood with Marius,[96] and by marriage with Cinna. Sulla contented himself with requiring him to repudiate his wife. Cæsar refused, and fled into the Sabine mountains. The assassins were on his track, while his friends at Rome exerted themselves to the utmost to obtain his pardon. The vestals interceded for him.

Some of Sulla’s own adherents raised their voices in his favour, and pleaded his youth, his reckless temper and dissipated habits, in proof of his innocence or harmlessness. “I spare him,” exclaimed Sulla, “but beware! in that young trifler there is more than one Marius.” Cæsar was saved; but he prudently repaired to the siege of Mytilene.

The proscriptions were lists of selected victims, and though hundreds undoubtedly perished whose names had never been publicly devoted to slaughter, yet the number of the original citizens who fell in the massacres were not beyond the reach of computation. The accounts we have received vary indeed in this particular; but of senators there were slain perhaps from one to two hundred, of knights between two and three thousand. The victims of a lower class were, we may suppose, proportionally more numerous. But the destruction of the Italians was far more sweeping and indiscriminate. Cities were dismantled, and even razed to the ground; their lands were seized and distributed among the veterans of the Sullan armies, of whom 120,000 were located in colonies from one end of the peninsula to the other. The natives driven from their houses and estates were massacred in crowds; according to popular tradition the Samnite people were utterly annihilated, and of all their cities Beneventum alone remained standing. The inhabitants of the wretched Præneste were slaughtered wholesale. The Etrurians expiated with the direst persecution the tardy aid they had given to the common cause of the Italians. The great centres of their ancient civilisation had long fallen into decay, but a new class of cities had risen upon their ruins, and attained riches and celebrity. Of these Spoletium, Volaterræ, Interamna, and Fæsulæ were delivered to Roman colonists; the latter city was dismantled, and the new town of Florentia erected with the fragments of its ruins. Throughout large districts the population became almost entirely changed; everywhere the chief people perished from the face of the land, and with them all that was distinctive in the manners and institutions, even in the language of the country. The civilisation of Etruria disappeared from the sight of men, to be rediscovered at the end of twenty centuries, among the buried tombs of forgotten lucumons.

The same exterminating policy extended also to the provinces, wherever the temper of the native races seemed to resent the uncontrolled domination of the Roman conquerors. Sulla had chastised Greece and Asia with a rod of iron. He now commissioned his lieutenants to chase his enemies from the retreats to which they had been invited in Sicily, Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Metellus fell upon the Cisalpine province, Valerius Flaccus devastated the Narbonensis, Pompey was despatched to punish the provinces of the south, and Annius was deputed to follow Sertorius into Spain and recover the vast regions which he had armed against the new government of Rome, and even against Rome herself. At the same time the republic was threatened with a renewal of her foreign warfare. The Thracians, never yet subdued, troubled the frontiers of Macedonia; Mithridates was commencing a new movement in Asia; the distressed and indignant population of the eastern coasts had betaken themselves in vast numbers to the sea, and infested the waters of Greece and even Italy itself with fleets of pirate vessels. The mountains of Etruria and Sabellia, of Samnium and Lucania, swarmed with the miserable fugitives from spoliation and massacre, and armed bands roamed beneath the walls of populous cities ready to carry off any booty that fell in their way, and rendering both life and property everywhere insecure. Even the proprietors of estates leagued themselves with these wretched outcasts, and employed them to kidnap free citizens of the republic, to be buried as slaves in their forests, or chained in their factories.

Sulla had returned to Rome laden with the spoils of war; his troops had been gorged with plunder, and he could not plead for his proscriptions the demands of an insatiate soldiery. But the accumulating troubles of the empire, and the increasing armaments required in every quarter, demanded the opening of new sources of revenue. The provinces, harassed by war, were now crushed by imposts. Treaties and promises were alike disregarded. All were forced to contribute--not only the tributary states, but even those which had acquired by their services immunity and independence. To satisfy the requisitions made upon them, many cities were forced to pledge their public lands, their temples, their ports, and even the stones of their walls. Sulla took upon himself to sell the sovereignty of the independent kingdom of Egypt to Alexander II. Donatives were demanded of foreign kings and potentates.[b]

“Zachariæ,[k]” says Ihne,[e] “in his book on L. Cornelius Sulla (i. 145), has hit the truth in saying: ‘We must not imagine that these horrors and cruelties were caused by the passions so powerfully excited by the civil war, nor that they are to be attributed to Sulla’s implacability and vindictiveness, nor that Sulla simply connived at them, or ordered deeds which he could not prevent, surrounded as he was by an army drunk with victory and greedy for plunder. It is true some dark passions were at work, and in several instances Sulla acted from momentary whims or was influenced by angry passions. It is true that Sulla was obliged to be indulgent and forgiving to his soldiers because he was himself in want of indulgence and forgiveness. Nevertheless we have good reason to believe that on the whole Sulla acted on a deep and coolly meditated plan.… He intended that out of the work of destruction a new and vigorous Italy was to come forth with a population from whose gratitude or satisfaction he could confidently expect security for peace, and for that constitution of the republic which he was about to establish.’” With this Freeman[l] agrees, when he says that Sulla “was not cruel in the sense of delighting in human suffering. Through the whole of Sulla’s tyranny there is nothing passionate; it is not so much cruelty as recklessness of human life; it is the cold, deliberating, exterminating policy of a man who has an object to fulfill, and who will let nothing stand in the way of that object.”[a]

FOOTNOTES

[89] [The Roman historian Florus[d] comments on and classifies the wars thus: “This only was wanting to complete the misfortunes of the Romans that they should raise up an unnatural war among themselves and that in the midst of the city and Forum, citizens should fight with citizens, like gladiators in an amphitheatre. I should bear the calamity, however, with greater patience if plebeian leaders or contemptible nobles had been at the head of such atrocity; but even Marius and Sulla (O indignity! such men, such generals!), the grace and glory of their age, lent their eminent characters to this worst of evils. It was carried on, if I may use the expression, under three constellations, the first movement being light and moderate, an affray rather than a war, for the violence prevailed only between the leaders themselves; in the next rising, the victory spread with greater cruelty and bloodshed, through the very bowels of the whole senate; the third conflict exceeded not merely animosity between citizens, but that between enemies, the fury of the war being supported by the strength of all Italy, and rancour raging till none remained to be killed.”

[90] [On this act of Octavius, Beesly[c] cynically comments: “He was an obstinate, dull man; and if the burlesque of the conduct of the senators when the Gauls took Rome was really enacted, theatrical display must have been cold comfort for those of his party on whom his incapacity brought ruin.”]

[91] [Ihne[e] says “the story is absurd,” and credits it to a calumny of his enemies. Long, however, accepts it as possible.]

[92] [See Valerius Maximus[f] and Cicero.[g] Mommsen[h] credits the story, and Dyer[i] calls it “one of those ferocious jokes which find their parallel only amidst the butcheries of the French Revolution.”]

[93] [“The battle of the Colline Gate was one of the few great and decisive battles which are recorded in the history of Rome,” says Ihne.[e] In spite of all this, he says, we know almost absolutely nothing of the position of the armies and the progress of the fight, “and this cannot be vouched for with any degree of confidence, as the two principal authorities cannot be satisfactorily made to harmonise.” Appian[m] says that each side lost 50,000; Orosius[n] sets the number at only 11,000.]

[94] [Mommsen[h] quotes the sale of an estate valued at £61,000 or $305,000 for about £20 or $100; and rates the total proceeds of confiscation at £3,050,000 or $15,250,000.]

[95] [Cicero[g] makes a grim pun which Guthrie Englished thus, “The same gentlemen who knocked down estates, knocked down men.” Later he says in the same oration that the slaughter was so great it reminded one of the battle of Lake Trasimene when Hannibal annihilated a Roman army.]

[96] [The connection with Marius was not by blood but by marriage; Julia, Cæsar’s aunt, was the wife of Marius.]