Drusus’s murder was the final blow to Italian aspirations. Communities across the peninsula rose in revolt. The struggle, called the War of the Allies, was bloody and bitter. Young, well-connected and ambitious Romans were expected to serve on military campaigns; although Cicero seldom showed any interest in soldiering, the war was too close to home for him to ignore. He temporarily abandoned his studies to serve in the army of Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo as a member of his general staff. He met the commander’s son for the first time, young Cnaeus Pompeius (whom we know as Pompey). Exact contemporaries, they were about sixteen or seventeen years old—and of course without an inkling of how closely their destinies were to be interlinked in future years.
Rome sustained some serious defeats and there was a distinct risk that the rebellion, which was centered on the Adriatic side of Italy, might spread. The neighboring Etruscans and the Umbrians seemed on the point of secession. So in 90 the Senate, facing disaster, gave way. They awarded Roman citizenship to all those Allies who stayed loyal and, it seems, also to those who surrendered. This was decisive, and, although fighting continued for some time at a terrible cost in human lives and suffering, Rome emerged the military victor—and the political loser.
Italy was now united and very gradually the old cultural divisions and languages of the peninsula gave way to an overall Latinity. In the short run, the shock to the Republic’s stability and to the self-confidence of its ruling class was great. And there was worse to come. The War of the Allies signaled a new bloodier spiral into social and political chaos. Soldiers in the Forum, elder statesmen massacred, half the Empire in revolt—nothing like it had been seen in the history of the Republic. It was nearly ten years before something approaching normality returned, in 82; during this period, according to a modern estimate, 200,000 lost their lives from a free population in Rome and Italy of about 4,500,000.
With typical, tricky mean-mindedness, the Senate corralled the new Italian citizens into a small number of the tribus, or voting groups, into which the General Assembly was divided, thus reducing their electoral impact. A radical Tribune, Publius Sulpicius Rufus, now intervened; he had been a friend of the dead Drusus and promoted a policy of fair play for the newly enfranchised Italians. In 88, he brought forward a proposal to distribute the new citizens across the complete range of the tribus. Uproar ensued among the optimates and Sulpicius, the latest in the line of civilian reformers, recruited 600 young equites as bodyguards; they were nicknamed the “anti-Senators.”
One of the Consuls in 87 was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, a descendant of an old but impoverished family who had arrived comparatively late on the political scene. Sulla had misspent his youth among a demimonde of actors and hustlers and first made a name for himself on the battlefield when he was thirty-one. His appearance was remarkable, for his face was disfigured by a birthmark which people said looked like a mulberry with oatmeal sprinkled on it. A conservative, he aimed to restore the Senate’s traditional authority. His Consulship was a reward for signal achievements in the War of the Allies. He was given a military command once his Consular year was over to deal with a serious crisis that had overtaken Rome’s territorial possessions in Asia Minor.
Mithridates, King of Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, had been scheming for years to free the entire region from Roman control. He was an able and ambitious man, of remarkable physical strength and mental stamina. Fearful of the plots endemic in an oriental court, he was reputed to consume small regular doses of poison to build up his resistance. The War of the Allies gave him a one-time opportunity to act while Rome’s back was turned, and he seized it. His army invaded the region and his fleet sailed into the Aegean. Democrats in Athens invited him to liberate Greece.
Mithridates’ advance was so swift and total that about 80,000 Roman and Italian businessmen and their families found themselves unexpectedly marooned in enemy territory. Mithridates’ solution to the problem of what to do with them was final. He sent secret instructions to local authorities in every town to kill all strangers who spoke Latin. In general the order was obeyed with enthusiasm, clear evidence of the unpopularity of Roman rule. In one town, the executioners planned their work with sadistic ingenuity: children were killed in front of their parents, then wives in front of their husbands and lastly the men. All Italian property was confiscated and handed over to the king.
The massacre was a terrible blow to the Republic’s authority and added greatly to its economic difficulties, because a regular flow of tax and trading revenues was abruptly cut off. Bankruptcies became common and indebtedness in every social class reached very high levels. Senators, much of whose wealth was locked up in land, found themselves with few liquid assets; the aftermath of the War of the Allies was no time to sell real estate to raise cash. Everyone agreed that it was crucial to retrieve Asia Minor. The future of the Empire was in the balance and, whatever Rome’s internal problems, dealing with the threat in the east came first.
At this point, Marius, the great general who had saved Rome from the Gauls, unexpectedly reappeared. He had served in the War of the Allies but had spent a number of years out of public view. Now nearly seventy, he was old and embittered by what he saw as the Republic’s ingratitude and was out for vengeance. The Tribune Sulpicius unwisely turned to him for support. In return, he arranged for Sulla’s eastern command to be taken from him and given to Marius. The Consuls tried to stop Sulpicius by suspending public business and in the riots that followed Sulla was forced to take refuge in Marius’s house.
This was an unbearable humiliation. Sulla decided to rejoin his army not far from the city, where it was waiting for him to lead them eastwards. But he had a score to settle and did not set off at once. Instead he turned his legions on Rome, which he captured after a few hours of street fighting. Sulpicius was hunted down and killed, but Marius, after a series of hair-raising adventures, made his escape to Africa where many of his old troops had been settled. Sulla quickly passed laws which invalidated Sulpicius’s legislation and would make it difficult for reformers to have their way during his absence. He then marched off to fight the King of Pontus, who would not wait.
Sulla’s entry into Rome was a watershed. He had broken one of the Republic’s greatest taboos by marching soldiers inside the city limits. Worse than that, the army had shown decisively that its loyalty was to its leader, not to the state. The rule of law had been overturned, and a legally elected Tribune, whose person was meant to be sacrosanct, had been put to death. Others would lose little time in exploiting these fatal precedents.
Sulla’s plans to contain the situation in Rome fell apart almost as soon as his back was turned. One of the Consuls for 87, Lucius Cornelius Cinna, a ruthless popularis, promptly proceeded to repeal Sulla’s measures. Marius, deranged and in poor health, staged his own invasion of Rome and let his men run amok during five days of slaughter and looting. The victims included friends of the Cicero family, among them one of his mentors, the orator and elder statesman Marcus Antonius.
Marius did not survive to enjoy his triumph for long. Bad news from abroad brought on an illness, perhaps a stroke, and he died in 86 at the beginning of his seventh Consulship. Cinna was left in charge; he brought the killings to an end and retained the Consulship for two more years, until he was killed in 84 by mutinous troops.
Meanwhile, Sulla won his war with Mithridates despite also having had to cope with a Roman army sent out against him. Anxious to return to Rome, he did not have time to insist on an unconditional surrender. He met the king near the ruins of Troy and signed a peace treaty. Mithridates got off quite lightly, merely agreeing to evacuate Asia and pay a moderate indemnity. In return he was confirmed as King of Pontus and recognized as an Ally—in today’s terms, he was awarded “most favored nation status.”
In 83 Sulla was back at last after an absence of three years. He landed in Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) and marched inexorably up Italy like an avenging angel. The popularis regime that had been gov
erning the Republic fought back. However, having brushed aside one army in the north, Sulla resoundingly defeated another outside one of the gates of Rome and, in 82, entered the city. He regulated his position by reviving the disused post of Dictator, which gave him supreme authority in the government. He had himself appointed for an indefinite period, instead of the traditional six months, and set himself the task of reforming and restoring the institutions of the Republic.
Another massacre of the ruling class now took place. Under Marius, men of the political right had been struck down. Now it was the turn of the left. After a period of indiscriminate slaughter, a young Senator complained to Sulla, “We are not asking you to pardon those you have decided to kill; all we ask is that you free from suspense those you have decided not to kill.”
The Dictator took the point and agreed to put some order into the mayhem. He posted proscription lists on white tablets in the Forum, which gave the names of those he wanted dead. Anybody was legally entitled to kill a proscribed person and on the presentation of convincing evidence (usually a head) could claim a substantial reward of 1,200 denarii. AS a rule, the heads of those killed were displayed in the Forum.
A cousin of Cicero’s, the Praetor Marcus Marius Gratidianus, was one of those who suffered. He was handed over to Quintus Lutatius Catulus, a leading conservative, because he had been implicated in the forced suicide of Catulus’s father during Marius’s reign of terror. With the help of a young aristocrat named Lucius Sergius Catilina, Catulus flogged Gratidianus through the streets to the tomb of the Catulus clan. There his arms and legs were smashed with rods, his ears cut off, his tongue wrenched from his mouth and his eyes gouged out. He was then beheaded and his corpse was offered as a sacrifice to the spirit of Catulus’s dead father. In a grim postscript, an officer fainted at the horror of what he was seeing and was himself executed for disloyalty. Catilina was then said to have carried Gratidianus’s severed head “still alive and breathing” (according to Cicero in one of his more fanciful flights of rhetoric) into Rome to present to Sulla.
Many of the most senior figures of the day were liquidated. Forty Senators were proscribed at the outset and 1,600 equites, but the final death toll was far higher. According to one estimate there were 9,000 victims in all. The sons of those killed were sent into exile, their descendants barred forever from holding public office. One consequence of these massacres was that the Senate became seriously depleted. There were fewer than 200 survivors, not enough to run an empire.
At the time of the proscriptions, Cicero was twenty-four and his friend Pomponius was three years older. Julius Caesar was only eighteen. The terrible events of the War of the Allies and the bloodlettings of Marius and Sulla had taken place during their formative years. Their reactions to what they saw hardened over the years into mature political positions which, as it happened, covered the whole spectrum of the possible. Defense of Republican traditions, withdrawal from direct political activity, and commitment to radical reform—these were the various ways in which three very different personalities came to terms with the breakdown of the constitution and the decimation of the ruling class.
Of the trio, Caesar was in the greatest personal danger during this period. His family, although highly born, was not well-off and lived in the densely populated working-class district of Subura. He was fiercely proud of his Patrician ancestry, but Romans saw public life very much in personal terms; his aunt Julia’s marriage to Marius placed Caesar in the thick of revolutionary politics and made him an enemy of Sulla.
Caesar was only fourteen in 86 when, under the Consulship of Cinna, he was chosen to be a Priest of Jupiter (flamen dialis), a religious post reserved for Patricians; the previous incumbent had been forced to commit suicide during the troubles. It was not unusual for Priests to be appointed when they were young, fresh enough to learn all they had to about religious rules and procedures. Perhaps, too, Cinna’s government found it hard to find a more prominent Patrician willing to take the job.
In any event, Caesar would not be able to assume office until he reached his majority and, perhaps thanks to the fact that in due course Sulla annulled all Cinna’s acts, it seems he never had to do so. This was a stroke of luck, for, theoretically at least, the appointment would have prevented him from ever leading a political career. The Priest of Jupiter, who held office for life, was forbidden to mount a horse, set eyes on armed soldiers or spend more than two nights in succession outside Rome. But nominated as he was to the post, Caesar was now obliged to marry a Patrician; so he broke off his engagement with the daughter of a rich equestrian family and married Cinna’s daughter, Cornelia.
Caesar did not take part in the civil war that broke out after Sulla’s return from Asia Minor. The victorious Dictator did not harm him, insisting only on one point—that he divorce his wife, perhaps because he had someone more suitable in mind. The young man rejected out of hand this apparent sign of goodwill. Fearful of Sulla’s anger, Caesar slipped out of Rome and, he hoped, out of sight, but he fell seriously ill with malaria and was picked up by a Sullan patrol. He managed to buy his way out of trouble for the sum of 3,000 sesterces and eventually well-connected relatives persuaded a reluctant Sulla to leave him alone. Relieved, Caesar set off for Asia Minor to do some soldiering.
Why was he so steadfast in his resistance? It is hard to be sure, but his actions anticipate what we know of the mature man. He would not be bullied. He was loyal even when it was inconvenient to be so. (He stayed faithful to Cornelia until her death in 69.) He was energetic and cool-headed in a crisis. Caesar’s views were governed by a profound impatience with the aristocracy, not just for its selfishness but for its incompetence. He had been brought up a popularis and would remain one for the rest of his life. While he held his first political position ten years or so later, a Quaestorship, his aunt Julia died. The Sullan constitution was still in place and the Senate very much in charge. Nevertheless, Caesar delivered the funeral oration and, in defiance of the law and with some personal courage, brought out effigies of Julia’s husband, Marius, and his son to display in the procession. No action was taken against him, but he had nailed his radical flag to the mast for all to see.
The second young man of the trio, Titus Pomponius, also had popularis connections, but he did not share Caesar’s flamboyant temerity. In fact, he turned his back on politics, throwing in his cards before they had even been dealt. Born in Rome into a wealthy and cultivated equestrian family, he was related to Sulpicius, and when the Tribune came to grief in 88 he saw he was in serious danger. Realizing that Sulla’s bloodletting was not just designed to eliminate opposition but was also a form of fund-raising, he decided to leave Italy and settled in Athens, taking good care to transfer all his assets to Greece at the same time. He may have heard the story of the rich man who, although having nothing to do with politics, read his name on the proscription lists in the Forum and remarked: “Things are bad for me: I am being hunted down by my Alban estate.” Pomponius had no more intention of losing his fortune than his life.
In fact, he wanted to become richer. He had inherited about 2 million sesterces and set about making his money grow. He bought a large amount of land in Epirus at a time when Mithridates had just ravaged Greece and prices were low. Noting the popularity of gladiatorial shows, he invested in fighters whom he kept on his estate and trained in the art of dying gracefully. He lent money at interest but on the quiet, as it was not felt to be a trade fit for a gentleman. He shared his father’s literary tastes and by collecting a large staff of skillful copyists in his house became, in due course, a successful publisher. He was a distinguished scholar, writing a summary of Roman history from the earliest times to his day and genealogical studies of some aristocratic Roman families.
In Athens, Pomponius went to great lengths to be popular. He learned to speak Greek fluently and soon acquired the cognomen Atticus—after Attica, the territory of which Athens was the capital. From now on this was the name by which he was known and is how
he will be referred to in this book. He was generous to local charities and took the trouble to develop the common touch. His biographer, Cornelius Nepos, a younger contemporary whom he knew personally, wrote that Atticus “behaved so as to seem at one with the poorest and on a level with the powerful.”
Atticus had a nasty fright when Sulla called at Athens on his way back to Rome in 83. The general was sufficiently impressed by the young man to ask him to go back to Italy with him. His back to the wall, Atticus for once in his life refused to do a powerful man’s bidding. “No, please, I beg you,” he replied. “I left Italy to avoid fighting you alongside those you want to lead me against.” Sulla liked his candor and let the matter drop.
Atticus usually came back to Rome for elections and he made a profession of friendship. In his personal relationships, he was a kind and affectionate man and an excellent conversationalist. He insisted on high standards of personal behavior: according to Cornelius Nepos, “he never told a lie and could not tolerate lying in others.” He cultivated politicians of every persuasion, doing them favors and steering clear of any overt ideological commitment. He was often used as a go-between and could be relied on to carry messages discreetly hither and thither. Like Caesar, he was loyal but with this difference: he liked to do good by stealth, behind the scenes. Posterity is greatly in his debt, for his friendship with Cicero was maintained by a constant exchange of correspondence, much of which survives.
For all his excellent personal qualities, Atticus had an unerring instinct for the protection of his own interests. It is hard to warm to him. Gaston Boissier, who wrote in the mid-nineteenth century what is still one of the most charming and witty books on Cicero, observed:
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