by Mary Beard
What the jury made of it is unknown. Did they find the excuses for the missing documents rather thin? Or did they understand that this was exactly the kind of chapter of accidents, and identity loss, that often follows civil war? Either way, Cicero’s defence is precious evidence for some of the controversies and administrative nightmares that must have lain just under the surface of the simple shorthand that ‘citizenship was granted to the allies’. It was an extraordinarily bold move by the Romans, even if forced upon them; but there were probably many other Archiases caught up in the resulting legal tangles without the resources or influence to call on a Cicero to present their case.
Sulla and Spartacus
The Roman commander at the siege of Pompeii in 89 BCE, where the teenaged Cicero served as a very junior officer, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, meaning ‘lucky’ or, rather more imposingly, ‘the favourite of the goddess Venus’. He faced well-organised opposition inside the town, to judge from a series of notices, uncovered beneath later plaster on the street façades, apparently giving instructions to the local militia on where to muster. The Pompeians seem to have held out for some time after Sulla had moved on to more important targets, but he made a big enough impact for some local graffiti artist to have scrawled his name on one of the towers of the town wall.
Sulla was to be a central and controversial figure in almost a decade of open warfare in and around the city of Rome and in a short and bloody period of one-man rule. Born into a patrician family that had fallen on hard times, he was elected consul for 88 BCE, aged about fifty. The conflicts started in that year when he invaded Rome, with troops he had been leading in the closing stages of the Social War, to reclaim the potentially glorious and lucrative command in the war against King Mithradates, which had been allocated to him and then suddenly transferred to a rival. They continued after he returned victorious to Italy in 83 BCE, when he fought for almost two years to take Rome back from the enemies who had gained control while he was away. During his absence, disagreements in the city had been fought out through violence, murder and guerrilla warfare. And rival generals had been sent out to take command against Mithradates, who were as much opposed to one another as they were to any foreign enemy; it was a situation that would have been faintly ludicrous had it not been so deadly.
Ancient writers paint a lurid, bloodthirsty and confusing picture of this whole period in the mid 80s BCE. Vicious fighting in the heart of the city marked both of Sulla’s invasions of Rome. During the second, the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, the founding symbol of Republican Rome, burned down, and senators were not safe even in the senate house. Four of them – including an ancestor of the emperor Nero – were slaughtered as they sat there, at the hands of Sulla’s enemies. Meanwhile, in the campaigns against Mithradates, one army commander was murdered by his second in command, who later killed himself after most of his troops deserted. The majority of the deserters decided to join forces with Sulla, though a couple of officers chose instead to throw in their lot with Mithradates, the enemy they were supposed to be fighting.
41. A silver coin of Sulla, minted 84–83 BCE, boasting of the divine protection he enjoyed. On the one side is the head of Venus, with her son Cupid holding a palm – a symbol of victory – just visible to the right. On the other side, there are references to the military successes this protection brought: IMPER(ATOR)ITERUM records that he had twice (iterum) been publicly hailed as a mighty victor (imperator) by his troops; and among the symbols in the centre are two sets of armour that were used as trophies of victory.
The grimmest anecdotes, however, surround the murderous proscriptions and the terror provoked by the clinically bureaucratic lists of those who were to be exterminated. Sulla’s sadism was part of the story. Where his enemies a few years earlier had started the gory practice of pinning up the heads of their victims on the rostra in the Forum, Sulla was rumoured to have gone one worse, installing them as trophies in the atrium (or hall) of his house – a nasty parody of the Roman tradition of displaying the portrait heads of ancestors there. He also took the quotation of Greek literature to a new low when, presented with the head of a particularly young victim, he came up with a line from the comic dramatist Aristophanes to the effect that the boy was trying to run before he could walk. ‘No one did me wrong whom I did not pay back in full’ were among the words he penned for his tomb, a far cry from the epitaphs of the Scipios. But that was not all there was to it. Another part of the story was the eagerness of so many to join in the massacre, to settle old scores or simply to claim the financial rewards for the murders. Catiline was a notorious culprit, persuading Sulla to insert his personal enemies into the lists and, when his dirty work was done, washing the traces of human butchery off his hands in a sacred fountain.
How can we explain such violence? It is not enough to argue that it was less terrible than it is portrayed. That is true, up to a point. Much of the narrative that has come down to us relies on partisan accounts by those keen to exaggerate the brutality of their enemies. The blackening of Catiline, for example, likely goes back to Cicero’s propaganda. But only up to a point: Sulla’s two invasions of Rome, the burning of the Temple of Jupiter, the warring legions and the proscription lists cannot simply be dismissed as the figments of a propaganda war. Nor is it enough to wonder what drove Sulla to do what he did. His motives have been debated ever since. Was he a brutal and calculating autocrat? Or was he making a last-ditch attempt to restore order in Rome? The point is that, whatever lay behind Sulla’s actions (and that is as irrecoverable now as it ever was), the violence was much more widespread than could possibly be put down to the influence of one man.
The conflicts of this period were in many ways a continuation of the Social War: a civil war between former allies and friends developed into a civil war between citizens. What was eroded in the process was the fundamental distinction between Romans and foreign enemies, or hostes. Sulla in 88 BCE declared his rivals in the city hostes, the first time we know that the term was publicly used, as Cicero used it later, against a fellow Roman. As soon as he left the city, they promptly declared Sulla a hostis in return. This blurring of boundaries is captured in the military debacles in the eastern Mediterranean: old certainties were so radically overturned that soldiers deserting one Roman commander could apparently see both Sulla and King Mithradates as plausible options for their new allegiance; and one faction of Roman forces actually destroyed the city of Troy, Rome’s ancestor. It was the mythical equivalent of patricide.
The Social War also ensured that there was plenty of military manpower readily available near Rome, soldiers with considerable practice in fighting their Italian kith and kin. The recent precedents for violence in the city, controversial and brutal as they were, had been relatively small scale and short term. But when fully armed legions replaced the kind of thugs who had murdered the supporters of the Gracchi, the city easily became the site of the full-scale and long-term warfare that defined the Sullan period. It was almost a return to the private armies of early Rome, as individual commanders, backed by different votes of the people or decrees of the senate, used their legions to pursue their own sectional struggles wherever it suited them.
Yet out of all this came an extraordinary, radically conservative attempt to rewrite Roman politics: wholesale change masquerading as an exercise in putting the clock back. Once re-established in the city in 82 BCE, Sulla engineered his own election as ‘dictator for making laws and restoring order to the res publica’. The dictatorship was an old emergency office which gave sole power to an individual on a temporary basis to cope with a crisis, sometimes but not always military. The last person to hold the position had been appointed more than a century earlier, to conduct elections in 202 BCE, at the end of the Second Punic War, when both consuls were away from Rome. Sulla’s dictatorship was different in two ways: first, there was no time limit placed on it; second, it entailed vast, unchecked powers to make or repeal any laws, with guaranteed immunity from prose
cution. For three years that is exactly what he did, before resigning the office, retiring to his country house on the Bay of Naples and dying in his bed in 78 BCE. It was a surprisingly peaceful end, given his life’s record, though several ancient writers were pleased to report how gruesome it was: his flesh was supposed to have dissolved into worms, which multiplied so quickly that they could not be removed. Sulla was the first dictator in the modern sense of the term. Julius Caesar would be the second. That particular version of political power is one of Rome’s most corrosive legacies.
Sulla introduced a programme of reform on an even bigger scale than Gaius Gracchus. He cancelled some of the recent popular measures, including the subsidised corn ration. And he introduced a series of legal procedures and rules and regulations for office holding, many of which reasserted the central position of the senate as a state institution. He drafted in hundreds of members to double its size from about 300 to about 600 (there was never an absolutely fixed number), and he astutely changed the method of recruitment for the future to ensure that the new size would be maintained. Rather than senators being enrolled individually by the censors, from now on anyone who held the junior office of quaestor would automatically enter the senate, and at the same time the number of quaestors was increased from eight to twenty; this meant enough new recruits more or less to replace those who would have died each year. Sulla also insisted that political offices be held in a particular order and at a minimum age (no one could become quaestor, for example, before the age of thirty), and no office was to be held twice within ten years. This was an attempt to prevent exactly the build-up of personal power that he himself enjoyed.
These reforms were dressed up as a return to traditional Roman practice. In fact, many were nothing of the sort. There had been one or two previous attempts to regularise patterns of office holding, but by and large the earlier you go back in Rome’s history, the more fluid any such rules become. There were also some unintended consequences. Increasing the number of quaestors solved one problem – senatorial recruitment – but in doing so created another. As the number of consuls remained just two, more and more men were being brought into the political race at the bottom who could never make it to the top position. To be sure, some did not want to, and some died before they reached the new minimum age, normally forty-two, for the consulship. But the system was almost guaranteed to intensify political competition and produce disgruntled failures, just like Catiline a couple of decades later.
One of Sulla’s most notorious reforms offers a glimpse of his reasoning. Men holding the office of tribune of the people had introduced almost all the radical reforms since the Gracchi. So Sulla, who must have been aware of this, set out drastically to restrict the tribunes’ powers. This was another office, like the dictatorship, that had been largely reinvented, probably in the decades before Sulla. It had been established in the fifth century BCE to represent the interests of the plebeians, but some of its rights and privileges made it a particularly attractive office for anyone looking for political power in much later periods. In particular, it carried the right to propose laws to the Plebeian Assembly as well as the right to interpose a veto on public business. This veto must have started in a very limited way. It is unthinkable that in the early days of the Conflict of the Orders the patricians would have allowed the plebeian representatives to block any decisions they chose. But by the time that Octavius repeatedly vetoed the laws of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE, the principle must have been established, or asserted, that the tribune’s right to intervene was almost unlimited.
Tribunes came in all political colours: both Octavius and the vigilante who killed Tiberius Gracchus with the chair leg were Tiberius’ fellow tribunes. They were also at this period uniformly rich, and certainly not a voice of politics from the bottom. But the office retained its popular image. It was still open to plebeians only – though patricians who were keen enough could always get round the difficulty by being adopted into a plebeian family. And it was repeatedly used to introduce popular reforms. So Sulla shrewdly set about making it an unattractive office for anyone with political ambitions. He took away the tribunes’ right to introduce legislation, curtailed their veto and made anyone who had held the tribunate ineligible for any future elected office – a guaranteed way of turning it into a dead end. The removal of these restrictions became the main rallying cry of the opposition to Sulla, and within ten years of his retirement all were repealed, paving the way for another generation of powerful and prominent tribunes. Even the emperors later boasted that they had ‘the power of the tribunes’ (tribunicia potestas), to suggest their concern for the ordinary people of Rome.
In retrospect, however, the tribunate seems something of a distraction. It was disagreement about the nature of political power that was dividing Roman politics, not the prerogatives of one particular office. Much more significant in the medium term, even if less visible and openly controversial, were some of Sulla’s practical decisions on disbanding his long-serving legions. He settled many of the ex-soldiers in the towns of Italy that had fought against Rome in the Social War, and requisitioned nearby land to provide them with a livelihood. It must have seemed an easy way of punishing the rebels, but often both sides lost: some locals were dispossessed, while some of the veterans were better fighters than farmers and conspicuously failed to make a living off the land. In 63 BCE it was said that these ex-soldiers-turned-failed-smallholders swelled the ranks of Catiline’s supporters. Even before then, the various victims of Sulla’s settlements had a big part to play in what has become – thanks partly to Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas – one of the best known of all ancient wars.
In 73 BCE, under the leadership of Spartacus, fifty or so slave gladiators, improvising weapons out of kitchen equipment, escaped from a gladiatorial training school at Capua in southern Italy and went on the run. They spent the next two years gathering support and withstanding several Roman armies until they were eventually crushed in 71 BCE, the survivors crucified in a grisly parade along the Appian Way.
It is hard now to see through the hype, both ancient and modern, to what was really going on. Roman writers, for whom slave uprisings were probably the most alarming sign of a world turned upside down, wildly exaggerate the number of supporters Spartacus attracted; estimates go as high as 120,000 insurgents. Modern accounts have often wanted to make Spartacus an ideological hero, even one who was fighting the very institution of slavery. That is next to impossible. Many slaves wanted freedom for themselves, but all the evidence from ancient Rome suggests that slavery as an institution was taken for granted, even by slaves. If they had a clearly formulated aim, the best guess is that Spartacus and his fellow escapees wanted to return to their various homes – in Spartacus’ case probably Thrace in northern Greece; for others, Gaul. One thing is certain, though: they managed to hold out against Roman forces for an embarrassingly long time.
What explains that success? It was not simply that the Roman armies sent out against them were ill trained. Nor was it just that the gladiators had discipline and fighting skills developed in the arena and were powered by the desire for freedom. Almost certainly the rebel forces were stiffened with the discontented and the dispossessed among the free, citizen population of Italy, including some of Sulla’s ex-soldiers, who may well have felt more at home on military campaign, even against the legions in which they had once served, than on the farm. Seen in these terms, Spartacus’ uprising was not only an ultimately tragic slave rebellion but also the final round in a series of civil wars that had started twenty years earlier with the massacre of Romans at Asculum that marked the beginning of the Social War.
42. This sketchy painting from Pompeii shows a man fighting on horseback – labelled, in the Oscan language, written from right to left, ‘Spartaks’, that is Spartacus. Cautious scholars are probably right to imagine that this is a scene of gladiatorial combat rather than of some engagement during the Spartacus rebellion. But even so, this may be the only surviving
contemporary depiction of the famous slave gladiator.
Ordinary lives
The story of the political conflicts of this period tends to be the story of the clash of political principles and of widely divergent views about how Rome should be governed. It is a story of big ideas, and almost inevitably it becomes a story of big men, from Scipio Aemilianus to Sulla. For that is how the Roman writers, on whose accounts we now depend, told it, focusing on the heroes and anti-heroes, the larger-than-life personalities who appear to have determined the course of both war and politics. They also drew on material, now largely lost, that came from the pens of those men themselves: the speeches of Gaius Gracchus or – one of the saddest losses in the whole of classical literature – the shamelessly self-justificatory autobiography of Sulla, written in twenty-two volumes during his retirement, that later writers occasionally mentioned and consulted.
What is missing is the perspective of those outside this exclusive group: the view of the ordinary soldiers or voters, of the women or – with the exception of the many fictions about Spartacus – the slaves. The men who jumped from rooftop to rooftop in Carthage, the people who scrawled the graffiti urging Tiberius to land reform, the loose-tongued servant who insulted the supporters of Gaius, and the five wives of Sulla remain in the background or are at best bit-part players. Even when ordinary people do speak for themselves, their surviving words tend to be brief and non-committal: ‘To Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, dictator, son of Lucius, from his ex-slaves’, as one inscription on a stone pedestal runs; but who they were, what stood on top of the pedestal and why they were dedicating it to him is anyone’s guess. Just as uncertain is how far the life of many men and women in the street went on more or less as normal throughout most of this period while those at the top fought it out with their legions. Or did the violence and disintegration of civic order dog most of the population most of the time?
