After unsuccessful negotiations, Opimius had some archers loose their arrows into the crowds on the Aventine, throwing them into confusion. Gaius, furious at what was happening, took no part in the fighting. He walked up the broad steps of the Temple of Diana, standing high on its plateau on the hilltop, and entered the precinct. Ironically, the shrine was devoted to community, sanctuary, and arbitration, attributes not on offer that day. Gaius was so depressed that he considered taking his own life, but his companions confiscated his dagger and urged him to escape.
With enemies close behind, Gaius, a slave, and two friends ran across the narrow wooden footbridge spanning the Tiber, the Pons Sublicius. The friends halted and turned round at the head of the bridge, where, like Horatius and his companions, they fought their pursuers in order to give Gaius time to make a getaway. But they were soon overwhelmed.
Bystanders watched Gaius run to the other side of the river. They told him to hurry up, but offered no help. When he called for a horse, nobody gave him one. On being caught, the slave with him threw his arms around his master and had to be killed as well. (Another version of Gaius’s end has him finally succeed in committing suicide.) Gaius’s head was cut off and taken to Opimius, who had promised to reward the bearer with its weight in gold. Some say Gaius’s killer gouged out his brains and replaced them with lead to make the head heavier.
* * *
FOR ALL THE brothers’ good intentions the Gracchan episode was a disaster. Their policies were rational, and ultimately much of their legislation passed into the body of Roman law. The economic consequences of their land reforms were beneficial. The Senate reacted to the brothers rather like a general faced with a mutiny, who concedes most of the grievances but executes the ringleaders.
However, the constitutional results of their efforts were overwhelmingly negative. The Italians were more embittered than ever, through the Assembly the People had stretched their muscles, and for the first time the equites had become aware of their own strength vis-à-vis the Senate. Before the Gracchi, nobody had realized that the Republic could be governed from the tribunes’ bench. Both the Senate and the People had been shown to act with breathtaking selfishness, always consulting their own rather than the public interest.
The Roman constitution was a complicated contraption of levers and balances, with obsolete pieces of machinery left in place alongside modern additions. Its management called for sensitivity, imagination, and, above all, an ability to accommodate, to concede, to compromise. For centuries, these qualities among Rome’s politicians had drawn the admiration, reluctant or full-hearted, of friend and foe.
Now, though, the tragic trajectory of the Gracchi exposed the Republic for what it had become, an unstable and uncreative monster. It is no accident that, in his Civil Wars, Appian chose this moment at which to begin his story. He observed:
No sword was ever brought into the assembly, and no Roman was ever killed by a Roman, until Tiberius Gracchus … became the first man to die in civil unrest, and along with him a great number of people who had crowded together on the Capitol and were killed around the temple. The disorders did not end even with this foul act; on each occasion when they occurred the Romans openly took sides against each other, and often carried daggers; from time to time some elected official would be murdered in a temple, or in the assembly, or in the Forum—a Tribune or Praetor or Consul, or a candidate for these offices, or somebody otherwise distinguished. Undisciplined arrogance soon became the rule, along with a shameful contempt for law and justice.
The mother of the Gracchi left Rome after Gaius’s death. She settled in Misenum, a narrow isthmus culminating in a rocky outcrop at the northern end of the Bay of Naples. It had beautiful views and was off the beaten track. However, Cornelia did not hide herself away and made no alteration to the gregarious brilliancy of her lifestyle. Plutarch reports: “She had many friends and because of her love of visitors kept a good table. She always had Greeks and intellectuals as guests, and all the reigning monarchs exchanged gifts with her.”
It made her happy to reminisce about her father’s life and character. Remarkably, she spoke of her sons without any tears or displays of emotion and discussed their careers and sad ends as if she were referring to immemorial statesmen from Rome’s first centuries.
Cornelia survived her lost jewels for more than ten years, dying at the turn of the century. She was lucky not to witness the fulfillment of their legacies.
17
Triumph and Disaster
THE TWO MEN WERE, TO PUT IT MILDLY, UNPROMISing and even distasteful specimens of humanity.
The older one was Gaius Marius. He was born in 157 in a small village near Arpinum, a hill town in Latium of Volscian and Samnite origins, some sixty miles southeast of Rome. He was lucky to be a voting citizen of Rome, for the full franchise had been awarded the town only thirty years earlier.
According to his biographer Plutarch, the boy’s parents lived in very humble circumstances and he is said to have worked for wages as a simple peasant. He may have been a blacksmith for a time. He grew up rough and uncouth and lived frugally. He seems to have been proud of his modest background. When campaigning later in life for public office, Marius certainly made the most of it, and liked to compare himself, a little in the manner of Cato, with effete aristocrats:
These proud men make a very big mistake. Their ancestors left them all they could—riches, portrait busts, and their own glorious memory.… They call me vulgar and unpolished, because I don’t know how to put on an elegant dinner and don’t have actors at my table or keep a cook who has cost me more than my farm bailiff. All this, fellow citizens, I am proud to admit. For I was taught by my father and other men of blameless life that, while elegant graces befit woman, a man’s duty is to labor.
The teenage Marius chose the only escape route from provincial isolation that was open to him, the army. His exceptional ability soon allowed him to shine. It is possible, too, that despite his poverty his social status was higher than he cared to admit and that he came from an equestrian family that had fallen on hard times; if so, that would have helped speed promotion.
He had a fierce temper. Plutarch once saw a statue of him at Ravenna and wrote: “It very well expresses the harshness and bitterness of character that are attributed to him.” Military life suited him. He refused to study Greek literature and never spoke Greek; he could not see the point of having anything to do with the culture of a subject people. Some critics regarded him as a hypocrite who would say anything to get his way and was not above employing blackmail; to their annoyance, Iago-like, he actually won a reputation for honest dealing.
What nobody could deny was Marius’s combination of fortitude and realism. Later in life, he suffered from varicose veins in both legs. Disliking their ugly appearance, he decided to undergo surgery to remove them. Anesthetic had not been discovered, but he refused to be tied down, as was the practice, to keep himself still. He endured the excruciating pain from the knife in silence and without moving. But when the surgeon proceeded to the other leg, Marius stopped him, saying, “I can see that the cure is not worth the pain.”
LUCIUS CORNELIUS SULLA could not have been more different in background and personality from a bright country lad with rough edges. Nearly twenty years Marius’s junior, he was born into a patrician family of little distinction and less money. His only ancestor of whom anything was known had been expelled from the Senate. He inherited so little from his father that he lived in a cheap ground-floor apartment in an unfashionable part of town.
Sulla loved literature and the arts, and before he had any money he spent most of his time with actors and actresses. He liked a good time and enjoyed drinking and joking with the most indiscreet theater people; once seated at a dinner table, he categorically refused to discuss any serious topic, although when on business he was severe and unyielding.
The young nobleman seems to have got on well with older women; his stepmother loved him as if he were her own
son and left him her estate. He fell in love with a wealthy courtesan, a certain Nicopolis, and his charm and youthful grace eventually led her to return his feelings; on her death, he inherited again. In this way, he became moderately well-off. However, Sulla was bisexual and the true love of his life was Metrobius, a celebrated tragic actor who specialized in women’s roles, of whom he remained passionately fond until his dying day.
Sulla’s most remarkable feature was his appearance. He had gray eyes and a sharp and powerful gaze. His face was covered with an ugly birthmark—coarse blotches of red interspersed with white. An Athenian wit wrote a famous verse about him:
Sulla is a mulberry sprinkled with barley meal.
Marius and Sulla came to represent two emerging groups in Roman public life. On the one hand, the populares spoke for the People; in the footsteps of the Gracchi, they supported the sovereignty of the Assembly against the authority of the Senate. They were inheritors of the centuries-old campaigners for the rights of the plebs. Then there were the optimates, the soi-disant “best people,” who distrusted democracy and spoke for the predominance of the great families that monopolized the offices of state.
These groups were not disciplined political parties with agreed programs, as in today’s parliamentary democracies. Rather, they were fluctuating factions. Their methods varied; a popularis leader tended to be an individualist who sought power for himself, whereas the optimates defended a collective interest. Although the occasional novus homo, “new man,” such as Marius, was admitted via elections into the ruling class, the membership of both groups was drawn from the aristocracy. Ordinary citizens were allowed to vote, but otherwise their participation in politics did not extend much beyond watching and waiting, receiving bribes from candidates for public office, and, when they lost patience, rioting.
THE PATHS OF Marius, the unpolished commoner, and Sulla, the hard-up sensualist, crossed for the first time in northern Africa. They were fighting Jugurtha, a very able but unscrupulous grandson of the old Numidian king Masinissa, who had helped the Romans defeat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama nearly a century earlier. As a young man, he had served in Spain under Scipio Aemilianus, and won golden praises. He was ambitious and very free with his money. Scipio gave him some avuncular advice. In a private meeting, he told Jugurtha to cultivate Rome’s friendship, not that of individual Romans, and to suppress his habit of offering bribes. The prince paid absolutely no attention to these wise words.
When the current king of Numidia died, he bequeathed his realm to his two sons and to Jugurtha, his nephew. A similar tripartite division had worked well enough on Masinissa’s death, probably because it had been guaranteed by the Romans. But Jugurtha did not want to share power. He had one brother assassinated and the other, Adherbal, fled to Rome. The Senate misguidedly decided that Numidia should be bisected between the two surviving rivals. Jugurtha refused to accept the settlement and besieged Adherbal in his capital. A resident community of Italian merchants persuaded the beleaguered king to give himself up on condition that his life be spared.
Jugurtha accepted the terms, but as soon as he had his cousin in his possession he put him to death—and many of the Italian merchants were massacred, too, for good measure. This was an irreparable mistake. Rome never forgave the murder of its citizens. War was declared and the Senate dispatched an army to Africa. However, Jugurtha soon agreed to surrender to a Roman general on condition that he keep his throne.
This was a completely unexpected outcome, and it was widely supposed that Jugurtha had bribed every Roman official with whom he had come into contact. The Senate set up a board of inquiry and Jugurtha was invited to Rome under a safe-conduct to reveal the identity of all those he had suborned. Incorrigible as ever, he bribed a tribune to prevent him from announcing any names. He was also responsible for the assassination of a cousin, who was living in Rome and had been invited by one of the consuls to claim the Numidian throne for himself. By now it was obvious that Jugurtha was a man with whom it was impossible to do business. He was sent back to Africa, and the fighting resumed.
An incompetent Roman army was soundly beaten by the Numidians and forced to march under a yoke of spears, as in the bad old days of the Samnite Wars. It was obliged to evacuate Numidia. At long last in 109, the Senate was persuaded to treat Jugurtha seriously and a competent and incorruptible general was sent out to rescue the war.
He was Quintus Caecilius Metellus, a member of a leading senatorial family. Marius was among Metellus’s clients and served as his legatus, or deputy. Now in his late forties, he had made reasonable progress up the political ladder for a novus homo, having been elected praetor in 114 and appointed governor of Lusitania. He was ambitious for the top job, even if it meant offending his longtime patron.
Metellus was winning the campaign, but slowly. Jugurtha had not been captured. Marius began to agitate that the war was being spun out unnecessarily. He was popular with the army rank and file and with Roman traders, not to mention voters at home. He asked Metellus for permission to return to Rome so that he could run for the consulship and take over the command. Being the aristocrat that he was, an irritated Metellus could not resist cracking a joke at his deputy’s expense. “So you are going to abandon us, are you, my dear fellow?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it be a better idea to delay your campaign until you can stand at the same time as this boy of mine?” Metellus’s son was only twenty.
Eventually, Marius was allowed to take his leave. In Rome, he raised enough popular and equestrian support to win the consulship. The Assembly disregarded the Senate’s decision to prolong Metellus’s command and appointed Marius in his place. This usurpation of the Senate’s traditional role in deciding provincial commands set a dangerous precedent. It paved the way for extraordinary commands for ambitious politicians who were willing to bypass the usual constitutional limitations.
Marius was determined to finish off Jugurtha at the earliest opportunity, so he levied more troops. However, he found the going as difficult and time-consuming as his predecessor had. He reduced stronghold after stronghold, but the legions were hard put to worst a highly mobile enemy on land well suited to the deployment of cavalry. Jugurtha strengthened his position by an alliance with his neighbor, Bocchus, the king of Mauretania. At long last a pitched battle was fought, which Marius won decisively—thanks in large part to Sulla, who commanded the cavalry, turning up at just the right moment.
However, the slippery Numidian king was still at large. He was not so slippery, though, as his new friend Bocchus, who decided to surrender him to the Romans. Simultaneously and falsely, the king promised Jugurtha to hand Sulla over to him; with such a distinguished captive, the Numidian calculated, he would easily be able to negotiate a peace with Rome. Bocchus invited the two men to a conference. Sulla, taking his life in his hands, rode to the rendezvous with only a few followers. At the last minute, the Mauretanian king had second thoughts and wondered anxiously whether, after all, he should favor Jugurtha. He eventually decided that the Roman was the better bet, and Jugurtha was arrested.
Jugurtha was taken to Rome and paraded in Marius’s triumph. Defeat made him lose his mind. When he was inserted, naked, into Rome’s main prison, the Tullianum, a tiny drumlike cellar with a shaft leading into the Cloaca Maxima, he said, “God, this Roman bath is cold.” He lasted six days in the dark and without food before dying.
Much to Marius’s fury, Sulla made the most of his coup and was widely credited with winning the war. He had a seal ring made that depicted Bocchus delivering, and Sulla receiving, Jugurtha.
We may imagine a smile lighting up Metellus’s face.
MARIUS WAS CREDITED with being a great military innovator, although it may be that the ancient sources have used him as a clotheshorse on which to hang a number of important reforms agreed at different times.
As the Gracchi had discovered, the days of the reasonably well-off yeoman were closing and, when he raised his additional troops for Africa, Marius recruited directly
from the head count, Rome’s lowest economic and social stratum, who owned little or nothing and by law could not be drafted. This was not as revolutionary a step as might at first appear, for the prescribed property qualifications for legionaries had been falling for some time, and Marius was careful to ask for volunteers rather than conscripts.
One way or another, many recruits could no longer afford to pay for their own gear, as they had been expected to do in the past, and had no farms to return to. What had once been a militia was mutating into a near-professional army. This had one very dangerous consequence: soldiers became increasingly dependent on their commanders, both to ensure that they were well equipped and, already a problem in the age of Scipio, that they had somewhere to go when they were demobilized after their six to sixteen years’ term of service.
The system of maniples, the three lines of infantry and the forward screen of light-armed skirmishers, gave way during the second and first centuries to the cohort, a grouping of four hundred and eighty foot soldiers equivalent to three maniples. Not as complex and decentralized as the old arrangement, a legion of ten cohorts was more readily responsive to its commander during battle.
Marius standardized uniforms and weapons and, to foster esprit de corps, introduced the aquila, a silver eagle carried on a pole. It symbolized the legion, and its capture by the enemy conferred lasting shame on all its soldiers.
An ingenious technical device helped make survival on the field of battle a better bet. The heavy javelin, or pilum, was an essential part of the legionary’s armory. But when he threw it at his opponents, they often picked it up and hurled it back. Its iron head was attached to a wooden pole by two metal rivets. One of these was now replaced by a wooden dowel, so that the head was bent or snapped off entirely when the pilum reached its target or fell to the ground. This meant that it could not be reused.
The Rise of Rome Page 38
