Since the failure to capture Jugurtha meant the war would continue, Metellus admitted that a disgruntled Marius would be more a hindrance than a help in the next campaign. So just twelve days before the consular election Metellus finally gave Marius leave to return to Rome. His hope was that even if Marius won election that the Senate would not appoint him to take over Metellus’s command in Numidia.39
AFTER MARIUS DEPARTED, Metellus marched out to finish the war. At that point, Jugurtha’s campaign was in dire straits. The king’s increasing paranoia drove many former supporters away, and conscripts deserted almost as soon as they were pressed into service. In the closing months of 108, Metellus managed to chase Jugurtha all the way to the city of Thala, deep in the interior of Numidia. The city was supposedly impervious to siege as it sat atop the only source of freshwater for fifty miles. But thanks to a fortuitous rain that filled Roman water sacks, the legions were able to batter down the gates. The sack of Thala turned out to be a hollow victory, however: by the time the Romans entered the city, Jugurtha had already fled. Meanwhile, the leaders of Thala gathered up anything the Romans might seize as profitable plunder and loaded it into the main palace in the center of town. There they threw themselves one last grand banquet and afterward, set fire to the building, destroying everything in it, including themselves.40
Though the capture of Thala was not decisive, it did change the dynamic of the war. Thala had been Jugurtha’s last great stronghold in Numidia and its fall forced him out of his own kingdom entirely. Jugurtha kept constantly on the move, riding southwest into the wild territory beyond the reach of the “civilized” powers. It was there that he finally found refuge with a tribe of nomads inhabiting the Atlas Mountains. Thanks to the treasure he carried with him, Jugurtha convinced these nomadic horsemen to form the core of a new army.41
But the mercenary nomads alone would not be enough to continue the war with Rome, so Jugurtha also wrote to King Bocchus of Mauretania to propose an alliance. The Kingdom of Mauretania bordered Numidia to the west, covering the region of northwest Africa that roughly corresponds to modern-day Morocco. The two monarchs already shared a familial tie, though the exact nature isn’t clear: some sources say Jugurtha married Bocchus’s daughter; others say Bocchus married Jugurtha’s daughter. Regardless, the king of Mauretania turned out to be amenable to a closer alliance as he had no love for the Romans or their habit of imperial expansion.42
The first joint operation of the new anti-Roman coalition was to attack the great city of Cirta. The city had been in Roman hands for many years now, and Metellus had used Cirta as the primary storehouse for his own treasury, baggage, and captured prisoners. Informed of the alliance between Jugurtha and Bocchus, Metellus decided not to rush out into battle, instead staying close to his defensive base, waiting for the kings to come to him. He sent out repeated letters of warning to Bocchus about getting mixed up with Jugurtha’s inevitably doomed resistance. Bocchus wrote back hinting at a peaceful solution but always seeking leniency for Jugurtha. It is not clear whether Bocchus was stalling for time or genuinely trying to negotiate a settlement.43
It was while he corresponded with Bocchus that Metellus was hit with a broadside from Rome. Not only had Gaius Marius been elected consul, but the Assembly had voted to override the Senate’s decision to keep Metellus in command of Numidia. Marius would soon be on his way to take over the job. Crushed and angry, Metellus was “more affected by this news than was right or becoming, neither refraining from tears nor bridling his tongue; although he had the other qualities of a great man, he showed little fortitude in bearing mortification.”44
MARIUS’S CAMPAIGN FOR the consulship marked the culminating blow against the optimates in the Senate. What had begun with Memmius’s attacks in 111, and then continued through the Mamilian Commission corruption trials in 109, now climaxed with the consular campaign of a proudly defiant novus homo. For Marius this day had been a long time coming.
Marius campaigned with a thunderous fury. In yet another clear break with mos maiorum, Marius routinely denounced Metellus for his conduct during the war. It was unheard of for a subordinate to criticize his general so openly, but Marius refused to be a slave to tradition—especially after Metellus tried to block him from the consulship. Above all, Marius made a single forthright promise: “If they would make him consul, he would within a short time deliver Jugurtha alive or dead into the hands of the Roman People.” Not surprisingly, Marius was elected.45
After his victory, Marius’s attacks on the Senate only intensified. He denounced the old nobles as men of lineage but not merit: “I personally know of men, citizens, who after being elected consuls began for the first time to read the history of our forefathers and the military treatises of the Greeks!” He said if they made mistakes that “their ancient nobility, the brave deeds of their ancestors, the power of their kindred and relatives, their throng of clients, are all a very present help.” He himself could not “display family portraits or the triumphs and consulships of my forefathers; but if occasion requires, I can show spears, a banner, trappings and other military prizes as well as scars on my breast. These are my portraits.” He then ended by saying triumphantly of the Senate that he had “wrested the consulship from them as the spoils of victory.”46
But his election alone did not guarantee that he would take over the Numidian campaign. Indeed, the Senate had already determined Numidia would remain Metellus’s province for another year. But as they had previously done for Scipio Aemilianus, the Assembly overrode the Senate and made Numidia Marius’s province. The bonds of mos maiorum loosened still further.47
As he prepared to raise new legions, Marius ran into the same problem that had plagued Rome for a generation. As more and more families were pushed off their land, fewer and fewer men met the minimum property requirement for service in the legions. But while the consuls were forced to scrape the bottom of a very dry barrel looking for potential legionaries, tens of thousands of young men sat idle. The only mark against them was that they did not own land. So to fill his legions, Marius took a fateful step in the long history of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic—he requested exemption from the property qualification. Of this request to recruit from among the poorest plebs, Sallust says: “Some say that he did this through lack of good men, others because of a desire to curry favor… As a matter of fact, to one who aspires to power the poorest man is the most helpful, since he has no regard for his property, having none, and considers anything honorable for which he receives pay.” Any man, no matter how poor and destitute, could now serve in the army. With the promise of plunder and glory dangled before their eyes, poor men from across Italy rushed to sign up for Marius’s open legions.48
Emergency suspension of the property requirements was not without precedent. An ancestor of the Gracchi had even led a legion composed of slaves and gladiators during the darkest days of the Second Punic War. But what makes this moment so important is that it marked a permanent transition from temporary armies conscripted from among the free citizens to professional armies composed of soldiers who made their careers in the army—whose loyalties would be to their generals rather than to the Senate and People of Rome. But Marius wasn’t thinking about the grand sweep of history. For the moment, he just wanted to raise an army of men to go fulfill his promise to win the war.49
Eager to begin, Marius sailed for Africa before his new army was completely assembled. New cohorts of cavalry were still in the process of being raised, so Marius left his newly elected quaestor to finish the job. That quaestor’s name was Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
CHAPTER 6
THE GOLDEN EARRING
Why, my son, do you so long for Ambition, that worst of deities? Oh, do not; the goddess is unjust; many are the homes and cities once prosperous that she has entered and left to the ruin of her worshippers.
EURIPIDES1
LUCIUS CORNELIUS SULLA WAS BORN IN ROME IN 138 BC. As a Cornelii he belonged to one of the oldest patrician families in Rome. B
ut though he bore a noble name, and the easy arrogance that went with it, Sulla’s own particular branch of the family had long since faded into obscurity. No one in his family had risen beyond praetor for three generations, and Sulla did not seem particularly primed to restore the family to glory. As a young man he caroused with actors, poets, and musicians—the bottom feeders of the Roman social order. He and his friends drank and partied and lived their lives outside the stuffy confines of the respectable classes. During his youth, Sulla also began a romantic relationship with the actor Metrobius, who went on to become his lifelong companion. Even as Sulla married, had children, and climbed to the pinnacle of power, Metrobius remained by his side.2
Though Sulla was a carefree hedonist, he never neglected his studies. He had great natural intelligence and received a good education. By the time he was a teenager he was fluent in Greek and highly literate in art, literature, and history. Despite the low fortunes of his family, Sulla still spent his youth expecting to embark on a public career. But when his father died, Sulla discovered just how far the family fortunes had fallen. Sulla’s father was bankrupt and left his son no inheritance. Sulla could not even afford to join the legions as a cavalry officer, the prerequisite to any political career. So rather than spending his twenties in the legions, Sulla continued his dissolute life in Rome, renting an inexpensive apartment and living his life in the pursuit of wine, women, and song.3
Sulla cut a striking figure on the streets of Rome, with sharp gray eyes and light reddish hair. Though plagued by breakouts of red splotches on his face, Sulla was a handsome and charismatic young man who commanded the attention of any room: “He was eloquent, clever, and quick to make friends. He had a mind deep beyond belief in its power of disguising its purposes, and was generous with many things, especially with money.” He would never entirely leave his early life behind. The friends he made remained close at hand, and in the future, Sulla would live something of a double life: stern and composed while dealing with matters of business, and then, “once at table, he refused to be serious at all… he underwent a complete change as soon as he betook himself to good-fellowship and drinking.”4
Around age thirty, Sulla secured an advantageous marriage to a woman called only “Julia,” whom it is strongly suspected was a cousin of Gaius Marius’s wife Julia—creating an attachment to Marius just as Marius’s career was taking off. But though he was married, Sulla was not faithful. He was charismatic and indulged in numerous affairs, especially with older widows who were happy to help him maintain his libertine lifestyle. Sulla had a particularly prolonged affair with a woman known only by his pet name for her, “Nicopolis.” She died around 110 BC and named Sulla as her principal heir. Around this time, his stepmother also died and similarly left him all her property. Suddenly Sulla had wealth to match his ambitions. The fact that he had started with so little and acquired so much later made his enemies sneer: “How can you be an honest man,” they said, “when your father left you nothing, and yet you are so rich?”5
Sulla used his patrician advantage, plus a hefty fee, to bypass the required service time in the legion before standing for public office. Elected quaestor for 107, Sulla was attached to the command of newly elected consul Gaius Marius. The contrast between the two men was striking. As a novus homo, Marius had been forced to fight and scrape his way up the cursus honorum. He was not even allowed to stand for military tribune until he had spent a decade in the army. Sulla, on the other hand, walked out of the brothels, waived his patrician credentials, and purchased the job. Narrowing his eyes at this inexperienced dilettante, Marius ordered Sulla to stay behind in Rome to raise cavalry units, ensuring that he would not get in the way as Marius sailed for Numidia to finish the war against Jugurtha.6
WHEN MARIUS ARRIVED in Africa in early 107, Metellus was unable to overcome his rage at being cast aside, and so he refused the custom of personally handing over command to a successor. Instead, Metellus sent his second in command to greet Marius and hand over the army. Metellus, meanwhile, sailed back to Rome under a dark cloud of not entirely unjustifiable bitterness.7
But upon his return to Rome, Metellus found that his honor was not totally besmirched. Though Marius had seized the consulship, the Metelli were still powerful, and so the family arranged for Metellus to be met by jubilant crowds and induced the Senate to vote him a triumph. There was a ham-fisted effort to prosecute Metellus for the same charges of extortion and corruption that the Mamilian Commission had used so effectively, but it went nowhere. The jury refused to even consider the charges and Metellus was acquitted on all counts. The Metelli family then induced the Senate to award Metellus the title Numidicus for his work. Despite what he must have thought would be a lasting disgrace, Metellus Numidicus maintained his political stature and remained a powerful force in the Senate.8
Marius, meanwhile, had to make good on his promise to end the war quickly. But now that he was actually running the army and not just carping from the peanut gallery, he realized there was no magic strategy that would work better than what Metellus had already been doing. Jugurtha popped up and disappeared at will, and always danced just beyond the reach of the legions. During that first year, Marius managed to force a few encounters with Jugurtha, but the king always seemed to get away. So despite his promises of ending the war in a matter of days, Marius was still chasing the Numidian king as 107 gave way to 106.9
The Assembly kept its faith in him, however, and Marius managed to secure an extension for his command. But as he marched out in 106 he had a major problem on his hands: Jugurtha was nowhere to be found. The Numidian king’s whereabouts during the entirety of 106 are unknown. We can say with a fair bit of certainty that he withdrew with his mercenary nomads across the Atlas Mountains to the southern desert country. Marius marched on the city of Capsa and then followed the mountains east, attacking cities and trying to force Jugurtha out of hiding. Finally, he reached the border between Numidia and Mauretania and found along the river Muluccha one of the last remaining strongholds Jugurtha could possibly rely on. Most importantly, it was where Jugurtha had dumped most of his remaining treasure before taking off across the mountains.10
SULLA HAD SPENT the beginning of the campaign in Italy gathering more cavalry. But with his units now filled, he joined Marius’s army just as the siege of the fortress along the Muluccha began. Despite Marius’s earlier doubts, Sulla turned out to be bright, talented, and a quick study. Sulla threw himself headlong into the soldier’s life, never avoided hardship, and was soon regarded as the “best soldier in the whole army.” Because he had spent his youth among the lower rungs of Roman society, Sulla had a natural rapport with the men. He laughed and joked with them, shared their toils, and was generous with favors and money without ever asking repayment—though the ever-cynical Sallust hints that this was just so Sulla could have as many men in his debt as possible. By the time the legions captured the fort of Muluccha, even Marius considered Sulla one of the best officers under his command.11
As the legions marched back to Cirta for the winter, the long-absent Jugurtha decided to finally strike. He had revived his alliance with Bocchus and the two massed an army and waited to hit the Romans by surprise. The legions narrowly escaped the ambush, though, thanks to a level-headed flanking move led by Sulla, which drove the combined Numidian/Mauretanian army into retreat. Two days later a second battle erupted, and this time the compact and disciplined legions scattered the Africans to the four winds. Bocchus fled back to the safety of Mauretania and Jugurtha disappeared yet again.12
AS MARIUS TIGHTENED the Roman hold on Numidia, the northern border once again began to crack. Roman authority in southern Gaul had been a relatively new phenomenon; it was not until the late 120s that the legions established a presence, and even then the province of Gallia Narbonensis was nothing but a thin strip of coastline connecting the Alps to the Pyrenees. The Romans had established their hegemony over the region after inflicting a string of defeats on the local Gallic tribes, but
in the ruthlessly predatory world of war and politics, you were only on top if you could stay on top. The crushing defeats at the hands of the Cimbri in 113 and 109 crippled Roman prestige.13
The Cimbri themselves had gone back up the Rhône to central Gaul after destroying Silanus’s legions in 109. But that only opened the door for other tribes to take advantage of the power vacuum. A tribe from modern Switzerland called the Tigurini took advantage of Roman setbacks and moved down out of the mountains. So as the newly elected consul Marius raised legions to go to Numidia in 107, his consular colleague Lucius Cassius Longinus raised legions to go to Gaul. It was this double threat that played a big part in the Senate dropping property requirements for service in the legions. Longinus’s object was to defeat the Tigurini and repair the damage to the Roman reputation for invincibility that the Cimbri had so thoroughly spoiled.14
The Tigurini kept raiding west, however, and Longinus shadowed them all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The Tigurini were aware the Romans were following them and at an opportune moment they laid a trap. The oblivious Longinus led his men directly into an ambush and died in the ensuing battle. Command of the defeated legions fell to a legate named Gaius Popillius, who, like young Tiberius Gracchus in Spain, was forced to make a life or death decision on behalf of tens of thousands of men. Like Tiberius, Popillius chose life. After promising to hand over half their baggage and pass under the yoke, the battered Romans were allowed to depart.15
Back in Rome this defeat was greeted with the same angry shock that always greeted legions that surrendered. Upon his return to Rome, Popillius was charged with treason. He did not go quietly and snapped back at his accusers, “Now what should I have done when I was surrounded by so great a force of Gauls? Fight? But then our advance would have been with a small band… Remain in camp? But we neither had reinforcements to look for, nor the means to stay alive… Abandon the camp? But we were blocked… Sacrifice the lives of the soldiers? But I thought I had accepted them on the stipulation that so far as possible I should preserve them unharmed for their fatherland and their parents… Reject the enemy’s terms? But the safety of the soldiers has priority over that of the baggage.” The argument fell on deaf ears and Popillius was found guilty and exiled.16
The Storm Before the Storm Page 14
