This news of the change in command would have been impossible to contain. Restless shockwaves rippled through the camps at Nola. What happened next? Was Sulla still their commander? Were they still going east? Then the notice went around that Sulla planned to address his troops. Throughout Roman history, generals had addressed their troops only to discuss military business—usually matters of pay, discipline, and strategy. Now for the first time, a Roman general delivered a political speech to his men. Sulla described what had happened back in Rome, told them about his maltreatment at the hands of Marius and Sulpicius, and then revealed the latest outrage: he had been stripped of the eastern command. The soldiers were outraged—not only at the treatment of their chief, but also out of fear that they would be left behind. Marius had his own vast recruiting network of veterans, friends, and clients to draw on. The troops under Sulla’s command were likely to be left in Italy and miss out on the riches they had already spent in their minds.30
Believing he had successfully euthanized Sulla’s political career, Marius began the process of taking over the legions and sent two military tribunes to Nola with orders to remove Sulla from command. These two guys—whose names are unrecorded—became unfortunate early casualties of the Civil War. Assuming command of the army was supposed to be a matter of routine paperwork, but when the two officers arrived they were seized by Sulla’s inflamed legions and stoned to death.31
With his men ready to follow him anywhere, Sulla took a conference with his senior officers and made his audacious proposal. If Sulpicius and Marius were going to run roughshod over consular authority, then they were going to have to live with the consequences. Sulla told them he was going to lead his six legions back to Rome. Almost to a man his officers refused to participate in any such march. Never before had a Roman general marched legionaries against Rome itself. So left with only a quaestor and some centurions, Sulla led his legions onto the Via Appia and began a slow march on Rome.32
SULLA WAS NOT in any great hurry. He hoped the very fact of his approach would have the intended effect of forcing Marius and Sulpicius to back down. Unlike Marius, whose entire career was built on careful planning, Sulla was likely improvising each step and trusting himself to the goddess Fortuna. He later said, “Of the undertakings which men thought well-advised, those upon which he had boldly ventured, not after deliberation, but on the spur of the moment, turned out for the better.” For now it was enough that his army was moving toward Rome—what he would do when he got there was anyone’s guess. Including Sulla himself.33
Sulla’s march triggered a flurry of activity in Rome. Sulpicius used his own considerable powers as tribune, combined with Marius’s new military authority, to seize control of the situation. Partisans of Sulla were identified and assassinated, while the Senate was cowed into submission by Sulpicius’s Anti-Senate. Those who managed to dodge the assassins, including the consul Pompeius, slipped out of Rome for the safety of Sulla’s army. On the other side, many soldiers—either for personal or patriotic reasons—refused to help Sulla conquer Rome. They deserted the march and raced ahead to Rome. This created a whirlwind of movement, as families coming to and from Rome jammed the streets, both sides carrying exaggerated rumors and reports about the situation in the old camp. Marius is murdering everyone! Sulla wants to raze Rome! Needless to say, it was not a time for careful contemplation.34
The old guard in the Senate found themselves adrift in this chaotic storm. Certainly not friends with Marius and Sulpicius, they were now equally horrified that Sulla was marching six legions against Rome. So a moderate faction of senators attempted to find a way to broker a peace. They dispatched two praetors to Sulla’s approaching army, but with both linked to the Marians, Sulla scoffed at their demands. The praetors themselves were then severely maltreated. Though they got out alive, Sulla’s men smashed their symbols of office and tore off their togas. They returned to the Senate in a pitiful state. The Senate then sent another group of envoys who asked Sulla why he was marching his army against his own country, to which Sulla responded: “To deliver her from tyrants.”35
When Sulla arrived at the outskirts of Rome he invited the Senate to further talks. The Senate’s representatives revealed that they had already decreed Sulla be given his command back. But everyone knew their decree was useless if Sulpicius controlled the Assembly. To bridge the impasse, Sulla said he was prepared to meet Marius and Sulpicius out on the Campus Martius and would pitch camp until a summit could be arranged.36
But as soon as the envoys left Sulla told his men to suit up for battle. Word had already reached him that his friends inside the city were turning up dead. He also learned that Marius and Sulpicius were arming their supporters, promising freedom to slaves and gladiators who fought for them. The tales coming out of the city were more exaggerated than Sulla realized at the time. The call for slaves to join turned up a pitiful response; six veteran legions were marching on Rome—any slave who joined Marius would likely enjoy his freedom for all of five minutes before dying in the service of another man’s ambitions. But not knowing how weak the Marians really were, Sulla wanted to quickly secure a decisive victory. He ordered one of his legions forward to capture and hold the Esquiline Gate.37
Marius and Sulpicius were alerted that Sulla’s men were moving and they prepared their own forces for battle. The two sides clashed in the forum of the Esquiline Hill. Marian partisans beat back the encroaching legionaries and pelted them from rooftops with tiles. Appian says that after a generation of street fights, this was “the first fought in Rome with bugle and standards in full military fashion, no longer like a mere faction fight. To such extremity of evil had the recklessness of party strife progressed among them.” With fighting under way, Sulla turned up personally with reinforcements and used archers with flaming arrows to drive the Marians off the roofs.38
The Marians could hold against a single legion but never six, and they fell back as Sulla entered the city. Marius took temporary refuge in the Temple of Tellus and called for the citizens of Rome to join him in this patriotic defense against Sulla’s treacherous invasion—but his call went unheeded. To the plebs urbana, this was a grudge match between nobles that they wanted no part of. With Sulla seizing control of the main streets, Marius, Sulpicius, and their chief accomplices fled the city.39
SULLA MARCHED THROUGH Rome following the path of Roman triumphs toward the Capitoline Hill. With a last clutch of Marians having captured the Capitoline Hill, Sulla led an entire legion across the Pomerium, the sacred inner boundary of Rome, within which no citizen was to bear arms. One of the last and most sacred lines of mos maiorum had been crossed.40
Sulla was now left in the awkward position of being the first Roman to ever conquer Rome. He went out of his way to deflect the odium, singling out men under his command caught looting and punishing them for all to see. After a nervous night during which both he and Pompeius stayed up until dawn crisscrossing the city to make sure everything was under control, Sulla called for a public meeting the next morning in the Forum.41
When the crowd assembled, Sulla told them that his anger was only directed at a few select enemies. To prove his point, he announced the names of just twelve men he now considered enemies of the state. Marius and Sulpicius were at the top of the list. As public enemies, these twelve could now be killed on sight. But Sulla stressed that other than those twelve men, the rest of the population could expect no further trouble—even if they had taken part in the fighting. Sulla just wanted things to go back to normal.42
But by “normal” Sulla did not just mean the way things had been the day before. He wanted the Romans to return to their roots. He said that the Republic had fallen into a terrible state of disrepair and needed to return to the virtuous constitution of their elders. A bill presented to the Assembly should first gain approval from the Senate. Voting should be heavily tilted toward major landowners. Taking a page from Drusus’s reforms, Sulla proposed adding three hundred Equestrians to the Senate to bulk
up their numbers and make the institution robust and powerful again. But before he got those wider reforms dispensed, Sulla addressed more specific business. He announced that every law passed since Sulla and Pompeius declared the holiday was null and void. Sulla and Pompeius would still be consuls. Sulla would still have the eastern command. The plan to disperse the Italians throughout the thirty-one rural tribes would disappear into thin air.43
Under the watchful eye of the Sullan legions, the Assembly turned Sulla’s suggestions into law. But after the reforms passed, Sulla sent his men back to Nola to prove that he was not a tyrant or a king. The Senate was, by now, convulsed with mixed emotions. Sulla was clearly acting as their savior and benefactor, but they bristled at Sulla’s pretensions to now be the patron of the Senate—as if they were now his clients. And crossing the Pomerium with an entire army was unforgivable sacrilege.44
But Sulla studiously maintained that he was following a chain of precedent that linked Opimius in 121, to Marius in 100, to Sulla here in 88. What he had done was no different than what they had done: he took extraordinary consular action to quell a violent political faction. But of course, both Opimius and Marius had operated under the senatus consultum ultimum. The Senate had passed no such decree this time. Sulla acted under his own authority only. Legal scholars in the Senate were vexed, but Sulla’s legions spoke for themselves.
IN THE AFTERMATH of their defeat, the inner-circle Marians bolted out of Rome in every direction. Sulpicius ran for the coast but never made it outside the vicinity of Rome. Within a day of taking flight he was betrayed by a slave and executed the moment he was apprehended. Sulla later thanked the slave and said the man “deserved freedom in return for his services in giving information about the enemy.” But as soon as the manumission was complete Sulla “decreed that he should be hurled from the Tarpeian Rock because he had betrayed his master.”45
Marius, meanwhile, fled that night to one of his estates twelve miles outside the city with his son, grandson, and a small party of loyal partisans. Knowing they could not stay in the area they agreed to sail for North Africa, where they would take refuge in the veteran colonies set up in the wake of the Numidian war. These communities had been planted more than fifteen years ago, but hopefully they would remember their former general and patron.46
The next morning Marius and his party set sail from Ostia. Marius’s ship was not quite one hundred miles down the Italian coast when storms threw her against the shore near the city of Terracina. With the ship wrecked, the party had to continue on foot. Knowing Terracina was currently run by one of his enemies, Marius led the party along the coast toward the city of Minturnae, where Marius said he had friends. On the way, some shepherds told them the countryside was lousy with Sulla’s cavalry patrols. Unable to complete the trip before nightfall, Marius and his beleaguered compatriots spent a miserable night hiding in the woods without food or shelter.47
The next morning, Marius led the party back to the shore to continue the walk to Minturnae. While they walked, Marius lifted their spirits by telling them a story from his childhood. When he was a boy he saw an eagle’s nest fall from a tree. Gathering the nest in his cloak, he saw that it contained seven tiny eagles. As an eagle traditionally lays no more than two eggs, the unprecedented little flock was a fabulous find. His parents took the birds to a local seer to inquire if it had any special meaning. The seer was amazed and said their son would “be most illustrious of men, and was destined to receive the highest command and power seven times.” Now on the run and condemned as enemies of the state, Marius reminded his friends that this could not possibly be the end for he had only been consul six times and was yet destined for one more. Somehow, some way, he would be consul again.48
But just miles from Minturnae, they were spotted by a cavalry patrol. With nowhere to turn, someone in Marius’s party saw two ships sailing close to shore. Without waiting for permission from the sailors, the fugitives jumped in the water and swam. Most of the party reached one boat, forced the sailors to take them on board, and used very colorful threats to force the captain to sail them away. The older and slower Marius meanwhile dragged himself aboard the second boat and presented himself to the dumbfounded captain.49
The cavalry detachment hailed the captain from shore and said the wet old man on his boat was the fugitive Gaius Marius. The captain now faced the dilemma Marius would impose on everyone he met during his ordeal: hand over Marius and risk the wrath of his friends, or protect Marius and risk the wrath of his enemies. The captain decided he could not hand Marius over and sailed away. Not immediately following the boat that had sped off with Marius’s companions, the captain steered the craft to the mouth of a nearby river. The captain told Marius to go ashore, rest, and gather some provisions from the trip. As soon as Marius disembarked the captain sailed away. His solution to the dilemma was to set Marius down and run away.50
The abandoned Marius sat for a time and contemplated his sorry state. Then he picked himself up and moved inland, tromping through swampland, still aiming for Minturnae. With night falling, he ran into a peasant and begged shelter for the night. The peasant complied, but then a cavalry patrol rode up and banged on the door. While the frightened peasant confessed everything, Marius tore off his clothes and dove into a nearby swamp. He hid in the murky water with “his eyes and nostrils alone showing above the water.” But the patrol found him anyway. Gaius Marius, six-time consul and Third Founder of Rome, was dragged out of the swamp “naked and covered with mud.” Then he was led into Minturnae by a rope around his neck.51
Though it had only been five days since Sulla had captured Rome, word had already spread that the fugitive Marius was to be killed on sight. But the leaders of Minturnae anguished over the dilemma of what to do with him. After placing Marius under house arrest they brought out a slave and ordered him to go kill Marius. According to the story, this slave was either Gallic or Cimbric and thus likely made a slave by Marius himself. Overawed rather than filled with vengeance, the slave refused. He said, “I cannot kill Gaius Marius,” and ran out of the room.52
Unable to kill Marius, the leaders of Minturnae decided to put him on a boat: “Let him go where he will as an exile, to suffer elsewhere his allotted fate. And let us pray that the gods may not visit us with their displeasure for casting Marius out of our city in poverty and rags.” From the mainland, he sailed to the island of Aenaria, on the north end of the Bay of Naples, where he reunited with the men he had been separated from. Finally able to point themselves toward Africa, they sailed around Sicily, eventually putting in at Eryx on the northeast coast for supplies. But the quaestor in Eryx had been alerted to Marius’s general route and pounced as soon as the Marians put ashore. After a bloody battle on the docks that left sixteen dead, Marius and his remaining men cut loose their ship and put back out to sea.53
Finally, Marius landed on the island of Cercina off the coast of Africa. One of his veteran colonies had been established on the island after the Numidian war and he was welcomed into the homes of the inhabitants. The governor of Africa, meanwhile, had been told Marius was likely heading toward him and now faced the great dilemma of the fugitive Marius. The governor’s duty was clear—he must arrest Marius and kill him. But the province was full of Marius’s veterans. If the governor killed Marius, he was likely signing his own death warrant.54
After a few days, Marius crossed to the mainland and was greeted by an official bearing a decree from the governor: “The governor forbids you, Marius, to set foot in Africa; and if you disobey, he declares that he will uphold the decrees of the senate and treat you as an enemy of Rome.” Dejected, Marius sat brooding. When the official finally asked for Marius’s reply, the old general said, “Tell him, then, that you have seen Gaius Marius a fugitive, seated amid the ruins of Carthage.” Not far from where Scipio Aemilianus had once wept tears of dread foreboding, old Marius now sat and “as he gazed upon Carthage, and Carthage as she beheld Marius, might well have offered consolation the one to
the other.” He did not fight the decree and returned to Cercina.55
MEANWHILE, FAR OFF to the east, Mithridates had completed the envelopment of Anatolia. Because he needed the entire region to be united in opposition to Rome, the Pontic king ordered a blood pact. As spring gave way to summer in 88, Mithridates sent out a letter to every Asian city now under his dominion. As a sign of mutual solidarity the local magistrates were to wait thirteen days after receipt of the letter and then apprehend and murder every Italian in their jurisdiction—including women and children.56
Under the circumstances, there was little anyone could do but comply. No one was going to risk the wrath of Mithridates just to save a few Italians they didn’t really like anyway. So on the thirteenth day after receiving the letter, every city across Asia arrested and systematically executed all resident Italians. Informers were offered a share of confiscated Italian property, leading neighbor to betray neighbor. Each city soon had a pile of bodies. In total, the dead numbered as many as eighty thousand people. Mithridates himself undertook the central sacrifice of this gruesome pact. Bringing out the captured Manius Aquillius, Mithridates ordered molten gold poured down his throat. There was no going back now. The massacre of the Italians was an act of calculated genocide to bind the eastern cities against Rome. Each was now individually complicit in the murder of Romans. It was now either fight and win with Mithridates, or face the vengeance of Rome alone.57
The Storm Before the Storm Page 23
