UP IN THE north, the war continued to go badly for Carbo and his remaining forces. While Sulla led the drive up the Via Latina, Metellus Pius and Pompey charged up the Adriatic coast to secure Pompey’s home territory of Picenum. After inducing the defection of Asiaticus’s legions, the Sullan generals sent an army north into Cisalpine Gaul and another west into Etruria to attack Carbo’s last strongholds.40
But though darkness was closing in, Carbo still led enough legions to hold his own. He made a base on the Adriatic coast and tried to block Pius’s attempt to take Ravenna, but without a proper navy, there was nothing he could do. So he headed back into the interior and soon ran into Sulla himself, who was advancing north after the swing through Rome. Since almost all of the most hard-core anti-Sullan partisans were in Carbo’s army, there would be no defections this time. So instead of another bloodless victory, Sulla had to fight. Far from caving, Carbo’s legions held their own all day, and nightfall ruled the battle a draw. The war was still far from over.41
But now the dynamic of the war had changed. The original plan laid out by Cinna was to harness the full resources of Italy to overwhelm Sulla and his five legions, to make their position untenable in the long run by limiting access to reinforcements. Now the situation was reversed. But by the summer of 82, it was Sulla who could draw on manpower reserves and Carbo who was isolated. When Crassus and Pompey invaded Umbria, Carbo was forced to send detachments to reinforce his bases there. But the reinforcements were ambushed by a detachment of Sulla’s army, costing Carbo some five thousand men—men he could not afford to lose.42
The real downfall of the anti-Sullan forces, though, was the loss of Marius the Younger’s legions in the south. Instead of Sulla feeling pressure from two fronts, his armies could now surround Carbo. Recognizing that the siege of Praeneste had to be lifted, Carbo withdrew back to the Adriatic coast and peeled off vital forces to relieve the city. If they were successful, the balance of the war would shift again. But the first relief army never even made it to Praeneste. They were jumped and destroyed by Pompey en route. The defeated soldiers ran off in every direction. Most never came back.43
With resistance to Sulla collapsing, the Samnites and Lucanians got together and raised one last great army. Having never been defeated in the Social War, these men bore a particular hostility to Sulla. Mostly on their own initiative, they raised tens of thousands of men to relieve the siege of Praeneste. Sulla knew as well as Carbo that everything hinged on relieving the siege, so he positioned his own army near the city. Despite a strong push by the Samnite and Lucanian army, Sulla’s legions beat back the attempt. The siege of Praeneste held.44
Carbo’s legions in the north still numbered as many as forty thousand men, but with a string of failures mounting, one of Carbo’s lieutenants opened secret communications with Sulla. The lieutenant secured a promise of leniency if he could “accomplish anything important.” To accomplish this “anything important,” the lieutenant invited a group of Carbo’s officers to dinner—including the ex-consul Norbanus. Suspecting treachery, Norbanus himself stayed away, but the others accepted the invitation. When they arrived they were all arrested and executed. The traitorous lieutenant then fled to Sulla’s camp while Norbanus himself despaired of victory and boarded a ship that sailed for the Greek city of Rhodes.45
Carbo, meanwhile, continued to send detachments to Praeneste, but they repeatedly failed to reach the city. With Carbo focused on the south, Metellus Pius, Pompey, and Crassus enveloped all of Cisalpine Gaul behind his back. Carbo’s old province was supposed to be a stronghold of last resort—now it was in enemy hands. The war in Italy lost, Carbo determined his only hope was to escape to the provinces and somehow keep the war going from the periphery of the empire. Sertorius was already in Spain, and Norbanus had just fled to Greece. Carbo decided that if he headed to Africa, by way of Sicily, the war might yet be won. Leaving a joint command of officers in charge of the northern army, Carbo fled Italy. Despite all his military justifications for departing, Carbo was now as much concerned about his head as he was winning the war.46
AFTER GETTING WHIPPED in battle by Pompey, the joint command Carbo left behind determined the only thing to be done was abandon the north completely. They would instead swarm on Praeneste and keep the war going in Samnium, a region known for its deep hostility to Sulla. The northern army came down and combined with the independent Samnite and Lucanian forces now led by the Samnite general Telesinus. All these forces joined together and tried one last time to relieve Praeneste in early November 82. But the fortifications blocking all the roads were simply too strong and they were forced to retreat.47
With all reasonable strategies having come up empty, the only thing left to do was launch one last dramatic attempt to salvage the war. Despite the fact that Italy was swarming with Sullan armies, Telesinus noticed there was, at that moment, no army standing between them and Rome. With winter descending, and the armies of Sulla closing in on their position, Telesinus proposed pulling up stakes in the middle of the night and racing to Rome to recapture it before Sulla could stop them. The other officers agreed.48
When dawn broke the next morning, the people of Rome found an army forty thousand strong camped outside the Colline Gate. Newly inspired Sullan partisans raised a force and sallied out in the hope of scattering the enemy in case it was just a bluff to intimidate the city. But it was no bluff. The force that rode out the gates didn’t come back. This triggered a panic inside Rome. With Telesinus’s army mostly composed of Samnites and Lucanians, they would not be merciful if they breached the walls. Indeed, as they stood before the Colline Gate, Telesinus gave his men a fiery speech: “The last day is at hand for the Romans… These wolves that made such ravages upon Italian liberty will never vanish until we have cut down the forest that harbors them.”49
Sulla was not far behind. After discovering the enemy had decamped for Rome the night before, he spent the morning racing to catch up. At about noon, the first of his men arrived at Rome, and once they were all assembled, the battle trumpets sounded. Despite all his success over the past eighteen months, Sulla spent the rest of the day convinced that all was lost. He personally commanded the left wing of his army, which buckled under the weight of the Samnites. In the confusion of battle, Sulla believed Fortuna had finally abandoned him. Scattered messengers even raced back to Praeneste to tell the men there to break off the siege and reinforce Sulla’s battered legions. But what Sulla did not know was that on the other side of the battle, Crassus had smashed the enemy and captured their camps. It was not until hours later that Sulla realized he had actually won the battle—and only then after Crassus sent Sulla a request for more food to feed his victorious troops. When all the dust cleared, the Battle of the Colline Gate was in fact not just a victory, but an utter route: fifty thousand enemies killed and eight thousand taken prisoner. Telesinus was himself found wounded in the field. He was killed and his head hoisted on a spear.50
When Sulla’s legions returned to Praeneste bearing the heads of the Samnite generals, the inhabitants of the city gave up and opened the gates. Marius the Younger tried to escape through an underground tunnel, but when he found all exits guarded he committed suicide rather than accept capture. When Sulla himself arrived at the defeated city, he ordered the inhabitants divided up into three groups: Romans, Samnites, and Praenestians. He said the Romans deserved to die but that he would be merciful in victory and pardon them. The Samnites and Praenestians, on the other hand, were surrounded and massacred. Sulla then allowed the forces that had been prosecuting the siege to brutally sack Praeneste. The head of Marius the Younger was carried back to Rome. After his head was posted in the Forum, it became an object lesson in the folly of youth. The laughing Romans quoted Aristophanes: “First learn to row, before you try to steer.”51
WITH ALL HIS enemies now defeated, Sulla himself returned to Rome. When he arrived the inhabitants of the city found him a very different man than the one who had addressed them a few mon
ths earlier. As the historian Cassius Dio later wrote:
Sulla up to the day that he conquered the Samnites… was believed to be a very superior man both in humaneness and piety… But after this event he changed so much that one would not say his earlier and his later deeds were those of the same person. Thus it would appear that he could not endure good fortune. For he now committed acts which he had censured in other persons while he was still weak, and a great many others still more outrageous. Thus Sulla, as soon as he had conquered the Samnites and thought he had put an end to the war… changed his course, and leaving behind his former self, as it were, outside the wall on the field of battle, proceeded to outdo Cinna and Marius and all their successors combined.52
* Pompey would attempt the same trick with Julius Caesar in 49.
CHAPTER 13
DICTATOR FOR LIFE
The republic is nothing, a mere name without body or form.
JULIUS CAESAR1
IN THE AFTERMATH OF HIS DECISIVE VICTORY AT THE COLLINE Gate, Sulla set up a headquarters on the Campus Martius. Though he was the master of Rome, at the moment he held no official magistracy. He was not a consul, or a praetor, or a legate, or even a quaestor. His only claim to constitutional sovereignty came from his proconsular assignment to the Mithridatic War. That appointment was now five years old and concerned a war that had already been won, but it was all Sulla had. By law, a provincial governor’s sovereignty expired when he crossed the sacred Pomerium and reentered Rome. In the routine course of empire this was a mere formality as men entered and exited office, but for Sulla, it trapped him outside of Rome. If he crossed the city limits, he would lose all his sovereign authority.
Despite ignoring the Pomerium so brazenly during his first march on Rome, Sulla now elected to maintain this strange façade of constitutional scruples. So he called the Senate to assemble at the Temple of Bellona outside the walls rather than cross the sacred boundary. When the Senate assembled, Sulla did not discuss the Civil War, but instead presented an account of his actions in the Mithridatic War. After he listed his accomplishments in the east, he requested the right to enter the city in triumph. It was as if the last two years hadn’t happened.2
But there was a dark backdrop to this charade. Before addressing the Senate, Sulla ordered six thousand Samnite prisoners herded into the adjacent Circus Flaminius. The Samnites had been told they were going to be counted and processed as prisoners of war, but they soon learned the truth. As Sulla began reading his report on the Mithridatic War to the Senate, his men surrounded the six thousand prisoners in the Circus Flaminius and methodically massacred them. Their screams were impossible to ignore inside the Temple of Bellona, and the dumbfounded senators were horrified. But Sulla bade them to please continue to listen to his remarks and “not concern themselves with what was going on outside, for it was only that some criminals were being admonished.”3
When the killing was done, and the disturbed senators departed, Sulla called an open meeting to address the people of Rome. He reiterated that only his enemies need fear his wrath. For the first time, Sulla specifically said the defection of Asiaticus’s army was the dividing line. Those who had exercised wisdom and joined him before that point could expect peace and friendship. Those who had remained under arms after that point were to be liquidated as enemies of the state. But he also pointedly said that the plebs urbana and common soldiers had nothing to fear from him. Sulla scrupulously allowed that these men had merely followed wicked leaders—and it was the leaders, not the followers, who should pay.4
With anxiety running high in the richer quarters of the city, a small deputation of senators approached Sulla and asked for some relief. They said, “We do not ask you to free from punishment those whom you have determined to slay, but to free from suspense those whom you have determined to save.” When Sulla replied that he did not know whom he would save, one senator said, “Let us know whom you intend to punish.” If everyone knew whom Sulla considered his mortal enemy, it would resolve a lot of anxiety on the Palatine Hill. Sulla took their words to heart and spent the night with his closest advisers talking it through. Obviously men who had served magistracies or senior commands in the Cinnan regime would be marked for death, as would any noncombatant senator who had actively collaborated with the regime. The next morning, Sulla posted an inscribed tablet containing eighty names. These named men could be killed on sight and their property confiscated. The Sullan proscriptions had begun.5
THE LIST OF proscribed enemies started as way to free the innocent from fear. When the original list of eighty names went up, it seemed that the surgeon Sulla was going back to work. Yes, it was a seven-fold increase of the twelve men named after the first march on Rome, but a lot had happened since then. Sulla’s enemies had declared him an enemy of the state, seized his property, exiled his family, killed his friends, and forced him to fight a civil war. Eighty seemed a bargain to atone for all that. But though a few of these eighty men scrambled to extract themselves from Rome, most already knew they could expect no mercy. Carbo, Norbanus, and Sertorius were all on the list. They had fled already. Since Marius had escaped Sulla’s wrath by dying, Sulla settled for demolishing Marius’s monuments and digging up the body of his late nemesis and scattering the bones.6
But the next day, the people of Rome awoke to a frightening revision. Overnight Sulla posted in the Forum a new list with 220 additional names. Men who had breathed a sigh of relief the day before now faced death. The following morning another new list went up. It now contained more than five hundred names. Now everyone lived in fear that at any moment they would be proscribed. A man who had been spared from the original lists arrived in the Forum one day to discover his name was now posted. When he discovered he was marked for death, he tried to cover his face and withdraw, but he was spotted, attacked, and killed on the spot. Another man reveled in the early days of the killing and mocked those who faced grim death. His name appeared on the list the next day; he was killed and his property confiscated. In addition to the proscribed themselves, anyone caught harboring a fugitive was also subject to immediate execution. Far from relieving tension, the proscription blanketed Italy under a reign of terror.7
As the proscriptions continued, the promise to limit victims to Sulla’s personal enemies went up in smoke. Sulla not only paid a bounty for every head delivered, but he allowed the murderers a share of the victim’s property. This led to an odious mingling of political proscription and personal profit as men with hard hearts and empty wallets fanned out across the peninsula to get rich killing Sulla’s enemies. With the official proscription list ever changing, a man’s name could be added to the list simply because he was rich and held valuable property. An apolitical Equestrian named Quintus Aurelius found his name posted on the list and lamented that he was, “done for because of my Alban Farm.”8
Out in the countryside of Italy, the list itself acted as a basic guideline with improvisation left to the discretion of senior officers. Among those sent forth was Marcus Licinius Crassus, the hero of the Battle of the Colline Gate. Accompanied by a greedy and brutal young officer named Gaius Verres, Crassus traveled a circuit across Italy taking testimony from locals about anti-Sullans in their midst. The guidelines of the proscription now included any family that had rendered material aid to Sulla’s enemies, so local merchants, bankers, and magistrates were seized and executed. But, as often as not, local pro-Sullan leaders took the opportunity to eliminate personal rivals, naming men who were not enemies of Sulla, but enemies of themselves. Little care or notice was taken why a man was named, but the punishment was always the same: execution and confiscation of property. Crassus and Verres both became experts at this swift and profitable justice. Beginning his infamously sadistic career in real estate, Crassus had a man executed in Bruttium just to seize an attractive estate.9
Aside from Sulla’s formal representatives like Crassus, unofficial murder gangs also now roamed the streets. Professional proscription became a lucrative busin
ess to get into. Joining these gangs was another ambitious youth with a cruel streak named Lucius Sergius Catilina, more commonly known as Catiline. In twenty years, Catiline would stand at the center of another cycle of revolutionary upheaval, but for the moment he was simply a young Sullan partisan on the make. Coveting the property of his brother-in-law, Catiline killed the man to get title to the land. Then he made a run through the Equestrian merchant class, murdering his way to an impressive portfolio. He rounded this out by targeting his other brother-in-law—who just so happened to be Marcus Marius Gratidianus, the nephew of Marius who had introduced the measure to guarantee coins during the Cinnan regime. Falsely accusing Gratidianus of murdering Catulus during the Marian terror, Catiline dragged his brother-in-law to Catulus’s tomb and brutally murdered him.10
With the rules collapsing, the proscription became self-perpetuating as new victims could always be named. One man was killed for lamenting the death of his friend. One of Sulla’s freedmen killed another man to settle a personal score, then conspired to add the victim’s name to the list after the fact. Another freedman was dragged to face Sulla after he was discovered hiding one of the proscribed. To his astonishment, Sulla discovered the man was his old upstairs neighbor from when he lived in the rented apartment before his public career began. Sulla ordered his old neighbor tossed from the Tarpeian Rock.11
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