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Marius and Sulla Following the death of Gaius Gracchus, the pattern of Roman politics was set. As groups vied for control, the need for the approval of the crowd became more important. Not all Romans believed that the demagogues were taking the right path. Some became more conservative in their political views and these people looked to the older families and the older ways to guide them in politics. The two groups that competed for control were known as the populares and the optimates. The populares tended to use the Assembly of the Plebs and the Tribunes as vehicles for power. They appealed to the crowd and would attack the Senate in all of their speeches. They used class hatred of the upper classes to their benefit. The optimates on the other hand, tended to use the Senate for political ends. They tended to be conservative and also tended to look on the mob and the lower classes with contempt. Gaius Marius was a populare. He was from a rural background and had no real connections in Rome. He tried to get elected to different offices and won a few, but never was elected to an important one. Of any of the people we will study in Roman history, he is without a doubt both one of the most mediocre AND most important of them. He decided to seek his fame in the military and proved to be a very efficient and intelligent soldier and officer. At this time there was trouble in Numidia. King Jugurtha was trying to get control of Numidia and was being opposed. He was using resentment against the Romans to gain control. Jugurtha proved to be a very effective military commander and defeated the legions many times. Marius believed that he could defeat Jugurtha and stood for the consulship in 107 BC. He promised that he would end the Jugurthine War in one year. He was elected. It took him two, but it made him a hero in Rome. He defeated Jugurtha by bribing a neighboring king, King Bacchus, to lure Jugurtha to Mauritania (Morocco). He was captured there by Marius’ lieutenant, Lucius Cornelia Sulla. Marius returned to Rome a hero and celebrated his triumph. It looked as though Marius would recede into history after his victory. Rome was at peace and their was no need for a military hero. Serendipity enters again. In 104 BC, the Teutones and the Cimbrii (two Germanic tribes) migrated into the northern Po valley and began to attack Roman settlements. This panicked the allies of northern Italy and made the Romans remember the sack of Rome in 390 BC. Now the Romans needed a military man. Marius had left his veterans in Numidia to control the natives, so there was a shortage of manpower to raise legions. To collect men for fighting the Germans, Marius used the roman mob as a source of soldiers. He used the landless headcount, those that had lost their farms to the latifundia and also those that simply didn’t have jobs. Marius had them equipped at state expense and he had them sign up with the promise of land grants after their term of service was up. This was a dangerous reform. In doing this, the soldiers were no longer fighting for their country or Republic, but were fighting for themselves and their generals. Another of Marius’ reforms was to assign soldiers to lifelong units. Each unit had Standards and Banners to build unit pride. This all served to make the army a unit separate from society instead of part of society. What this means is in the day of the yeoman farmer legions, the point of the military campaigns was to defend and benefit the Republic. After the reforms of Marius, the point of the campaigns was the benefit of the army and its’ generals. Marius proved to be a particularly incompetent consul even though he was a great military man. He was taken advantage of by purported friends such as Saturnitus. Eventually he had to quell a rebellion led by his friends. This made him look like a fool and in reality, he was one. Sulla Lucius Cornelius Sulla was an optimates. His family was one of the oldest and most respected in all of Rome. As such, he was the polar opposite of Marius. Sulla believed in rule according to the old ways. He believed in the power of the Senate, which represented the aristocracy. As Marius’ lieutenant, Sulla had captured Jugurtha and felt his whole life that Marius had failed to properly recognize this fact. Relations between Sulla and Marius were civil for a number of years, but they eventually fell out over a fight for power. The issue of enfranchisement of the Allies became an issue. Marcus Livius Drusus, the son of the man who opposed Gaius Gracchus, proposed to enfranchise the allies of the Italian peninsula. This was, of course, demagoguery but Drusus miscalculated. The people of Rome were very jealous about the issue of citizenship and they turned on Drusus. This alienated the outlying regions around Rome, the people that wanted the vote, and led to some groups, like the Samnites, rebelling. This led to the Social War (91 – 88 BC) in which groups that had had a long standing grudge against Rome trying to leave the confederation. This was a bloody and pointless war that could have been easily avoided. What it provided was an opportunity for Marius and Sulla to compete with each other to become the mobs’ military hero. It was eventually put down, but it provided Sulla with an opportunity to seize power. In the meantime, a king of Pontus, Mithridates VI, saw the Social War as an opportunity to try to lead the eastern regions of the Republic in rebellion. He staged the Asiatic Vespers, a single day in which 85,000 men, women and children were executed. This caused the Senate to respond with rage and they voted to dispatch Sulla to the East to get revenge on Mithridates. He left in 88 BC. Marius was now an old man and he was fading from the public eye. He wanted more glory. He got a tribune to submit a bill to the Assembly of the Plebs to assign him command of the war against Mithradates. This violated the tradition of the Senate controlling foreign policy. The Assembly voted Marius the command and an army, completely ignoring the fact that Sulla was already in the field. What happened was the first true civil war of the republic. The two armies spent most of their time fighting each other rather than Mithradates. Sulla responded by sending an army against Rome. When asked why he was marching on Rome, he replied that he was simply freeing Rome from tyrants. Upon his arrival in Rome, Sulla suppressed the Assembly. He butchered enemies of the Senate, declared Marius an outlaw and put a bounty on his head. Marius fled to North Africa. Sulla returned power to the Senate, but he had set a horrible precedent. He had marched an army on Rome to settle a political question. This pattern would be repeated over and over again until the rise of Octavian. Sulla returned to the east to finish Mithridates. When he left, Marius returned and seized control with the help of the co-consul for 86 BC, Cinna. Sulla turned his army around and headed back to Rome with vengeance on his mind. In 82 BC, Sulla defeated the armies of Cinna and Marius and entered Rome. He knew that the only way that Cinna and Marius had been able to seize control was with the help of the Senate, so he decided to fix the situation. He had 8000 prisoners of the war in the east. He placed them in the Circus Maximus (the predecessor of the Colliseum), which was next to the Forum. Sulla entered the Forum and the Senate alone, carrying his gladius hispana or sword. On a signal, the prisoners were executed en masse. The screams could be heard clearly in the Senate. When asked what was going on, he replied “some enemies of the state are getting their just reward”. With this Sulla is declaring himself the state. The next step was a List of Proscription. What this did was compile a death list. Those on the proscription list were to be executed by whomever wanted to do it. A reward was offered for each, a lot of money, and whomever executed the person would also get a portion of their property. Sulla declared open season on these people, all of whom were his political enemies and usually wealthy. After the death of each individual, the government would seize their property and pay the vigilante and keep the rest. This was a bloodbath. Sons killed fathers, fathers killed sons, slaves killed masters and the list grew every day. The victory of Sulla and the proscription lists placed the Republic in its’ coffin. It was up to Pompey and Gaius Julius Caesar to bury it.