Download Marius and Sulla

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.