XVIII. MARIUS AND SULLA…

XVIII. MARIUS AND SULLA

The personal rivalry of her two most fortunate generals becomes now the main channel of the history of Rome herself. In the year which closed the contest of the republic with her dependent allies (88), Sulla was forty-nine years old, Marius about seventy. The former was enjoying the full breeze of popularity and renown, while the latter, wearied but not sated with accumulated honours, was moodily throwing away the advantages he had earned in his earlier career. From campaign to campaign Sulla, as we have seen, had dogged the steps of the elder warrior, always ready to step in and seize the opportunities which the other cast recklessly in his way. Not that Marius in his exalted station was even from the first indifferent to this incipient rivalry. He was deeply jealous of his subordinate. He felt chagrin at the contrast presented by their respective birth and origin; for Sulla, though needy in point of fortune, was a scion of the illustrious house of the Cornelii, and plumed himself on the distinction and advantage such a lineage conferred. Sulla, moreover, was trained in the accomplishments of Hellenic education, which Marius, conscious of his want of them, vainly affected to despise. Sulla wrote and spoke Greek; his memoirs of his own life became the text-book of the Greek historians of Rome, from whom we principally derive our acquaintance with him. But this varnish of superior culture seems to have failed in softening a rough plebeian nature. Sulla was one of many noble Romans who combined with pretensions to literary taste the love of gross debauchery, and pleasure in the society of mimes and vulgar jesters. He was a coarse sensualist and by his disregard of the nuptial tie offended even the lax morality of his age. His eyes, we are told, were of a pure and piercing blue, and their sinister expression was heightened by the coarseness of his complexion and a countenance disfigured by pimples and blotches, compared by the raillery of the Greeks to a mulberry sprinkled with meal. His manners, except when he unbent in the society of his inferiors, were haughty and morose; nor is there any act of kindliness or generosity recorded of him. The nobles who accepted him as their champion had no personal liking for him. But selfish and ambitious though he was, the aggrandisement of his party and order was with Sulla a species of fanaticism. He despised the isolated ascendency of a Marius, and aspired to rule in Rome at the head of a dominant oligarchy.

Marius had quitted the camp at the most critical moment of the war, and while he buried himself in a distant retreat, Sulla brought the contest to a close, having obtained his election to the consulship for the year 88. The imminence of a new war with Mithridates had hastened the arrangements for the peace, and Sulla was still consul when it became necessary to select a general to command in the East. For this important service both his merits and his position gave Sulla the highest claim; but Marius was mortified and jealous, and cursed his own folly in having at such a moment withdrawn himself from the public eye. He returned impatiently to Rome, and showed himself once more among the young soldiers who trained and exercised themselves in the Field of Mars, running, wrestling, and climbing poles in rivalry with the most vigorous and active among them, to prove that, though old in years, he possessed the energy requisite for command. But the nobles had no wish to gratify the man they feared and distrusted, while they had found one of their own order, on whose fidelity they could rely as implicitly as on his valour. They mocked the clumsy feats of the veteran candidate, and persuaded the people to follow their example, and send their old favourite with jeers to his retreat in Campania.

The enterprise demanded a man of the maturest powers and the highest abilities. Pontus, on the eastern shores of the Euxine Sea, the region from which Mithridates derived his title, constituted but a small part of the dominions over which he ruled. His patrimonial kingdom he inherited from a succession of princes of high Persian extraction, and he was himself the sixth sovereign of his own name. To the north he had extended his sway over the tribes of the Cimbric Bosporus as far as the banks of the Borysthenes or Dnieper, while to the south he had received from his father the sovereignty of Phrygia, which the republic had sold for a sum of money. This country, indeed, the Romans had again wrested from him at an early period of his reign; but he had taken advantage of their dissensions to interfere in the affairs of Cappadocia, to murder, it is said, its sovereign, and at last to place upon its throne an infant child of his own. The armies of Mithridates were recruited from the hardy barbarians of the Caucasus and the Taurus; but his generals were mostly perhaps of Greek extraction, skilled in military science hardly less than the Romans themselves. Nor had he failed to enlist in his service many able citizens of the republic, for the allegiance of the Romans sat but loosely upon them in the provinces, and they were easily swayed from their principles by the seductions of eastern civilisation. His own genius was conspicuous both in war and peace. He was robust in bodily frame, and expert in martial exercises. The story that he had fortified his system against poison by the constant use of antidotes is a mere romance which modern science has pronounced impossible; nor is it much more credible that he could converse, as has been asserted, with the various tribes of which his kingdom was composed, in twenty-five different languages or dialects. Our accounts of the great king of Pontus are derived entirely from Roman sources, and we cannot rely implicitly upon the particular instances of ferocity and perfidy recorded of him. As an Oriental, however, it is but too probable that he maintained himself in power by the usual arts of oriental conquerors, by shameless fraud and remorseless cruelty.

THE FIRST MITHRIDATIC WAR

[Sidenote: [92-88 B.C.]]

In the year 92, the Romans interfered to overturn the appointment Mithridates had made to the throne of Cappadocia. Mithridates did not venture to resist, but he secretly instigated Tigranes, king of Armenia, to invade the country and expel the nominee of the republic. Ariobarzanes fled to Rome, and there obtained assurance of support. Sulla, at this time prætor in Cilicia, was ordered to reinstate him, while the king of Pontus still remained tranquil. But the state of the republic’s affairs in Italy soon emboldened him. The death of a king of Bithynia gave him an opportunity; and he dared to defy the western conquerors by setting up a pretender to the throne of which they claimed the disposal. At the same time he made a descent upon Cappadocia in person, and expelled the luckless Ariobarzanes a second time.

The disasters of the Social War were now carrying dismay and consternation to the heart of the republic. Sulla had been recalled to aid the efforts of her best commanders in her defence. Nevertheless, when the fugitive appeared once more before the senate with entreaties for its support, he did not appeal in vain to the old Roman constancy. An army was despatched to restore him, and once more Mithridates bowed to the storm, and retired from the disputed territory. But the Roman officers in the East were not satisfied with this act of submission. They incited their allies to harass and invade his dominions, and when appealed to by him, refused to check their aggressions. Then at last did Mithridates arm in his own defence. With an immense force he burst upon the territories both of the republic and its allies. He chased Ariobarzanes a third time from his dominions, defeated the king of Bithynia, supported by the legions of Rome, in a great battle on the river Amnias in Paphlagonia, routed the Roman commander in a second engagement, overran Phrygia and Galatia, and proclaimed himself a deliverer to the subjects of the republic in the East. His advent was hailed by the provincials with acclamations. The insolence of the conquerors and the tyranny of their fiscal agents had excited deep discontent among them. On the mainland almost every city joyfully opened its gates to Mithridates, and when in the intoxication of his triumph he issued, as we are told, a decree for the massacre of all the Roman residents in Asia, it was promptly obeyed, if indeed, as we may fairly conjecture, it had not been spontaneously anticipated. Eighty thousand citizens--some say 150 thousand, though even the lesser number is probably a gross exaggeration--are stated to have fallen by this bloody act of retribution.

THE FIRST CIVIL WAR

[Sidenote: [88-87 B.C.]]

Meanwhile the senate was preparing to encounter this formidable assailant with adequate forces, and had pitched, as we have seen, upon Sulla to take the command. Marius was disgusted at the inactivity to which he found himself condemned amidst the derision of the populace. In his retirement at Misenum he meditated revenge. The new citizens of Latium and Italy were already mortified at finding the inefficiency of their votes, confined to a small minority of the tribes, and the slender importance attached to their favour. Their nobles complained of their want of influence, their proletaries of the paltry price their votes commanded. Marius conceived the idea of turning their discontent to his own advantage. Between him and them there was an ancient sympathy, and this it was easy to improve into strict alliance. He offered to repair the injustice of the senate towards them, and to diffuse them among the old tribes of the city, in which their voices would be more powerful than when cooped within the narrow limits of a few separate divisions. Marius recommenced his old game of popular agitation.

Among the tribunes was Sulpicius Galba, whose eloquence and learning and high aristocratic connections had raised him to eminence in the state, but who under the pressure of debt was ready to sell his services to a patron who could hold out to him at least a distant prospect of sharing the spoils of Mithridates. With this guerdon in view, he paused at no excess. Taking Saturninus as his model, he studied only to surpass him in audacity. He marshalled a body of six hundred knights around his person, and gave them the name of his opposition senate. He attacked the consuls in the public assembly with a band of armed men, and seized and massacred the son of Pompeius Rufus. Sulla, the other consul, being pursued, made his escape into the house of Marius, where he was least likely to be sought for, and so baffled the pursuers who ran past him. Marius himself received the credit of concealing and letting him out by another door, but Sulla, we are told, made no acknowledgment of such a service in his memoirs. Marius indeed was for the moment triumphant. Sulpicius, having cleared the Forum of his chief opponents, prevailed on the populace to nominate his patron to the command in Asia; and the new proconsul, while preparing to set out on his mission, despatched two tribunes to receive the army of Sulla. But Sulla, escaping from the Forum, had repaired directly to his camp. He had inflamed the fury of his devoted soldiers by the recital of his double injury. While the officers, men of birth and national feeling, refused to listen to his solicitations, the men responded to them without scruple, and carried his banners towards Rome, killing the emissaries of Marius on the way. Joined by Pompeius Rufus with the ensigns of the consulship, these tumultuous bands resumed the appearance of a regular army; and Sulla could avow himself with some show of legality the defender of the state and avenger of the insults she had sustained in the person of her chief magistrates.

This daring movement was entirely unexpected. Six legions advanced upon the city, and the men who had just seized the government were totally unprovided with arms to resist them. Marius sent two prætors to meet the enemy, and command them to desist; but the soldiers neither listened to them, nor paused in their march. They were stripped of their togas, their fasces were broken, and themselves ordered to return with every mark of indignity. Such violence betokened worse to follow. The citizens were dismayed, and without regard either to Marius or Sulpicius, sent envoys to entreat the advancing generals to halt, while they promised to do full justice to their cause by legal and peaceful measures. Sulla himself, it is said, had faltered in his daring design; but he was reassured by a dream, in which a strange divinity, whom the Romans had learned to worship in the East, placed a thunderbolt in his hand, and directed him to launch it against his enemies. He advanced, and Marius, having vainly attempted to raise troops to oppose him, fled with precipitation. As he entered the city tiles and stones were hurled on his soldiers from the house-tops; but a threat of burning the city soon reduced every opponent to submission. Sulla had conquered Rome.[89]

But the conqueror was moderate in the use of his victory. He caused his troops to observe the strictest discipline, and limited his personal vengeance to exacting the death of twelve of his enemies. Sulpicius was betrayed by one of his own slaves, and put to the sword. Sulla enfranchised the betrayer for his obedience to the edict, and then cast him from the Tarpeian Rock for his treachery to his master. Marius himself escaped out of the city, while a price was set upon his head, and upon that of his son also. On the morrow Sulla summoned the people to assemble in the Forum. He explained to them that factious foes had compelled him to resort to force; but having once taken up arms he was determined not to lay them down till he had secured the power of the insulted nobles against the future aggressions of the tribunes. Sulpicius, during his brief tenure of power, had recalled the exiles of the Varian law, and increased the influence of the Italians in the comitia. Sulla abrogated all these enactments, and to insure the permanence of his own, repealed the solemn statute which gave the force of law to the plebiscita, or resolutions of the people. The violence of Marius drove his rival to the opposite extreme, and established a counter-revolution upon the ruins of tribunician ambition. But Sulla was not yet prepared to enforce an oligarchical tyranny against every constitutional prescription. He left the people the free exercise of their suffrages, and professed himself not dissatisfied with their boldness in rejecting a nephew of his own as a candidate for the consulship.

Cn. Octavius, a firm but independent supporter of the senate, obtained one place; but the people gave him for a colleague L. Cornelius Cinna, well known as a partisan of Marius. Sulla pretended, perhaps, to guide them in this latter choice; he claimed the right of binding the new consul to favour his own measures by a solemn vow. At his direction Cinna ascended the Capitol, with a stone in his hand, which, when he had taken the oath, he hurled to the ground, imprecating upon himself that he might be cast as violently out of the city, if he failed to observe it. The Romans were deeply impressed by such religious formalities; and the peculiar horror with which they regarded Cinna’s later atrocities was coloured, perhaps, by indignation at his perjury. For, no sooner had he entered upon his office than he proceeded at once to disturb the settlement he had pledged himself to respect, and caused a process to be instituted against Sulla himself. But Sulla was eager to commence operations against Mithridates, and neither stayed to meet the charge nor to punish the accuser. The victory he anticipated would be a sufficient answer to the people, and give him the means of completing the policy of which he had hitherto laid only the foundations.

Meanwhile Marius was flying for his life, and hiding the head upon which a price had been set. His romantic adventures are narrated with great animation by his biographer Plutarch. On quitting Rome he was separated in the darkness of the night from the partisans who aided his escape. Retiring to a farm he possessed at Solonium he despatched his son to get provisions from a kinsman in the neighbourhood; but during his absence, fearful of a surprise, or suspicious, perhaps, of his nearest friends, he abandoned this retreat and hurried to Ostia, where he knew that a vessel was in waiting for him. The son reached the place to which he had been sent, but the house was immediately invested by the enemy’s scouts, and he was with difficulty saved from their pursuit, being conveyed in a wagon, hidden under a load of beans, to the house of his wife in Rome. The next night he made his way to the sea, and embarking in a vessel bound for Libya, arrived there in safety.

The elder Marius was wafted along the coast of Italy by a favourable wind, but fearing to fall into the hands of Geminius, a personal enemy, one of the chief people of Tarracina, he charged the mariners to avoid touching at that place. Unfortunately the wind changed, and a strong gale setting in shore, they were unable to keep out at sea. The old man himself, alarmed at his danger, and tormented with sea-sickness, bade them run to land, which they reached near Circeii. They were now also in want of provisions, in search of which they descended from the bark, and wandered along the shore. Some herdsmen to whom they applied, but who had nothing to give them, recognised Marius, and warned him that horsemen had been just seen riding about in quest of him. Weary and famishing, his life at the mercy of companions hardly less harassed than himself, he turned from the road and plunged into a deep forest, where he passed the night in extreme suffering. The next day, compelled by hunger, and wishing to make use of his remaining strength before he was completely exhausted, he once more sought the highways in quest of some hospitable retreat. He kept up his spirits and those of his followers by repeating to them the prodigies which had foretold his greatness in youth, and assured them that he was destined to enjoy the highest magistracy yet a seventh time. He had arrived within two or three miles of Minturnæ, when they perceived a troop of horse advancing towards them, and at the same moment two barks sailing along the coast. Running down to the sea as fast as their strength would allow, and casting themselves into the water, they swam towards the vessels. Marius, corpulent and heavy, and quite overcome with fatigue, was carried or hurried along by the exertions of his slaves, and with difficulty lifted on board, while the horsemen, following closely in pursuit, shouted to the sailors to abandon him in the waves. The sailors touched with pity at first refused to surrender him, and the horsemen rode off in anger; but they presently changed their minds, brought their bark to shore, and induced Marius to quit it, and take food and rest on land, while they waited, as they pretended, for the evening breeze. As soon as he was lifted out of the vessel and laid on the grass his bearers rejoined the ship; the sails were hoisted, and he found himself betrayed and abandoned. For some time he lay in despair; at last he rose, and made another effort to save himself.

The coast near the mouth of the Liris, at which he had been put on shore, was a desolate swamp, through which the wretched Marius waded with pain and difficulty, till he reached an old man’s lonely cottage. Falling at his feet he begged him to save a man who, if he escaped from his present dangers, would reward him beyond all his hopes. The man, who either knew Marius of old, or perceived in the expression of his countenance the greatness of his rank, offered him shelter in his hut, if shelter was all he needed, but promised to conceal him in the marshes, if he was flying from the pursuit of enemies. With the old man’s assistance Marius hid himself in a hole by the river’s side, and covered himself with reeds and sedge.

But Geminius of Tarracina was in hot pursuit. After ransacking every place of refuge far and near, he reached the hut in the morass, and loudly questioned the occupant. Marius, who overheard what was passing, seized with a paroxysm of terror, drew himself out of his hiding-place, and buried himself up to the chin in the water. In this position he was discovered, dragged out, and led naked to Minturnæ. The magistrates here and elsewhere had received orders to make search for the fugitive, and to put him to death when taken. The decurions of Minturnæ met to deliberate, and resolved to execute the sentence and claim the reward. But none of their citizens would undertake the ungracious office. Marius was placed in custody, in a private house; a Cimbrian slave, a captive of Vercellæ, was sent with a sword to despatch him. Marius was crouching in the darkest corner of the chamber, and the man, so ran the legend, declared that a bright flame glared from his eyes, and a voice issued from the gloom, “Wretch, dare you to slay Caius Marius?” The barbarian immediately took to flight, and throwing his sword down rushed through the door, exclaiming, “I cannot kill Caius Marius.” The Minturnians were shocked and penetrated with remorse: “Let him go,” they said, “where he pleases, as an exile, and suffer in some other place whatever fate is reserved for him. And let us pray that the gods visit us not with their anger, for ejecting Marius from our city in poverty and rags.” Thereupon all the chief people of the place presented themselves before him in a body, and offered to conduct him with honour to the seacoast, furnishing him at the same time with everything requisite for his comfort. There was need of expedition, and their nearest way lay through the sacred grove of Marica, into which whatever was once carried was never permitted to be again carried out. But when an old man exclaimed that no road was impassable to Marius, his voice was hailed as a divine monition, and superstition herself fell before the champion of Italy.

Marius thus effected his escape from his nearest pursuers. He set sail for Africa, but landing for water on the coast of Sicily, was very nearly taken and slain. On the shores of Africa he hoped to find allies among the chieftains of Numidia, with whom he had formed relations of amity at the period of his war against Jugurtha. He landed to await the result of his negotiations. While he sat in silent meditation among the ruins of Carthage, himself a livelier image of ruin hardly less appalling, the Roman governor of the province sent to warn him to be gone. The Numidians could not venture to shelter him, and he was compelled to take refuge on an island off the coast, where he continued for a time unmolested.

While the conqueror of the Cimbrians was thus flying before the face of his own countrymen, and his triumphant rival prosecuting the war against Mithridates in the East, affairs were hurrying on to a new and unexpected revolution at Rome. The Samnites had never entirely laid down their arms at the general pacification of Italy; they rose under their leader, Pontius Telesinus, excited fresh movements among the slaves and bandits in the south of the peninsula, and at one moment threatened a descent upon Sicily. Metellus Pius, to whom the repression of this new Social War was entrusted, was unable to bring the enemy to a decisive engagement, but continued to make head against them with various alternations of success. The army of the north was still arrayed in Picenum, under the banners of Pompeius Strabo, who showed no disposition to relinquish his command at the conclusion of hostilities in that quarter. The senate despatched the late consul Pompeius Rufus to receive its legions from his hands. But it had no means of satisfying the soldiers’ demands for pay or largesses, and its emissary met with a cold reception from these disappointed mercenaries. Their discontent soon broke out in open mutiny, instigated, as has been generally suspected, by Pompeius Strabo himself. Rufus was massacred before the altar at which he was sacrificing. Strabo presently appeared among the mutineers, and restored order, without instituting inquiry or inflicting punishment. Such were the dispositions of the army and the general upon whom Rome was now compelled to rely, both for the pacification of Italy and the maintenance of the established government.

As soon as Sulla had withdrawn to Asia, Cinna made no further concealment of his designs. Avowing himself the restorer of the late order of things, he demanded the recall of the exiles of his party, and the restoration of the laws of Sulpicius, that is to say, the full and final emancipation of Italy. In the actual temper of the public mind, such demands could not fail to produce a sedition in the Forum. Such, in fact, was the result. A disturbance ensued, and blood was shed. But Cinna had miscalculated his strength. The new citizens, upon whose efforts he relied, were few in number. The senate, his colleague Octavius, and even a majority of the tribunes of the plebs, together with the mass of the original citizens, united themselves against him. They flew to arms, and drove his partisans out of the city. Cinna, we may suppose, counted in this abortive attempt upon the support of Pompeius Strabo, while that general, reserved and perhaps undecided, contented himself with observing it from a distance, and leaving the two factions to weaken and exhaust each other.

The victorious party proceeded to deprive Cinna of the consulship, and elected L. Merula, a flamen of Jupiter, a man respectable for his birth and reputed integrity, in his room. Cinna, proscribed and outlawed, betook himself to the new citizens of Campania, and declaimed to them on the persecution to which he was exposed for his devotion to their interests. The Campanians discovered more zeal for the defence of their newly acquired rights than they had evinced in the struggle to obtain them. Cinna succeeded in collecting an armed following. Many exiles of his party flocked to his standard, and among them was Q. Sertorius, an officer of distinction. Nor did he scruple to unite himself with the Samnites and Lucanians, the avowed enemies of the republic. Clothed in black, with disordered hair and beard, he ventured to enter the camp of the Roman general commanding in Campania, and moved the soldiers to compassion at the sight of a consul kneeling to them in supplication. They insisted on placing themselves under his orders. At the head of a Roman army he demanded the restitution of his rights, and vowed the destruction of his opponents.

Wandering from coast to coast, and threading the ambuscades of a thousand enemies, Marius was not unapprised of the events that were passing. He found means of communicating with his friends, and when he suddenly threw himself on the coast of Etruria, he was joined by several adherents with a band of five hundred fugitive slaves. Etruria was crowded, as we have seen, with a population of serfs, whose native masters kept them in a state of degradation and misery. Unconscious of the political questions in agitation, these men flocked to the adventurer’s banner as the symbol of vengeance and plunder. While Marius advanced upon the city from the west, Cinna was slowly approaching in the opposite direction.

At the same time Sertorius and Carbo threatened her from other quarters, and Rome found herself encircled by four armies of her own rebellious citizens, backed by the resources of the Samnite insurrection. To resist these accumulating dangers, the senate hastily recalled Metellus, bidding him make peace with the Samnites on any terms. But the conditions they exacted in the insolence of this triumph--admission to the franchise, compensation for their losses, the surrender without return or reciprocity of their fugitive slaves--were intolerable to the pride of the Roman general. Metellus ventured to disobey his orders, and broke off the negotiation. He left a small detachment under his lieutenant Plautius to check the advance of the enemy, while he hastened in person to Rome. Plautius was speedily overpowered, and the rebel Romans were reinforced by the whole strength of the Samnite confederacy, which devoted Rome itself to destruction. There can be no peace, they exclaimed, for Italy until the forest shall be extirpated in which the Roman wolves have made themselves a den. The senate was reduced to extremity. Envoys were despatched to the quarters of Pompeius Strabo in Picenum; his command was acknowledged, his services were invoked, his return to the defence of the city earnestly entreated. At this moment Strabo might feel himself the arbiter of his country’s destinies; but he still vacillated as to his course, and continued apparently to treat with both parties, until the advancing successes of the Marians diminished the value of his adhesion.

Treason was at work within the city. For a moment Rome was opened to Marius, and he well-nigh succeeded in effecting his entrance by a gate on the side of the Janiculum, from which he was repulsed after a sharp engagement. Mutiny broke out in Strabo’s camp, which he had advanced almost to the walls. His soldiers seem to have personally detested him; a conspiracy was formed against his life, and defeated only by the devotion of his son, who threw himself on the ground and declared that the mutineers should pass over his body before they reached the object of their fury. The young Pompey was already beloved by the soldiers, and this spirited defiance saved the life of the father. But famine and pestilence quickly followed. The populace of the city were swept off in great numbers, nor were the soldiers, on either side, exempt from the contagion. The consuls, abandoning the unwholesome districts round the walls, withdrew their legions to the Alban mount. Strabo himself fell a victim to the disease, or, as some accounts relate, was killed by lightning. It is not improbable that he was actually assassinated.

This last blow paralysed the resistance of the senate. A first deputation was sent to Cinna, to arrange terms of accommodation. When these were refused, a second was only charged to solicit an amnesty. Cinna received it seated in his curule chair, with the ensigns of the consular office which he claimed to bear. Marius stood by his side, squalid and unshorn, and clothed in the black rags of an exile and an outlaw, and his gloomy silence interpreted, in the worst sense, the ambiguous reply which Cinna vouchsafed the deputation. But no further time was allowed for parley. The senate hastened to invite her conquerors within the walls.

Then, at last, Marius opened his mouth with bitter words: “An exile,” he exclaimed, “must not enter the city.” The restoration of Cinna to his consulship, of his associate to his dignities and privileges, may have saved Rome from being delivered to the Samnites for destruction; but the victorious generals had still their own soldiers to satisfy, and they did not shrink from surrendering the city to plunder and massacre. They had pledged their words for the safety of the consul Octavius, and the augurs whom he had consulted had ventured to assure him of his security. Fortified by these assurances he had repelled the entreaties of his friends to effect his escape, and had declared that as consul he would never desert his country. He had betaken himself with a small retinue to the Janiculum, and there seated himself in his curule chair, with the ensigns of his office around him. Here he soon learned that neither the dignity of his office nor the promises of the victors would command respect. But he refused to rise from his place, and when a band of assassins approached him, calmly offered himself to the sword.[90] His head was severed from his body, and carried to Cinna, by whose order it was suspended before the rostra. This, it is said, was the first instance of the public exhibition of these horrid trophies of civil war, and the custom, which became but too frequent in the subsequent contests of the Roman factions, was thus inaugurated in the person of the highest magistrate of the city. As the massacre proceeded, the bodies of the knights and meaner citizens were cast out for burial, but the mangled heads of the senators were reserved for exhibition in the Forum. The thirst for vengeance or plunder was succeeded by a savage delight in the horrors which accompanied it, and the populace itself, debauched and degraded, learned to gloat upon the blood of the victims. In the list of slain are included many of the noblest names of Rome. P. Crassus, who had been both consul and censor, either slew himself or was killed by the assassins. M. Antonius, celebrated at the time, and long afterwards remembered as one of the greatest of Roman orators, was murdered by the leader of a body of soldiers, whom he had almost moved by his eloquence to spare him. Two of the Julii, kinsmen of Julius Cæsar, the future dictator, suffered. Some were caught and murdered in the act of flying; others, who ventured to throw themselves upon the mercy of Marius, were coldly repulsed and cruelly slaughtered.

Marius himself seldom condescended to answer their entreaties; but his followers were instructed to spare those only to whom he held out his hand to kiss. The swords of the hired assassins were directed, in the first instance, against the adherents of Sulla and the aristocratic faction, the special objects of the conqueror’s vengeance; but their numbers were speedily swelled by slaves and Italians, who sacrificed men of every party to their indiscriminate fury.

For a few days Cinna and Marius allowed these ruffians to riot unchecked. At last they deemed it necessary to arrest their career of systematic murder and pillage. Sertorius was charged with the task of repressing them with a military force, and the assassins themselves were made to feel the edge of the sword they had so long wielded with impunity. But the new rulers of the city continued to destroy by the forms of judicial process the victims who had escaped tumultuary violence. Cinna could not pardon the illustrious Merula the crime of having succeeded to the consulship of which he had been himself deprived. The flamen of Jupiter opened his own veins, after a solemn declaration in writing that he had previously laid aside his tufted cap of office, that he might not involve his country in the guilt of sacrilege. Catulus, the noble colleague of Marius in the last battle against the Cimbri, threw himself on his knees, and vainly begged for life. “You must die,” was the only response vouchsafed him; and he was compelled to suffocate himself with charcoal in a newly plastered chamber.

[Sidenote: [87-86 B.C.]]

Cinna and Marius now began to reorganise the government of the state. Not deigning even to summon the assembly of the tribes, they nominated themselves by their own authority to the highest magistracy. Marius became consul for the seventh time. At the age of seventy, with his health broken and strength failing, which had borne him through so many fatigues, he reached the summit of his aspirations and accomplished the prediction, the assurance of which had nerved his courage in such dire vicissitudes. Nevertheless, while Cinna reserved for himself the administration of affairs in Italy, the old general was destined to resume the command of the legions, and wrest from Sulla the conduct of the war against Mithridates.

Sulla, indeed, it was already reported, had driven the king of Pontus to sue for peace, and was about to return and measure himself once more with the usurpers of the commonwealth. Marius, upon whom the auguries of his young rival’s ultimate success had made no less impression than the prognostications of his own triumphs, shuddered at the approaching contest, in which he felt himself doomed to be worsted. Harassed by terrific dreams, or worn out by nightly watchings, he sought escape from his own thoughts by constant intoxication.[91] Wearied with life, he could hardly wish to protract the existence which had become so intolerable a burden to him. One evening, it was related, while walking with some friends after supper, he fell to talking of the incidents of his life, beginning with his boyhood; and after enumerating his triumphs and his perils, no man of sense, he said, ought to trust fortune again after such alternations; upon which he took leave of his friends, and keeping his bed for seven days successively, thus died. We are tempted to suspect that, impelled by disgust and despair, he shortened his last days by suicide. The deceased consul’s obsequies were celebrated with pomp, and accompanied, if we may believe the story told us, with a frightful ceremony. In ancient times, according to tradition, it had been customary to slaughter slaves or captives on the tomb of the departed hero; but if any such usage had actually prevailed among the Romans, it had been long softened at least into an exhibition of gladiatorial combats.

On this occasion, however, the tribune Flavius Fimbria determined to immolate a noble victim to the manes of the dead. He therefore caused the venerable Mucius Scævola, the chief of Roman jurists, to be led before the pyre, and bade the sacrificer plunge a sword into his bosom. The wounded old man was allowed to be carried off and tended by his friends, under whose care he recovered. But when Fimbria heard that he still lived, he brought him to the bar of judgment, and being asked what charge he had against him, coldly replied, “Having escaped with life.” The story thus told by Valerius Maximus is founded, perhaps, on a misapprehension of a passage in Cicero, who only says that Fimbria required Scævola to be wounded.[92] If the tribune had intended to make a sacrifice, he would hardly have suffered it to remain incomplete. Only eleven years before, human sacrifices had been abolished by a decree of the senate. But in many expiatory and lustral rites, the shedding of a drop of blood was retained as a type of the ancient usage with which it has been frequently confounded. It may be added, that the historians have passed over this shocking occurrence in total silence; and the actual death of Scævola will be related at a later period.[b]

IHNE’S ESTIMATE OF MARIUS

“The judgment pronounced on Marius by posterity is not, like that on many other eminent men, wavering and contradictory. He is not one of those who to some have appeared heroes, to others malefactors, nor has he had to wait for ages, like Tiberius, before his true character became known. Disregarding the conscious misrepresentations of his personal enemies, we may say that he has always been taken for a good specimen of the genuine old Roman, uniting in his person in an exceptional degree the virtues and the faults of the rude illiterate peasant and the intrepid soldier. No one has ever ventured to deny that by his eminent military ability he rendered essential service to his country. Nobody has doubted his austere virtues, his simplicity and honesty, qualities by which, no less than by his genius for war, he gained for himself the veneration of the people. On the other hand, it is universally admitted that as a politician he was incompetent, and that he was only a tool in the hands of those with whom he acted. But morbid ambition and revengeful passion urged him at last to deeds which make it doubtful whether it would not have been better for Rome if he had never been born. He has, therefore, neither deserved nor obtained unmixed admiration; but as his darkest deeds were committed in moments when he was half mad from sufferings and indignities he had endured, and when perhaps he hardly knew what he was doing, he may, in the opinion of humane judges, gain by comparison with Sulla, who acted from reflection and in cool blood when he consigned thousands to death and enacted the horrid spectacle of the proscriptions.”[e]

Cinna now chose for his colleague Valerius Flaccus, the same who, as consul fourteen years before, had aided Marius to crush the conspiracy of Saturninus; an appointment which seems to betoken considerable respect for the usages of the state; for Flaccus, though formerly both consul and censor, had taken much less part in the recent contest than either Carbo or Sertorius, whose inferior rank counterbalanced their higher services. Cinna was now actively engaged in fulfilling his pledges to his allies. Censors were elected on purpose to effect the complete emancipation of Italy by suppressing the ten Italian tribes, and enrolling the new citizens of the Plautian law among the thirty-five tribes of the city. Whether this inscription was based upon a principle of numerical equalisation, or of geographical distribution, or whether it was attempted to combine the two, we have, perhaps, no means of determining; but thus the last remaining distinction between the Romans and Italians was effaced, for as many at least of the latter class as chose to avail themselves of the proffered privilege. The Samnites, Lucanians, and others still scorned to accept it. Another measure, undertaken by Flaccus, was more delicate, and more generally interesting. The consul ventured to enact an adjustment of debts, and relieve the accumulating distress of the poorer citizens, by enabling all obligations to be cancelled by the payment of one-fourth of the principal. He exchanged, as the Romans phrased it, silver for coppers; for the copper coin called the as was made equivalent for the purpose to the silver sesterce, which at this time was of four times its intrinsic value. After so long a series of wars and revolutions, and the fatal changes which had long been operating in the possession of property, it is possible that this measure was adopted as a necessary expedient. But whatever the urgency of the occasion may have been, the stroke was of fearful augury for the future, and did not fail to kindle criminal hopes in the dissolute and discontended for more than one succeeding generation. Having accomplished this important measure, Flaccus placed himself at the head of the legions destined for the Pontic War, and proceeded to the East to watch the movements of Sulla.

While yet unchecked by the best troops and most accomplished generals of the republic, Mithridates had obtained the most astounding successes. The kingdoms of Bithynia and Cappadocia had fallen without resistance into his hands. The Roman province of Asia had succumbed, and even received its new master with acclamations. From thence he had crossed the Ægean Sea, accepting the submission of its rich and flourishing islands, and his admiral Archelaus had captured Athens itself, with its harbour in the Piræus and all its naval stores and equipments. The Greek cities were, for the most part, favourably disposed towards the liberator, who promised to break the rod of proconsular oppression. It was impossible to foresee how far the contagion of provincial disaffection might spread; and when Sulla landed on the eastern shores of the Adriatic, his task had swelled to the reconquest of one hemisphere of the empire.

SULLA IN GREECE

Nor had he now, like his predecessors in the career of eastern conquest, the undivided resources of the commonwealth to sustain him. Sulla was conscious that he was only the general of a party which, though for the moment triumphant, was, he well knew, insecure, and every express that arrived to him from Rome brought him alarming accounts of the fears and perils of the friends he had left behind him. He reached Greece at the commencement of the year 87 with a force of five legions, which he had no means of recruiting, and he might apprehend that in the course of another year he would be superseded by another commander, the nominee, perhaps, of his enemies. He had not a moment to lose. Instead of checking the licentiousness of his soldiers, and drawing tighter the long relaxed bands of discipline, which must have been a work of time and leisure, he was compelled to stimulate their ardour and secure their obedience by additional indulgence and license more complete. The course of his march he allowed to be marked by plunder, devastation, and sacrilege. He traversed Greece and Asia to gorge his men with booty before he turned their arms against the invader from the East. The sacred treasures of the temples at Epidaurus, Ephesus, and Olympia fell successively into his hands. When the spirits of his soldiers were elated to the utmost, he led them under the walls of Athens, which he speedily reduced, and devoted to pillage. In Bœotia he encountered the enemy in the open field, and routed them in the great battle of Chæronea (86). Flaccus was now advancing upon his steps, and summoning him to surrender his command to his legitimate successor.

[Sidenote: [86-84 B.C.]]

He was about to turn boldly upon the intruders, confident of his soldiers’ devotion, when Mithridates placed a second army within his reach. A second great battle at Orchomenos broke the power of the king of Pontus, reducing him to act on the defensive beyond the waters of the Ægean. Greece remained as a clear stage for the Roman armies to contend upon. At the close of the year 86 Sulla had taken up his quarters in Thessaly, while Flaccus, not venturing to engage him, had moved in a lateral direction, and watched him from the neighbourhood of Byzantium. Among the new consul’s officers was Flavius Fimbria, the tribune whose ferocity has already been signalised. Beloved by the soldiers whose licentiousness he encouraged, while his general strove fruitlessly to repress it, Fimbria conceived the idea of making himself independent of the government at home, and acting the part of a Strabo or a Sulla himself. Flaccus was assassinated in his camp, and Fimbria, who may be supposed to have instigated the deed, was proclaimed general in his room by the soldiers themselves. But neither they nor their new leader chose to measure themselves with the rival imperator in Thessaly. Passing over into Asia (85) they ravaged every fertile plain and wealthy city, attacked the forces of Mithridates wherever they could reach them, and defeated a son of the great king himself. Mithridates was driven out of Pergamus, and reduced to shelter himself in Pitane, where he must have been captured, had not Lucullus, a lieutenant of Sulla, removed the fleet with which he co-operated to a distance, in order to prevent the upstart Fimbria from snatching the honour of such a triumph from his own superior. Mithridates escaped by sea, and Sulla opened negotiations with him. Upon his surrendering Bithynia to Nicomedes, and Cappadocia to Ariobarzanes, renouncing his pretensions to the province of Asia, and delivering up a large portion of his fleets and treasures, he was solemnly admitted to the alliance and amity of Rome. Sulla thus confined the enemy of the republic to the limits of his dominions, such as they existed before the war; but, doubtless, had his own resources been more abundant and his position more secure, he would not have been content with a barren victory, nor have returned from the frontiers of the empire without an effort to advance them.

Sulla had entered Asia to conduct his negotiations at the sword’s point. As soon as they were concluded he turned abruptly upon Fimbria. The two Roman armies met near Thyatira; but Fimbria’s soldiers, plied with gold, rapidly deserted, and even those who still kept to their standards, refused to engage their brethren in the field. Having failed in an attempt to procure his rival’s assassination, Fimbria found himself deprived of his last resource. In this extremity Sulla promised him his life, on condition that he should resign his command, and withdraw from Asia. When Rutilius, on the part of his general, offered him a safe conduct to retire by sea, he replied proudly that he knew a shorter and a better way, and pierced himself with his sword.

Fimbria might well despair when he saw the forces with which his own victory over Mithridates had armed the champion of the party he had outraged. Sulla could leave in the East the legions which his rivals had brought to share or contest his laurels, while he took himself the route of Italy with a force of thirty thousand veterans, who had served three years under his standard, and had learned in a rapid career of glory and plunder to regard him as the founder and the pledge of their fortunes. The treasures of Mithridates, swelled by the ransom of an hundred Greek and Asiatic cities, furnished him with ample means for securing their fidelity. The vast fleets of Asia, delivered into his hands, might be used to abridge the long march through Thrace and Macedonia. The news of the surrender and death of Fimbria was accompanied by the announcement of Sulla’s speedy return; and the moderation he had professed while his successes were still incomplete was already exchanged for bitter complaints of the injuries he had received, the confiscation of his estates, the banishment of his family, the proscription of his own person, and persecution of his party. But his foes and those of the republic, whom he classed together, were now, he declared, about to suffer due chastisement; in proclaiming an amnesty for honest men of all parties, he announced that he would respect the privileges of the Italians, and leave them no excuse for devoting themselves to his adversaries.

THE RETURN OF SULLA; AND THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

[Sidenote: [84-83 B.C.]]

The senate, no less than the populace, was terrified by this manifesto. So many of the Marian party had become incorporated among the thinned ranks of the ancient aristocracy, that the counter-revolution now impending seemed not only to menace the safety of the particular faction which had aspired to rule the state, but to threaten the great mass of the nobility with indiscriminate massacre. Both in Rome and throughout the states of the peninsula, the vicissitudes of war and conflicts of special interests had gone far to efface the old distinctions of parties, and both Cinna and Sulla relied rather upon personal than political attachments. The senate, as an order in the state, could only pretend to mediate between rival chieftains.

It now ventured to send a deputation to mollify the ferocity of the conqueror; on the other hand, it forbade the consuls to make preparations for their own defence. Cinna and Carbo, who had now succeeded to Flaccus, disregarded this feeble interference. They made new levies throughout Italy, and solicited the Samnites and Lucanians to wreak their vengeance upon Rome by arming once more against her victorious champion. The Italians promised their succours; but the troops they levied for the purpose could not be induced to embark, and the expedition which Cinna rashly undertook to lead against Sulla in the East was reluctantly abandoned. Cinna himself was soon afterwards massacred in his camp by his own mutinous soldiers. Carbo took advantage of the disturbed state of affairs to withhold the election of another colleague, and remained through the rest of the year 84 in sole occupation of the consulship. He strengthened himself by a further extension of the franchise, and enrolled large numbers of emancipated slaves in the thirty-five tribes of the city. His brief usurpation was a career of unbridled violence. He hurled his enemies from the Tarpeian Rock and expelled the tribunes from the city. He caused the terrified senate to decree that all the legions then in arms should be disbanded, hoping to fix upon Sulla a charge of disloyalty in refusing, as he of course expected, obedience to the command. Sulla had, by this time, assembled his troops at Dyrrhachium, and this decree was the signal for his crossing the sea with five legions of veterans. The invader was aware that he should have armies far more numerous than his own to encounter, but these he knew were for the most part new levies; while the old soldiers they had among them were dispersed in petty detachments and under unknown leaders: nor did he apprehend that any confidence or concert would exist among the host of generals, Carbo himself, the young Marius, Cælius, Carrinas, Brutus, Sertorius, and others, under whom they were arrayed. The Italians ranged themselves on the side of Carbo and Marius, but many tribes were at least lukewarm in the cause, the promises and bribes which Sulla could administer might be expected to find their way into the camp of the enemy. The north of Italy, the Cisalpines, the Picentines, and the Marsians were jealous of the Samnite confederacy in the south; and even the Samnites, in their implacable hostility to the Roman power, seem to have negotiated secretly with the assailant, in whom they, for their part, recognised only the enemy of the republic. Sulla’s address was equal to his valour. He was enabled to penetrate into the heart of Italy without striking a blow. One by one the most illustrious officers of the government brought over their troops to him. Metellus Pius raised his standard in Liguria; the young Pompey, already the idol of his own soldiery, levied three legions for him in Picenum, and defeated the Marians in various encounters. Crassus, the son of a victim of the late proscriptions, who had been compelled to conceal himself for the last eight months in a cave, Cethegus, Dolabella, and M. Lucullus, brother to Sulla’s lieutenant in Asia, gave to his cause the lustre of their noble names. The persecution which the young Marius presently renewed against the most distinguished senators, effected the complete identification of the interests of Sulla with those of the highest aristocracy of the city.

[Sidenote: [83-82 B.C.]]

At this crisis, an event, the origin or authors of which were never discovered, threw the city into consternation. On the sixth of July 83, the Capitol was consumed by fire; even the Sibylline volumes, stored away in its most secret recesses, were devoured by the flames. This destruction of the sanctuary of the republic, the site of its wealthiest and most august temples, and of the oracles which guided the most solemn decisions of the senate, seemed to many an announcement of a great change in the destinies of the state. It was the closing of the first volume of the fortunes of Rome.

From Apulia, Sulla had passed, as we have seen, without an obstacle into Campania. He was there met by the consul Norbanus, whom he defeated in the neighbourhood of Capua. Scipio, the other consul, commanded a second force at Teanum, a few leagues in the rear of his colleague. Sulla demanded a truce and employed the interval in tampering with the fidelity of the soldiers opposed to him, who speedily passed under his colours. At the commencement of the year 82, Carbo and the young Marius took possession of the consulate: the one undertook to close the passes of the Apennines, and check the threatened attack of Metellus and Pompey on the north; the other to cover the approach to Latium against the advancing legions of Sulla. The former gained some successes against Metellus, and was only reduced to the necessity of retreating by the critical position of his colleague. Marius had selected Præneste, an impregnable position on the frontiers of Latium, for his headquarters. There he assembled his military forces, and collected all the treasures he had amassed at leisure, including the plunder of many temples in the city, and a large mass of gold and silver drawn from the vaults under the Capitol. Confiding, perhaps, in the strength of this citadel, he had not attempted to prevent Sulla from seizing the passes of the Apennines, nor did he come forth to encounter his assailant till he had arrived at Sacriportus, four leagues in advance of Præneste. The complete defeat which Marius sustained at this spot opened the road to Rome; for Sulla could venture to leave his beaten enemy behind their impregnable walls, and push on towards the city which was ready, as he well knew, to open its gates. He arrived indeed too late to prevent the crowning massacre in which Marius caused the most illustrious of his remaining enemies to be slaughtered in the curia itself. Among the victims was Mucius Scævola, the grand pontiff, who had so narrowly escaped on more than one previous occasion, and who was now sacrificed before the altar of Vesta, whose eternal fires were not extinguished by the scanty drops of blood the old man’s veins could supply.

[Sidenote: [82 B.C.]]

Sulla masked Præneste with a detachment under Lucretius Ofella, while he swiftly traversed Rome, and threw himself into Etruria, where Carbo was advancing to the rescue of his colleague Marius, being himself unable to maintain his position in the Cisalpine against Metellus and Pompey. Carbo stationed himself near Clusium, behind the Clanis, with his Italian allies and some Gallic and Iberian troops. Of the Iberians, however, a portion passed over to the enemy, and the general in a fit of despair caused the remainder to be massacred. Engaging the enemy he obtained two trifling successes, and fought a bloody battle without a decisive result. But fortune became more favourable to Sulla, who cut off one large division of his adversaries, and now eagerly expected the arrival of Metellus and Pompey to surround Carbo with irresistible numbers. In this strait Carbo, instead of dashing forwards to relieve Præneste, returned on his steps to arrest the assailants from the north.

He contented himself with detaching a division of his army to effect a junction with the Samnites, now advancing, and thus create a diversion on the right of Sulla’s position. Sulla took measures to guard the defiles which lead towards Præneste, while Pompey, by a lateral movement, surprised and routed the detached division. The ground, however, was cleared around Carbo’s entrenchments. He had only a single enemy, Metellus, before him, and upon him he threw himself with desperate resolution. But a great battle fought at Faventia near Ravenna resulted in his total defeat, with the loss of ten thousand slain, and several thousands of deserters. His officers hastened to pillage and betray him. His quæstor Verres plundered his military chest, while Albinovanus massacred several chiefs of the army, whom he had invited to a banquet. Norbanus took ship and fled to Rhodes. Carbo, after raising another army in Etruria, and conducting for some time a war of guerillas in the mountains, abandoned his colleague to the fate which awaited him, and made the best of his way into Africa. Sertorius had already withdrawn from a contest which he judged to be hopeless, and was engaged in forming a new confederation in Spain. The Marian chieftains surrendered Italy to the senate, and sought to raise the provinces against it (82).

Sulla and his colleagues now directed their victorious legions upon the last of the Marian armies in their last stronghold, Præneste. But Pontius Telesinus, at the head of a combined force of Samnites, Lucanians, and Campanians, to whom the destruction or humiliation of Rome was a dearer object than the success of either party among the Romans, seized the opportunity to wreak the vengeance of their countrymen upon the capital of their common enemies. Adroitly evading the lines of the numerous legions which were now concentrating upon Præneste, they penetrated by night within ten or twelve miles of the city, which they hoped to surprise, and give to the flames. But they spent one day in the preparations for the assault, and in the interval the slender garrison within the city was enabled to communicate with Sulla. On the first of November the Samnites advanced, but Sulla was already at their back. At the Colline Gate he came up with them, and engaged them in a long and desperate encounter. Since the invasion of the Gauls Rome had never struggled against an enemy so near to her own walls, nor been brought so nigh to destruction.

The combat lasted a day and a night. The left wing commanded by Sulla himself was put to rout, and the fugitives running to the lines before Præneste, exclaimed that the battle was lost and their imperator himself slain. But Crassus meanwhile, with the right wing, had broken the enemy’s ranks, and pursued them as far as Antemnæ. Eight thousand of the Italians were made prisoners, and the Roman officers captured in their ranks were devoted to the sword. Pontius Telesinus, grievously wounded in the fight, was despatched by the conqueror on the field of battle. His whole life had been devoted to the hatred of Rome, and at the moment when she finally escaped from his murderous grasp he could no longer wish to live. He was the last Italian enemy of Rome. As the adversary of the Decii and Fabii he might have been the destroyer of the Roman name, and have changed the face of history. But in the age of Marius and Sulla he could only hope for one day of plunder and conflagration, and when this momentary triumph was snatched from him, what sweeter satisfaction could he covet than to fall among fifty thousand corpses, one-half of which were Roman?[93]

As soon as the Prænestines learned the result of this bloody day, and saw the heads of the Italians and Marians borne in triumph beneath their walls, they opened their gates to the victors. The young Marius had retired into a subterraneous apartment with the brother of Pontius Telesinus. Determined not to fall into the enemy’s hands, they challenged each other to the combat, and Marius, having slain his friend and confederate, caused himself to be despatched by the hands of a slave. A few cities still held out. At Norba in Latium, the inhabitants chose to consume themselves together with their city, rather than submit to the conqueror. Nola opened its gates after a long defence; Volaterræ resisted for two years. But the struggle in Italy was hopeless. Spain and Africa rose indeed against the Roman government; but the gates of the peninsula were securely closed against these foreign auxiliaries.

Events and circumstances had now fulfilled their part in developing Sulla’s policy, and moulding his character. Fond of literature, vain of his accomplishments, attached to frivolous pleasures and frivolous people, a man, it is said, of soft and even tender feelings, and easily moved to tears by a tale of sorrow, Sulla in his early years had surprised his countrymen, rather than alarmed them, by the success of his military career and his influence with the soldiers. The haughty jealousy of Marius had disposed him to take an opposite part in public life. The rivalry of the two great captains had been enhanced by the contrast of their manners, origin, and connections. In brooding over his personal resentments Sulla had insensibly come to identify himself with the cause of the oligarchy. The sanguinary violence of Cinna and Marius had irritated the champion of the persecuted faction, and he had vowed a bloody vengeance against the authors of the proscriptions. But the opposition he experienced in Italy expanded his views beyond the limits of party warfare. The Etrurians and the Samnites transformed him from the chief of a Roman faction into the head of the Roman nation. The vows of extermination they breathed against the sacred city of Quirinus sank deeply into his mind. He had displayed in the East his contempt for the just claims of the provincials. The cries of the miserable Greeks and Asiatics he had mocked with pitiless scorn, and had reimposed upon their necks, in its full weight and irksomeness, the yoke from which they had in vain invoked Mithridates to relieve them. The man who had reconquered the East had now reconquered Italy, and he determined to restore the supremacy of his countrymen at their own gates, which he had vindicated with triumphant success at the farthest limits of their empire.

The morning after the battle of the Colline Gate, Sulla was haranguing the senate in the temple of Bellona. As an imperator commanding a military force, the law forbade him to enter the city, and the senators attended his summons beyond the walls. Cries of horror and despair were suddenly heard outside the place of assembly. “Be not alarmed,” he calmly remarked to the affrighted senators, “it is only some rascals whom I have ordered to be chastised.” They were the death cries of the eight thousand Samnite prisoners, whom he had delivered to be cut to pieces by his legions in the Field of Mars. The first of his blows fell upon the Italian confederates; but he speedily launched his vengeance upon the Romans themselves. On his return from Præneste he mounted the rostra, and addressed the people. He vaunted his own greatness and irresistible power, and graciously assured them that he would do them good if they obeyed him well; but to his foes he would give no quarter, but prosecute them to the death, high as well as low, prætors, quæstors, tribunes, and whosoever had provoked his just indignation.

THE PROSCRIPTIONS

These words were a signal to his adherents, and before the names of the destined citizens were publicly announced many a private vengeance was wreaked, and many a claim advanced upon the conqueror’s gratitude. The family of Marius were among the first attacked. One of his relatives named Marius Gratidianus, who had signalised his prætorship by checking the debasement of the coinage, was pursued by Catiline, a brutal young officer, and murdered with the most horrible tortures. The assassin placed the bloody head upon Sulla’s banquet-table, and coolly washed his hands in the lustral waters of a neighbouring temple. The corpse of the great Marius himself, which had been buried and not burned, was torn from its sepulchre on the banks of the Anio, and cast into the stream. This desecration of the funeral rites was an impiety of which the contests of the Romans had hitherto furnished no example. It was never forgotten by a shocked and offended people. The troubled ghost, says the poet of the civil wars, continued to haunt the spot, and scared the husbandmen from their labours on the eve of impending calamity.

A great number of victims had already perished, when Catulus demanded of Sulla in the senate, “Whom then shall we keep to enjoy our victory with, if blood continues to flow in our cities as abundantly as on the battle-field?” A young Metellus had the boldness to ask when there would be an end to these miseries, and how far he would proceed before they might hope to see them stayed. “Spare not,” he added, “whomsoever it is expedient to remove; only relieve from uncertainty those whom you mean to save.” Sulla coldly replied that he had not yet determined whom he would spare. “Tell us then,” exclaimed Metellus, “whom you intend to punish.” Thereupon a list of proscriptions appeared containing eighty names. This caused a general murmur; nevertheless, two days after, 230, and the next day as many more, were added to the list. And this proscription, in which Sulla had consulted no magistrate, was accompanied with a speech in which he said that he had proscribed all he could think of for the present; by and by he might perhaps remember more. Rewards were offered for slaying the proscribed; it was rendered capital to harbour them. Their descendants were declared incapable of public office, and their fortunes were confiscated to the use of the state, though in most cases they were actually seized and retained by private hands. Nor were the proscriptions confined to Rome; they were extended to every city in Italy, and throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula neither temple nor domestic hearth offered security to the fugitives. From the first of December 82 to the first of June in the following year, this authorised system of murder was allowed to continue. Catiline, who had previously assassinated a brother, now got his victim’s name placed on the fatal list, in order to secure his estate. The favourites of Sulla, his slaves and freedmen, drove a lucrative trade in selling the right to inscribe the names of persons whom any one wished to make away with. The dignity of public vengeance was prostituted to mere private pique and cupidity.[94] One man was killed for his house, another for his gardens, another for his baths.[95] One unfortunate wretch, who had never meddled with affairs, examined the lists out of mere curiosity. Horror-struck on seeing his own inscribed, “My Alban farm,” he exclaimed, “has ruined me”; and hardly had he spoken the words before the pursuers smote him.

Sulla might smile to see the number of accomplices he had associated in his crimes, and he sought perhaps to render their share in these horrors more conspicuous by the rewards with which he loaded them. Upon Catiline, the boldest and readiest of his partisans, a man of blasted character and ruined fortunes, he heaped golden favours. The young Crassus, who had so narrowly escaped the sword of Marius, now laid the foundation of the wealth which earned him the renown of the richest of the Romans. Pompey had executed without remorse his master’s vengeance upon captives taken in arms; at his command he had consented to divorce his wife Antistia, and take in her stead Sulla’s step-daughter Metella; but he withheld his hand from the stain of the proscriptions, and scorned perhaps to enrich himself with the spoils of judicial massacre. Among the kinsmen of Marius was one whom Sulla himself vouchsafed to spare. Caius Julius Cæsar, then eighteen years of age, was connected by blood with Marius,[96] and by marriage with Cinna. Sulla contented himself with requiring him to repudiate his wife. Cæsar refused, and fled into the Sabine mountains. The assassins were on his track, while his friends at Rome exerted themselves to the utmost to obtain his pardon. The vestals interceded for him.

Some of Sulla’s own adherents raised their voices in his favour, and pleaded his youth, his reckless temper and dissipated habits, in proof of his innocence or harmlessness. “I spare him,” exclaimed Sulla, “but beware! in that young trifler there is more than one Marius.” Cæsar was saved; but he prudently repaired to the siege of Mytilene.

The proscriptions were lists of selected victims, and though hundreds undoubtedly perished whose names had never been publicly devoted to slaughter, yet the number of the original citizens who fell in the massacres were not beyond the reach of computation. The accounts we have received vary indeed in this particular; but of senators there were slain perhaps from one to two hundred, of knights between two and three thousand. The victims of a lower class were, we may suppose, proportionally more numerous. But the destruction of the Italians was far more sweeping and indiscriminate. Cities were dismantled, and even razed to the ground; their lands were seized and distributed among the veterans of the Sullan armies, of whom 120,000 were located in colonies from one end of the peninsula to the other. The natives driven from their houses and estates were massacred in crowds; according to popular tradition the Samnite people were utterly annihilated, and of all their cities Beneventum alone remained standing. The inhabitants of the wretched Præneste were slaughtered wholesale. The Etrurians expiated with the direst persecution the tardy aid they had given to the common cause of the Italians. The great centres of their ancient civilisation had long fallen into decay, but a new class of cities had risen upon their ruins, and attained riches and celebrity. Of these Spoletium, Volaterræ, Interamna, and Fæsulæ were delivered to Roman colonists; the latter city was dismantled, and the new town of Florentia erected with the fragments of its ruins. Throughout large districts the population became almost entirely changed; everywhere the chief people perished from the face of the land, and with them all that was distinctive in the manners and institutions, even in the language of the country. The civilisation of Etruria disappeared from the sight of men, to be rediscovered at the end of twenty centuries, among the buried tombs of forgotten lucumons.

The same exterminating policy extended also to the provinces, wherever the temper of the native races seemed to resent the uncontrolled domination of the Roman conquerors. Sulla had chastised Greece and Asia with a rod of iron. He now commissioned his lieutenants to chase his enemies from the retreats to which they had been invited in Sicily, Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Metellus fell upon the Cisalpine province, Valerius Flaccus devastated the Narbonensis, Pompey was despatched to punish the provinces of the south, and Annius was deputed to follow Sertorius into Spain and recover the vast regions which he had armed against the new government of Rome, and even against Rome herself. At the same time the republic was threatened with a renewal of her foreign warfare. The Thracians, never yet subdued, troubled the frontiers of Macedonia; Mithridates was commencing a new movement in Asia; the distressed and indignant population of the eastern coasts had betaken themselves in vast numbers to the sea, and infested the waters of Greece and even Italy itself with fleets of pirate vessels. The mountains of Etruria and Sabellia, of Samnium and Lucania, swarmed with the miserable fugitives from spoliation and massacre, and armed bands roamed beneath the walls of populous cities ready to carry off any booty that fell in their way, and rendering both life and property everywhere insecure. Even the proprietors of estates leagued themselves with these wretched outcasts, and employed them to kidnap free citizens of the republic, to be buried as slaves in their forests, or chained in their factories.

Sulla had returned to Rome laden with the spoils of war; his troops had been gorged with plunder, and he could not plead for his proscriptions the demands of an insatiate soldiery. But the accumulating troubles of the empire, and the increasing armaments required in every quarter, demanded the opening of new sources of revenue. The provinces, harassed by war, were now crushed by imposts. Treaties and promises were alike disregarded. All were forced to contribute--not only the tributary states, but even those which had acquired by their services immunity and independence. To satisfy the requisitions made upon them, many cities were forced to pledge their public lands, their temples, their ports, and even the stones of their walls. Sulla took upon himself to sell the sovereignty of the independent kingdom of Egypt to Alexander II. Donatives were demanded of foreign kings and potentates.[b]

“Zachariæ,[k]” says Ihne,[e] “in his book on L. Cornelius Sulla (i. 145), has hit the truth in saying: ‘We must not imagine that these horrors and cruelties were caused by the passions so powerfully excited by the civil war, nor that they are to be attributed to Sulla’s implacability and vindictiveness, nor that Sulla simply connived at them, or ordered deeds which he could not prevent, surrounded as he was by an army drunk with victory and greedy for plunder. It is true some dark passions were at work, and in several instances Sulla acted from momentary whims or was influenced by angry passions. It is true that Sulla was obliged to be indulgent and forgiving to his soldiers because he was himself in want of indulgence and forgiveness. Nevertheless we have good reason to believe that on the whole Sulla acted on a deep and coolly meditated plan.… He intended that out of the work of destruction a new and vigorous Italy was to come forth with a population from whose gratitude or satisfaction he could confidently expect security for peace, and for that constitution of the republic which he was about to establish.’” With this Freeman[l] agrees, when he says that Sulla “was not cruel in the sense of delighting in human suffering. Through the whole of Sulla’s tyranny there is nothing passionate; it is not so much cruelty as recklessness of human life; it is the cold, deliberating, exterminating policy of a man who has an object to fulfill, and who will let nothing stand in the way of that object.”[a]

FOOTNOTES

[89] [The Roman historian Florus[d] comments on and classifies the wars thus: “This only was wanting to complete the misfortunes of the Romans that they should raise up an unnatural war among themselves and that in the midst of the city and Forum, citizens should fight with citizens, like gladiators in an amphitheatre. I should bear the calamity, however, with greater patience if plebeian leaders or contemptible nobles had been at the head of such atrocity; but even Marius and Sulla (O indignity! such men, such generals!), the grace and glory of their age, lent their eminent characters to this worst of evils. It was carried on, if I may use the expression, under three constellations, the first movement being light and moderate, an affray rather than a war, for the violence prevailed only between the leaders themselves; in the next rising, the victory spread with greater cruelty and bloodshed, through the very bowels of the whole senate; the third conflict exceeded not merely animosity between citizens, but that between enemies, the fury of the war being supported by the strength of all Italy, and rancour raging till none remained to be killed.”

[90] [On this act of Octavius, Beesly[c] cynically comments: “He was an obstinate, dull man; and if the burlesque of the conduct of the senators when the Gauls took Rome was really enacted, theatrical display must have been cold comfort for those of his party on whom his incapacity brought ruin.”]

[91] [Ihne[e] says “the story is absurd,” and credits it to a calumny of his enemies. Long, however, accepts it as possible.]

[92] [See Valerius Maximus[f] and Cicero.[g] Mommsen[h] credits the story, and Dyer[i] calls it “one of those ferocious jokes which find their parallel only amidst the butcheries of the French Revolution.”]

[93] [“The battle of the Colline Gate was one of the few great and decisive battles which are recorded in the history of Rome,” says Ihne.[e] In spite of all this, he says, we know almost absolutely nothing of the position of the armies and the progress of the fight, “and this cannot be vouched for with any degree of confidence, as the two principal authorities cannot be satisfactorily made to harmonise.” Appian[m] says that each side lost 50,000; Orosius[n] sets the number at only 11,000.]

[94] [Mommsen[h] quotes the sale of an estate valued at £61,000 or $305,000 for about £20 or $100; and rates the total proceeds of confiscation at £3,050,000 or $15,250,000.]

[95] [Cicero[g] makes a grim pun which Guthrie Englished thus, “The same gentlemen who knocked down estates, knocked down men.” Later he says in the same oration that the slaughter was so great it reminded one of the battle of Lake Trasimene when Hannibal annihilated a Roman army.]

[96] [The connection with Marius was not by blood but by marriage; Julia, Cæsar’s aunt, was the wife of Marius.]

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XIX. THE DICTATORSHIP OF SULLA

[Sidenote: [81-79 B.C.]]

The reign of violence and revolution dated from the victory of the Colline Gate, the first of November, 82. While the young Marius and his colleague still occupied the consular office, the master of Rome, omnipotent as he really was, could not legitimately be invested with any civil authority. The weapon which he wielded with such terrible effect was the unsheathed sword of his proconsular imperium. The tribunal, before which he cited the wretched victims of his policy or vengeance, was the military suggestum of the prætorian tent. The death of Marius a few days later rendered vacant one of the consuls’ chairs. Carbo, who occupied the other, did not long survive, being taken in Sicily and executed by Pompey without respect to his rank or office. Before the close of the year the republic was left without a chief magistrate. The senate appointed L. Flaccus, one of Sulla’s officers, interrex to hold the assembly for the election of consuls for the term which was about to commence. But Flaccus, prompted by his imperator, proceeded to recommend the creation of a dictator.

The senate obeyed, the people acquiesced, and after an interval of 120 years, which had elapsed since Q. Fabius Maximus, the citizens beheld once more the four-and-twenty lictors, who invested with invidious splendour that union of civil and military pre-eminence of which their feelings and institutions were equally jealous. The dictatorship, they might remember, had been the rare resource of the patricians in ancient times, when they roused themselves to defend their hateful privileges against the just claims of the plebeians; but since the rights of either class had been happily blended together, the office itself had ceased to have any significance. To revive it now, when no enemy was at the gates, was only to threaten the commons of Rome with a new aristocratical revolution, to menace rights and liberties acquired in a struggle of two hundred years, and on which the greatness and glory of Rome were confessedly founded. But all these misgivings were hushed in silence.[b]

In the vivid words of Plutarch in North’s old translation, Sulla in the beginning, was very modest and civil in all his prosperity, and gave great good hope that if he came to the authority of a prince, he would favour nobility well, and yet love, notwithstanding, the benefit of the people. And being moreover a man in his youth given all to pleasure, delighting to laugh, ready to pity, and weep for tender heart; in that he became after so cruel and bloody, the great alteration gave manifest cause to condemn the increase of honour and authority, as the only means whereby men’s manners continue not such as they were at the first, but still do change and vary, making some fools, others vain and fantastical, and others extremely cruel and unnatural. But whether that alteration of nature came by changing his state and condition, or that it was otherwise a violent breaking out of hidden malice, which then came to show itself, when the way of liberty was laid open; this matter is to be decided in some other treatise. So it came to pass, that Sulla fell to shedding of blood and filled all Rome with infinite and unspeakable murders; for divers were killed for private quarrels, that had nothing to do with Sulla at any time, who suffered his friends and those about him to work their wicked wills.

But the most wicked and unjust act of all was that, he deprived the sons, and son’s sons of them whom he had killed, of all credit and good name, and besides that had taken all their goods as confiscate. And this was not only done in Rome, but also in all the cities of Italy throughout; and there was no temple of any god whatsoever, no altar in anybody’s house, no liberty of hospital, nor father’s house, that was not imbrued with blood and horrible murder. For the husbands were slain in their wives’ arms, and the children on their mothers’ laps: and yet they which were slain for private hatred and malice, were nothing in respect of those that were murdered only for their goods. And they that killed them might well say, his goodly great house made that man die, his goodly fair garden the other; and his hot baths another.

But besides so many murders committed, yet were there other things also that grieved the people marvellously. For he proclaimed himself dictator, which office had not been of six score years before in use, and made the senate discharge him of all that was past, giving him free liberty afterwards to kill whom he would, and to confiscate their goods; to destroy cities, and to build up new as he listed; to take away kingdoms, and to give them where he thought good. And furthermore, he openly sold the goods confiscate, by the crier, sitting so proudly and stately in his chair of state, that it grieved the people more to see those goods packed up by them, to whom he gave and disposed them, than to see them taken from those that had forfeited them. For sometimes he would give a whole country, or the whole revenues of certain cities, unto women for their beauty, or unto pleasant jesters, minstrels, or wicked slaves made free; and unto some, he would give other men’s wives by force, and make them to be married against their wills.[c]

The people crouched beneath the brandished sword of the conqueror, and the acclamations of the nobles, who relied upon his stern resolution to crush the insolence of the tribunes and repel the advance of democracy. Even the narrow limit of six months which the law had been wont to assign to the duration of this extraordinary despotism was now disregarded. Sulla was required to reform and reconstitute the commonwealth; he was allowed to determine for himself the period so arduous an enterprise would demand, nor less the principles and the means he should think fit to adopt. The Romans solemnly divested themselves of all their political rights, so long as the great reformer should deem it expedient to exercise autocratic control over them. To Sulla they committed without limit or question the power of life and death over citizens and subjects, of amercing his enemies and rewarding his friends, of building cities or destroying them, of giving away kingdoms or incorporating them in the empire. In order perhaps to mark more conspicuously the pre-eminence of this sovereign power above the legitimate dictatorship of ancient times, Sulla required that the consulship should coexist with it in a state of degrading subordination. He allowed the centuriate assembly to elect M. Tullius Decula and Cneius Dolabella for the year 81. In the following year he assumed the consular fasces himself in conjunction with Metellus Pius, while still retaining the ensigns of the dictatorship. He was elected a second time for the year 79; but his ambition was by this time satisfied and he declined the proffered title.

Proscription and massacre had cleared the ground for the social edifice which Sulla proposed to construct. With a blind and arrogant predilection for the traditionary forms of the ancient Roman municipality, he resolved to restore, as far as circumstances could be moulded thereto, by the harshest exercise of his prerogative, the civil ascendency of the old Roman families. To re-enact indeed the letter of the old oligarchical constitution, as it had existed before the days of plebeian encroachment, was impossible; but he hoped at least to reanimate its spirit. The temper however of the dictator was too impetuous and vehement for an undertaking requiring the most delicate management. His reforms were bold and decisive, they were conceived on a single great idea, and executed with consistency and vigour; but they were not adopted with any consideration for the genuine tendencies of society, and accordingly they struck no root in the mind of the people. Sulla, we have seen, had cut off two hundred senators with the sword of the proscriptions; Marius had probably slaughtered an equal number. The remnant had been decimated on the field of battle. To replenish this frightful void the dictator selected three hundred from the equestrian order; but however respectable in birth and rank these new senators may have been, they could hardly restore the lustre of the great council of the state, which had formerly owed its chief authority to the personal distinction of its members. We may conjecture that the numbers of the body thus reconstructed amounted to about six hundred. The vacancies which thenceforth occurred were probably more than supplied by the regular succession to the benches of the senate of the men who had filled certain high offices. Twenty quæstors were elected annually, and passed into it in due rotation.

The principle of hereditary succession to the senate was never recognised under the Roman Republic, but the practical restriction of the great offices from which it was replenished to one or two hundred families, allowed none of the chief Roman houses to remain unrepresented in the great council of the nation. To these houses Sulla wished to confine the entire legislation of the commonwealth. He repealed the lex Hortensia, by which the resolutions of the tribes were invested with the force of law, and gave to the senate alone the initiation of all legal enactments. To the senate he transferred once more the exclusive possession of the judicia, while he extended the authority of the quæstiones perpetuæ, or standing commissions for the trial of political offences, to a large class of criminal cases, which had hitherto fallen under the cognisance of the popular assemblies. Nothing however so much advanced the influence of the senate as the limitations Sulla placed upon the functions of the tribunate. He deprived the champions of the people of the right of proposing measures in the assembly of the tribes,[97] forbade them to exercise their arbitrary veto upon the legislation of the curia, and restricted their protectorate of the plebs to the relief of individuals in a few trifling cases of civil or criminal process. Whatever shadow of authority the office of tribune might still retain, a stigma was cast upon it by the decree which declared its holder incapable of succeeding to any of the chief magistracies of the state. Ambitious men disdained an office condemned to silence and obscurity. By the disparagement of its leaders the assembly of the tribes lost all its real power [though it could make laws with the senate’s consent and elect certain inferior magistrates]. As for the assembly by centuries, Sulla seems to have felt the impossibility of restoring the complicated machinery by which the citizens were enrolled in classes, according to their means, and the numbers of the lower ranks balanced by an artificial adjustment. If he could not restore in this popular assembly the preponderance which the Servian constitution had secured to property, the superiority he conferred upon the senate in the matter of legislation might suffice to keep the comitia in due subordination. The assembly of the centuries retained the election to the higher magistracies; the dictator relied on the influence of wealth, rank, and dignity, in breaking down the independence of the electors, already sapped by the prevalent dissolution of manners and degeneracy of public feeling. Nevertheless, he took from the people the appointment to the college of pontiffs, and placed the great political engine of the state religion in the hands of a self-elective corporation of the noblest members of the aristocracy.

The senate thus planted one foot on the neck of the knights, the other on that of the commons. Having, as we have seen, almost re-created it by one enormous draft from an inferior order, Sulla wished to insure the permanence of its constitution, and he would have looked, we may suppose, with jealousy on the independent action of the censorship, which ought to have called all its members to account every fifth year, and summarily ejected the unworthy. Accordingly he allowed no censors to execute their functions during his retention of power, nor was their venerable office revived for several years afterwards. The slaughter of the civil wars had caused a frightful reduction in the old Roman population. It was necessary to take measures for recruiting it, and on this account, perhaps, more than from any regard for the promises he had made at an earlier period, the dictator abstained from closing the franchise against the Italians.[98] He showed his contempt for the needy and venal populace by the enfranchisement at one blow of ten thousand slaves, the miserable remnant of the families of proscribed and murdered citizens. Left without masters they would have endangered the tranquillity of the commonwealth, but enrolled among the citizens they might become themselves masters in their turn, and help to keep the oppressed and discontented in subjection, both at home and abroad. They might at least devote themselves to the policy of the dictator.

The establishment of military colonies was one of the most important measures of the dictator. Besides satisfying claims he dared not disregard, he might hope to make these establishments the bulwark of his reforms. If so, we shall presently see how much he miscalculated their effect. But the change they produced in the social and political aspect of Italy was neither light nor transient. One hundred and twenty thousand legionaries, as has been said, received lands in the most fertile parts of the peninsula, and with them, of course, the franchise of the city, if they did not already possess it. This was carrying out an Agrarian law more sweeping and far more arbitrary than the Gracchi had even ventured to conceive. But these same legionaries, thus pampered and enriched, became the most restless and dangerous members of the body politic. Scattered broadcast over the face of the land, they became the prolific seed of disturbance and revolution.

SULLA’S LEGISLATION

Sulla’s legislation, besides its grand political bearings, descended to many minute particulars of social and civil economy. His enemies had revelled in the enjoyment of many successive consulships; he forbade any magistrate to fill the same office twice within a period of ten years. Casting a jealous eye on the proconsular imperium, the foundation of his own extraordinary power, he enacted a law of treason (maiestas), which defined the crimes of leaving the province, leading forth the legions, and attacking a foreign potentate without express command of the senate and people. Like other statesmen of antiquity, he was fully possessed with the notion that the moral character of a nation can be reformed and maintained by sumptuary laws. Accordingly, he sought to restrict the luxuries of the wealthy, in which the imitation of foreign tastes caused, perhaps, more scandal than the actual excess. He fixed the precise sums which might be expended on the pleasures of the table, and assigned three hundred sesterces, about sixty shillings, for suppers on the Calends, Ides, and Nones, and certain of the most solemn festivals of the year. He went even further in the same delusive path, in fixing the prices of articles by arbitrary enactment. Such laws could not outlast even the brief rule of the imposer himself, and Sulla seems, indeed, to have set the example of disregarding them in person. Nevertheless the same ineffective legislation continued to be frequently repeated at later periods.

Among other precautions for guarding the morality of the people, Sulla had denounced the vengeance of the law against the crimes of murder and adultery. But he lived himself in a course of notorious profligacy, and besides the guilt of the proscriptions, he showed that no law could deter him from shedding blood to gratify a momentary passion, or, at least, to confirm his enactments by terror. Lucretius Ofella, the officer who had so long blockaded Præneste, ventured to disregard the dictator’s provision for confining the suit for the consulship to persons who had been already prætors. Sulla admonished him to desist; nevertheless he persisted in his claim. A centurion poniarded him in the middle of the Forum. When the people dragged the assassin to the dictator’s tribunal, he commanded them to let the man go, avowing that he had acted by his own orders; and he proceeded, with the rude humour which he affected, to relate a story, how a labourer, being annoyed by vermin, twice stopped from his work to pluck them off; the third time he cast them without mercy into the fire. “Twice,” said Sulla, “I have conquered and spared you; take care lest, a third time, I consume you utterly.”

ABDICATION OF SULLA

[Sidenote: [79-78 B.C.]]

Such acts and such language were, however, rather ebullitions of a spoiled and vicious temper than any deliberate expression of contempt for law, or the assertion of an unlimited despotism. The reigning principle of Sulla’s actions was still an affectation of legality. He pretended, at least, to consider the oligarchical constitution of the early republic the only legitimate model for its renovation. The success of his schemes of ambition, the overthrow of all his opponents, the complete restoration, as he imagined, of the principles to which he had devoted himself, all combined to work upon a mind prone to superstition and addicted to fatalism, and changed him from a jealous partizan into an arrogant fanatic. Sulla claimed to be the favourite of fortune, the only divinity in whom he really believed. His reforms were complete, his work accomplished, his part performed; he feared to tempt his patroness by trespassing another moment on her kindness. By resigning his power he sought to escape the Nemesis which haunted his dreams.

In the year 79 Sulla abdicated the dictatorship. He could say that it had been conferred upon him for the reconstitution of the commonwealth, and having done what he was appointed to do, it was no longer his to enjoy. But if the Romans were amazed at this act of sublime self-sacrifice, it was with a feeling akin to awe that they beheld the tyrant descend from his blood-stained tribunal and retire with unmoved composure to the privacy of a suburban villa. Aged and infirm,[99] and sated perhaps with pleasure as well as ambition, it is not too much to believe that such a man as Sulla was indifferent to life, and little troubled by the risk to which he might thus expose himself from the daggers of his enemies. But in truth, while his veteran colonists were sworn to maintain his policy, his person was not unprotected, by bands of armed attendants. When the magistrate of a neighbouring town, in the expectation of the old man’s death, delayed paying the local contribution to the restoration of the Capitol, for the completion of which Sulla was anxious, as the only thing wanting to complete his career of prosperity, he could send men to seize the defaulter and even inflict death upon him. Sulla was evidently secure against the vengeance of his victim’s relatives. It may also be remarked that such vengeance would have been foreign to the habits of the Romans. However little they scruple to use the dagger to cut off a political enemy in the midst of his career, there is no instance perhaps in their history of exacting personal retribution from one who had ceased to possess the power of injuring.

There was, moreover, in Sulla a haughty contempt for mankind, and consequently for its highest aims and pleasures. Even while devoting his utmost energies to the pursuit of political eminence and the achievement of a national revolution, he could smile with grim moroseness at the vanity of his own exploits, and the hollowness of his triumphs. He paused in the midst of his career to break the toy with which he had so long amused himself. He had commenced life as a frivolous sensualist; he wished for nothing better than to finish it as a decrepit débauché. At the moment of laying down his office he made an offering of the tenth of his substance to Hercules, and feasted the people magnificently; so much, indeed, did the preparations made exceed what was required, that vast heaps of the superfluous supplies were thrown with ostentatious prodigality into the river.

In the midst of these entertainments, lasting several days, Metella, the consort to whom he was most permanently attached, fell sick and died. As the favourite and perhaps the priest of Venus, his house might not be polluted by the presence of death, and he was required to send her a divorce, and cause her to be removed while still breathing. The custom he observed strictly, through superstition; but the law which limited the cost of funerals, though enacted by himself, he violated in the magnificence of her obsequies. Retiring to his villa at Cumæ he finally relinquished the reins of government. Surrounded by buffoons and dancers, he indulged to the last in every sensual excess which his advancing years and growing infirmities permitted. Nevertheless he did not wholly abandon literature. He amused himself with reading Aristotle and Theophrastus, and dictating memoirs of his own life, upon which he was employed, it is said, only two days before his decease. In those pages he recorded how astrologers had assured him that it was his fate to die after a happy life, at the very height of his prosperity. Stained with the blood of so many thousand victims, and tormented with a loathsome disease--for his bowels corrupted and bred vermin, and neither medicines nor ablutions could mitigate the noisome stench of his putrefaction--in this faith he persisted to the last, and quitted the world without a symptom either of remorse or repining. He believed that a deceased son appeared to him in a dream, and entreated him to rest from his troubles, and go with him to rejoin his lost Metella and dwell with her in eternal peace and tranquillity. Fearful perhaps of the fate of Marius, he directed that his body should be burned; whereas it had ever been the custom of his house to inter the remains of their dead. A monument was erected to him in the Campus Martius, which was standing in the time of Plutarch, after the lapse of two centuries and the events of several revolutions. It bore an inscription, ascribed to Sulla himself, which said that none of his friends ever did him a kindness and none of his foes a wrong without being largely requited. Sulla survived his abdication about twelve months, and died in the year 78, at the age of sixty.

ROME’S DEBT TO SULLA

[Sidenote: [81-79 B.C.]]

Slowly and with many a painful struggle the Roman commonwealth had outgrown the narrow limits of a rustic municipality. The few hundred families which formed the original nucleus of her citizenship, and which in her earliest and simplest days had sufficed to execute all the functions of her government, had been compelled to incorporate allies and rivals in their own body, to enlarge their views, and to expand their institutions. The main object of Sulla’s policy was to revive at least the spirit of the old restrictions. The old families themselves had perished almost to a man; he replaced them by a newer growth; but he strove to pare away the accretions of ages, and restore the government of the vast empire of Rome to a small section of her children. The attempt was blind and bigoted; it was not less futile than unjust. It contravened the essential principle of national growth; while the career of conquest, to which the Romans devoted themselves, required the fullest expansion and the most perfect freedom of development.

Nevertheless the legislation of Sulla was undoubtedly supported by a vast mass of existing prejudice. He threw himself into the ideas of his time, as far as they were interpreted by history, by tradition, and by religious usage. The attempt to enlarge the limits of the constitution was in fact opposed to every acknowledged principle of polity. It was regarded equally by its opponents and its promoters as anomalous and revolutionary. It had as yet no foundation in argument, or in any sense of right, as right was then understood. Society at Rome was in a highly artificial state; and Sulla with many of his ablest contemporaries, mistook for the laws of nature the institutions of an obsolete and forgotten expediency. But nature was carrying on a great work, and proved too strong for art. Ten years sufficed to overthrow the whole structure of this reactionary legislation, and to launch the republic once more upon the career of growth and development. The champions of a more liberal policy sprang up in constant succession, and contributed, perhaps unconsciously, to the great work of union and comprehension, which was now rapidly in progress. The spirit of isolation which had split Greece and Italy into hundreds of separate communities was about to give way to a general yearning for social and moral unity. The nations were to be trained by the steady development of the Roman administration.

But though Sulla’s main policy was thus speedily overthrown, he had not lived in vain. As dictator he wasted his strength in attempting what, if successful, would have destroyed his country; but as proconsul he had saved her. The tyranny of the Roman domination had set the provinces in a blaze. Mithridates had fanned the flame. Greece and Asia had revolted. The genius of the king of Pontus might have consolidated an empire, such as Xerxes might have envied, on either shore of the Ægean Sea. But at this crisis of her fate, hardly less imminent than when Hannibal was wresting from her allies and subjects within the Alps, Rome had confided her fortunes to the prowess of Sulla. The great victory of Chæronea checked the dissolution of her empire. The invader was hurled back across the Ægean; the cities of Greece returned reluctantly to their obedience, never more to be tempted to renounce it. Sulla followed Mithridates into Asia; one by one he recovered the provinces of the republic. He bound his foe by treaties to abstain from fomenting their discontents. He left his officers to enforce submission to his decrees, and quartered the armies of Rome upon the wretched populations of the East. The pressing danger of the moment was averted, though it took twenty years more to subdue the power of Mithridates, and reduce Asia to passive submission. Rome was relieved from the last of her foreign invaders; and this was the great work of Sulla, which deserved to immortalise his name in her annals.[100]

Nevertheless this rolling back of the tide of aggression, and the return of the legions of the republic to the limits of her former conquests, had no effect in healing the internal sickness of which the irritation of the provinces was only symptomatic. The triumph of her arms and the sense of security it engendered only served to redouble her oppressions and to aggravate the misery of her subjects. The course of events will lead us on some future occasion to trace the remains of resentment and hatred towards Rome, which lingered long in some regions of Italy itself: but for the most part the Italians were now satisfied; they were content to regard the city of Romulus as their own metropolis; and while they enjoyed the fruits of her wide-wasting domination, gradually learned to take a pride in her name. But beyond the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian seas the same ardent vows were formed for enfranchisement which had precipitated upon Rome the Marsians and the Samnites; in more than one quarter the old struggle of the Social Wars was about to be renewed on wider and more distant theatres: but the elements of strife were now more complicated than before; the parties engaged were more thoroughly alien from each other; the hostility of Rome’s new enemies was the more inveterate as they had less sympathy with her institutions, and were ambitious of overthrowing rather than of sharing them. The second period of the civil wars of Rome opens with the revolt of the Iberians in the west, and the maritime devastations of the pirates in the east.

THE ROMAN PROVINCES

Italia, the region to which the privileges of the city had been conceded by the Plautian law, was bounded, as we have seen, by a line drawn across the neck of the peninsula from the Rubicon on the Adriatic, to the Isère on the Tyrrhenian Sea. To the north and south lay two provinces which held the first rank in political importance: on the one hand Gallia, or Gaul within the Alps; on the other the island of Sicily. The Gaulish province was divided into two districts by the Padus, or the Po, from whence they derived their denominations respectively, according as they lay within or beyond that river.

But the whole of this rich and extensive territory was placed under the command of a single proconsul, and the citizens soon learned to regard with jealousy a military force which menaced their own liberties at the same time that it maintained the obedience of their subjects. Sicily, on the other hand, though tranquil and generally contented, and requiring but a slender force to control it, was important to the republic from the abundance of its harvests, to which the city could most confidently look for its necessary supplies of grain. Next among the provinces in proximity to Rome were the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of which the former also furnished Italy with grain; but both were rudely and imperfectly cultivated, and the unhealthiness of the larger island especially continued to keep it below many far remoter regions in wealth, population, and intelligence. The first province the Romans had acquired beyond their own seas was Spain, where their arms had made slow but steady progress from the period of their earliest contests with the Carthaginians, although the legions had never yet penetrated into its wildest and most distant fastnesses. The connection between Rome and her Iberian dependencies was long maintained principally by sea, while the wide territory intervening between the Alps and Pyrenees was still occupied by numerous free and jealous communities. But in the course of the last half-century the republic had acquired the command of the coast of the Gulf of Lyons; her roads were prolonged from Ariminum to Barcino and Valentia, while the communications of her armies were maintained by numerous fortified positions in the Further Gaul, and a secure and wealthy province extending from the Var to the Garonne.

The Adriatic and the Ionian straits separated Italy from her eastern acquisitions. The great provinces of Illyricum and Macedonia comprised the whole expanse of territory from the Adriatic to the Ægean Sea, and were divided from one another by the long mountain ridges of Boion and Scardus. Ancient Greece, from Thermopylæ to Cape Malea, constituted a single command under the title of Achaia. With Asia, Rome communicated principally by sea, the route of the Hellespont being insecure, and the barbarous tribes of Thrace but imperfectly subjected. The province of Asia, recovered by Sulla, was held by an imperator with a numerous army, destined to control the dependent potentates of Bithynia, Cilicia, and Cappadocia. The eastern proconsul watched the movements of Mithridates, and unravelled his intrigues with every court from the Halys to the Tigris. He intruded himself into the affairs of Cyprus, Palestine, and Egypt, hunted down the mountaineers of Crete, and menaced with the vengeance of the republic the buccaneers who swarmed in every harbour of the eastern Mediterranean. On the southern coasts of the great inland sea the domain which once belonged to Carthage, limited on either side by the lesser Syrtis and the river Bagradas, formed the proconsular province of Africa; while the five cities of the Pentapolis acknowledged their entire dependence on the will of the republic. The extent of her empire under Sulla was hardly one-half of that which it attained under Augustus and Trajan.

The various relations in which the different classes of the provincial population stood to the ruling city, have been compared with the constitution of a Roman household. The colonies of Roman citizens planted in the provinces, enjoying the full exercise of their national rights, and presenting a miniature of the metropolis herself, held the position of the son towards the paterfamilias. The conquered races, which had thrown themselves on the victor’s mercy, were subjected to his dominion as unreservedly as the slave to that of his master. Those among them to whom the state had restored their lands and institutions, occupied a place analogous to that of freedmen. Some cities or nations had voluntarily sought a connection with Rome on terms of alliance, but with acknowledged inferiority. Others again stood on a more independent footing, offering a mutual interchange of good offices and citizenship; and lastly, there were some which entered into confederacy with the republic with perfect equality of rights on either side. All these had their prototypes respectively in the clients, the guests and the friends of the Roman noble. Within the limits of each Roman province there were generally some states which stood in these several relations to the republic; and the strictness of the military and civil administration was maintained or relaxed towards them according to their respective claims. But after all the mass of the provincial population belonged to the class of dediticii, that is, of those who had originally submitted without conditions, the slaves, as they may be termed, of the great Roman family. These were subjected to the severest fiscal and other burdens, enhanced by the rapacity of their rulers, who, from the consul or prætor to the lowest of their officers, preyed upon them without remorse and without satiety.

The appointment to the provincial commands was left ordinarily in the hands of the senate; nevertheless, the people had always regarded it as their own indefeasible prerogative, and sometimes, at the instigation of their demagogues, had not hesitated to resume it. It was the general rule that the consuls and prætors, after serving their year of office in the city, should proceed to administer for one, or sometimes for three years, the affairs of a province. The state placed large standing armies at their disposal, and threw enormous patronage into their hands; while their ambition, avarice, or mutual rivalry, far more than any sense of the public interests, impelled them to exert themselves, during their brief career, in reducing frontier tribes, in quelling insurrections which their own injustice excited, and, whenever they could find an excuse for it, in annihilating the ancient liberties and privileges still retained by the more favoured classes of the provincials. Surrounded by an army of officials, all creatures of their own, all engaged in the same work of carving fortunes for themselves and abetting their colleagues, the proconsuls had little sense of responsibility to the central government, and glutted their cupidity without restraint. Of all the provinces the Cisalpine and Macedonia, and latterly Asia, were the richest and most amply furnished with military armaments, and on both these accounts they were generally coveted by the consuls, and distributed between them by lot. The tithes, tolls, and other imposts, from which the public revenue was drawn, were farmed by Roman contractors, belonging generally to the order of knights, who had few opportunities of rising to the highest political offices at home. The connivance of their superiors in the province, backed by the corrupt state of public feeling in Rome, shielded, to a great extent, the sordid arts by which they were accustomed to defraud both the government and its subjects.

The means of enrichment which the provinces afforded to the nobility became the ultimate object of the deepest political intrigues. A man of ruined fortune looked to the office of proconsul as the sole means of retrieving his affairs. To obtain it, he allied himself with the chief or the party by whose influence he might hope to rise successively through the various steps which led to the consulship. He first sued for the post of quæstor; after a due interval he might hope to be elected ædile, next prætor, and ultimately consul. His grand object was then obtained; for upon the expiration of his term of office he departed as governor to a consular province, from the emoluments of which he calculated on repaying the expenses of his numerous contests, on liquidating the debt of gratitude to his adherents, and accumulating a vast fortune for his own gratification or the advancement of his party.

The cupidity which animated individuals was in fact the mainspring of the political factions of the time. The spoil of the provinces was the bait with which the popular leaders had lured the Italians to their standards. All the legal rights of citizenship had been conceded, but the old oligarchic families, dignified by historic associations, and revelling in the wealth accumulated by centuries of conquest, still hoped to maintain their grasp of the larger share of honours and emoluments, which they contrived to make generally accessible only to the richest. They still looked with scorn themselves, and infused the same sentiment into their inferiors, on the “new men,” the men of talents and education, but of moderate origin and fortune, who were striving on all sides to thrust themselves into public notice. The judicia was the great instrument by which they protected their monopoly; for by keeping this in their own hands, they could quash every attempt at revealing, by legal process, the enormities of the provincial administration. But as far as each party succeeded in retaining or extorting a share in the plunder, the same system was carried on by both. It would be unfair to point to either as exceeding the other in rapacity and tyranny. The distress and alienation of the provinces became the pressing evil and danger of the times. Adventurers sprang up in every quarter, and found a floating mass of discontent around them, from which they were certain of deriving direct assistance, or meeting at least with sullen approbation.

The original vice of the provincial administration of the republic consisted in the principle, openly avowed, that the native races were to be regarded as conquered subjects. The whole personnel of the civil and military government of the provinces was literally quartered upon the inhabitants; houses and establishments were provided for it at the cost of the provincials; the proconsul’s outfit, or vasarium, was perhaps generally defrayed by a grant from the public treasury, but the sums required for his maintenance, and that of his retinue, known by the name of salarium, was more commonly charged upon the local revenues. The proconsul himself indeed was supposed, in strictness, to serve the commonwealth gratuitously for the honour of the office; but practically he was left to remunerate himself by any indirect means of extortion he chose to adopt. As the supreme judicial as well as military authority there was no appeal against either the edicts he issued, or the interpretation he put upon them. The legions in occupation of the province were maintained at free quarters, and their daily pay supplied by the contributions of the inhabitants. The landowners were burdened with a tithe or other proportion of their produce, as a tribute to the conquering city. This payment was in most cases made by a composition, in which the proconsul was instructed to drive the hardest bargain he could for his employers. The local revenues were raised for the most part by direct taxes and customs’ dues; and these were generally farmed by Roman contractors, who made large fortunes from the transaction. Public opinion at home was such as rather to stimulate than to check their extortions. For it was a settled maxim of Roman policy that every talent extracted from the coffers of the provincial for the enrichment of the ruling caste was the transfer of so much of the sinews of war to the state from its enemies. But the rulers of the world were not content with the extortion of money from their subjects. An era of taste in art had recently dawned upon the rude conquerors of the East, and every proconsul, quæstor, and legatus was smitten with the desire to bring home trophies of Greek and Asiatic civilisation.

Those among them ambitious of ingratiating themselves with their fellow-citizens sought out the most celebrated statues and pictures, and even the marble columns of edifices, for the decoration of public places in the city. They did not scruple to violate the shrines of the gods, and ransomed rebellious cities for the plunder of their favourite divinities. This thirst for spoil led to acts of abominable cruelty: where persuasion failed, punishments and tortures were unsparingly resorted to; the proconsul and his officials were all bound together in a common cause, and the impunity of the subordinates was repaid by zeal for the interests of the chief. Of those who could refrain from open violence, and withhold their hands from the plunder of temples and palaces, few could deny themselves the sordid gains of money-lending usury. The demands of the government were enforced without compunction, and the provincial communities were repeatedly driven to pledge their sources of revenue to Roman capitalists. The law permitted the usurer to recover his dues by the severest process. In a celebrated instance the agent of one of the most honourable men at Rome could shut up the senators of a provincial town in their curia, till five of them actually died of starvation, to recover the debts due to his principal.

When indeed this intolerable tyranny reached its height, the provinces might sometimes enjoy the sweets of revenge, though with little prospect of redress, or of any alleviation of their lot. In a government by parties, the misdeeds of one set of men could not fail to rouse the pretended indignation of another; and while the factions of Rome contended for the prerogatives of conquest, they tried to brand each other with the iniquity of their abuse. The domination of the senators, as established by Sulla, soon provoked the jealous animadversions of their excluded rivals. Their administration of the provinces, protected as it was by the tribunals in which they reigned themselves supreme, presented a vulnerable point of attack, and against the crimes of the senatorial proconsuls the deadliest shafts of the popular orators were directed. The remains of Roman eloquence have preserved to us more than one full-length portrait of a proconsular tyrant. It is impossible indeed to rely upon the fidelity of the colouring, or the correctness even of the lines; nevertheless the general impression they leave upon us is amply borne out by numerous independent testimonies. There is a limit in the possible and the probable even to the rhetorical exaggerations of the Roman demagogues. A slight sketch from one of these pictures may suffice to give us an idea of the frightful originals.

THE CAREER OF VERRES

About the period of Sulla’s abdication, a young noble named Caius Verres accompanied the prætor Dolabella to his government of Cilicia (80). At Sicyon in Achaia, he chose to demand a sum of money of the chief magistrate of the city, and being refused, shut him up in a close chamber with a fire of green wood, to extort the gratuity he required. From the same place he carried off several of the finest statues and paintings. At Athens he shared with his chief the plunder of the temple of Minerva, at Delos that of Apollo; at Chios, Erythræ, Halicarnassus, and elsewhere on the line of his route, he perpetrated similar acts of rapine. Samos possessed a temple venerated throughout Asia; Verres rifled both the temple and the city itself. The Samians complained to the governor of Asia; they were recommended to carry their complaints to Rome. Perga boasted a statue of Diana, coated with gold; Verres scraped off the gilding. Miletus offered him the escort of one of her finest ships; he detained it for his own use and sold it. At Lampsacus he sought to dishonour the daughter of the first citizen of the place; her father and brother ventured to defend her: one of his attendants was slain. Verres seized the pretext to accuse them both of an attempt on his life, and the Roman governor of the province obliged him by cutting off the heads of both. Such were the atrocities of the young ruffian, while yet a mere dependent of the proconsul, with no charge or office of his own. Being appointed quæstor he extended his exactions over every district of the province, and speedily amassed, by the avowal of his own principal, from two to three million sesterces [about £24,000, or $120,000] beyond the requisitions of the public service.

[Sidenote: [75-72 B.C.]]

Verres could now pay for his election to the prætorship in the city. For one year he dispensed his favourable judgments to wealthy suitors at home, and on its termination sailed for the province of Sicily. Here his conduct on the tribunal was marked by the most glaring venality. He sold everything, both his patronage and his decisions, making sport of the laws of the country and of his own edicts, of the religion, the fortunes, and the lives of the provincials. During the three years of his government, not a single senator of the sixty-five cities of the island was elected without a gratuity to the proprætor. He imposed arbitrary requisitions of many hundred thousand bushels of grain upon the communities already overburdened with their authorised tithes. He distributed cities among his favourites with the air of a Persian despot; Lipara he gave to a boon companion, Segesta to an actress, Herbita to a courtesan. These exactions rapidly depopulated the country. At the period of his arrival, the territory of Leontium possessed eighty-three farms; in the third year of the Verrine administration only thirty-two remained in occupation. At Motya the number of tenanted estates had fallen from 188 to 101, at Herbita from 257 to 120, at Argyrona from 250 to 80. Throughout the province more than one-half of the cultivated lands were abandoned by their miserable owners, as if the scourge of war or pestilence had passed over the island.

But Verres was an amateur and an antiquary, and had a taste for art as well as a thirst for lucre. At every city where he stopped on his progresses he extorted gems, vases, and trinkets from his hosts, or from any inhabitant whom he understood to possess them. No one ventured to complain; there was no redress even for a potentate in alliance with the republic, such as Antiochus, king of Syria, who was thus robbed of a splendid candelabrum enriched with jewels, which he was about to dedicate in the Capitol of Rome. All these objects of art were sent off to Italy to decorate the villa of the proprætor; nor were the antiques and curiosities he amassed less valuable than the ornaments of gold and silver. Finally Verres laid his hands on certain statues of Ceres and Diana, the special objects of worship among the natives, who were only allowed the consolation of coming to offer them their sacrifices in his gardens.

Nor did the extortions of Verres fall upon the Sicilians alone. He cheated the treasury at Rome of the sums advanced to him in payment of corn for the consumption of the city. He withheld the necessary equipments from the fleet which he was directed to send against the pirates, and applied them to his own use. The fleet was worsted by the enemy, and the proprætor caused its officers to be executed for cowardice. His lictors sold to the victims’ relatives the miserable favour of despatching them at one blow. He crowned his enormities by punishing one of the ruling caste with death. Gavius, a Roman trader, he confined in the quarries of Syracuse; the man escaped, was retaken, and fastened to a cross on the beach within sight of Italy, that he might address to his native shores his plaintive but ineffectual exclamation, “I am a Roman citizen!”

Such is a specimen of the charges which could be plausibly advanced against a Roman officer, and which the criminal, though backed by the united influence of his party, and defended by the most experienced and successful advocate of his times, shrank from rebutting. In most cases however the governor accused of tyranny or malversation could screen himself by bribing his judges, who besides their natural anxiety to absolve one of their own order of crimes which might in turn be imputed to themselves, had been bred in the same school of corruption and venality as himself. The prosecution of these charges became indeed a ready means of acquiring notoriety, and the people, stimulated by their demagogues, encouraged, it was said, the young orators in their attacks, as whelps are trained to hunt down beasts of prey. But the assailants were in almost every case repulsed, and even if successful the provinces themselves reaped no benefit from their efforts. The proconsuls only exerted themselves the more strenuously to grasp the means of securing their acquittal. They could boast that the fruits of three years’ occupation of office would suffice--the first to make their own fortunes, the second to reward their advocates and partisans, the third and most abundant to buy the suffrages of their judges. The provinces, it might be anticipated, would soon come forward of their own accord and pray for the repeal of the laws against malversation, since they only served to redouble the extortions of their oppressors.

[Sidenote: [72-69 B.C.]]

These frightful iniquities which rendered the dominion of Rome as formidable to the nations in peace as her hostility had been in war, had grown with the progress of luxury and corruption. Her provincial governors had ever wielded their public authority with arrogance and harshness; but in purer and simpler ages they had at least refrained from the sordid exactions and selfish rapacity for which they had now become infamous. The tribunals also had degenerated both in corruption and shamelessness. The knights could venture to assert that during the forty years they had participated in the dispensation of the laws, the justice of Rome had been unstained even by the breath of suspicion. To the notorious venality of the tribunals under the administration of the senate they pointed as a proof of their own superior purity. It was indeed true that the increasing vices of the provincial government were symptomatic of the growing relaxation of morality at home. On the one hand the extension of foreign conquest and the opening in every quarter of new sources of wealth, had inflamed the passions of cupidity and ambition. On the other, half a century of domestic contentions had loosened the bonds of society, overbearing the ancient principles of justice, of respect for law and order, of reverence for things divine. But in fact this greater development of vice was accompanied at the same time by more general publicity, and a more jealous exposure of the faults of political parties. The knights, deterred from the use of force for the recovery of their lost privileges, affected a zeal for justice, to undermine their more fortunate rivals. The constitution of Sulla was assailed and eventually overthrown, not on the field of battle, but on the floor of the law courts.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[97] [That is, without the consent of the senate.]

[98] [Now that they were dispersed among all the tribes, and thus seemingly deprived of influence in the elections, the Italians could, in reality, if they chose, exercise far greater influence than when confined to a few tribes of their own, which always voted last. In all the assemblies they now stood on an equal footing with the rest of the citizens.]

[99] [Appian,[d] however, one of our best authorities for Sulla, says that “he was still of virile age and sound constitution.”]

[100] [This achievement of Sulla is perhaps exaggerated. Either Marius or Sertorius would have been able to put down Mithridates, and restore order in the East. Sulla’s chief service was the reform of the courts and the improvement of the administration.]

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XX. THE RISE OF POMPEY

LEPIDUS AND SERTORIUS

We now enter upon the last stage in the decline and fall of the republic. By a violent effort Sulla had restored the government to the senatorial nobility. But symptoms intimating the insecurity of the fabric which he had hastily reared on blood-bathed foundations showed themselves even before his death. After his secession, Q. Catulus became the chief of the senatorial party. He was son of the Catulus who shared the Cimbrian triumph with Marius, and in the year 79 B.C. he appeared among the candidates for the consulship with the certainty of election. The person who aspired to be his colleague was M. Æmilius Lepidus, a man of illustrious family, but of vain and petulant character. He was supported by many friends, among others by young Pompey. Sulla knew the man, and warned Pompey against entrusting him with power. But Pompey, who already began to talk of “the setting and the rising sun,” disregarded the warning, and Lepidus was elected.

Scarcely was Sulla dead when his words were fulfilled. Lepidus declared himself the chief of the Italian party, and promised to restore all that Sulla had taken away. To prevent a renewal of civil war, the senate bound him and Catulus alike by oath not to take up arms during their consulate. But Lepidus retired to his province of Transalpine Gaul, and, pretending that his oath did not bind him there, began to levy troops. The senate summoned him to return to Rome. He obeyed, but it was at the head of an army. To oppose him, Catulus took post before the Milvian bridge, with Pompey for his lieutenant. Here they were attacked by Lepidus, who was easily defeated. After this failure, he fled to Sardinia, where he died shortly after. But his lieutenants, M. Perperna and M. Junius Brutus, father of Cæsar’s murderer, kept the troops together, and waited for the course of events. A war was raging in Spain, which might well encourage the hopes of discontented persons.

[Sidenote: [78-75 B.C.]]

It has been mentioned that Q. Sertorius had assumed the government of Spain. But after a vain struggle against superior forces, he was obliged to take refuge in Mauretania. The news from Italy was dispiriting. It seemed as if the Marian cause was lost forever. Sertorius lent ear to the tales of seamen who had lately made a voyage to the Fortunate Islands (so the ancients called the Azores), and seemed to recognise the happy regions which Greek legends assigned as the abode of the blessed. But while the active soldier was indulging in day-dreams of indolent tranquillity, he received an invitation from the Lusitanians to head them in rising against the senatorial governors, and obeyed without a moment’s hesitation. Viriathus himself did not use with better effect the energies of the brave mountaineers. The south of Spain was soon too hot to hold the Sullan leaders; the proscribed Marians came out of their hiding places and joined the new chief. His progress, in the course of two years’ time, became so serious that, when Metellus Pius laid down his consulship, he was sent into Spain to crush Sertorius.

But to crush Sertorius was no easy task. He was no mere soldier, but possessed political qualities of a high order. Like Hamilcar and Hasdrubal of old, he flattered the Spaniards with the hope of rising to independence under his rule. The government which he formed indicated a disposition to dispute empire with Rome. He formed a senate of three hundred, consisting partly of proscribed Romans, partly of Spanish chiefs--a step unparalleled in the provincial government of Rome. All cities in his power he organised after the Italian model; and at Osca (now Huesca in Catalonia) he established a school for the noble youth of Spain. The boys wore the Roman garb, and were taught the tongues of Rome and Athens. Sertorius is almost the only statesman of antiquity who tried to use education as an engine of government. It cannot indeed be pretended that his views were merely philanthropic; no doubt he held the boys as hostages for the fidelity of their sires.

His great talents, above all his acknowledgment of equality between provincials and Romans, won him golden opinions. Everywhere the Spaniards crowded to see him, and loudly protested their readiness to die for him. Their enthusiastic reverence for his person was increased by the presence of a white doe, which continually followed him, and was regarded by the simple people as a familiar spirit, by means of which he held communication with heaven.

Metellus in two campaigns found himself unequal to cope with the new ruler of Spain. In the second of these years (77 B.C.) Perperna, who had retired to Gaul with the best troops of Lepidus, entered Spain, and joined the popular leader; and the senate hastily despatched Pompey to reinforce Metellus. On his march through Gaul, the young general encountered the other remnant of the army of Lepidus under Brutus; and Brutus, who fell into his hands, was put to death in cold blood.

[Sidenote: [75-72 B.C.]]

Pompey’s aid, however, did not change the face of affairs. In the first battle the young general was saved by the approach of Metellus, on which Sertorius said: “If the old woman had not come up, I should have given the boy a sound drubbing and sent him back to Rome.” At the end of 75 B.C. Pompey wrote a letter to the senate, representing the insufficiency of his forces, and two more legions were at once sent to reinforce him. Meantime Sertorius himself had reasons for apprehension. Some of his Roman friends, disliking his policy of favouring the provincials, made overtures to the senatorial commanders; and Sertorius, severe by nature, still further exasperated the Romans of his party by forming his bodyguard exclusively of Spaniards. But he still maintained his superiority in the field. Nor was it encouraging to learn that he had received envoys from Mithridates, who was about to renew war with Rome. Sertorius agreed to furnish Roman officers to train the soldiers of Asia, while the king was to repay the loan in ships and money.

The despotic power exercised by Sertorius had corrupted his nature. He indulged in the immoderate use of wine, was impatient of the slightest contradiction, and was guilty of many acts of tyranny. Even the Spaniards began to fall away; and Sertorius in a moment of irritation ordered all the boys at Osca to be put to death. This cruel and impolitic act would probably have cost him his power and his life, even if it had not been terminated by treachery. Perperna, who had at first joined him against his own inclination, thought that a favourable opportunity had arrived for grasping power. He invited Sertorius to a banquet at Osca; and the general, having drunk freely according to his custom, fell an easy prey to the dagger of the assassin (72 B.C.).

But when Perperna had wrought this shameful deed, he found that the name of Sertorius was still powerful among the Spaniards. Many of them, now that their great leader was no more, forgot his faults, and with the devoted enthusiasm of their nation threw themselves into the flames of his funeral pyre. A few days after the death of Sertorius, Perperna attempted to lead the soldiery against Pompey, but he sustained an ignominious defeat. His men were dispersed, and he was taken prisoner. When brought before Pompey, he endeavoured to gain favour by handing him letters which had been interchanged by Sertorius with some of the chief men at Rome. But Pompey, with prudent magnanimity, threw the letters into the fire and refused to hear him. In the course of a year the last relics of the Marian party in Spain were extinguished.

Before this was effected, Rome was engaged in conflict with Mithridates. [The history of this war will be given later in the chapter.] But here must be noticed a formidable outbreak that took place in Italy, and threatened the very existence of the state. This was:

THE WAR OF THE GLADIATORS

[Sidenote: [73-72 B.C.]]

For the purpose of the barbarous shows which were so much enjoyed at Rome, it was the custom to keep schools for training gladiators, who were let out by their owners to the ædiles. At Capua there was a large school of this kind; and among the gladiators in training there was Spartacus, a Thracian, who had once led his countrymen against Roman commanders, but now, having been taken prisoner, was destined to make sport for his conquerors. He persuaded about seventy of his fellow-bondsmen to join him in breaking loose; better it was, he argued, to die in battle on the open field, than on the sand of the amphitheatre. This handful of brave men took up a strong position upon Mount Vesuvius, where Spartacus was presently joined by slaves and outlaws of all descriptions. The gladiators, old soldiers like himself, supplied him with officers. Œnomaus and Crixus, the former a Greek, the latter a Gaul, acted as his lieutenants. He enforced strict discipline; and, so long as he was able, obliged his followers to abstain from acts of rapine. Two Roman prætors attacked him, but they were beaten with loss, and the numbers of his army swelled every day. All this happened in 73 B.C., after the Mithridatic War had broken out, and before the Sertorian War was ended.

In the next year (72 B.C.), the same which witnessed the murder of Sertorius, Spartacus had become strong enough to take the offensive. He had to face a formidable power, for both consuls were ordered to take the field. But, at the head of more than one hundred thousand men, he forced the passes of the Apennines and entered Picenum. His subordinates, however, proved unmanageable; and Spartacus, aware that the power of Rome must prevail, bent all his energies towards forcing his way across the Alps, in the hope of reaching some remote region inaccessible to Rome. As he pressed northwards, he was assaulted by both the consuls, but defeated them both, and made his way to Cisalpine Gaul; but here he was repulsed by the prætor Cassius, and obliged by the impatience of his followers to retrace his steps. Still, every other Roman officer who dared to meet him was defeated; at one time the brave gladiator is said to have meditated a descent upon Rome itself. But he relinquished his desperate plan, and spent the remainder of the year in collecting treasure and arms. Little discipline was now observed. The extent of the ravages committed by the bands under his command may be guessed from the well-known line of Horace, in which he promised his friend a jar of wine made in the Social War, “if he could find one that had escaped the clutches of roaming Spartacus.”

The management of the war was now committed to Crassus, who had really won the battle of the Colline Gate. Ever since the triumph of Sulla he had lived quietly at Rome, profiting by the proscription to buy up property cheap; and after that period he had been busied in making the most profitable use of the large fortune which he had amassed.

[Sidenote: [72-71 B.C.]]

Crassus took the field with six new legions, to be added to the remains of the consular armies. The disorganised battalions of these armies he punished by the unjust and terrible penalty of decimation; but his rigour was successful in restoring discipline. He found Spartacus besieging Rhegium, with the view of establishing a connection with Sicily, and rekindling the Servile War in that island. The gladiator had even agreed with a squadron of Cilician pirates to convey two thousand of his men across the straits; but the faithless marauders took the money and sailed without the men. Crassus determined to shut up the enemy by drawing entrenchments across the narrowest part of the Calabrian peninsula. Twice in one day did Spartacus endeavour to break through the lines; twice he was thrown back with great slaughter. But he continued to defend himself with dauntless pertinacity; and the senate, hearing that Pompey was on his way back from Spain, joined him in the command with Crassus, and urged him to accelerate his march.

Crassus, afraid of losing his laurels, determined to assault Spartacus; but the brave gladiator anticipated him by forcing a passage through the lines, and marching upon Brundusium, where he hoped to seize shipping and make his escape from Italy. But M. Lucullus, brother of Lucius, the commander against Mithridates, had just returned with a force of veteran soldiers from Macedonia to Brundusium. Spartacus, foiled in his intention, turned like a wolf at bay to meet Crassus. A fearful conflict ensued, which remained doubtful till Spartacus was wounded by a dart through the thigh. Supported on his knee, he still fought heroically, till he fell overpowered by numbers. Most of his followers were cut to pieces; but a strong body of the insurgents drew off in good order to the mountains. A division of five thousand made their way to the north of Italy, where Pompey fell in with them on his way home from Spain, and slew them to a man. About six thousand more were taken prisoners by Crassus, who hung them along the road from Rome to Capua.

To Crassus belongs the credit of bringing this dreadful war to a close. In six months he had finished his work. But Pompey claimed the honour of concluding not only the Sertorian War, but also the war with Spartacus. In fact he had not much cause for boasting in either case. The daggers of Perperna really brought the Spanish contest to an end; and as to the gladiatorial conflict, the lucky chance by which Pompey intercepted five thousand fugitives was his only claim to credit. But the young general was a favourite with the soldiery and with the people, while Crassus from his greedy love of money enjoyed little popularity. Public opinion, therefore, seconded claims which were put forward without modesty or justice.

Neither Pompey nor Crassus would enter the city; for both desired a triumph, and their armies lay at the gates to share the honours. The wish of Pompey was at once granted; but to Crassus only an ovation was conceded.

THE CONSULSHIP OF POMPEY AND CRASSUS

[Sidenote: [71-70 B.C.]]

Before they entered the city, they had both asked permission to offer themselves as candidates for the consulship. Both were excluded by the laws of Sulla. Crassus was still prætor, and at least two years ought to elapse before his consulship. Pompey was only in his thirty-fifth year, and had not even been quæstor. The senate, however, dared not refuse Pompey; for he would not disband his army, and his tone brooked no refusal. And what was granted to Pompey could not be denied to Crassus, who also kept his soldiers under arms. Thus, at the demand of two chiefs, each backed by an army, the senate were, within eight years after Sulla’s death, obliged to break his laws. Pompey was elected by acclamation. Crassus might have been less successful, had there not been a secret understanding between him and Pompey. On the calends of January, 70 B.C., Pompey and Crassus entered on their memorable consulship.

On that day Pompey gave intimation of his intention to pursue a popular course of policy. In a set speech he declared his intention of releasing the tribunes from the trammels imposed upon them by Sulla, and of attempting a reform of the judicial system. Both of Pompey’s announcements were received with shouts of applause. To the former the senate offered but a feeble opposition. The tribunes were restored to the exercise of their power, and with their restoration it may be said that the keystone of the arch erected by Sulla fell. With the resuscitation of this popular power revived also the independence of the tribe assembly, and hence followed by necessity a struggle between that body and the senate.

But the other measure broached by Pompey was one which the senate determined to oppose to the uttermost. They could not tamely abandon their absolute power over the law courts. Yet in the last ten years, scandal had been great. Among other persons Cæsar had reason to complain. After his escape from Sulla’s vengeance, he also, like Cicero, resorted to the schools of Greek philosophy. On his return, though only in his twenty-third year, he indicted Cn. Dolabella for misgovernment in Macedonia. Dolabella was defended by Q. Hortensius, the first advocate of the day, a determined adherent of the senatorial party, and as a matter of course he was acquitted. It had, however, been remarked that the knights were little less corrupt than the senators; and the law proposed under Pompey’s authority by the city prætor, L. Aurelius Cotta, was so devised as to establish a court composed of three elements, each of which might serve as a check upon the other two. In each jury one-third of the jurymen was to be furnished by the senate, one-third by the knights, and the remaining third by the tribunes of the treasury. Catulus endeavoured to promote a compromise; but Pompey was resolute, and the nobles prepared to maintain their privilege by arms.

An event, however, occurred which smoothed the way for Cotta’s law. Cicero, after the great credit he had won by his bold defence of Sext. Roscius, had quitted Rome for two years. He returned in 77 B.C., and immediately began to dispute with Hortensius the sway which he exercised in the law courts. Except during the year 75 B.C., when he was serving as quæstor in Sicily, he was employed as an advocate at Rome. His polished eloquence excited universal admiration; his defence of many wealthy clients brought him in much money and connected him with many powerful families. He was of the same age as Pompey; and, being now a candidate for the ædileship, he began to be eager for political distinction. To obtain this by military commands was not suited to his tastes or talents. But it was possible to achieve it by the public impeachment of some powerful offender. C. Cornelius Verres, a man connected with some of the highest senatorial families, had for three years been prætor of Sicily, from which province he had returned after practising extortions and iniquities unexampled even in those days. The Sicilians, remembering the industry and equity with which Cicero had lately executed the functions of quæstor in their island, begged him to come forward as the accuser of this man; and the orator, who saw how he might at once strengthen the hands of Pompey and share the popular triumph of the consul, readily undertook the cause.

The first attempt which the dexterous advocate of Verres made to elude Cicero’s attack was to put forward Q. Cæcilius Niger, who had been quæstor under Verres, to contend that to him belonged the task of accusation. But Cicero exposed the intended fraud so unanswerably that even the senatorial jurymen named Cicero as prosecutor. He demanded ninety days for the purpose of collecting evidence in Sicily. But he only used fifty of them, and on the fifth of August he opened this famous impeachment. He had in the meantime been elected ædile. But Hortensius had also become consul-elect; and one of the Metelli, a warm friend of the accused, was designated to succeed Glabrio, who now presided in the court as prætor peregrinus. It was therefore a great object for Verres to get the trial postponed to the next year, when his great senatorial friends would fill the most important offices in the state. To baffle this design, Cicero contented himself with a brief statement of his case, and at once proceeded to call witnesses. So overpowering was the evidence that Hortensius threw up his brief, and Verres sought impunity in a voluntary exile. To show what he could have done, Cicero published the five great pleadings in which he intended to have set forth the crimes of Verres; and they remain to us as a notable picture of the misery which it was in the power of a Roman proconsul to inflict.

Soon after the trial came to this abrupt issue, the law was passed, seemingly with little opposition; and thus a second great breach was made in the Sullan constitution.

The corrupt state of the senate itself was made manifest by a step now taken by Catulus and his friends. They restored the censorial office, which had been suspended for sixteen years. The censors of the year 70 B.C. discharged their duties with severe integrity, and sixty-four senators were degraded. For Catulus they revived the high rank of princeps, and he was the last independent senator who held that rank. When it was next called into existence, it served to give a title to the despotic authority of Augustus. The review of the knights was made remarkable by the fact that the consul Pompey appeared in the procession, leading his horse through the Forum, and submitting himself to the censorial scrutiny.

The jealousy of Crassus increased with Pompey’s popularity. Both the consuls continued to maintain an armed force near the city; and, though the liberal measures of Pompey had won the Forum, yet the gold of Crassus commanded many followers. The senate dreaded that the days of Marius or Cinna might return. But Crassus calculated the risks of a conflict, and prudently resolved to give a pledge of peace. At the close of the year he publicly offered his hand to Pompey, which the latter deigned to accept after the manner of a prince. It did not suit Crassus to disturb credit and imperil his vast fortune by a civil war; Pompey was satisfied so long as no other disputed his claim to be the first citizen of the republic.

Thus ended by far the most remarkable year that had passed since the time of Sulla. Two generals, backed by an armed force, had trampled on the great dictator’s laws; and one of them had rudely shaken the political edifice reared in so much blood. Behind them appeared the form of one who sought to gain by eloquence and civil arts what had lately been arrogated by the sword. But it was some years yet before Cæsar descended into the political arena.[b]

POMPEY SUBDUES THE CILICIAN PIRATES

[Sidenote: [84-67 B.C.]]

During the party struggles in Italy, Sicily, Africa, and Spain, during the dictatorship of Sulla and its sanguinary effects, felt long afterwards in the Sertorian and Slave wars, the sufferings of Rome and her provinces were increased by a scourge of a peculiar character which had gradually attained alarming proportions.

The coasts of the western part of that district of Asia Minor known as Cilicia, where the wild mountains of the Taurus, which intersect the country, afford a safe refuge to the robber and his prey, had been from ancient times the home of piracy. The hopeless confusion of the Syrian kingdom, of which Cilicia formed a part, set order at defiance and for a long time allowed full play to the lucrative trade which flourished under the protection of the states of Rhodes, Cyprus, and Egypt, all of them at enmity with the Syrian monarchy.

We know how in the year 228 Rome had punished the Illyrian pirates, but it was only about the year 103 that Marcus Antonius was sent against those of Cilicia and after some time celebrated a hard-earned triumph. The torpor of the Roman government and the civil disturbances were more inimical to the safety of the seas than to that of the land; and in the war against Mithridates, in which civil disturbances played such a disastrous part, the ships of the Cilicians offered the same refuge to the vanquished--whether he were of Pontus, Greece, or Rome, whether Mithridates or Sulla had made him homeless--as they afforded to escaped convicts, runaway slaves, and the outcasts of every nation and every country. Their pirate sails were soon to be found all over the Mediterranean Sea. After the collapse of the Grecian states and the decay of the Roman sea power there was soon no safety for any merchant ship, or coast district.

When the captured men could not ransom themselves by large sums of money, they were taken to the great slave markets of which the island of Delos was the chief depot, and in the secure and unassailable mountain castles of Cilicia the corsairs deposited the money and other property which their boats and fleets had seized throughout the whole district of the Mediterranean.

The excellent organisation of this roving power added tenfold to its danger. Any one who belonged to the great association could claim assistance from any ship that carried the pirate flag. There was no fear of treachery; a common interest, common foes, a similar life had created a kind of national cohesion and national feeling among these freebooters of the sea.

The repeated efforts of the Romans to stem the danger had been without avail. L. Murena (84-81) accomplished nothing, neither was anything of a decisive nature effected by P. Servilius Vatia (78-75), although he conducted the war with much will and energy. He did his best; and by his capture of the city of Isaura, in Taurus, he won for himself the surname of Isauricus and a triumph at which he was able to produce rich booty and, to the especial delight of the people, some pirate captains as prisoners. Cilicia was formed into a Roman province, but this left the evil practically untouched. The selection in the year 74 of Marcus Antonius, a son of the Marcus Antonius mentioned above, as proprætor against the Cilician corsairs, with considerable means at his disposal, was also a failure, for the chiefs of the Cretan pirate horde annihilated the greater portion of his fleet. Emboldened by success, the corsairs of the Syrian coasts ventured as far as the Pillars of Hercules; they mocked at the power and sapped the vitality of the Roman state. Notable men like P. Clodius and Julius Cæsar fell into their hands. Ambassadors of foreign powers on their way to Rome were captured, and Roman ambassadors and curule magistrates had to be ransomed. Twelve axes, Cicero moaned, fell into the hands of the pirates, who with these insignia in their possession mocked at the supremacy of Rome. Italian cities such as Caieta, and Misenum, to say nothing of Greek ones like Cnidus, Colophon, and Samos were plundered, and the pirate squadron--the nimble little myoparones--even appeared at Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber. Trade and the free supply of provisions were everywhere seriously obstructed and this was particularly felt at Rome; the high price of corn, and the emptiness of the treasury, whose source of replenishment was cut off, pressed heavily on the nation and at last became unendurable.

The half-measures adopted so far having accomplished nothing, it was evident that the pirates must either be destroyed by one great blow or left to do as they pleased.

[Sidenote: [67 B.C.]]

In these circumstances Gabinius, one of the tribunes of the people for the year 67, a favourite of Pompey and in the pay of the latter, came forward with the momentous proposal that a general invested with extensive powers should be entrusted with the extermination of the pirates. He should be an imperator for three years with proconsular and irresponsible power extending from the Pillars of Hercules to the farthest east. He should have unlimited command throughout the sea and four hundred stadia inland in all countries, including Italy. Fifteen senatorial legati with a prætor’s privileges, and appointed by himself; two hundred ships, six thousand Attic talents and whatever land forces he might require, should be placed at the disposal of this imperator. In making this proposal no name was given, but everybody knew that it pointed to Pompey. This rogation was received with great applause. Pompey had been successful in all his preceding efforts and had just re-established the tribunician power; he was the idol of every Roman citizen, and the people reposed in him that unlimited confidence which the multitude are wont to accord to those whom they have once chosen for their favourites. Naturally the senate did not receive the appointment in the same spirit. To give one man such boundless power was the same, it was said, as to give it to him forever; it was to exchange freedom for the government of one; to turn, as the punsters said, a navarch into a monarch. Q. Catulus tried to throw the weight of his esteemed name, and Q. Hortensius that of his eloquence, into the scale against the dangerous measure. They sought to obtain the veto of the rest of the tribunes against the rogation which would place all the power of the republic at the disposal of one man, and might thus create a regular tyranny, a new Romulus; and here and there party bitterness may have vented itself in angry words, saying that the new Romulus should be treated like the old, whose mangled remains were carried away from the Field of Mars under the togas of the senators. But when the measure was put to the vote of the assembly, all opposition was futile against the unanimous and clamorous voice of the people and of the most renowned leaders of the popular party whose interests, like those of Julius Cæsar, were intimately connected with those of Pompey. The tribune Trebellius ventured to interpose his veto and maintained it until seventeen tribes voted for his removal from office when his firmness forsook him. It was in vain that Q. Catulus counselled that the deputies should be appointed by the people and not by Pompey; all resistance was useless. One hundred and twenty thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry, twenty-four deputies and five hundred ships, which exceeded the first commission, were placed at the service of Pompey, who with assumed modesty begged to be spared the difficult task. And so high were the hopes centred in him that the price of corn fell immediately on his appointment and before he had done anything.

Pompey justified the hopes of Rome. He turned to the best account the means placed at his disposal. He divided his command into thirteen areas under his deputies, and moved with his main forces from west to east. The corsairs were chased from one lurking-place to another, from retreat to retreat, and one admiral drove them into another’s net. Before forty days had elapsed the western Mediterranean was free, and the corn ships from Africa, Sardinia, and Sicily now had free course into the Roman harbours, as had not been the case for years. After a short stay at Rome, Pompey again set sail for Brundusium, and the chase commenced afresh. Treachery and submission decreased the number of the pirates who could no longer hold out and who were wisely spared by Pompey when they submitted. In less than three months he was on the western coast of wild Cilicia and arrived at the promontory of Coracesium, where a final battle put an end to the war. The remaining corsairs were there assembled and were defeated. The seas were now free, and the mountain castles opened and disgorged their plunder, their arms, their treasure, and their prisoners. Thirteen hundred ships were burned, seventy-two taken, and 306 surrendered. One hundred and twenty strongholds and towns were destroyed, ten thousand pirates were killed, and twenty thousand taken prisoners.

The liberated prisoners who now returned to their homes, the soldiers enriched by the chase, the Roman people saved from hunger, the merchants of the wide Roman dominions whose commerce was reinstated--all lauded the name of the great proconsul who had accomplished in three months what had been vainly desired for seventeen years. In fact, this extermination of the corsairs of the Mediterranean was probably the most brilliant and in any case the most meritorious achievement in the life of Pompey, although it must also be noted that this swift conquest was as illustrative of the power of Rome when it assembled and united its forces, as it was of the capacity of Pompey. The pirates themselves moreover had no cause to complain of undue severity. The better sort were allowed to settle in the town of Soli in Cilicia, whose name, Pompeiopolis, immortalised the memory of its conqueror; others found shelter in different inland places and towns, whilst some were even bestowed in southern Italy. The temperate way in which Pompey treated the conquered led the Cretans, who had been conquered in 68 by Q. Metellus and treated with great cruelty, to send their submission by an embassy.

Pompey accepted it and sent them his deputy L. Octavius; Metellus protested loudly against this invasion of his province, and took up arms against him, but his protest was unjustifiable in face of the Gabinian law. Thus a regular civil war arose in the island, which was of little importance in itself but greatly increased the very unsettled condition of the republic and its government.

THE SECOND AND THIRD MITHRIDATIC WARS

[Sidenote: [84-73 B.C.]]

In the meanwhile Pompey was by no means inclined to be contented with this triumph. He expected that the command in the Pirate War would lead to a greater and more important one. The war in Asia had always been the object of his desires, and now, after crushing the corsairs, the people could not refuse him anything. L. Licinius Murena, left by Sulla in Asia in the year 84 with the two Fimbrian legions, had recommenced the war directly after his general’s departure, but without success, and at Sulla’s command he abandoned it; these military operations, which ended in the year 81 with the triumph of the proprætor Murena, were distinguished by the name of the Second Mithridatic War. Mithridates knew that the peace with Sulla was only a truce, and he saw himself threatened anew when the Romans made Bithynia a province in the year 75, its last king, Nicomedes III, having died and bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman people. We know that through the Marians who had taken refuge at his court, Mithridates entered into negotiations with Sertorius, and therefore in the year 74 the consuls, L. Licinius Lucullus and M. Aurelius Cotta, accepted the king’s challenge to the Third Mithridatic War.

The king found that the corsairs were allies not to be despised on the sea; and the Roman outlaws at his court, as well as the officers sent him by Sertorius, helped him to drill his army in the Roman fashion. Lucullus and Cotta were entrusted with the direction of the war. The former, a man belonging to the aristocratic class had exhibited great capacity in the eastern seat of war, and in all the appointments since filled by him, he had proved himself a skilful and intelligent officer, while his moderation and gentleness united with unusual cultivation had won Sulla’s highest approval.

In the year 74 the war commenced. Mithridates began operations by calling many districts in Asia Minor to arms and by making himself master in Bithynia by means of his fleet and army. The Romans had retired to Chalcedon; and here Cotta, who refused to wait for his advancing colleague, was beaten by land and water, and the king proceeded in a southwesterly direction, towards the town of Cyzicus, and laid siege to it. The Hellenic inhabitants offered a firm resistance, for they knew the fate that awaited conquered cities at the hands of the Pontian king. Lucullus was therefore able to move to a spot east of the camp of Mithridates. By this stroke he cut off the king’s communication with his Pontian territory and closing the way on the land side left Mithridates only the sea open to him. At the river Rhyndacus (east of Cyzicus) Lucullus defeated a portion of the enemy’s army which was attempting to break through the Roman lines. The sufferings from the winter season and want of care consequent on the stoppage of the transports had naturally thinned the ranks of the three hundred thousand men who were besieging the city. So in the spring of 73 the king was finally forced to raise the siege and escape with the rest of his fleet; and the failure would have been fatal to him, had not the Roman ships been burned in the harbour the previous year.

[Sidenote: [73-70 B.C.]]

Thus the Pontian fleet, which swept the Black Sea and the Propontis, met with no opposition in its expedition to the Ægean Sea, and it was said that the Roman exiles who commanded it had decided to attempt a landing in Italy. However, Lucullus himself, who had turned westward from Cyzicus, commanded the little fleet, which had been collected in the Ægean waters and defeated the enemy’s squadron in a battle between Lemnos and Scyros in which most of the Roman exiles lost their lives.

In the meanwhile, Lucullus’ deputies Voconius, Barba, and Triarius, united against Mithridates, who was stationed with his troops at Nicomedia (Bithynia). The king avoided a battle and fled on a pirate ship, besieged Heraclea on the way, where he assembled the rest of his fleet which the storm had almost entirely scattered, and then proceeded past Sinope to Amisus. The foes being now driven back to their own domains, the Romans took the offensive.

Aurelius Cotta stationed himself at Heraclea. Lucullus himself passed in the autumn of the year 73 into the Pontian district. Mithridates avoided a battle and retired inland where the pursuing enemy would find it difficult to obtain supplies. Lucullus followed, leaving parties to besiege or watch Amisus and Eupatoria, the most important cities of Pontus; and deaf to the murmurs of his soldiers, quickly pursued the king and arrived in the spring of 72 at Cabira (on the Lycus in Pontus).

The king had looked in vain for allies in the winter; neither the great ruler of Armenia, his son-in-law Tigranes, nor the Parthians would support him. But a powerful army of forty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry was meanwhile levied in his own states under the command of Diophantus and Taxiles, whilst Lucullus only mustered three legions. Mithridates’ cavalry, his best support, was completely defeated by Lucullus’ deputy, M. Fabius Hadrianus, and when the king ordered a further retreat, the camp became the scene of blind fear and confusion which was turned into a complete rout by a timely onslaught from Lucullus. The king fled with two thousand cavalry over the border of his kingdom to Armenia, where his son-in-law Tigranes received him. The rich booty of the camp fell into the hands of the Roman soldiers; by the king’s command an eunuch forced the women of the harem to drink of a flagon of poison to save them from falling into the hands of the enemy--the greatest of all disgraces for an oriental ruler.

There was now a pause in the war. The flat country submitted everywhere to the Romans; only Amisus on the Pontian coast, Sinope and Amastris on the Paphlagonian, and Heraclea on the Bithynian coast, made an obstinate resistance, supported by the troops of the king and his allies, the corsairs, with their ships.

While the deputies were occupied with these sieges, from 72-70, the commander-in-chief organised the internal affairs of the Asiatic province, where there was a pressing need for the attention of an upright man like Lucullus. Sulla’s peace had left the inhabitants of these beautiful countries to their hopeless misery under Roman tax gatherers. The twenty thousand talents which Sulla had imposed on them had grown to a debt of 120,000 talents under the usurious interest of the Roman capitalists, who advanced the community the money for the indemnity; and to satisfy the creditors the sacred vessels in the temples of the gods had to be melted down, freemen sold their sons and daughters into slavery, and where payment was delayed or impossible every torture was resorted to which inventive avarice could devise; so that according to Plutarch’s expression “slavery seemed like peace and seisachtheia[101] in comparison.”

To mitigate this disgraceful state of things, Lucullus issued a decree at Ephesus forbidding more than twelve per cent. interest, releasing debtors from the obligation to pay interest whose total exceeded the original capital, and prohibiting the creditor from claiming more than a quarter of the debtor’s property.

The provincials congratulated themselves on having such a just and humane proconsul, but his policy aroused the deadly hatred of the Roman capitalists as it injured their business, and they spared no efforts in Rome to accomplish his fall as soon as possible. In this they received great assistance from the increasing discontent of the soldiers who were as much opposed to the justice and moderation of Lucullus as they were to the long continuation of the war, which had just taken a fresh start.

Mithridates had worked the whole winter trying to draw Tigranes into the Roman war which he must sooner or later be unable to avoid. His own power had broken down, his son Machares, the satrap of his kingdom of the Bosporus had made peace with Lucullus on his own account and his ships returning from Crete and Spain had been destroyed by Lucullus’ deputy at Tenedos.

THE ARMENIAN WAR

[Sidenote: [70-68 B.C.]]

Tigranes’ kingdom of Armenia had previously been, like so many others, a province of the Syrian kingdom, and its governor had asserted his independence under Antiochus the Great. Tigranes had extended it on every side and had increased it by fragments taken from the Syrian kingdom which was now falling into ruins, whilst princes of the house of the Seleucidæ quarrelled over its remains. From the year 83 Syria and Cilicia appear as Armenian provinces under Armenian governors. But the great king Tigranes himself held his gorgeous court in eastern fashion at Tigranocerta near the borders of Mesopotamia. It was one of those gigantic cities rapidly built and filled at the bidding of a despot, the ruins of which are to be found in the East scattered here and there as witnesses to the evanescent character of despotic creations.

In earlier times the Roman government would not have so long delayed showing this despot his proper place. Lucullus, contrary to the will of the government now carried the war into Tigranes’ territory, demanding from the great ruler that he should deliver up Mithridates. This was suggested by Appius Claudius, whose bold speech filled the barbarian ruler with astonishment. He was furious and enraged that Lucullus did not give him his title of “King of Kings,” but only addressed him as king, and avenged himself by refusing the title of “imperator” to the Roman, and making common cause with Mithridates whom he had not previously admitted to his presence.

Lucullus led his unwilling army, of which the Fimbrian legions after thirteen campaigns were now with some reason demanding to be disbanded, over the Cappadocian Mountains and then across the Euphrates. This was an ill-advised course considering the nature of the Armenian territory and the small numbers and ill-humour of his soldiers who were in no way pleased to be leaving the Pontian district behind them.

Whilst King Tigranes was still rocking himself in the ignorance of an eastern prince and listening to his courtiers’ assurances that the Roman army would never venture to face the hosts of the King of Kings, a messenger arrived to acquaint him with its approach. The messenger who brought the unpleasant news was rewarded by death, but it was none the less true. Mithrobarzanes was given the command of the band now sent against the Romans as punishment for not having joined the flatteries of the courtiers, but he was easily beaten. Tigranes left his capital just before the arrival of the Romans, and reinforcements gradually arrived from the different nations of his kingdom. Their appearance and their numbers--there were Arabians, Syrians, Medes, Adiabenians, Armenians, Iberians, and Albanians from the heights and valleys of the Caucasus--inspired him with confidence. He rejected the counsel of Mithridates, who, from his own experience of the Romans, advised him to avoid a battle and to employ his own superior cavalry to cut off the enemy’s supplies, and the heights around Tigranocerta were soon covered with the king’s army of 150,000 heavy infantry, 20,000 light infantry, and 55,000 mounted men, 17,000 being in coat of mail. Lucullus left 6000 men before the city, and the remainder, who seemed to the king to be too many for an embassy and too few for an army went up the river to find a ford. “There they fly, these invincible Roman hoplites!” exclaimed the king, with confidence. However, he soon afterwards saw to his horror, how the eagle of the first legion wheeled round and then one cohort after another crossed the river in the proud and confident manner of Roman troops. Quickly the king sought to array his followers but it was another barbarian battle, in which the stampede commenced before the troops were ranged in order. Driven back by the first attack and thrown into confusion the masses of men offered a wide target and an easy prey for the swords of the enemy.

The Romans were almost ashamed at their easy victory, for it cost them only five dead and 105 wounded. The enemy’s loss was incalculable. The tiara and diadem of the Armenian king fell into Roman hands; and the city of Tigranocerta had to surrender. It was taken and given over to the soldiers to plunder; some of the heterogeneous population were sent back to their native districts.

Lucullus wished to follow up the victory so as to give the enemy no time to assemble for a fresh resistance. Submission was made to him by many of the subjects of Tigranes, and an embassy of the Parthians appeared with an offering of friendship. Only one more blow was needed to finally drive the Armenian from his throne. But it was some time before the general could appease his discontented, unwilling soldiers and the allied kings made use of the opportunity to reassemble an army of seventy thousand infantry and thirty-five thousand cavalry. This time they followed Mithridates’ advice to avoid a battle. However, when Artaxata (on the Araxes) the second city of the kingdom was threatened, a battle ensued on the river Arsanias in the neighbourhood. The conflict lasted somewhat longer this time and the victory was bought more dearly, the loss of the enemy was somewhat slighter, but the result was the same. No Asiatic army, albeit large and well chosen, could be victorious over a well-commanded Roman army.

[Sidenote: [68-67 B.C.]]

But Lucullus had not yet accomplished his purpose. His military capacity was indisputable, but he was wanting in the power of attaching the soldiers to himself by that personal charm which was almost a more important gift in those times.

They murmured that the richest towns had been past by, none had been taken by storm, so that they had come in for no plunder; but they maintained that the imperator looked out for himself though he gave them nothing, and it cannot be denied that Lucullus enriched himself. In his cold, severe manner the general ignored their desire for loot, and they hated him not only because he was an aristocrat but because he treated the inhabitants of the cities with consideration, whilst they, as savage soldiery, regarded them as profitable booty. The snow-covered mountains and the endless precipitous roads filled them with aversion; never had they wintered in a friendly Hellenic city, and the officers concurred in these complaints, particularly P. Clodius, the brother-in-law of the general, who actively fostered the feeling against Lucullus in the camp as well as the capital.

The proconsul could not induce his soldiers to help him to take Artaxata, the second city of the Armenian kingdom. Half ceding to their pressure he turned southward to Mesopotamia, whose capital Nisibis surrendered to him. But here the unwilling machine denied him further service. The troops insisted on winter quarters in Nisibis and its environs where they wished to wait for the successor of Lucullus. This was advantageous to the enemy as it delayed the final blow.

However Tigranes gained nothing, as L. Fannius came opportunely to the aid of Lucullus’ soldiers whom Tigranes had surprised. Nevertheless Mithridates strove to benefit by the discontent in the Roman army and regain his kingdom.

He arrived at Pontus and attacked the Romans, who had excited universal hatred in the country, with a small force, and not unsuccessfully for he had learned somewhat in the long war, and in the following year (67) he defeated the deputy Triarius at Zela on the river Iris (southwest of Pontus) when the Romans lost seven thousand killed, amongst them a great number of officers.

Lucullus, hearing the bad news, withdrew to Mesopotamia and returned to Pontus, and Mithridates carried the war from thence to Cappadocia. When Lucullus wished to follow him thither, the Fimbrian soldiers declined to obey him as he was no longer their general and they declared they would only remain under arms with the other legions, until the autumn.

Mithridates profited by these occurrences. Acilius Glabrio, the governor of Bithynia who was to have been replaced by Lucullus, and Q. Marcius Rex, the governor of Cilicia, were inactive in their provinces, and when the ten commissioners of the Roman senate arrived to join with Lucullus in organising the conquered district of Pontus as a province, Mithridates had reconquered the greater part of it. In the meanwhile, the mine laid at Rome against the general of the aristocracy by his active enemies, namely, Pompey and his friends, the embittered members of the equestrian order, the offended officers and the misguided people, was finally sprung and the inevitable Pompey, who reaped everywhere where he had not sown, was appointed commander-in-chief in the East and this time with full powers more comprehensive and extravagant than those conferred in the previous year by the Gabinian law.[c]

[Sidenote: [67-66 B.C.]]

During the year of inaction that had preceded Pompey’s appointment, Mithridates had collected a fresh army, with which he occupied the frontier of Pontus. Pompey received his new commission in the summer of 66 B.C., and he at once pushed forward towards Cabira, through a country wasted by previous campaigns. Mithridates, anxious to avoid a battle, retired towards the sources of the Halys, but he was overtaken by the Roman general, and obliged to give battle on a spot afterwards marked by the city of Nicopolis, founded by Pompey in memory of the battle. Here Mithridates was entirely defeated, and with only a few stragglers succeeded in crossing the Euphrates. But Tigranes refused to harbour him in Armenia, and he made his way northward, with great difficulty, through the wild mountain tribes of Caucasus to Dioscurias (Iskuria) on the coast of Circassia. Banished from the regions south of Caucasus, his adventurous genius formed the conception of uniting the Sarmatian tribes northward of the Black Sea, and making a descent upon Italy. Panic-stricken at his father’s approach, Machares, viceroy of the Crimea, sought death by his own hand; and the Crimea again became subject to Mithridates.

So great was the terror caused by the victories of the Roman general, that Tigranes would have prostrated himself at his feet, had not Pompey prevented the humiliation; and Phraates of Parthia, who had assumed the proud title of “King of Kings,” lately arrogated by Tigranes, sent to make an alliance with the victorious Roman, who turned his steps northward in pursuit of Mithridates. At midwinter he celebrated the Saturnalia on the river Cyrus (Kur), and in the spring advanced along the coast to the Phasis. But learning that Mithridates was safe in the Crimea, he turned back to his old quarters on the Cyrus, and spent the summer in reducing the tribes which occupied the southern slopes of Caucasus. One of his victories was celebrated by the foundation of another Nicopolis. But he was obliged to return to Pontus for winter quarters. Here he received ambassadors from the neighbouring potentates, and busied himself in reducing Pontus to the form of a Roman province. For the next two years he occupied himself by campaigns in the famous countries to the south of Asia Minor.[b]

THE END OF MITHRIDATES

[Sidenote: [66-63 B.C.]]

Mithridates spent part of his youth away from his father’s court; he had been put on the wildest horses, which he had learned to master; he retired into the most impenetrable hunting districts, so that half the time no one knew where he was. He differed from all kings with whom the Romans had fought because he had pure Persian and true Asiatic blood flowing through his veins; for he was descended from Persian satraps.

The aim of his life was to make the throne of Pontus the centre of the national Asiatic opposition to Rome. Thereby he enjoyed great momentary success: but he was defeated by the great power of the Romans in their union with the Greek element. He was then robbed of his father’s lands. Nothing but the life of an adventurous fugitive remained for him. His brave wife Hypsicratia, who had to look after him and his horse, accompanied him to the citadel, where the royal treasure was kept. Mithridates divided it among the loyal followers who were still around him. He is said to have entertained the same thoughts attributed to Philip III of Macedonia of advancing on Italy through the lands of the Danube, and from the east of seeking the Romans in their home, as did Hannibal. But these daring chimeras were joined to a feeling of immediate danger.

Among his followers he divided equal shares of poison, so as to insure them against the danger of falling into the hands of the Romans. He himself did not die from poison; he sought support in his Bosporus possessions. But as there his son rebelled against him, he had the death-blow given him by a true Gaul. The son, Pharnaces, joined the Romans.

After Mithridates had been driven out, Pompey turned against Tigranes in Armenia, who at this time was waging war with the Parthian king Phraates whom the younger Tigranes had joined. In the midst of all these dissensions in Armenia, Pompey stepped in, not precisely as an enemy, but as arbitrator. There are many accounts of the submissiveness which Tigranes expressed towards Pompey. The main point is that he praised Pompey as the man into whose hands the fate of the world had now been laid.

Tigranes had to give up all acquisitions which he had made in war with the Seleucians; he kept Armenia. The son was led away into captivity. Armenia had more or less already been drawn into the circle of universal history. But Pompey can be added to the men who have carried on the historical movement of the world in provinces which up till this time had remained undisturbed by it. At the election he met the Albanians, who still continued in the primitive simplicity of a pastoral people. With their cavalcades they tried to prevent the Romans from reaching the Black Sea, or at least, if this was unsuccessful, to make their return impossible. In the year 65 a battle took place in which the Roman manœuvres had the upper hand. Albanians, Iberians, and a few other independent nations sealed a compact with them. Pompey is said to have had the desire, like Alexander, to seek the Caucasian Rock, to which, according to Greek tradition, Prometheus was chained. But the Roman leader was not the man to let himself be led by an illusion of this kind; it was sufficient for him to have subjected Pontus and Armenia. Already he felt himself strong enough to deprive the king of the Parthians of the title of “King of Kings.” He took up the interests of Armenia against the Parthians. As Tigranes had lost his acquisitions, so Phraates was to lose his. Phraates did not dare take up arms against the victorious Roman army. The ambassadors of Elymais and Media appeared at the winter camp of Pompey at Amisus.

POMPEY IN JERUSALEM

Through the victory in Armenia the Romans at the same time became masters in Syria, which it was impossible to give back to the Seleucians, as they did not know how to defend themselves. The survivors of this battle had to content themselves with the grant of a small province, and acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. After the example of the Syrian kings, Pompey could not think of introducing the Greek worship of the gods into Jerusalem; he occupied himself only with the political interests.[d]

As he advanced southward, his authority was called in to settle a quarrel between two brothers of that royal family, which had inherited the Jewish sceptre and high priesthood from the brave Maccabees. Aristobulus was the reigning king of Judea, but his title was disputed by his brother Hyrcanus. It was the latter who applied for aid to the Roman general. Pompey accepted the appeal. But the Jews, attached to the reigning prince, refused obedience, and Pompey was obliged to undertake the siege of Jerusalem. For three months the Jews defended themselves with their wonted obstinacy; but their submission was enforced by famine, and Pompey entered the Holy City. Pillage he forbade: but, excited by the curiosity which even then the spiritual worship of Jehovah created in the minds of Roman idolaters, he entered the sacred precincts of the Temple, and ventured even to intrude into the Holy of Holies, and to stand behind that solemn veil which had hitherto been lifted but once a year, and that by the high priest alone. We know little of the impression produced upon Pompey’s mind by finding the shrine untenanted by any object of worship. But it is interesting to compare the irreverent curiosity of the Roman with the conduct attributed to the Great Alexander upon a similar occasion. Hyrcanus was established in the sovereignty, on condition of paying a tribute to Rome: Aristobulus followed the conqueror as his prisoner.

Aretas, king of the Nabatæan Arabs, defied the arms of Pompey; and the conqueror was preparing to enter the rocky deserts of Idumæa, so as to penetrate to Petra, when he received news which suddenly recalled him to Asia Minor. Mithridates was no more. Pompey hastened to Sinope, to which place the body of the old king had been sent by his son. It was honoured with a royal funeral, and placed in the sepulchre of his fathers.

The remainder of the year 63 B.C. was spent by the general in regulating the new provinces of Bithynia, Pontus, and Syria, and in settling the kingdoms which he allowed to remain under Roman protection on the frontiers of these provinces. Pharnaces, son of Mithridates, was left in the possession of the Crimea and its dependencies; Deiotarus, chief of Galatia, received an increase of territory; Ariobarzanes was restored for the fourth time to the principality of Cappadocia. All this was done by Pompey’s sole authority, without advice from the senate.

[Sidenote: [62-61 B.C.]]

Early in 62 B.C. he left Asia, and proceeded slowly through Macedonia and Greece--so slowly, that on the 1st of January, 61 B.C., he had not yet appeared before the walls of Rome to claim his triumph. He had been absent from Italy for nearly seven years. His intentions were known to none. But the power given him by the devotion of his soldiers was absolute; and the senatorial chiefs might well feel anxiety till he disclosed his will. But before we speak of his arrival in Rome, we must relate the important events that had occurred during his absence.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[101] The measure by which Solon eased the burdens of the Attic creditors.

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