The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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Conflicts without Result
Accordingly he took the place of Metellus in the course of 647;
and held the command in the campaign of the following year; but his
confident promise to do better than his predecessor and to deliver
Jugurtha bound hand and foot with all speed at Rome was more easily
given than fulfilled. Marius carried on a desultory warfare with
the Gaetulians; he reduced several towns that had not previously been
occupied; he undertook an expedition to Capsa (Gafsa) in the extreme
south-east of the kingdom, which surpassed even that of Thala in
difficulty, took the town by capitulation, and in spite of the
convention caused all the adult men in it to be slain--the only
means, no doubt, of preventing the renewed revolt of that remote city
of the desert; he attacked a mountain-stronghold--situated on the
river Molochath, which separated the Numidian territory from the
Mauretanian--whither Jugurtha had conveyed his treasure-chest, and,
just as he was about to desist from the siege in despair of success,
fortunately gained possession of the impregnable fastness through
the coup de main of some daring climbers. Had his object merely
been to harden the army by bold razzias and to procure booty for the
soldiers, or even to eclipse the march of Metellus into the desert
by an expedition going still farther, this method of warfare might
be allowed to pass unchallenged; but the main object to be aimed at,
and which Metellus had steadfastly and perseveringly kept in view--
the capture of Jugurtha--was in this way utterly set aside.
The expedition of Marius to Capsa was a venture as aimless, as
that of Metellus to Thala had been judicious; but the expedition
to the Molochath, which passed along the border of, if not into,
the Mauretanian territory, was directly repugnant to sound policy.
King Bocchus, in whose power it lay to bring the war to an issue
favourable for the Romans or endlessly to prolong it, now concluded
with Jugurtha a treaty, in which the latter ceded to him a part of
his kingdom and Bocchus promised actively to support his son-in-law
against Rome. The Roman army, which was returning from the river
Molochath, found itself one evening suddenly surrounded by immense
masses of Mauretanian and Numidian cavalry; they were obliged to fight
just as the divisions stood without forming in a proper order of battle
or carrying out any leading command, and had to deem themselves
fortunate when their sadly-thinned troops were brought into temporary
safety for the night on two hills not far remote from each other.
But the culpable negligence of the Africans intoxicated with victory
wrested from them its consequences; they allowed themselves to be
surprised in a deep sleep during the morning twilight by the Roman
troops which had been in some measure reorganized during the night,
and were fortunately dispersed. Thereupon the Roman army continued
its retreat in better order and with greater caution; but it was
yet again assailed simultaneously on ail the four sides and was in
great danger, till the cavalry officer Lucius Cornelius Sulla first
dispersed the squadrons opposed to him and then, rapidly returning
from their pursuit, threw himself also on Jugurtha and Bocchus at
the point where they in person pressed hard on the rear of the
Roman infantry. Thus this attack also was successfully repelled;
Marius brought his army back to Cirta, and took up his winter
quarters there (648-9).
Negotiations with Bocchus
Strange as it may seem, we can yet understand why the Romans now,
after king Bocchus had commenced the war, began to make most zealous
exertions to secure his friendship, which they had at first slighted
and thereafter had at least not specially sought; by doing so they
gained this advantage, that no formal declaration of war took place
on the part of Mauretania. King Bocchus was not unwilling to return
to his old ambiguous position: without dissolving his agreement with
Jugurtha or dismissing him, he entered into negotiations with the
Roman general respecting the terms of an alliance with Rome. When
they were agreed or seemed to be so, the king requested that, for
the purpose of concluding the treaty and receiving the royal captive,
Marius would send to him Lucius Sulla, who was known and acceptable
to the king partly from his having formerly appeared as envoy of
the senate at the Mauretanian court, partly from the commendations of
the Mauretanian envoys destined for Rome to whom Sulla had rendered
services on their way. Marius was in an awkward position.
His declining the suggestion would probably lead to a breach; his
accepting it would throw his most aristocratic and bravest officer
into the hands of a man more than untrustworthy, who, as every one
knew, played a double game with the Romans and with Jugurtha, and
who seemed almost to have contrived the scheme for the purpose of
obtaining for himself provisional hostages from both sides in the
persons of Jugurtha and Sulla. But the wish to terminate the war
outweighed every other consideration, and Sulla agreed to undertake
the perilous task which Marius suggested to him. He boldly departed
under the guidance of Volux the son of king Bocchus, nor did his
resolution waver even when his guide led him through the midst of
Jugurtha's camp. He rejected the pusillanimous proposals of flight
that came from his attendants, and marched, with the king's son at
his side, uninjured through the enemy. The daring officer evinced
the same decision in the discussions with the sultan, and induced
him at length seriously to make his choice.
Surrender and Execution of Jugurtha
Jugurtha was sacrificed. Under the pretext that all his requests were
to be granted, he was allured by his own father-in-law into an ambush,
his attendants were killed, and he himself was taken prisoner.
The great traitor thus fell by the treachery of his nearest relatives.
Lucius Sulla brought the crafty and restless African in chains along
with his children to the Roman headquarters; and the war which had
lasted for seven years was at an end. The victory was primarily
associated with the name of Marius. King Jugurtha in royal robes
and in chains, along with his two sons, preceded the triumphal chariot
of the victor, when he entered Rome on the 1st of January 650: by
his orders the son of the desert perished a few days afterwards in
the subterranean city-prison, the old -tullianum- at the Capitol--
the "bath of ice," as the African called it, when he crossed the
threshold in order either to be strangled or to perish from cold and
hunger there. But it could not be denied that Marius had the least
important share in the actual successes: the conquest of Numidia up
to the edge of the desert was the work of Metellus, the capture of
Jugurtha was the work of Sulla, and between the two Marius played a
part somewhat compromising the dignity of an ambitious upstart.
Marius reluctantly tolerated the assumption by his predecessor of the
name of conqueror of Numidia; he flew into a violent rage when king
Bocchus afterwards consecrated a golden effigy at the Capitol, which
represented the surrender of Jugurtha to Sulla; and yet in the eyes
of unprejudiced judges the services of these two threw the generalship
of Marius very much into the shade--more especially Sulla's brilliant
expedition to the desert, which had made his courage, his presence of
mind, his acuteness, his power over men to be recognized by the
general himself and by the whole army. In themselves these military
rivalries would have been of little moment, if they had not been mixed
up with the conflict of political parties, if the opposition had not
supplanted the senatorial general by Marius, and if the party of the
government had not, with the deliberate intention of exasperating,
praised Metellus and still more Sulla as the military celebrities
and preferred them to the nominal victor. We shall have to return
to the fatal consequences of these animosities when narrating
the internal history.
Reorganization of Numidia
Otherwise, this insurrection of the Numidian client-state passed
away without producing any noticeable change either in political
relations generally or even in those of the African province.
By a deviation from the policy elsewhere followed at this period
Numidia was not converted into a Roman province; evidently because
the country could not be held without an army to protect the frontier
against the barbarians of the desert, and the Romans were by no
means disposed to maintain a standing army in Africa. They
contented themselves accordingly with annexing the most westerly
district of Numidia, probably the tract from the river Molochath to
the harbour of Saldae (Bougie)--the later Mauretania Caesariensis
(province of Algiers)--to the kingdom of Bocchus, and with handing
over the kingdom of Numidia thus diminished to the last legitimate
grandson of Massinissa still surviving, Gauda the half-brother of
Jugurtha, feeble in body and mind, who had already in 646 at the
suggestion of Marius asserted his claims before the senate.(15)
At the same time the Gaetulian tribes in the interior of Africa were
received as free allies into the number of the independent nations
that had treaties with Rome.
Political Issues
Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were
the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the
Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated
too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein
brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely
notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the
governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty
of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and
the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple
truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he
had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself.
But the whole external and internal government of this period bore
the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact,
that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better
accounts than the other contemporary military and political events,
shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these
revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every
intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts.
The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh,
still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of
the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its
incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition
and a public opinion with which the government would have found
it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the
corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter
nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than
the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible
to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman
senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to
say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the
constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt
to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the
political question was converted into a personal one, the generals
were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were
banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party
as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of
government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an
oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently
well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of
the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual
oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon
as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the
rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius
was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted.
If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of
Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but
after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing
more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the
commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious
officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older
Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for
himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly-
expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in
the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible
weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say
that Marius intended to play the pretender, at least at the time when
he canvassed the people for the supreme command in Africa; but,
whether he did or did not understand what he was doing, there was
evidently an end of the restored aristocratic government when the
comitial machine began to make generals, or, which was nearly the
same thing, when every popular officer was able in legal fashion to
nominate himself as general. Only one new element emerged in these
preliminary crises; this was the introduction of military men and of
military power into the political revolution. Whether the coming
forward of Marius would be the immediate prelude of a new attempt
to supersede the oligarchy by the -tyrannis-, or whether it would,
as in various similar cases, pass away without further consequence
as an isolated encroachment on the prerogative of the government,
could not yet be determined; but it could well be foreseen that, if
these rudiments of a second -tyrannis- should attain any development,
it was not a statesman like Gaius Gracchus, but an officer that would
become its head. The contemporary reorganization of the military
system--which Marius introduced when, in forming his army destined
for Africa, he disregarded the property-qualification hitherto
required, and allowed even the poorest burgess, if he was otherwise
serviceable, to enter the legion as a volunteer--may have been
projected by its author on purely military grounds; but it was none
the less on that account a momentous political event, that the army
was no longer, as formerly, composed of those who had much, no
longer even, as in the most recent times, composed of those who had
something, to lose, but became gradually converted into a host of
people who had nothing but their arms and what the general bestowed
on them. The aristocracy ruled in 650 just as absolutely as in 620;
but the signs of the impending catastrophe had multiplied, and on
the political horizon the sword had begun to appear by the side
of the crown.
Chapter V
The Peoples of the North
Relations of Rome to the North
The Country between the Alps and the Pyrenees
Conflicts with the Ligurians and the Salassi
From the close of the sixth century the Roman community ruled over
the three great peninsulas projecting from the northern continent into
the Mediterranean, at least taken as a whole. Even there however--in
the north and west of Spain, in the valleys of the Ligurian Apennines
and the Alps, and in the mountains of Macedonia and Thrace--tribes
wholly or partially free continued to defy the lax Roman government.
Moreover the continental communication between Spain and Italy as
well as between Italy and Macedonia was very superficially provided
for, and the countries beyond the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkan
chain--the great river basins of the Rhone, the Rhine, and the Danube--
in the main lay beyond the political horizon of the Romans. We have
now to set forth what steps were taken on the part of Rome to secure
and to round off her empire in this direction, and how at the same
time the great masses of peoples, who were ever moving to and fro
behind that mighty mountain-screen, began to beat at the gates of the
northern mountains and rudely to remind the Graeco-Roman world that
it was mistaken in believing itself the sole possessor of the earth.
Let us first glance at the region between the western Alps and the
Pyrenees. The Romans had for long commanded this part of the coast
of the Mediterranean through their client city of Massilia, one of
the oldest, most faithful, and most powerful of the allied communities
dependent on Rome. Its maritime stations, Agatha (Agde) and Rhoda
(Rosas) to the westward, and Tauroentium (Ciotat), Olbia (Hyeres?),
Antipolis (Antibes), and Nicaea (Nice) on the east secured the
navigation of the coast as well as the land-route from the Pyrenees
to the Alps; and its mercantile and political connections reached far
into the interior. An expedition into the Alps above Nice and Antibes,
directed against the Ligurian Oxybii and Decietae, was undertaken by
the Romans in 600 partly at the request of the Massiliots, partly
in their own interest; and after hot conflicts, some of which were
attended with much loss, this district of the mountains was compelled
to furnish thenceforth standing hostages to the Massiliots and to pay
them a yearly tribute. It is not improbable that about this same
period the cultivation of the vine and olive, which flourished in this
quarter after the model set by the Massiliots, was in the interest
of the Italian landholders and merchants simultaneously prohibited
throughout the territory beyond the Alps dependent on Massilia.(1)
A similar character of financial speculation marks the war, which was
waged by the Romans under the consul Appius Claudius in 611 against the
Salassi respecting the gold mines and gold washings of Victumulae (in
the district of Vercelli and Bard and in the whole valley of the Dorea
Baltea). The great extent of these washings, which deprived the
inhabitants of the country lying lower down of water for their fields,
first gave rise to an attempt at mediation and then to the armed
intervention of the Romans. The war, although the Romans began it
like all the other wars of this period with a defeat, led at last to
the subjugation of the Salassi, and the cession of the gold district
to the Roman treasury. Some forty years afterwards (654) the colony of
Eporedia (Ivrea) was instituted on the territory thus gained, chiefly
doubtless with a view to command the western, as Aquileia commanded
the eastern, passage of the Alps.
Transalpine Relations of Rome
The Arverni
These Alpine wars first assumed a more serious character, when Marcus
Fulvius Flaccus, the faithful ally of Gaius Gracchus, took the chief
command in this quarter as consul in 629. He was the first to enter
on the career of Transalpine conquest. In the much-divided Celtic
nation at this period the canton of the Bituriges had lost its
real hegemony and retained merely an honorary presidency, and the
actually leading canton in the region from the Pyrenees to the Rhine
and from the Mediterranean to the Western Ocean was that of the
Arverni;(2) so that the statement seems not quite an exaggeration,
that it could bring into the field as many as 180,000 men. With
them the Haedui (about Autun) carried on an unequal rivalry for the
hegemony; while in north-eastern Gaul the kings of the Suessiones
(about Soissons) united under their protectorate the league of the
Belgic tribes extending as far as Britain. Greek travellers of
that period had much to tell of the magnificent state maintained by
Luerius, king of the Arvernians--how, surrounded by his brilliant train
of clansmen, his huntsmen with their pack of hounds in leash and his
band of wandering minstrels, he travelled in a silver-mounted chariot
through the towns of his kingdom, scattering the gold with a full
hand among the multitude, and gladdening above all the heart of the
minstrel with the glittering shower. The descriptions of the open
table which he kept in an enclosure of 1500 double paces square, and
to which every one who came in the way was invited, vividly remind us
of the marriage table of Camacho. In fact, the numerous Arvernian
gold coins of this period still extant show that the canton of the
Arvernians had attained to extraordinary wealth and a comparatively
high standard of civilization.
War with Allobroges and Arverni
The attack of Flaccus, however, fell in the first instance not on
the Arverni, but on the smaller tribes in the district between the Alps
and the Rhone, where the original Ligurian inhabitants had become mixed
with subsequent arrivals of Celtic bands, and there had arisen a
Celto-Ligurian population that may in this respect be compared to the
Celtiberian. He fought (629, 630) with success against the Salyes
or Salluvii in the region of Aix and in the valley of the Durance,
and against their northern neighbours the Vocontii (in the departments
of Vaucluse and Drome); and so did his successor Gaius Sextius Calvinus
(631, 632) against the Allobroges, a powerful Celtic clan in the rich
valley of the Isere, which had come at the request of the fugitive
king of the Salyes, Tutomotulus, to help him to reconquer his land, but
was defeated in the district of Aix. When the Allobroges nevertheless
refused to surrender the king of the Salyes, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus,
the successor of Calvinus, penetrated into their own territory (632).
Up to this period the leading Celtic tribe had been spectators of the
encroachments of their Italian neighbours; the Arvernian king Betuitus,
son of the Luerius already mentioned, seemed not much inclined to enter
on a dangerous war for the sake of the loose relation of clientship
in which the eastern cantons might stand to him. But when the Romans
showed signs of attacking the Allobroges in their own territory,
he offered his mediation, the rejection of which was followed by
his taking the field with all his forces to help the Allobroges;
whereas the Haedui embraced the side of the Romans. On receiving
accounts of the rising of the Arverni, the Romans sent the consul
of 633, Quintus Fabius Maximus, to meet in concert with Ahenobarbus
the impending attack. On the southern border of the canton of the
Allobroges at the confluence of the Isere with the Rhone, on the
8th of August 633, the battle was fought which decided the mastery
of southern Gaul. King Betuitus, when he saw the innumerable
hosts of the dependent clans marching over to him on the bridge
of boats thrown across the Rhone and the Romans who had not a
third of their numbers forming in array against them, is said to have
exclaimed that there were not enough of the latter to satisfy the dogs
of the Celtic army. Nevertheless Maximus, a grandson of the victor
of Pydna, achieved a decisive victory, which, as the bridge of boats
broke down under the mass of the fugitives, ended in the destruction
of the greater part of the Arvernian army. The Allobroges, to whom
the king of the Arverni declared himself unable to render further
assistance, and whom he advised to make their peace with Maximus,
submitted to the consul; whereupon the latter, thenceforth called
Allobrogicus, returned to Italy and left to Ahenobarbus the no longer
distant termination of the Arvernian war. Ahenobarbus, personally
exasperated at king Betuitus because he had induced the Allobroges
to surrender to Maximus and not to him, possessed himself
treacherously of the person of the king and sent him to Rome, where
the senate, although disapproving the breach of fidelity, not only kept
the men betrayed, but gave orders that his son, Congonnetiacus, should
likewise be sent to Rome. This seems to have been the reason why
the Arvernian war, already almost at an end, once more broke out, and
a second appeal to arms took place at Vindalium (above Avignon) at
the confluence of the Sorgue with the Rhone. The result was not
different from that of the first: on this occasion it was chiefly
the African elephants that scattered the Celtic army. Thereupon
the Arverni submitted to peace, and tranquillity was re-established
in the land of the Celts.(3)
Province of Narbo
The result of these military operations was the institution of a
new Roman province between the maritime Alps and the Pyrenees.
All the tribes between the Alps and the Rhone became dependent
on the Romans and, so far as they did not pay tribute to Massilia,
presumably became now tributary to Rome. In the country between
the Rhone and the Pyrenees the Arverni retained freedom and were not
bound to pay tribute to the Romans; but they had to cede to Rome
the most southerly portion of their direct or indirect territory-
the district to the south of the Cevennes as far as the Mediterranean,
and the upper course of the Garonne as far as Tolosa (Toulouse).
As the primary object of these occupations was the establishment of
a land communication between Italy and Spain, arrangements were made
immediately thereafter for the construction of the road along the
coast. For this purpose a belt of coast from the Alps to the Rhone,
from 1 to 1 3/4 of a mile in breadth, was handed over to the Massiliots,
who already had a series of maritime stations along this coast, with
the obligation of keeping the road in proper condition; while from
the Rhone to the Pyrenees the Romans themselves laid out a military
highway, which obtained from its originator Ahenobarbus the name
of the -Via Domitia-.