The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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For the execution of his task two methods of operation offered
themselves; Marius might attempt to overthrow the oligarchy either as
-imperator- at the head of the army, or in the mode prescribed by the
constitution for constitutional changes: his own past career pointed to
the former course, the precedent of Gracchus to the latter. It is easy
to understand why he did not adopt the former plan, perhaps did not even
think of the possibility of adopting it The senate was or seemed so
powerless and helpless, so hated and despised, that Marius conceived
himself scarcely to need any other support in opposing it than his
immense popularity, but hoped in case of necessity to find such a
support, notwithstanding the dissolution of the army, in the soldiers
discharged and waiting for their rewards. It is probable that Marius,
looking to Gracchus' easy and apparently almost complete victory and to
his own resources far surpassing those of Gracchus, deemed the overthrow
of a constitution four hundred years old, and intimately bound up with
the manifold habits and interests of the body-politic arranged in a
complicated hierarchy, a far easier task than it was. But any one, who
looked more deeply into the difficulties of the enterprise than Marius
probably did, might reflect that the army, although in the course of
transition from a militia to a body of mercenaries, was still during
this state of transition by no means adapted for the blind instrument of
a coup d'etat, and that an attempt to set aside the resisting elements
by military means would have probably augmented the power of resistance
in his antagonists. To mix up the organized armed force in the struggle
could not but appear at the first glance superfluous and at the second
hazardous; they were just at the beginning of the crisis, and the
antagonistic elements were still far from having reached their last,
shortest, and simplest expression.
The Popular Party
Marius therefore discharged the army after his triumph in accordance
with the existing regulation, and entered on the course traced out by
Gaius Gracchus for procuring to himself supremacy in the state by
undertaking its constitutional magistracies. In this enterprise he
found himself dependent for support on what was called the popular
party, and sought his allies in its leaders for the time being all
the more, that the victorious general by no means possessed the gifts
and experiences requisite for the command of the streets. Thus the
democratic party after long insignificance suddenly regained political
importance. It had, in the long interval from Gaius Gracchus to Marius,
materially deteriorated. Perhaps the dissatisfaction with the
senatorial government was not now less than it was then; but several
of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful
adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there
had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation
tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented
were by no means willing to follow it. In fact, amidst the chase and
turmoil of twenty years there had been rubbed off and worn away very
much of the fresh enthusiasm, the steadfast faith, the moral purity
of effort, which mark the early stages of revolutions. But, if the
democratic party was no longer what it had been under Gaius Gracchus,
the leaders of the intervening period were now as far beneath their
party as Gaius Gracchus had been exalted above it. This was implied
in the nature of the case. Until there should emerge a man having
the boldness like Gaius Gracchus to grasp at the supremacy of the state,
the leaders could only be stopgaps: either political novices, who gave
furious vent to their youthful love of opposition and then, when duly
accredited as fiery declaimers and favourite speakers, effected with
more or less dexterity their retreat to the camp of the government
party; or people who had nothing to lose in respect of property and
influence, and usually not even anything to gain in respect of honour,
and who made it their business to obstruct and annoy the government
from personal exasperation or even from the mere pleasure of creating a
noise. To the former sort belonged, for instance, Gaius Memmius(5) and
the well-known orator Lucius Crassus, who turned the oratorical laurels
which they had won in the ranks of the opposition to account in the
sequel as zealous partisans of the government.
Glaucia
Saturninus
But the most notable leaders of the popular party about this time were
men of the second sort. Such were Gaius Servilius Glaucia, called by
Cicero the Roman Hyperbolus, a vulgar fellow of the lowest origin and of
the most shameless street-eloquence, but effective and even dreaded by
reason of his pungent wit; and his better and abler associate, Lucius
Appuleius Saturninus, who even according to the accounts of his enemies
was a fiery and impressive speaker, and was at least not guided by
motives of vulgar selfishness. When he was quaestor, the charge of the
importation of corn, which had fallen to him in the usual way, had been
withdrawn from him by decree of the senate, not so much perhaps on
account of maladministration, as in order to confer this--just at that
time popular--office on one of the heads of the government party, Marcus
Scaurus, rather than upon an unknown young man belonging to none of
the ruling families. This mortification had driven the aspiring and
sensitive man into the ranks of the opposition; and as tribune of
the people in 651 he repaid what he had received with interest.
One scandalous affair had at that time followed hard upon another.
He had spoken in the open market of the briberies practised in Rome
by the envoys of king Mithradates--these revelations, compromising in
the highest degree the senate, had wellnigh cost the bold tribune his
life. He had excited a tumult against the conqueror of Numidia, Quintus
Metellus, when he was a candidate for the censorship in 652, and kept
him besieged in the Capitol till the equites liberated him not without
bloodshed; the retaliatory measure of the censor Metellus--the expulsion
with infamy of Saturninus and of Glaucia from the senate on occasion of
the revision of the senatorial roll--had only miscarried through the
remissness of the colleague assigned to Metellus. Saturninus mainly had
carried that exceptional commission against Caepio and his associates(6)
in spite of the most vehement resistance by the government party; and in
opposition to the same he had carried the keenly-contested re-election
of Marius as consul for 652. Saturninus was decidedly the most
energetic enemy of the senate and the most active and eloquent leader
of the popular party since Gaius Gracchus; but he was also violent
and unscrupulous beyond any of his predecessors, always ready to
descend into the street and to refute his antagonist with blows
instead of words.
Such were the two leaders of the so-called popular party, who now made
common cause with the victorious general. It was natural that they
should do so; their interests and aims coincided, and even in the
earlier candidatures of Marius Saturninus at least had most decidedly
and most effectively taken his side. It was agreed between them that
for 654 Marius should become a candidate for a sixth consulship,
Saturninus for a second tribunate, Glaucia for the praetorship, in order
that, possessed of these offices, they might carry out the intended
revolution in the state. The senate acquiesced in the nomination of
the less dangerous Glaucia, but did what it could to hinder the election
of Marius and Saturninus, or at least to associate with the former a
determined antagonist in the person of Quintus Metellus as his colleague
in the consulship. All appliances, lawful and unlawful, were put in
motion by both parties; but the senate was not successful in arresting
the dangerous conspiracy in the bud. Marius did not disdain in person
to solicit votes and, it was said, even to purchase them; in fact, at
the tribunician elections when nine men from the list of the government
party were proclaimed, and the tenth place seemed already secured for a
respectable man of the same complexion Quintus Nunnius, the latter was
set upon and slain by a savage band, which is said to have been mainly
composed of discharged soldiers of Marius. Thus the conspirators gained
their object, although by the most violent means. Marius was chosen as
consul, Glaucia as praetor, Saturninus as tribune of the people for 654;
the second consular place was obtained not by Quintus Metellus, but by
an insignificant man, Lucius Valerius Flaccus: the confederates might
proceed to put into execution the further schemes which they
contemplated and to complete the work broken off in 633.
The Appuleian Laws
Let us recall the objects which Gaius Gracchus pursued, and the means
by which he pursued them. His object was to break down the oligarchy
within and without. He aimed, on the one hand, to restore the power of
the magistrates, which had become completely dependent on the senate, to
its original sovereign rights, and to re-convert the senatorial assembly
from a governing into a deliberative board; and, on the other hand, to
put an end to the aristocratic division of the state into the three
classes of the ruling burgesses, the Italian allies, and the subjects,
by the gradual equalization of those distinctions which were
incompatible with a government not oligarchical. These ideas the three
confederates revived in the colonial laws, which Saturninus as tribune
of the people had partly introduced already (651), partly now introduced
(654).(7) As early as the former year the interrupted distribution of
the Carthaginian territory had been resumed primarily for the benefit of
the soldiers of Marius--not the burgesses only but, as it would seem,
also the Italian allies--and each of these veterans had been promised an
allotment of 100 -jugera-, or about five times the size of an ordinary
Italian farm, in the province of Africa. Now not only was the
provincial land already available claimed in its widest extent for
the Romano-Italian emigration, but also all the land of the still
independent Celtic tribes beyond the Alps, by virtue of the legal
fiction that through the conquest of the Cimbri all the territory
occupied by these had been acquired de jure by the Romans. Gaius Marius
was called to conduct the assignations of land and the farther measures
that might appear necessary in this behalf; and the temple-treasures of
Tolosa, which had been embezzled but were refunded or had still to be
refunded by the guilty aristocrats, were destined for the outfit of the
new receivers of land. This law therefore not only revived the plans of
conquest beyond the Alps and the projects of Transalpine and transmarine
colonization, which Gaius Gracchus and Flaccus had sketched, on the most
extensive scale; but, by admitting the Italians along with the Romans
to emigration and yet undoubtedly prescribing the erection of all the
new communities as burgess-colonies, it formed a first step towards
satisfying the claims--to which it was so difficult to give effect, and
which yet could not be in the long run refused--of the Italians to be
placed on an equality with the Romans. First of all, however, if the
law passed and Marius was called to the independent carrying out of
these immense schemes of conquest and assignation, he would become
practically--until those plans should be realized or rather, considering
their indefinite and unlimited character, for his lifetime--monarch of
Rome; with which view it may be presumed that Marius intended to have
his consulship annually renewed, like the tribunate of Gracchus. But,
amidst the agreement of the political positions marked out for the
younger Gracchus and for Marius in all other essential particulars,
there was yet a very material distinction between the land-assigning
tribune and the land-assigning consul in the fact, that the former was
to occupy a purely civil position, the latter a military position as
well; a distinction, which partly but by no means solely arose out of
the personal circumstances under which the two men had risen to the head
of the state. While such was the nature of the aim which Marius and his
comrades had proposed to themselves, the next question related to the
means by which they purposed to break down the resistance--which might
be anticipated to be obstinate--of the government party. Gaius Gracchus
had fought his battles with the aid of the capitalist class and the
proletariate. His successors did not neglect to make advances likewise
to these. The equites were not only left in possession of the
tribunals, but their power as jurymen was considerably increased, partly
by a stricter ordinance regarding the standing commission--especially
important to the merchants--as to extortions on the part of the public
magistrates in the provinces, which Glaucia carried probably in this
year, partly by the special tribunal, appointed doubtless as early as
651 on the proposal of Saturninus, respecting the embezzlements and
other official malversations that had occurred during the Cimbrian
movement in Gaul. For the benefit, moreover, of the proletariate of
the capital the sum below cost price, which hitherto had to be paid on
occasion of the distributions of grain for the -modius-, was lowered
from 6 1/3 -asses- to a mere nominal charge of 5/6 of an -as-.
But although they did not despise the alliance with the equites and
the proletariate of the capital, the real power by which the confederates
enforced their measures lay not in these, but in the discharged soldiers
of the Marian army, who for that very reason had been provided for in
the colonial laws themselves after so extravagant a fashion. In this
also was evinced the predominating military character, which forms
the chief distinction between this attempt at revolution and that
which preceded it.
Violent Proceedings in the Voting
They went to work accordingly. The corn and colonial laws encountered,
as was to be expected, the keenest opposition from the government.
They proved in the senate by striking figures, that the former must
make the public treasury bankrupt; Saturninus did not trouble himself
about that. They brought tribunician intercession to bear against
both laws; Saturninus ordered the voting to go on. They informed
the magistrates presiding at the voting that a peal of thunder had
been heard, a portent by which according to ancient belief the gods
enjoined the dismissal of the public assembly; Saturninus remarked
to the messengers that the senate would do well to keep quiet, otherwise
the thunder might very easily be followed by hail. Lastly the urban
quaestor, Quintus Caepio, the son, it may be presumed, of the general
condemned three years before,(8) and like his father a vehement
antagonist of the popular party, with a band of devoted partisans
dispersed the comitia by violence. But the tough soldiers of Marius,
who had flocked in crowds to Rome to vote on this occasion, quickly
rallied and dispersed the city bands, and on the voting ground thus
reconquered the vote on the Appuleian laws was successfully brought to
an end. The scandal was grievous; but when it came to the question
whether the senate would comply with the clause of the law that
within five days after its passing every senator should on pain of
forfeiting his senatorial seat take an oath faithfully to observe it,
all the senators took the oath with the single exception of Quintus
Metellus, who preferred to go into exile. Marius and Saturninus
were not displeased to see the best general and the ablest man among
the opposing party removed from the state by voluntary banishment.
The Fall of the Revolutionary Party
Their object seemed to be attained; but even now to those who saw
more clearly the enterprise could not but appear a failure. The cause
of the failure lay mainly in the awkward alliance between a politically
incapable general and a street-demagogue, capable but recklessly
violent, and filled with passion rather than with the aims of a
statesman. They had agreed excellently, so long as the question related
only to plans. But when the plans came to be executed, it was very soon
apparent that the celebrated general was in politics utterly incapable;
that his ambition was that of the farmer who would cope with and,
if possible, surpass the aristocrats in titles, and not that of the
statesman who desires to govern because he feels within him the power
to do so; that every enterprise, which was based on his personal standing
as a politician, must necessarily even under the most favourable
circumstances be ruined by himself.
Opposition of the Whole Aristocracy
He knew neither the art of gaining his antagonists, nor that of keeping
his own party in subjection. The opposition against him and his
comrades was even of itself sufficiently considerable; for not only did
the government party belong to it in a body, but also a great part of
the burgesses, who guarded with jealous eyes their exclusive privileges
against the Italians; and by the course which things took the whole
class of the wealthy was also driven over to the government. Saturninus
and Glaucia were from the first masters and servants of the proletariate
and therefore not at all on a good footing with the moneyed aristocracy,
which had no objection now and then to keep the senate in check by means
of the rabble, but had no liking for street-riots and violent outrages.
As early as the first tribunate of Saturninus his armed bands had their
skirmishes with the equites; the vehement opposition which his election
as tribune for 654 encountered shows clearly how small was the party
favourable to him. It should have been the endeavour of Marius to avail
himself of the dangerous help of such associates only in moderation,
and to convince all and sundry that they were destined not to rule, but
to serve him as the ruler. As he did precisely the contrary, and the
matter came to look quite as if the object was to place the government
in the hands not of an intelligent and vigorous master, but of the mere
-canaille-, the men of material interests, terrified to death at the
prospect of such confusion, again attached themselves closely to the
senate in presence of this common danger. While Gaius Gracchus, clearly
perceiving that no government could be overthrown by means of the
proletariate alone, had especially sought to gain over to his side
the propertied classes, those who desired to continue his work began by
producing a reconciliation between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.
Variance between Marius and the Demogogues
But the ruin of the enterprise was brought about, still more rapidly
than by this reconciliation of enemies, through the dissension which
the more than ambiguous behaviour of Marius necessarily produced among
its promoters. While the decisive proposals were brought forward by
his associates and carried after a struggle by his soldiers, Marius
maintained an attitude wholly passive, just as if the political leader
was not bound quite as much as the military, when the brunt of battle
came, to present himself everywhere and foremost in person. Nor was
this all; he was terrified at, and fled from the presence of, the
spirits which he had himself evoked. When his associates resorted to
expedients which an honourable man could not approve, but without which
in fact the object of their efforts could not be attained, he attempted,
in the fashion usual with men whose ideas of political morality are
confused, to wash his hands of participation in those crimes and at the
same time to profit by their results. There is a story that the general
once conducted secret negotiations in two different rooms of his house,
with Saturninus and his partisans in the one, and with the deputies of
the oligarchy in the other, talking with the former of striking a blow
against the senate, and with the latter of interfering against the
revolt, and that under a pretext which was in keeping with the anxiety
of the situation he went to and fro between the two conferences--a story
as certainly invented, and as certainly appropriate, as any incident in
Aristophanes. The ambiguous attitude of Marius became notorious in the
question of the oath. At first he seemed as though he would himself
refuse the oath required by the Appuleian laws on account of the
informalities that had occurred at their passing, and then swore it with
the reservation, "so far as the laws were really valid"; a reservation
which annulled the oath itself, and which of course all the senators
likewise adopted in swearing, so that by this mode of taking the oath
the validity of the laws was not secured, but on the contrary was for
the first time really called in question.
The consequences of this behaviour--stupid beyond parallel--on the part
of the celebrated general soon developed themselves. Saturninus and
Glaucia had not undertaken the revolution and procured for Marius
the supremacy of the state, in order that they might be disowned and
sacrificed by him; if Glaucia, the favourite jester of the people, had
hitherto lavished on Marius the gayest flowers of his jovial eloquence,
the garlands which he now wove for him were by no means redolent of
roses and violets. A total rupture took place, by which both parties
were lost; for Marius had not a footing sufficiently firm singly to
maintain the colonial law which he had himself called in question and
to possess himself of the position which it assigned to him, nor were
Saturninus and Glaucia in a condition to continue on their own account
the work which Marius had begun.
Saturninus Isolated
Saturninus Assailed and Overpowered
But the two demagogues were so compromised that they could not recede;
they had no alternative save to resign their offices in the usual way
and thereby to deliver themselves with their hands bound to their
exasperated opponents, or now to grasp the sceptre for themselves,
although they felt that they could not bear its weight. They resolved
on the latter course; Saturninus would come forward once more as a
candidate for the tribunate of the people for 655, Glaucia, although
praetor and not eligible for the consulship till two years had elapsed,
would become a candidate for the latter. In fact the tribunician
elections were decided entirely to their mind, and the attempt of
Marius to prevent the spurious Tiberius Gracchus from soliciting the
tribuneship served only to show the celebrated man what was now the
worth of his popularity; the multitude broke the doors of the prison in
which Gracchus was confined, bore him in triumph through the streets,
and elected him by a great majority as their tribune. Saturninus and
Glaucia sought to control the more important consular election by the
expedient for the removal of inconvenient competitors which had been
tried in the previous year; the counter-candidate of the government
party, Gaius Memmius--the same who eleven years before had led the
opposition against them(9)--was suddenly assailed by a band of ruffians
and beaten to death. But the government party had only waited for a
striking event of this sort in order to employ force. The senate
required the consul Gaius Marius to interfere, and the latter in reality
professed his readiness now to draw for the conservative party the
sword, which he had obtained from the democracy and had promised to
wield on its behalf. The young men were hastily called out, equipped
with arms from the public buildings, and drawn up in military array; the
senate itself appeared under arms in the Forum, with its venerable chief
Marcus Scaurus at its head. The opposite party were doubtless superior
in a street-riot, but were not prepared for such an attack; they had now
to defend themselves as they could. They broke open the doors of the
prisons, and called the slaves to liberty and to arms; they proclaimed--
so it was said at any rate--Saturninus as king or general; on the day
when the new tribunes of the people had to enter on their office, the
10th of December 654, a battle occurred in the great market-place--the
first which, since Rome existed, had ever been fought within the walls
of the capital. The issue was not for a moment doubtful. The Populares
were beaten and driven up to the Capitol, where the supply of water was
cut off from them and they were thus compelled to surrender. Marius,
who held the chief command, would gladly have saved the lives of his
former allies who were now his prisoners; Saturninus proclaimed to the
multitude that all which he had proposed had been done in concert with
the consul: even a worse man than Marius was could not but shudder at
the inglorious part which he played on this day. But he had long ceased
to be master of affairs. Without orders the youth of rank climbed
the roof of the senate-house in the Forum where the prisoners were
temporarily confined, stripped off the tiles, and with these stoned
their victims. Thus Saturninus perished with most of the more notable
prisoners. Glaucia was found in a lurking-place and likewise put
to death. Without sentence or trial there died on this day four
magistrates of the Roman people--a praetor, a quaestor, and two
tribunes of the people--and a number of other well-known men, some of
whom belonged to good families. In spite of the grave faults by which
the chiefs had invited on themselves this bloody retribution, we may
nevertheless lament them: they fell like advanced posts, which are left
unsupported by the main army and are forced to perish without aim in
a conflict of despair.