The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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Second Year of the War
Etruria and Umbria Tranquillized
On the strength of these concessions to the wavering communities, the
Romans resumed with fresh courage the conflict against the insurgent
districts. They had pulled down as much of the existing political
institutions as seemed necessary to arrest the extension of the
conflagration; the insurrection thenceforth at least spread no
farther. In Etruria and Umbria especially, where it was just
beginning, it was subdued with singular rapidity, still more, probably,
by means of the Julian law than through the success of the Roman arms.
In the former Latin colonies, and in the thickly-peopled region of the
Po, there were opened up copious and now trustworthy sources of aid:
with these, and with the resources of the burgesses themselves, they
could proceed to subdue the now isolated conflagration. The two former
commanders-in-chief returned to Rome, Caesar as censor elect, Marius
because his conduct of the war was blamed as vacillating and slow, and
the man of sixty-six was declared to be in his dotage. This objection
was very probably groundless; Marius showed at least his bodily
vigour by appearing daily in the circus at Rome, and even as
commander-in-chief he seems to have displayed on the whole his old
ability in the last campaign; but he had not achieved the brilliant
successes by which alone after his political bankruptcy he could have
rehabilitated himself in public opinion, and so the celebrated champion
was to his bitter vexation now, even as an officer, unceremoniously laid
aside as useless. The place of Marius in the Marsian army was taken
by the consul of this year, Lucius Porcius Cato, who had fought with
distinction in Etruria, and that of Caesar in the Campanian army by
his lieutenant, Lucius Sulla, to whom were due some of the most
material successes of the previous campaign; Gnaeus Strabo retained--
now as consul--the command which he had held so successfully in
the Picenian territory.
War in Picenum
Asculum Besieged
And Conquered
Subjugation of the Sabellians and Marsians
Thus began the second campaign in 665. The insurgents opened it,
even before winter was over, by the bold attempt--recalling the grand
passages of the Samnite wars--to send a Marsian army of 15,000 men to
Etruria with a view to aid the insurrection brewing in Northern Italy.
But Strabo, through whose district it had to pass, intercepted
and totally defeated it; only a few got back to their far distant
home. When at length the season allowed the Roman armies to assume
the offensive, Cato entered the Marsian territory and advanced,
successfully encountering the enemy there; but he fell in the region
of the Fucine lake during an attack on the enemy's camp, so that the
exclusive superintendence of the operations in Central Italy devolved
on Strabo. The latter employed himself partly in continuing the
siege of Asculum, partly in the subjugation of the Marsian, Sabellian,
and Apulian districts. To relieve his hard-pressed native town,
Iudacilius appeared before Asculum with the Picentine levy and
attacked the besieging army, while at the same time the garrison
sallied forth and threw itself on the Roman lines. It is said that
75,000 Romans fought on this day against 60,000 Italians. Victory
remained with the Romans, but Iudacilius succeeded in throwing himself
with a part of the relieving army into the town. The siege resumed
its course; it was protracted(17) by the strength of the place and the
desperate defence of the inhabitants, who fought with a recollection of
the terrible declaration of war within its walls. When Iudacilius
at length after a brave defence of several months saw the day of
capitulation approach, he ordered the chiefs of that section of
the citizens which was favourable to Rome to be put to death under
torture, and then died by his own hand. So the gates were opened,
and Roman executions were substituted for Italian; all officers and
all the respectable citizens were executed, the rest were driven forth
to beggary, and all their property was confiscated on account of
the state. During the siege and after the fall of Asculum numerous
Roman corps marched through the adjacent rebel districts, and induced
one after another to submit. The Marrucini yielded, after Servius
Sulpicius had defeated them decidedly at Teate (Chieti). The praetor
Gaius Cosconius penetrated into Apulia, took Salapia and Cannae, and
besieged Canusium. A Samnite corps under Marius Egnatius came to the
help of the unwarlike region and actually drove back the Romans, but
the Roman general succeeded in defeating it at the passage of the
Aufidus; Egnatius fell, and the rest of the army had to seek shelter
behind the walls of Canusium. The Romans again advanced as far
as Venusia and Rubi, and became masters of all Apulia. Along the
Fucine lake also and at the Majella mountains--the chief seats of
the insurrection--the Romans re-established their mastery; the Marsians
succumbed to Strabo's lieutenants, Quintus Metellus Pius and Gaius
Cinna, the Vestinians and Paelignians in the following year (666) to
Strabo himself; Italia the capital of the insurgents became once more
the modest Paelignian country-town of Corfinium; the remnant of the
Italian senate fled to the Samnite territory.
Subjugation of Campania As Far As Nola
Sulla in Samnium
The Roman southern army, which was now under the command of Lucius
Sulla, had at the same time assumed the offensive and had penetrated
into southern Campania which was occupied by the enemy. Stabiae was
taken and destroyed by Sulla in person (30 April 665) and Herculaneum
by Titus Didius, who however fell himself (11 June) apparently at the
assault on that city. Pompeii resisted longer. The Samnite general
Lucius Cluentius came up to bring relief to the town, but he was
repulsed by Sulla; and when, reinforced by bands of Celts, he
renewed his attempt, he was, chiefly owing to the wavering of these
untrustworthy associates, so totally defeated that his camp was taken
and he himself was cut down with the greater part of his troops on
their flight towards Nola. The grateful Roman army conferred on its
general the grass-wreath--the homely badge with which the usage of
the camp decorated the soldier who had by his capacity saved a division
of his comrades. Without pausing to undertake the siege of Nola and
of the other Campanian towns still occupied by the Samnites, Sulla
at once advanced into the interior, which was the head-quarters of
the insurrection. The speedy capture and fearful punishment of
Aeclanum spread terror throughout the Hirpinian country; it submitted
even before the arrival of the Lucanian contingent which had set itself
in motion to render help, and Sulla was able to advance unhindered as
far as the territory of the Samnite confederacy. The pass, where the
Samnite militia under Mutilus awaited him, was turned, the Samnite army
was attacked in rear, and defeated; the camp was lost, the general
escaped wounded to Aesernia. Sulla advanced to Bovianum, the capital of
the Samnite country, and compelled it to surrender by a second victory
achieved beneath its walls. The advanced season alone put an end
to the campaign there.
The Insurrection on the Whole Overpowered
The position of affairs had undergone a most complete change.
Powerful, victorious, aggressive as was the insurrection when it
began the campaign of 665, it emerged from it deeply humbled, everywhere
beaten, and utterly hopeless. All northern Italy was pacified.
In central Italy both coasts were wholly in the Roman power, and the
Abruzzi almost entirely; Apulia as far as Venusia, and Campania as far
as Nola, were in the hands of the Romans; and by the occupation of the
Hirpinian territory the communication was broken off between the only
two regions still persevering in open resistance, the Samnite and the
Lucano-Bruttian. The field of the insurrection resembled the scene
of an immense conflagration dying out; everywhere the eye fell on
ashes and ruins and smouldering brands; here and there the flame
still blazed up among the ruins, but the fire was everywhere mastered,
and there was no further threatening of danger. It is to be
regretted that we no longer sufficiently discern in the superficial
accounts handed down to us the causes of this sudden revolution.
While undoubtedly the dexterous leadership of Strabo and still more
of Sulla, and especially the more energetic concentration of the
Roman forces, and their more rapid offensive contributed materially
to that result, political causes may have been at work along with the
military in producing the singularly rapid fall of the power of the
insurgents; the law of Silvanus and Carbo may have fulfilled its design
in carrying defection and treason to the common cause into the ranks
of the enemy; and misfortune, as has so frequently happened, may
have fallen as an apple of discord among the loosely-connected
insurgent communities.
Perseverance of the Samnites
We see only--and this fact points to an internal breaking up of Italia,
that must certainly have been attended by violent convulsions--that
the Samnites, perhaps under the leadership of the Marsian Quintus Silo
who had been from the first the soul of the insurrection and after the
capitulation of the Marsians had gone as a fugitive to the neighbouring
people, now assumed another organization purely confined to their
own land, and, after "Italia" was vanquished, undertook to continue
the struggle as "Safini" or Samnites.(18) The strong Aesernia was
converted from the fortress that had curbed, into the last retreat
that sheltered, Samnite freedom; an army assembled consisting, it was
said, of 30,000 infantry and 1000 cavalry, and was strengthened by the
manumission and incorporation of 20,000 slaves; five generals were
placed at its head, among whom Silo was the first and Mutilus next to
him. With astonishment men saw the Samnite wars beginning anew after
a pause of two hundred years, and the resolute nation of farmers making
a fresh attempt, just as in the fifth century, after the Italian
confederation was shattered, to force Rome with their own hand to
recognize their country's independence. But this resolution of the
bravest despair made not much change in the main result; although the
mountain-war in Samnium and Lucania might still require some time and
some sacrifices, the insurrection was nevertheless already
substantially at an end.
Outbreak of the Mithradatic War
In the meanwhile, certainly, there had occurred a fresh complication,
for the Asiatic difficulties had rendered it imperatively necessary
to declare war against Mithradates king of Pontus, and for next year
(666) to destine the one consul and a consular army to Asia Minor.
Had this war broken out a year earlier, the contemporary revolt of
the half of Italy and of the most important of the provinces would have
formed an immense peril to the Roman state. Now that the marvellous
good fortune of Rome had once more been evinced in the rapid collapse
of the Italian insurrection, this Asiatic war just beginning was,
notwithstanding its being mixed up with the expiring Italian
struggle, not of a really dangerous character; and the less so,
because Mithradates in his arrogance refused the invitation of the
Italians that he should afford them direct assistance. Still it
was in a high degree inconvenient. The times had gone by, when
they without hesitation carried on simultaneously an Italian and
a transmarine war, the state-chest was already after two years of
warfare utterly exhausted, and the formation of a new army in addition
to that already in the field seemed scarcely practicable. But they
resorted to such expedients as they could. The sale of the sites
that had from ancient times(19) remained unoccupied on and near the
citadel to persons desirous of building, which yielded 9000 pounds of
gold (360,000 pounds), furnished the requisite pecuniary means. No new
army was formed, but that which was under Sulla in Campania was destined
to embark for Asia, as soon as the state of things in southern Italy
should allow its departure; which might be expected, from the progress
of the army operating in the north under Strabo, to happen soon.
Third Campaign
Capture of Venusia
Fall of Silo
So the third campaign in 666 began amidst favourable prospects for
Rome. Strabo put down the last resistance which was still offered
in the Abruzzi. In Apulia the successor of Cosconius, Quintus Metellus
Pius, son of the conqueror of Numidia and not unlike his father in
his strongly conservative views as well as in military endowments,
put an end to the resistance by the capture of Venusia, at which 3000
armed men were taken prisoners. In Samnium Silo no doubt succeeded
in retaking Bovianum; but in a battle, in which he engaged the Roman
general Mamercus Aemilius, the Romans conquered, and--what was more
important than the victory itself--Silo was among the 6000 dead whom
the Samnites left on the field. In Campania the smaller townships,
which the Samnites still occupied, were wrested from them by Sulla,
and Nola was invested. The Roman general Aulus Gabinius penetrated
also into Lucania and gained no small advantages; but, after he had
fallen in an attack on the enemy's camp, Lamponius the insurgent
leader and his followers once more held almost undisturbed command
over the wide and desolate Lucano-Bruttian country. He even made an
attempt to seize Rhegium, which was frustrated, however, by the Sicilian
governor Gaius Norbanus. Notwithstanding isolated mischances the Romans
were constantly drawing nearer to the attainment of their end; the fall
of Nola, the submission of Samnium, the possibility of rendering
considerable forces available for Asia appeared no longer distant,
when the turn taken by affairs in the capital unexpectedly gave fresh
life to the well-nigh extinguished insurrection.
Ferment in Rome
The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations
Secondary Effect of the Political Prosecutions
Marius
Rome was in a fearful ferment. The attack of Drusus upon the
equestrian courts and his sudden downfall brought about by the
equestrian party, followed by the two-edged Varian warfare of
prosecutions, had sown the bitterest discord between the aristocracy
and the bourgeoisie as well as between the moderates and the ultras.
Events had completely justified the party of concession; what it had
proposed voluntarily to bestow, men had been more than half compelled
to concede; but the mode in which the concession was made bore, just
like the earlier refusal, the stamp of obstinate and shortsighted
envy. Instead of granting equality of rights to all Italian
communities, they had only expressed the inferiority in another form.
They had received a great number of Italian communities into Roman
citizenship, but had attached to what they thus conferred an offensive
stigma, by placing the new burgesses alongside of the old on nearly
the same footing as the freedmen occupied alongside of the freeborn.
They had irritated rather than pacified the communities between the
Po and the Alps by the concession of Latin rights. Lastly, they had
withheld the franchise from a considerable, and that not the worst,
portion of the Italians--the whole of the insurgent communities
which had again submitted; and not only so, but, instead of legally
re-establishing the former treaties annulled by the insurrection, they
had at most renewed them as a matter of favour and subject to revocation
at pleasure.(20) The disability as regarded the right of voting
gave the deeper offence, that it was--as the comitia were then
constituted--politically absurd, and the hypocritical care of the
government for the unstained purity of the electors appeared to every
unprejudiced person ridiculous; but all these restrictions were
dangerous, inasmuch as they invited every demagogue to carry his
ulterior objects by taking up the more or less just demands of the
new burgesses and of the Italians excluded from the franchise. While
accordingly the more clear-seeing of the aristocracy could not but find
these partial and grudging concessions as inadequate as did the new
burgesses and the excluded themselves, they further painfully felt
the absence from their ranks of the numerous and excellent men whom
the Varian commission of high treason had exiled, and whom it was the
more difficult to recall because they had been condemned by the verdict
not of the people but of the jury-courts; for, while there was little
hesitation as to cancelling a decree of the people even of a judicial
character by means of a second, the cancelling of a verdict of
jurymen bythe people appeared to the betterportion of the aristocracy
as a very dangerous precedent. Thus neither the ultras nor the
moderates were content with the issue of the Italian crisis. But still
deeper indignation swelled the heart of the old man, who had gone
forth to the Italian war with freshened hopes and had come back from
it reluctantly, with the consciousness of having rendered new services
and of having received in return new and most severe mortifications,
with the bitter feeling of being no longer dreaded but despised by
his enemies, with that gnawing spirit of vengeance in his heart,
which feeds on its own poison. It was true of him also, as of the
new burgesses and the excluded; incapable and awkward as he had shown
himself to be, his popular name was still a formidable weapon in
the hand of a demagogue.
Decay of Military Discipline
With these elements of political convulsion was combined the rapidly
spreading decay of decorous soldierly habits and of military
discipline. The seeds, which were sown by the enrolment of the
proletariate in the army, developed themselves with alarming rapidity
during the demoralizing insurrectionary war, which compelled Rome
to admit to the service every man capable of bearing arms without
distinction, and which above all carried political partizanship
directly into the headquarters and into the soldiers' tent.
The effects soon appeared in the slackening of all the bonds of
the military hierarchy. During the siege of Pompeii the commander
of the Sullan besieging corps, the consular Aulus Postumius Albinus,
was put to death with stones and bludgeons by his soldiers, who believed
themselves betrayed by their general to the enemy; and Sulla the
commander-in-chief contented himself with exhorting the troops to efface
the memory of that occurrence by their brave conduct in presence of
the enemy. The authors of that deed were the marines, from of old
the least respectable of the troops. A division of legionaries raised
chiefly from the city populace soon followed the example thus given.
Instigated by Gaius Titius, one of the heroes of the market-place, it
laid hands on the consul Cato. By an accident he escaped death on
this occasion; Titius was arrested, but was not punished. When Cato
soon afterwards actually perished in a combat, his own officers, and
particularly the younger Gaius Marius, were--whether justly or unjustly,
cannot be ascertained--designated as the authors of his death.
Economic Crisis
Murder of Asellio
To the political and military crisis thus beginning fell to be added
the economic crisis--perhaps still more terrible--which set in upon the
Roman capitalists in consequence of the Social war and the Asiatic
troubles. The debtors, unable even to raise the interest due and yet
inexorably pressed by their creditors, had on the one hand entreated
from the proper judicial authority, the urban praetor Asellio, a
respite to enable them to dispose of their possessions, and on the
other hand had searched out once more the old obsolete laws as to
usury(21) and, according to the rule established in olden times,
had sued their creditors for fourfold the amount of the interest
paid to them contrary to the law. Asellio lent himself to bend the
actually existing law into conformity with the letter, and put into
shape in the usual way the desired actions for interest; whereupon
the offended creditors assembled in the Forum under the leadership of
the tribune of the people Lucius Cassius, and attacked and killed the
praetor in front of the temple of Concord, just as in his priestly
robes he was presenting a sacrifice--an outrage which was not even
made a subject of investigation (665). On the other hand it was
said in the circles of the debtors, that the suffering multitude could
not be relieved otherwise than by "new account-books," that is, by
legally cancelling the claims of all creditors against all debtors.
Matters stood again exactly as they had stood during the strife
of the orders; once more the capitalists in league with the
prejudiced aristocracy made war against, and prosecuted, the oppressed
multitude and the middle party which advised a modification of the
rigour of the law; once more Rome stood on the verge of that abyss
into which the despairing debtor drags his creditor along with him.
Only, since that time the simple civil and moral organization of a
great agricultural city had been succeeded by the social antagonisms
of a capital of many nations, and by that demoralization in which
the prince and the beggar meet; now all incongruities had come to be
on a broader, more abrupt, and fearfully grander scale. When the
Social war brought all the political and social elements fermenting
among the citizens into collision with each other, it laid the
foundation for a new resolution. An accident led to its outbreak.
The Sulpician Laws
Sulpicius Rufus
It was the tribune of the people Publius Sulpicius Rufus who in 666
proposed to the burgesses to declare that every senator, who owed more
than 2000 -denarii- (82 pounds), should forfeit his seat in the senate;
to grant to the burgesses condemned by non-free jury courts liberty
to return home; to distribute the new burgesses among all the tribes,
and likewise to allow the right of voting in all tribes to the
freedmen. They were proposals which from the mouth of such a man
were at least somewhat surprising. Publius Sulpicius Rufus (born in
630) owed his political importance not so much to his noble birth, his
important connections, and his hereditary wealth, as to his remarkable
oratorical talent, in which none of his contemporaries equalled him.
His powerful voice, his lively gestures sometimes bordering on
theatrical display, the luxuriant copiousness of his flow of words
arrested, even if they did not convince, his hearers. As a partisan
he was from the outset on the side of the senate, and his first public
appearance (659) had been the impeachment of Norbanus who was mortally
hated by the government party.(22) Among the conservatives he belonged
to the section of Crassus and Drusus. We do not know what primarily
gave occasion to his soliciting the tribuneship of the people for 666,
and on its account renouncing his patrician nobility; but he seems
to have been by no means rendered a revolutionist through the
fact that he, like the whole middle party, had been persecuted as
revolutionary by the conservatives, and to have by no means intended
an overthrow of the constitution in the sense of Gaius Gracchus.
It would rather seem that, as the only man of note belonging to
the party of Crassus and Drusus who had come forth uninjured from
the storm of the Varian prosecutions, he felt himself called on
to complete the work of Drusus and finally to set aside the still
subsisting disabilities of the new burgesses--for which purpose he
needed the tribunate. Several acts of his even during his tribuneship
are mentioned, which betray the very opposite of demagogic designs.
For instance, he prevented by his veto one of his colleagues from
cancelling through a decree of the people the sentences of jurymen
issued under the Varian law; and when the late aedile Gaius Caesar,
passing over the praetorship, unconstitutionally became a candidate
for the consulship for 667, with the design, it was alleged, of getting
the charge of the Asiatic war afterwards entrusted to him, Sulpicius
opposed him more resolutely and sharply than any one else. Entirely
in the spirit of Drusus, he thus demanded from himself as from
others primarily and especially the maintenance of the constitution.
But in fact he was as little able as was Drusus to reconcile things
that were incompatible, and to carry out in strict form of law the
change of the constitution which he had in view--a change judicious
in itself, but never to be obtained from the great majority of the
old burgesses by amicable means. His breach with the powerful
family of the Julii--among whom in particular the consular Lucius
Caesar, the brother of Gaius, was very influential in the senate--
and withthesectionof the aristocracy adhering to it, beyond doubt
materially cooperated and carried the irascible man through personal
exasperation beyond his original design.