The Rise of Rome

Rome had outfaced an external challenge, but it was to have no peace. Now it was to risk destruction from enemies within.

MARIUS WAS NOT much of a politician. A man without grace, he was happier giving orders to troops than compromising with civilians. While serving his successive consulships and campaigning against the Celts, he needed political support in the Forum. He found it, unwisely, in an embittered and daring tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, a nobleman who turned against his class and became a popularis after being sacked from his job as quaestor in charge of managing Rome’s grain supply at the port of Ostia.

A fine public speaker and a clever fixer, Saturninus was elected tribune in 103. His policy was uncomplicated: it was to be as disobliging as possible to the Senate. He entered into a partnership with Marius and on his behalf passed a law settling the general’s veterans from the war with Jugurtha on land in the province of Africa. He had no qualms about using violence. When a fellow tribune tried to interpose a veto, Saturninus got his followers to drive him off with a hail of stones. He also helped Marius win his fourth consulship in 102.

After his victories over the Celts, Marius returned to Rome and entered into a new compact with Saturninus. The tribune and the consul shared a hatred for Metellus, who had not only patronized Marius in Africa but also tried to remove Saturninus from the Senate on the grounds of immorality. They laid a trap for him.

A proposal was put to the Senate that all soldiers, Latins as well as Roman citizens, demobilized after the defeat of the Cimbri and the Teutones, should be given allotments in Transalpine Gaul and colonies in various places across the Mediterranean. A controversial clause was added that each senator should swear to observe the new law. Everyone knew that for Metellus this was an unconstitutional infringement of senatorial independence.

Marius assured all and sundry that he would never bind himself in this way. Then, a few days later, just before the legal deadline for taking the oath, he unexpectedly convened the Senate and said that because of popular pressure he had changed his mind. But he had worked out an ingenious formula that would address Metellus’s objection. He would swear to obey the law “insofar as it was a law.” A nervous Senate followed his lead, except for Metellus. He was outmaneuvered and isolated, but, having taken a stand, he refused to backtrack. His punishment was exile.

Marius, although cussed, was no revolutionary and could see that the populares were running out of control. Saturninus won a third term as tribune, and a colleague of his ran for consul. When a leading rival for the consulship was beaten to death in public, it was clear that a line had been crossed. Popular support for Saturninus evaporated.

For the second time, the Senate passed the Final Decree. The tribune and his friends occupied the Capitol. Abandoning them to their fate, Marius put together an armed force and cut off their water supply. This was a turning point in the history of Rome, for soldiers in uniforms and carrying weapons were strictly forbidden within the city boundary; also, the ease and speed with which the consul found and deployed these men strongly suggests a personal loyalty to him rather than to the state.

The parched revolutionaries soon surrendered. Promised their lives would be spared, they were locked up, as a temporary expedient, in the Senate House at the foot of the Capitol. But a furious lynch mob climbed onto the roof, stripped off the roof tiles, and threw them down onto the rebels until most of them were dead.

That was the end of the affair. Marius completed his term as consul, but his lack of political skill and principle were embarrassingly obvious, and thereafter he was frozen out of public life. As Plutarch put it: “He lacked the abilities others had of making themselves agreeable socially and useful politically. So he was left on the side like military equipment in peace-time.” He traveled to the East, apparently on private business, and disappeared from view.

Ancient historians have not been kind to Saturninus, and we cannot now judge his value as a statesman. He may have been no more than an upper-class monster with a chip on his shoulder, or a worthy successor of the Gracchi, or a bit of both. But one truth stands out: where the old Republic used to solve problems through discussion, now the optimates and the populares had acquired an addiction to violence that they were unable to shake off.

IF THE ENTENTE in the Forum was dissolving, so, too, were relations between Rome and its allies throughout Italy. For years there had been talk of offering them full Roman citizenship, but proposals had always lapsed. The urban masses who voted at assemblies in Rome would not allow any measure that benefited others than themselves.

In 91, a bright young optimate, Marcus Livius Drusus, was elected tribune. He was hardworking but self- important. From his boyhood, he refused to take holidays. When he was building a house on the fashionable Palatine Hill, his architect thought of a way of designing it that would prevent it from being overlooked. “No,” replied Drusus. “Build it so that my fellow citizens are able to see everything I do.” The tribune had a solution to every political conundrum, and a talent for putting backs up—in the Senate and among the People and the equites. He correctly judged that the Italian allies should be given what they wished, and proposed that they should be enfranchised. But the opposition was too strong. Drusus was suspected of conspiring with allied leaders, some of whom he was known to have entertained in his house—no doubt because of its openness to observers. It was there, too, that he paid for his plans with his life. One evening, after conducting business in a portico, he dismissed the crowd. Then, suddenly, he shouted that he had been stabbed, and fell to the ground with the words on his lips. He had been fatally wounded in the groin. A leather worker’s knife was found, but not the assassin.

The allies laid secret plans for an uprising but awaited the outcome of Drusus’s attempts at reform. With his death, they abandoned negotiation for armed force. Their war aim was, to put it mildly, unusual: most of them sought not to overthrow the Republic but to join it. They intended to force the Romans to be their friends and equals, and to give them the vote. There was one exception, a community that had harbored hatred for their conquerors through long, bitter centuries of servitude. These were the Samnites. They had never accepted the verdict of defeat after defeat after defeat two centuries earlier. Whenever the opportunity arose, they enthusiastically took up arms against their ancient enemy once again.

By mischance the allies’ plans were detected too soon, and they were obliged to launch their attack rather late in the campaigning season. However, they held the initiative and swept all before them. After all, they regularly supplied more than half of Rome’s ever-victorious armies and knew all there was to know about their methods. The legions were fighting against old comrades.

Rome had the winter to gather its forces, and by spring of 90 put fourteen legions into the field. Every Roman of good family was called up. (Even the unmilitary young Cicero served as an officer.) There were two theaters of war—north-central Italy and Samnium. In both of them, the Italians scored a catalog of victories culminating in the defeat and death of a consul. Marius was recalled and held off the onslaught in the north (he soon retired, ostensibly on grounds of ill health, but perhaps because, as a man of Arpinum, he was not altogether trusted). Although much of the peninsula was in flames, the Latin and Roman fortress coloniae remained true.

As one disastrous month followed another, the revolt spread southward, and toward the end of the year the Etruscans and Umbrians in the north demanded the franchise. The Senate made a historic decision. The only way Rome could win the war was by conceding the main point at issue. A law was passed granting full Roman citizenship to any Latin or Italian communities that either had not revolted or had laid down their arms.

The war carried on for another two years, but this timely concession, later extended to everybody, threw a blanket over the flames. Sulla was successfully active in the south. The legions began to win victories, and even the Samnites lost heart. Gradually, the fighting petered out.

It had been a terrible convulsion. Many thousands of lives had been lost, and it was said that the devastation of the countryside exceeded that wreaked by Pyrrhus and Hannibal. In the long run, there were both positive and negative consequences. Every man south of the Po became a Roman citizen, and there was a growing sense of Italy as a single nation. Local identities continued to flourish, but within a larger commonwealth that the civitas Romana brought into being and guaranteed.

However, Italian enfranchisement weakened a constitution that had been designed for a city-state where most citizens were within a day or two’s traveling distance of Rome, and so were able to cast their democratic vote. In future, the interests of those attending Assembly meetings in Rome were not necessarily the same as those of the new larger, far-flung citizenship.