Not far from the scene of the murder of Glaucia and Saturninus there
was lying at this time in his cradle, or carried about in his nurse's
arms, a child who, in his manhood, was to hold an inquiry into this
business, and to bring one of the perpetrators to answer for himself.
On the 12th of the preceding July, B.C. 100,[1] was born into the world
Caius Julius Caesar, the only son of Caius Julius and Aurelia, and
nephew of the then Consul Marius. His father had been praetor, but had
held no higher office. Aurelia was a strict stately lady of the old
school, uninfected by the lately imported fashions. She, or her
husband, or both of them, were rich; but the habits of the household
were simple and severe, and the connection with Marius indicates the
political opinions which prevailed in the family.
No anecdotes are preserved, of Caesar's childhood. He was taught Greek
by Antonius Gnipho, an educated Gaul from the north of Italy. He wrote
a poem when a boy in honor of Hercules. He composed a tragedy on the
story of Oedipus. His passionate attachment to Aurelia in after-years
shows that between mother and child the relations had been affectionate
and happy. But there is nothing to indicate that there was any early
precocity of talent; and leaving Caesar to his grammar and his
exercises, we will proceed with the occurrences which he must have
heard talked of in his father's house, or seen with his eyes when he
began to open them. The society there was probably composed of his
uncle's friends; soldiers and statesmen who had no sympathy with mobs,
but detested the selfish and dangerous system on which the Senate had
carried on the government, and dreaded its consequences. Above the
tumults of the factions in the Capitol a cry rising into shrillness
began to be heard from Italy. Caius Gracchus had wished to extend the
Roman franchise to the Italian States, and the suggestion had cost him
his popularity and his life. The Italian provinces had furnished their
share of the armies which had beaten Jugurtha, and had destroyed the
German invaders. They now demanded that they should have the position
which Gracchus designed for them: that they should be allowed to
legislate for themselves, and no longer lie at the mercy of others, who
neither understood their necessities nor cared for their interests.
They had no friends in the city, save a few far-sighted statesmen.
Senate and mob had at least one point of agreement, that the spoils of
the Empire should be fought for among themselves; and at the first
mention of the invasion of their monopoly a law was passed making the
very agitation of the subject punishable by death.
Political convulsions work in a groove, the direction of which varies
little in any age or country. Institutions once sufficient and salutary
become unadapted to a change of circumstances. The traditionary holders
of power see their interests threatened. They are jealous of
innovations. They look on agitators for reform as felonious persons
desiring to appropriate what does not belong to them. The complaining
parties are conscious of suffering and rush blindly on the superficial
causes of their immediate distress. The existing authority is their
enemy; and their one remedy is a change in the system of government.
They imagine that they see what the change should be, that they
comprehend what they are doing, and know where they intend to arrive.
They do not perceive that the visible disorders are no more than
symptoms which no measures, repressive or revolutionary, can do more
than palliate. The wave advances and the wave recedes. Neither party in
the struggle can lift itself far enough above the passions of the
moment to study the drift of the general current. Each is violent, each
is one-sided, and each makes the most and the worst of the sins of its
opponents. The one idea of the aggressors is to grasp all that they can
reach. The one idea of the conservatives is to part with nothing,
pretending that the stability of the State depends on adherence to the
principles which have placed them in the position which they hold; and
as various interests are threatened, and as various necessities arise,
those who are one day enemies are frightened the next into unnatural
coalitions, and the next after into more embittered dissensions.
To an indifferent spectator, armed especially with the political
experiences of twenty additional centuries, it seems difficult to
understand how Italy could govern the world. That the world and Italy
besides should continue subject to the population of a single city, of
its limited Latin environs, and of a handful of townships exceptionally
favored, might even then be seen to be plainly impossible. The Italians
were Romans in every point, except in the possession of the franchise.
They spoke the same language; they were subjects of the same dominion.
They were as well educated, they were as wealthy, they were as capable
as the inhabitants of the dominant State. They paid taxes, they fought
in the armies; they were strong; they were less corrupt, politically
and morally, as having fewer temptations and fewer opportunities of
evil; and in their simple country life they approached incomparably
nearer to the old Roman type than the patrician fops in the circus or
the Forum, or the city mob which was fed in idleness on free grants of
corn. When Samnium and Tuscany were conquered, a third of the lands had
been confiscated to the Roman State, under the name of _Ager Publicus_.
Samnite and Etruscan gentlemen had recovered part of it under lease,
much as the descendants of the Irish chiefs held their ancestral
domains as tenants of the Cromwellians. The land law of the Gracchi was
well intended, but it bore hard on many of the leading provincials, who
had seen their estates parcelled out, and their own property, as they
deemed it, taken from them under the land commission. If they were to
be governed by Roman laws, they naturally demanded to be consulted when
the laws were made. They might have been content under a despotism to
which Roman and Italian were subject alike. To be governed under the
forms of a free constitution by men no better than themselves was
naturally intolerable.
[Sidenote: B.C. 95.] [Sidenote: B.C. 91.] The movement from without
united the Romans for the instant in defence of their privileges. The
aristocracy resisted change from instinct; the mob, loudly as they
clamored for their own rights, cared nothing for the rights of others,
and the answer to the petition of the Italians, five years after the
defeat of the Cimbri, was a fierce refusal to permit the discussion of
it. Livius Drusus, one of those unfortunately gifted men who can see
that in a quarrel there is sometimes justice on both sides, made a vain
attempt to secure the provincials a hearing, but he was murdered in his
own house. To be murdered was the usual end of exceptionally
distinguished Romans, in a State where the lives of citizens were
theoretically sacred. His death was the signal for an insurrection,
which began in the mountains of the Abruzzi and spread over the whole
peninsula.
The contrast of character between the two classes of population became
at once uncomfortably evident. The provincials had been the right arm
of the Empire. Rome, a city of rich men with families of slaves, and of
a crowd of impoverished freemen without employment to keep them in
health and strength, could no longer bring into the field a force which
could hold its ground against the gentry and peasants of Samnium. The
Senate enlisted Greeks, Numidians, any one whose services they could
purchase. They had to encounter soldiers who had been trained and
disciplined by Marius, and they were taught by defeat upon defeat that
they had a worse enemy before them than the Germans. Marius himself had
almost withdrawn from public life. He had no heart for the quarrel, and
did not care greatly to exert himself. At the bottom, perhaps, he
thought that the Italians were in the right. The Senate discovered that
they were helpless, and must come to terms if they would escape
destruction. They abandoned the original point of difference, and they
offered to open the franchise to every Italian state south of the Po
which had not taken arms or which returned immediately to its
allegiance. The war had broken out for a definite cause. When the cause
was removed no reason remained for its continuance. The Italians were
closely connected with Rome. Italians were spread over the Roman world
in active business. They had no wish to overthrow the Empire if they
were allowed to share in its management. The greater part of them
accepted the Senate's terms; and only those remained in the field who
had gone to war in the hope of recovering the lost independence which
their ancestors had so long heroically defended.
The panting Senate was thus able to breathe again. The war continued,
but under better auspices. Sound material could now be collected again
for the army. Marius being in the background, the chosen knight of the
aristocracy, Lucius Sylla, whose fame in the Cimbrian war had been only
second to that of his commander's, came at once to the front.
Sylla, or Sulla, as we are now taught to call him, was born in the year
138 B.C. He was a patrician of the purest blood, had inherited a
moderate fortune, and had spent it like other young men of rank,
lounging in theatres and amusing himself with dinner-parties. He was a
poet, an artist, and a wit, but each and everything with the languor of
an amateur. His favorite associates were actresses, and he had neither
obtained nor aspired to any higher reputation than that of a cultivated
man of fashion. His distinguished birth was not apparent in his person.
He had red hair, hard blue eyes, and a complexion white and purple,
with the colors so ill-mixed that his face was compared to a mulberry
sprinkled with flour. Ambition he appeared to have none; and when he
exerted himself to be appointed quaestor to Marius on the African
expedition, Marius was disinclined to take him as having no
recommendation beyond qualifications which the consul of the plebeians
disdained and disliked.
Marius, however, soon discovered his mistake. Beneath his
constitutional indolence Sylla was by nature a soldier, a statesman, a
diplomatist. He had been too contemptuous of the common objects of
politicians to concern himself with the intrigues of the Forum, but he
had only to exert himself to rise with easy ascendency to the command
of every situation in which he might be placed. He had entered with
military instinct into Marius's reform of the army, and became the most
active and useful of his officers. He endeared himself to the
legionaries by a tolerance of vices which did not interfere with
discipline; and to Sylla's combined adroitness and courage Marius owed
the final capture of Jugurtha.
Whether Marius became jealous of Sylla on this occasion must be decided
by those who, while they have no better information than others as to
the actions of men, possess, or claim to possess, the most intimate
acquaintance with their motives. They again served together, however,
against the Northern invaders, and Sylla a second time lent efficient
help to give Marius a victory. Like Marius, he had no turn for platform
oratory and little interest in election contests and intrigues. For
eight years he kept aloof from politics, and his name and that of his
rival were alike for all that time almost unheard of. He emerged into
special notice only when he was praetor in the year 93 B.C., and when
he characteristically distinguished his term of office by exhibiting a
hundred lions in the arena matched against Numidian archers. There was
no such road to popularity with the Roman multitude. It is possible
that the little Caesar, then a child of seven, may have been among the
spectators, making his small reflections on it all.
[Sidenote: B.C. 120.] In 92 Sylla went as propraetor to Asia, where the
incapacity of the Senate's administration was creating another enemy
likely to be troublesome. Mithridates, "child of the sun," pretending
to a descent from Darius Hystaspes, was king of Pontus, one of the
semi-independent monarchies which had been allowed to stand in Asia
Minor. The coast-line of Pontus extended from Sinope to Trebizond, and
reached inland to the line of mountains where the rivers divide which
flow into the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The father of
Mithridates was murdered when he was a child, and for some years he led
a wandering life, meeting adventures which were as wild and perhaps as
imaginary as those of Ulysses. In later life he became the idol of
Eastern imagination, and legend made free with his history; but he was
certainly an extraordinary man. He spoke the unnumbered dialects of the
Asiatic tribes among whom he had travelled. He spoke Greek with ease
and freedom. Placed, as he was, on the margin where the civilizations
of the East and the West were brought in contact, he was at once a
barbarian potentate and an ambitious European politician. He was well
informed of the state of Rome, and saw reason, perhaps, as well he
might, to doubt the durability of its power. At any rate, he was no
sooner fixed on his own throne than he began to annex the territories
of the adjoining princes. He advanced his sea frontier through Armenia
to Batoum, and thence along the coast of Circassia. He occupied the
Greek settlements on the Sea of Azof. He took Kertch and the Crimea,
and with the help of pirates from the Mediterranean he formed a fleet
which gave him complete command of the Black Sea. In Asia Minor no
power but the Roman could venture to quarrel with him. The Romans ought
in prudence to have interfered before Mithridates had grown to so large
a bulk, but money judiciously distributed among the leading politicians
had secured the Senate's connivance; and they opened their eyes at last
only when Mithridates thought it unnecessary to subsidize them further,
and directed his proceedings against Cappadocia, which was immediately
under Roman protection. He invaded the country, killed the prince whom
Rome had recognized, and placed on the throne a child of his own, with
the evident intention of taking Cappadocia for himself.
This was to go too far. Like Jugurtha, he had purchased many friends in
the Senate, who, grateful for past favors and hoping for more,
prevented the adoption of violent measures against him; but they sent a
message to him that he must not have Cappadocia, and Mithridates,
waiting for a better opportunity, thought proper to comply. Of this
message the bearer was Lucius Sylla. He had time to study on the spot
the problem of how to deal with Asia Minor. He accomplished his mission
with his usual adroitness and apparent success, and he returned to Rome
with new honors to finish the Social war.
It was no easy work. The Samnites were tough and determined. For two
years they continued to struggle, and the contest was not yet over when
news came from the East appalling as the threatened Cimbrian invasion,
which brought both parties to consent to suspend their differences by
mutual concessions.
[1] I follow the ordinary date, which has been fixed by the positive
statement that Caesar was fifty-six when he was killed, the date of
his death being March, B.C. 44. Mommsen, however, argues plausibly
for adding another two years to the beginning of Caesar's life, and
brings him into the world at the time of the battle at Aix.