Extracts from "Caesar, a Sketch," by JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, LL.D.
(157-86 B.C.)
[Illustration: Caius Marius.]
Caius Marius was at this time forty-eight years old.[3] Two-thirds of
his life were over, and a name which was to sound throughout the world
and be remembered through all ages, had as yet been scarcely heard of
beyond the army and the political clubs in Rome. He was born at
Arpinum, a Latin township, seventy miles from the capital, in the year
157 B.C. His father was a small farmer, and he was himself bred to the
plough. He joined the army early, and soon attracted notice by his
punctual discharge of his duties. In a time of growing looseness,
Marius was strict himself in keeping discipline and in enforcing it as
he rose in the service. He was in Spain when Jugurtha[4] was there,
and made himself especially useful to Scipio; he forced his way
steadily upward, by his mere soldierlike qualities, to the rank of
military tribune. Rome, too, had learnt to know him, for he was chosen
tribune of the people the year after the murder of Caius Gracchus.
Being a self-made man, he belonged naturally to the popular party.
While in office he gave offence in some way to the men in power, and
was called before the Senate to answer for himself. But he had the
right on his side, it is likely, for they found him stubborn and
impertinent, and they could make nothing of their charges against him.
He was not bidding at this time, however, for the support of the mob.
He had the integrity and sense to oppose the largesses of corn; and he
forfeited his popularity by trying to close the public granaries
before the practice had passed into a system. He seemed as if made of
a block of hard Roman oak, gnarled and knotted, but sound in all its
fibres. His professional merit continued to recommend him. At the age
of forty he became praetor, and was sent to Spain, where he left a mark
again by the successful severity by which he cleared the province of
banditti. He was a man neither given himself to talking, nor much
talked about in the world; but he was sought for wherever work was to
be done, and he had made himself respected and valued in high circles,
for after his return from the Peninsula he had married into one of the
most distinguished of the patrician families.
[Footnote 3: B.C. 109.]
[Footnote 4: King of Numidia. He successfully withstood the
Romans during several years.]
Marius by this marriage became a person of social consideration. His
father had been a client of the Metelli; and Caecilius Metellus, who
must have known Marius by reputation and probably in person, invited
him to go as second in command in the African campaign. He was
moderately successful. Towns were taken, battles were won: Metellus
was incorruptible, and the Numidians sued for peace. But Jugurtha
wanted terms, and the consul demanded unconditional surrender.
Jugurtha withdrew into the desert; the war dragged on; and Marius,
perhaps ambitious, perhaps impatient at the general's want of vigor,
began to think that he could make quicker work of it. The popular
party were stirring again in Rome, the Senate having so notoriously
disgraced itself. There was just irritation that a petty African
prince could defy the whole power of Rome for so many years; and
though a democratic consul had been unheard of for a century, the name
of Marius began to be spoken of as a possible candidate. Marius
consented to stand. The law required that he must be present in person
at the election, and he applied to his commander for leave of absence.
Metellus laughed at his pretensions, and bade him wait another twenty
years. Marius, however, persisted, and was allowed to go. The
patricians strained their resources to defeat him, but he was chosen
with enthusiasm. Metellus was recalled, and the conduct of the
Numidian war was assigned to the new hero of the "Populares."
A shudder of alarm ran, no doubt, through the Senate house, when the
determination of the people was known. A successful general could not
be disposed of so easily as oratorical tribunes. Fortunately, Marius
was not a politician. He had no belief in democracy. He was a soldier,
and had a soldier's way of thinking on government and the methods of
it. His first step was a reformation in the army. Hitherto the Roman
legions had been no more than the citizens in arms, called for the
moment from their various occupations, to return to them when the
occasion for their services was past. Marius had perceived that fewer
men, better trained and disciplined, could be made more effective and
be more easily handled. He had studied war as a science. He had
perceived that the present weakness need be no more than an accident,
and that there was a latent force in the Roman state, which needed
only organization to resume its ascendency. "He enlisted," it was
said, "the worst of the citizens," men, that is to say, who had no
occupation, and who became soldiers by profession; and as persons
without property could not have furnished themselves at their own
cost, he must have carried out the scheme proposed by Gracchus, and
equipped them at the expense of the state. His discipline was of the
sternest. The experiment was new; and men of rank who had a taste for
war in earnest, and did not wish that the popular party should have
the whole benefit and credit of the improvements, were willing to go
with him; among them a dissipated young patrician, called Lucius
Sulla, whose name also was destined to be memorable.
By these methods, and out of these materials, an army was formed, such
as no Roman general had hitherto led. It performed extraordinary
marches, carried its water-supplies with it in skins, and followed the
enemy across sandy deserts hitherto found impassable. In less than two
years the war was over. The Moors, to whom Jugurtha had fled,
surrendered him to Sulla; and he was brought in chains to Rome, where
he finished his life in a dungeon.
Marius had formed an army barely in time to save Italy from being
totally overwhelmed. A vast migratory wave of population had been set
in motion behind the Rhine and the Danube. The German forests were
uncultivated. The hunting and pasture grounds were too straight for
the numbers crowded into them, and two enormous hordes were rolling
westward and southward in search of some new abiding-place. Each
division consisted of hundreds of thousands. They travelled, with
their wives and children, their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians
and with the modern South African Dutch, being at once their
conveyance and their home. Gray-haired priestesses tramped along among
them, barefooted, in white linen dresses, the knife at their girdle;
northern Iphigenias, sacrificing prisoners as they were taken, to the
gods of Valhalla. On they swept, eating up the country, and the people
flying before them. In 113 B.C. the skirts of the Cimbri had
encountered a small Roman force near Trieste, and destroyed it. Four
years later another attempt was made to stop them, but the Roman army
was beaten and its camp taken. The Cimbrian host did not, however,
turn at that time upon Italy. Their aim was the south of France. They
made their way through the Alps into Switzerland, where the Helvetii
joined them and the united mass rolled over the Jura and down the bank
of the Rhone. Roused at last into the exertion, the Senate sent into
Gaul the largest force which the Romans had ever brought into the
field. They met the Cimbri at Orange, and were simply annihilated.
Eighty thousand Romans and forty thousand camp-followers were said to
have fallen. The numbers in such cases are generally exaggerated, but
the extravagance of the report is a witness to the greatness of the
overthrow. The Romans had received a worse blow than at Cannae. They
were brave enough, but they were commanded by persons whose
recommendations for command were birth or fortune; "preposterous men,"
as Marius termed them, who had waited for their appointment to open
the military manuals.
Had the Cimbri chosen at this moment to recross the Alps into Italy,
they had only to go and take possession, and Alaric would have been
antedated by five centuries. In great danger it was the Senate's
business to suspend the constitution. The constitution was set aside
now, but it was set aside by the people themselves, not by the Senate.
One man only could save the country, and that man was Marius. His
consulship was over, and custom forbade his re-election. The Senate
might have appointed him Dictator, but would not. The people, custom
or no custom, chose him consul a second time--a significant
acknowledgment that the Empire, which had been won by the sword, must
be held by the sword, and that the sword itself must be held by the
hand that was best fitted to use it. Marius first triumphed for his
African victory, and, as an intimation to the Senate that the power
for the moment was his and not theirs, he entered the Curia in his
triumphal dress. He then prepared for the barbarians who, to the
alarmed imagination of the city, were already knocking at its gates.
Time was the important element in the matter. Had the Cimbri come at
once after their victory at Orange, Italy had been theirs. But they
did not come. With the unguided movements of some wild force of
nature, they swerved away through Aquitaine to the Pyrenees. They
swept across the mountains into Spain. Thence, turning north, they
passed up the Atlantic coast and round to the Seine, the Gauls flying
before them; thence on to the Rhine, where the vast body of the
Teutons joined them, and fresh detachments of the Helvetii. It was as
if some vast tide-wave had surged over the country and rolled through
it, searching out the easiest passages. At length, in two divisions,
the invaders moved definitely toward Italy, the Cimbri following their
old tracks by the Eastern Alps toward Aquileia and the Adriatic, the
Teutons passing down through Provence, and making for the road along
the Mediterranean. Two years had been consumed in these wanderings,
and Marius was by this time ready for them. The Senate had dropped the
reins, and no longer governed or misgoverned; the popular party,
represented by the army, was supreme. Marius was continued in office,
and was a fourth time consul. He had completed his military reforms,
and the army was now a professional service, with regular pay. Trained
corps of engineers were attached to each legion. The campaigns of the
Romans were thenceforward to be conducted with spade and pickaxe as
much as with sword and javelin, and the soldiers learnt the use of
tools as well as arms.
The effect of the change was like enchantment. The delay of the
Germans made it unnecessary to wait for them in Italy. Leaving
Catulus, his colleague in the consulship, to check the Cimbri in
Venetia, Marius went himself, taking Sulla with him, into the south of
France. As the barbarian host came on, he occupied a fortified camp
near Aix. He allowed the enormous procession to roll past him in their
wagons toward the Alps. Then, following cautiously, he watched his
opportunity to fall on them. The Teutons were brave, but they had no
longer mere legionaries to fight with, but a powerful machine, and the
entire mass of them, men, women, and children, in numbers which,
however uncertain, were rather those of a nation than an army, were
swept out of existence. The Teutons were destroyed on the 20th of
July, 102. In the year following, the same fate overtook their
comrades. The Cimbri had forced the passes through the mountains. They
had beaten the unscientific patrician Catulus, and had driven him back
on the Po. But Marius came to his rescue. The Cimbri were cut to
pieces near Mantua, in the summer of 101, and Italy was saved.
The victories of Marius mark a new epoch in Roman history.[5] The
legions were no longer the levy of the citizens in arms, who were
themselves the state for which they fought. The legionaries were
citizens still. They had votes, and they used them; but they were
professional soldiers with the modes of thought which belong to
soldiers; and besides, the power of the hustings was now the power of
the sword. The constitution remained to appearance intact, and means
were devised sufficient to encounter, it might be supposed, the new
danger. Standing armies were prohibited in Italy. Victorious generals
returning from campaigns abroad were required to disband their legions
on entering the sacred soil. But the materials of these legions
remained a distinct order from the rest of the population, capable of
instant combination, and in combination, irresistible, save by
opposing combinations of the same kind.
[Footnote 5: He was ranked with Romulus and Camillus and
given the title of the third founder of Rome.]
The danger from the Germans was no sooner gone than political anarchy
broke loose again. Marius, the man of the people, was the saviour of
his country. He was made consul a fifth time, and a sixth. The party
which had given him his command shared, of course, in his
pre-eminence. The elections could be no longer interfered with or the
voters intimidated. The public offices were filled with the most
violent agitators, who believed that the time had come to revenge the
Gracchi, and carry out the democratic revolution, to establish the
ideal Republic, and the direct rule of the citizen assembly. This,
too, was a chimera. If the Roman Senate could not govern, far less
could the Roman mob govern. Marius stood aside, and let the voices
rage. He could not be expected to support a system which had brought
the country so near to ruin. He had no belief in the visions of the
demagogues, but the time was not ripe to make an end of it all. Had he
tried, the army would not have gone with him; so he sat still, till
faction had done its work. The popular heroes of the hour were the
tribune Saturninus and the praetor Glaucia. They carried corn laws and
land laws--whatever laws they pleased to propose. The administration
remaining with the Senate, they carried a vote that every senator
should take an oath to execute their laws under penalty of fine and
expulsion. Marius did not like it, and even opposed it, but let it
pass at last.
Marius was an indifferent politician. He perceived as well as any one
that violence must not go on, but he hesitated to put it down. He knew
that the aristocracy feared and hated him. Between them and the
people's consul no alliance was possible. He did not care to alienate
his friends, and there may have been other difficulties which we do
not know, in his way. The army itself was perhaps divided. On the
popular side there were two parties: a moderate one, represented by
Memmius, who, as tribune, had impeached the senators for the
Jugurthine infamies; the other, the advanced radicals, led by Glaucia
and Saturninus. Memmius and Glaucia were both candidates for the
consulship; and as Memmius was likely to succeed, he was murdered.
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.
The contrast of character between 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 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 Sulla, whose fame in the Cimbrian war had been
only second to that of his commander's, came at once to the front. Too
late the democratic leaders repented of their folly in encouraging the
Senate to refuse the franchise to the Italians. The Italians, they
began to perceive, would be their surest political allies. Caius
Gracchus had been right after all. The Roman democracy must make haste
to offer the Italians more than all which the Senate was ready to
concede to them. Together they could make an end of misrule, and place
Marius once more at their head.
Much of this was perhaps the scheming passion of revolution; much of
it was legitimate indignation, penitent for its errors and anxious to
atone for them. Marius had his personal grievances. The aristocrats
were stealing from him even his military reputation, and claiming for
Sulla the capture of Jugurtha. He was willing, perhaps anxious, to
take the Eastern command. Sulpicius Rufus, once a champion of the
Senate and the most brilliant orator in Rome, went over to the people
in the excitement. Rufus was chosen tribune, and at once proposed to
enfranchise the remainder of Italy.
But Sulla was not so easily got rid of. It was no time for nice
considerations. He had formed an army in Campania out of the legions
which had served against the Italians. He had made his soldiers
devoted to him. They were ready to go anywhere and do anything which
Sulla bade them. After so many murders, and so many commotions, the
constitution had lost its sacred character; a popular assembly was, of
all conceivable bodies, the least fit to govern an empire; and in
Sulla's eyes the Senate, whatever its deficiencies, was the only
possible sovereign of Rome. The people were a rabble, and their voices
the clamor of fools, who must be taught to know their masters. His
reply to Sulpicius and to the vote for his recall, was to march on the
city. He led his troops within the circle which no legionary in arms
was allowed to enter, and he lighted his watch-fires in the Forum
itself. The people resisted; Sulpicius was killed; Marius, the saviour
of his country, had to fly for his life, pursued by assassins, with a
price set upon his head.[6] Twelve of the prominent popular leaders
were immediately executed without trial; and in hot haste, swift,
decisive measures were taken, which permanently, as Sulla hoped, or if
not permanently, at least for the moment, would lame the limbs of the
democracy.
[Footnote 6: According to legend Marius took refuge among the
ruins of Carthage, comparing his own fallen greatness to that
of the city. His dignity in misfortune awed the soldiers who
came to seize him, and they left him in peace.]
He was no sooner out of Italy than the democratic party rose, with
Cinna at their head, to demand the restoration of the old
constitution. Cinna had been sworn to maintain Sulla's reforms, but no
oath could be held binding which was extorted at the sword's point. A
fresh Sulpicius was found in Carbo, a popular tribune. A more valuable
supporter was found in Quintus Sertorius, a soldier of fortune, but a
man of real gifts, and even of genius. Disregarding the new obligation
to obtain the previous consent of the Senate, Cinna called the
assembly together to repeal the acts which Sulla had forced on them.
The wounds of the social war were scarcely cicatrized, and the peace
had left the allies imperfectly satisfied. Their dispersed armies
gathered again about Cinna and Sertorius. Old Marius, who had been
hunted through marsh and forest, and had been hiding with difficulty
in Africa, came back at the news that Italy had risen again; and six
thousand of his veterans flocked to him at the sound of his name. The
Senate issued proclamations. The limitations on the Italian franchise
left by Sulla were abandoned. Every privilege which had been asked for
was conceded. It was too late. Concessions made in fear might be
withdrawn on the return of safety. Marius and Cinna joined their
forces. The few troops in the pay of the Senate deserted to them. They
appeared together at the gates of the city, and Rome capitulated.
There was a bloody score to be wiped out. Marius bears the chief blame
for the scenes which followed. Undoubtedly he was in no pleasant
humor. A price had been set on his head, his house had been destroyed,
his property had been confiscated, he himself had been chased like a
wild beast, and he had not deserved such treatment. He had saved Italy
when but for him it would have been wasted by the swords of the
Germans. His power had afterward been absolute, but he had not abused
it for party purposes. The Senate had no reason to complain of him. He
had touched none of their privileges, incapable and dishonest as he
knew them to be. His crime in their eyes had been his eminence. They
had now shown themselves as cruel as they were worthless; and if
public justice was disposed to make an end of them, he saw no cause
for interference.
Thus the familiar story repeated itself: wrong was punished by wrong,
and another item was entered on the bloody account which was being
scored up year after year. The noble lords and their friends had
killed the people in the Forum. They were killed in turn by the
soldiers of Marius. Fifty senators perished, not those who were
specially guilty, but those who were most politically marked as
patrician leaders. With them fell a thousand equites, commoners of
fortune, who had thrown in their lot with the aristocracy. From
retaliatory political revenge the transition was easy to pillage and
wholesale murder; and for many days the wretched city was made a prey
to robbers and cut-throats.
So ended the year 87, the darkest and bloodiest which the guilty city
had yet experienced. Marius and Cinna were chosen consuls for the year
ensuing, and a witches' prophecy was fulfilled, that Marius should
have a seventh consulate. But the glory had departed from him. His sun
was already setting, redly, among crimson clouds. He lived but a
fortnight after his inauguration, and he died in his bed on the 13th
of January, at the age of seventy-one.
"The mother of the Gracchi," said Mirabeau, "cast the dust of her
murdered sons into the air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius."