loosened considerably in their friendship as the war advanced, and made
separate treaties of peace, by which Rome was enabled to deal with them
piecemeal, instead of being compelled to stand against their united
efforts. The Samnites evinced their old obstinacy, and waited, as usual,
to be cut to pieces, before they abandoned the hope of holding together.
When the sword had been busy among them for three years, there remained
still a mass of sufficient importance to induce the Romans to offer the
franchise to all who would lay down their arms; and of this proposal the
Samnites at last reluctantly availed themselves.
Rome having acquired a large accession of new citizens, was puzzled to
determine what to do with them. Had they been distributed amongst the
thirty-five country tribes, the old members would have been swamped by
the new, and the latter were, therefore, formed into--some say six, some
say eight, and some say fifteen separate bodies. Such is the
disagreement of the learned doctors on this head, that we cannot put
confidence in one without discrediting two; and we consequently take the
more impartial course of believing none of them. So great is the
discrepancy of the authorities on nearly every point, that, for the sake
of history, we can only hope they do not go for their facts to the same
sources which have supplied their figures. It is true that they usually
profess to deal with round numbers alone; and perhaps if every number
employed were literally round, it would represent the sum of what is
known with certainty on the subjects that are spoken of.
The fact, however, is indisputable, that, in the times to which our
history relates, the weaker states were the prey of the stronger,--might
overcame right; and the only mode by which a small society could save
itself from destruction by one power, was by the sale of its
independence to another. Those places which were incompetent to practise
the noble art of self-defence, could only obtain protection against
violence on the right hand, by submitting to robbery on the left; and
the Romans, who were usually appealed to for aid, always plentifully
helped themselves at the cost of those by whom their help was required.
By the foreign policy of Rome, ambassadors were always planted in all
places of importance, to interfere in the quarrels between nations and
their kings; and the ambassadors took care, by fomenting quarrels, that
there should be no lack of material for their diplomacy. The cost of
intervention fell heavily on those upon whom it was bestowed, but it
eventually helped to ruin Rome itself; for neglect of one's own affairs
is the inevitable consequence of interfering with the affairs of one's
neighbours. The professed object of this meddling on the part of the
great republic, was to give to other states the benefit of freedom.
There is, however, no slavery more abject than that which induces a
nation to accept a foreign, instead of a domestic, tyranny. Those who
are willing to import their independence from abroad, will never find it
flourish at home; and there is not a more melancholy object--as recent
events have proved--than a transplanted tree of liberty.
FOOTNOTES:
[68] Sallust, Jugurthine War, c. vi.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH.
MITHRIDATES, SULLA, MARIUS, CINNA, ET CÆTERA.
[Illustration]
Following the order of dates, we come to Mithridates, the son of old
Mithridates the Fifth, surnamed Eupator, who had been a fast ally of
Rome; but his son, who was much faster in another sense, soon came to
hostilities.
The birth of young Mithridates had been, according to Justin,[69]
signalised by the appearance of a wondrous comet, which was, probably,
an idle tale; but those whose eyes are always strained towards a rising
sun, are liable to be dazzled by all sorts of illusory visions.
If the comet was to have brought prosperity to Mithridates, the
consignment must have been dropped on the way, inasmuch as none of it
reached the young prince, whose early years were passed in hot water;
for he was in one continual perspiration, caused by the constant
discovery that his life was in danger. His grandmother, Laodice, had
killed five of her children, when young Mithridates, fearing that
infanticide might run in the family, resorted to matricide, as an
alternative for checking the fearful disease, and, according to
Appian,[70] murdered his mother. It is said that his guardians did their
utmost to get rid of him, by encouraging him in all sorts of dangerous
games;--that they gave him weapons for playthings, and that one of his
toys was a real sword, with which the child might have accidentally cut
the slender thread of his own existence.
They mounted him, also, upon the highest horses that could be found,
which was the height of cruelty; but though the animals often kicked and
hurled the youngster from his seat, fortune always decided the throw in
his favour. He soon acquired such skill, that he was deep enough to meet
the most fearful amount of plunging; and when placed upon a determined
jibber, he could always back out of his danger. Though the horses given
him to ride were quite unbroken, his neck remained entire; and he at
length became such an excellent horseman, that he could travel on
horseback--according to Polybius--125 miles a day, a length to which we
are not prepared to go with the ancient historian. Young Mithridates,
going at full gallop, for several successive hours, presents a spirited
picture to the mind's eye, but duty compels us to pull him up at the
turnpike of truth; for we can allow no evasion of the important trust of
history.
Among his other accomplishments, it is said that he could hurl the
javelin to such a distance, that the enthusiasm of the spectators would
be roused to the utmost pitch; but we are obliged to add, that his power
in throwing the spear was not equal to that of the chroniclers in
throwing the hatchet.
His guardians having failed to kill him by physical force, attempted to
do so by the force of physic, and were continually giving him poisonous
drugs, which, though exceedingly unpleasant, he was not nice enough to
reject, for he had the bad taste to swallow them. They put him through a
course of hen-bane, but he was now no chicken, and had learnt to
neutralise the effects of the bane by a powerful antidote. So admirably
did the latter answer its object, that he could swallow arsenic by the
drachm without a scruple, and his inside was rendered thoroughly
poison-proof, though there is an utter absence of historical proof to
support the statement.
In order to harden himself externally, as well as internally, we are
informed that he would lie at night in the open air; but we do not
believe he was any more hardened by lying than those who make the
statement. He would trust to the chase for a dinner, and he was often
very hard run for a meal, which he sometimes sought by a contest with a
wild beast: and the question then was, whether the latter was to be
cooked, or Mithridates himself done for.
The excitement of an encounter with some ferocious animal furnished the
continual source of a _sauce piquante_ to what he took to eat, which
formed food for his courage as well as for his appetite. He was well
versed in physics, which he was continually imbibing at the hands of his
enemies, and, in accordance with the saying _fas est ab hoste doceri_,
he turned the dosing to good account by studying the power of antidotes.
He became a master of languages, and taught himself; so that he was, in
fact, his own master and his own pupil. His object appears to have been
to save the trouble and expense of diplomatic agents, by qualifying
himself to talk with all foreign ambassadors, and to prevent the chance
of matters being misinterpreted through the mouth of an interpreter.
Those historians who have built up a considerable fabric on
inconsiderable grounds, do not hesitate to add to their fabrications
another story, by describing Mithridates as a giant in growth, and as a
lad so tall that he might have overlooked an ordinary ladder.
Such had been the education and pursuits of the young man whom we find
occupying the throne of Pontus, and interfering in the affairs of
Cappadocia, to which he undertook to supply a king, from his own family,
whenever a vacancy happened. Rome, also, began to take an interest in
Cappadocia, and the only party without a voice in the affair, consisted
of the Cappadocians. They were assailed with the offer of freedom and a
republic at the point of the sword, on one side,--while, on the other,
they were asked to pin their faith to a monarchy which would otherwise
be pinned to them by the blades of a foreign army. The Cappadocians had
a wholesome horror of republican freedom, especially when imported from
abroad; and Rome, therefore, sent them a king, who was accepted until
his throne was overthrown by Mithridates--the Cappadocians having to pay
a heavy fine on each change of government.
The king, who was thoroughly put out by Mithridates, applied to Rome,
which raised an army in three divisions; but the Romans were so hated in
Asia Minor, that they encountered every opposition from the inhabitants.
Appius and Aquilinus, who were leaders of two of the divisions, soon
fell into the hands of Mithridates, and it is said that he punished
their avarice by pouring melted gold down their throats; but this is
more than any one could swallow.
The Roman Senate, irritated by defeat, called upon L. Cornelius
Sulla--or Sylla, as, by an alteration of the first syllable, he is
sometimes called--to take the command of the army. The family boasted of
its antiquity, though one family must be quite as old as another, if
everybody's pedigree could be traced; and the real wonder would be to
find a man whose ancestors had a beginning, instead of the ordinary case
of one with an apparently endless line of progenitors. The family of
Cornelius Sulla claimed connection with that of Cornelius Rufinus, who,
in the year of Rome 540, instituted the Ludi Apollinares, in honour of
Apollo, and in conformity with the directions of the Sibylline books,
from which he had taken the name of Sibylla. This had, according to the
interpretation put upon it by family pride, been corrupted into Sulla;
and such is the empty boast of ancestry, that even corruption is eagerly
acknowledged as a proof of ancient lineage. The father of L. Cornelius
Sulla had left little--not even an unsullied name--to his son, but had
been equally wasteful of fortune and character. The boy was clever and
quick, but his speediness speedily degenerated into fastness. Having
neither morality nor means, he took a cheap apartment, where he
entertained a low set, and there was nothing to be envied either in his
room or his company.
In early life he had distinguished himself as a soldier in the
Jugurthine War; and he subsequently obtained the office of Prætor, in
which he won the affections of the people, by introducing into the
entertainments of the amphitheatre the extraordinary attraction of 100
real lions.
These noble animals had been the gift of a Mauritanian king, and as
Sulla might have wished the present absent, if he had been saddled with
the cost of the keep of no less than one hundred monarchs of the forest,
the donor forwarded a band of Moors, who were to serve as food for the
lions, by being turned into the arena with them when occasion required.
Sulla had excited the jealousy of Marius during the Jugurthine War, and
the latter, though now a man of seventy, still cherished his old
animosity with all the obstinacy of a most inveterate veteran. He was
still ambitious of the laurel, though he should have been thinking only
of the cypress; and with one foot in the grave, he was anxious to march
with the other at the head of an army. Limping into the Campus Martius,
where the soldiers were being drilled, he placed himself by the side of
the youngest, and hobbled through the exercise with an air of
ill-assumed juvenility. His feeble evolutions excited a mixed feeling of
ridicule and disgust among the lookers-on, instead of obtaining for him
the command to which he aspired. Having been disappointed of producing
the effect he had anticipated, he had recourse to his friend, the
tribune P. Sulpicius, who exercised a sort of reign of terror by means
of 3000 gladiators, whom he always had about him. This formidable band
of armed ruffians went by the name of the Anti-Senate of Sulpicius, who
employed them to carry any measure he proposed, by showing the point of
the sword to those who did not see the point of his argument. In order
to gain time, the Senate appointed a series of holidays, or Feriæ,
during which all business was suspended for the celebration of public
sports, which often enabled the authorities to play a game of their own,
by delaying any measure that was opposed to their interests. After a
brief interval, the Senate appointed Sulla to the chief command,
whereupon the Anti-Senate appointed Marius; and the former had no sooner
heard the news, than he marched upon Rome with the whole of his army.
The utmost consternation ensued; for no army having been expected at
Rome, there had been no preparations for defence; and though the gates
were closed, they were almost as crazy and unhinged as the terrified
inhabitants.
[Illustration: _Marius discovered in the Marshes at Minturnæ._]
A feeble attempt was made to bolt the doors against Sulla and his
soldiers, but it was impossible to bar their entrance. As they marched
through the streets, they were assailed from the houses with showers
of brick, which, though very destructive, could not have been so
damaging as the modern mortar. Some of the inhabitants were armed with
slings, and now and then an arrow was discharged from a bow window.
Orders were immediately given to set fire to the quarters whence the
annoyance proceeded, and the directions were acted upon with that
indiscriminate ferocity which is too often displayed by an incensed
soldiery against an unarmed populace. The anger excited by the few was
vented on the unoffending many, and the troops performed, with savage
alacrity, the most humiliating service on which they could have been
employed--the butchery of their defenceless fellow-citizens.
[Illustration: "Who dares kill Marius?"]
The leaders, or, rather, the mis-leaders of the people in this miserable
conspiracy, were the first to seek their own safety in flight, and the
tribune P. Sulpicius, who had set the example of employing brute force,
evinced the most cowardly haste in running away from it, when he seemed
likely to become one of its victims. Marius made for the marshes near
Minturnæ, where he stuck in the mud, and covered his reputation with a
number of stains that are quite indelible. On being discovered in his
ignoble retreat, by those who had pursued him through thick and thin, he
was dragged to the town and lodged in the nearest station. A price had
been put upon his head, but the article does not seem to have been worth
much, for he had shown very little sense in the part he had been
playing. His gray hairs, or, perhaps, rather, his total baldness, still
commanded so much of sympathy, that nobody evinced a disposition to
become his executioner, until a Cimbric soldier undertook the
discreditable office. He approached the veteran with a drawn sword, but
Marius had got into a dark corner, and succeeded in frightening the
man-at-arms by putting on a voice of the most dismal character. The
soldier fancying himself in the presence of a ghost, failed in plucking
up a sufficient spirit; and when a moan was heard--inquiring, "Who dares
kill Caius Marius?" the would-be assassin, having flung down his sword,
ran away, exclaiming--"Not I, for one, at any rate!" The soldier, of
course, exaggerated the cause of his fears, and declared that the eyes
of Marius had appeared to him like two candles burning in their sockets.
The inhabitants of Minturnæ became as nervous as the panic-stricken
soldier, and put Marius on board a ship, which, after being tossed about
for several days, came to an anchor, or ran aground, high and dry, on
the fine old crusted port of Carthage. Here he rambled about the ruins,
and rested his aching head upon its broken temples. The Roman Governor,
Sextilius, not knowing what to do with such an embarrassing visitor,
sent a messenger to request him to "move on;" but the exile, with a
dignified air, claimed his right to repose upon the dry rubbish. "Tell
thy master," he observed to the officer on duty, who had respectfully
told him he must "come out of that," in compliance with the orders of
the authorities,--"Tell thy master that thou hast seen Marius, sitting
on the ruins of Carthage." The intelligence was not new, but it seems to
have been rather startling, for it had the effect of causing Marius to
be allowed to remain; and we will, therefore, leave him there, while we
proceed with the march of our history.
Sulla having reduced the city to the most complete subjection, made a
merit of not pursuing his vengeance farther against the defenceless
inhabitants; and so great was his confidence in the efficacy of his
work, that he acquiesced in the appointment of L. Cornelius Cinna, a
partisan of Marius, to the consulship. Sulla proceeded to Greece, where
he blockaded Athens, whose inhabitants he plundered, as a practical
acknowledgment of their worth; and he spared their lives, to show how he
valued their ancestors. He manifested his respect for their arts by
robbing their city of its chief ornaments; and he paid their learning
the compliment of stealing their principal libraries.
In the meantime Cinna had entered on the duties of the consulship at
Rome, but there the truth of the maxim, that two heads are better than
one, was rendered extremely doubtful by the constant dissensions between
himself and his colleague. The latter was Cn. Octavius, who opposed
whatever the former recommended; and while one tried to carry his
measures by brute force, the other endeavoured to defeat them by armed
violence. Cinna appealed to the mob, and Octavius trusted to the army,
both forces being the principal movers under a republican rule or
misrule, and both being equally repugnant to the spirit of
constitutional government. The arms of such a republic might have for
its supporters the bludgeon and the sword, with the figure of Liberty
battered and bleeding, slashed and sabred, gagged and fettered, in the
middle. Octavius and the sword had, on this occasion, got the upper
hand; and Cinna, the clubbist, was glad to break his bludgeon or cut his
stick, in flying from the city.
[Illustration: Marius in the Ruins of Carthage.]
The Senate decreed that he had forfeited the consulship, and Cinna,
having been well received in the Italian towns, decreed that the Senate
had forfeited their authority. The Government was thus reduced to two
negatives, which could not make an affirmative; and in the midst of a
theoretical perfection of republican forms, there existed only the
substance of practical anarchy. The inhabitants of the Capitol, with the
sword at their throats, elected a Consul, who was, of course, declared
by the executive to be their free choice; while the people in the
provinces protested, as loudly as they dared, against the violence that
had been done to all the principles of law and liberty. Cinna, who had
possessed himself of large sums of public money, employed bribes and
promises to get himself acknowledged as the lawful Consul, for it is
customary with despotism, acting under the name of freedom, to rob the
people with one hand, in order to corrupt them with the other.
The veteran Marius, who, after making his bed on the ruins of Carthage,
was not too anxious to lie there, had been wanted to join the party of
Cinna, and the great captain of the age was received with enthusiasm, in
consideration of the great age of the captain. Papirius Carbo and Q.
Sertorius also gave in their adhesion; but Cn. Pompeius, who was
stationed with an army at Umbria, waited to see which side would pay him
best, and of those who would bid the highest, he was prepared to do the
bidding. Marius, in the meanwhile, landed in Tuscany with a few friends;
but to excite commiseration, he dressed himself in rags, which was,
indeed, putting on the garb of poverty. He spoke so repeatedly of his
reverses, and touched so frequently on his old clothes, that the subject
was completely threadbare. Rags are seldom attractive, but in this
instance, they were successful in obtaining for the wearer a large crowd
of followers.
Cn. Pompeius had at length consented to espouse the cause of the Senate,
but the alliance was one of interest on his side, for he would not
espouse anything without a very large pecuniary settlement having been
made in his favour. He met the army of Cinna under the walls of Rome,
but both forces were enfeebled by sickness. Each party proceeded to do
its best, but the soldiers on both sides were so wretchedly ill, that
none of them could, for one moment, stand at ease; and all were much
fitter to be in bed than in battle. A storm did sad havoc among the
defenders of Rome, and a flash of lightning falling naturally upon the
conductor of the army, caused the death of Cn. Pompeius. The gates of
the city were thrown open, Cinna was restored to the Consulship, and
though there had been an understanding that no blood should be shed,
Marius set a band of slaves and mercenaries upon the defenceless people.
Under the pretence that he would only act according to law, this
sanguinary impostor, declaring himself an exile, pretended that he would
not enter the city until the sentence should be repealed; and with a
sword at every throat, he demanded an expression of the voice of the
people. The decision need scarcely be told, and Marius entered the city,
where, standing behind Cinna's consular chair, he made a series of
savage grimaces at his intended victims. Among these was the Consul,
Octavius, who, soothed by the soothsayers into the belief that he had
nothing to fear, boldly refused to fly, until some hired assassins
executed their task, by executing the unhappy officer. He met his death
while still maintaining his seat, and expired in the arms of his
armchair of office.
Marius being now master of the situation, did all he could to make the
situation vacant by a system of indiscriminate murder. The heads of the
nation were not only imprisoned, but struck off. The two Cæsars were
savagely seized and killed, while Marc Antony--an orator of considerable
mark--had concealed himself in a place that was made known to Marius.
The tyrant was at supper when he heard the news, and as if determined to
sup full of horrors, he started up with a determination to witness the
murder, which he desired should immediately take place; but his friends
pacified him with the assurance that the head should be brought in to
him.
If the chroniclers are to be credited, Marc Antony owed his detection to
his fastidiousness as to the sort of wine that was placed before him.
While in concealment, his daily supply was procured from a neighbouring
tavern, by a messenger who was in the habit of tasting several bottles
before he was satisfied. This excited the curiosity of the landlord, who
became anxious to know the name of his very particular customer. The
messenger, on one occasion, had taken so much of the wine in, that he
let the truth out, when the wine-merchant treacherously proceeded to
betray the hiding-place of Marc Antony. Soldiers were sent to his
lodgings; but he grew so eloquent over his generous wine, that he
excited among the guards a generous spirit. His life would probably have
been spared, had not the tribune Annius rushed up-stairs, and himself
struck off the head of the unhappy Antony.