Late autumn 89 BC. Election time. Sulla left his army and headed north to Rome. He arrived there with a reputation brightly burnished by his recent exploits. First, he had forced the capitulation of all the rebel-held cities in Campania, until only Nola, bristling with her strengthened defences, had continued to hold out. Ignoring the threat that this presented to his rear, Sulla had next launched a dagger-thrust at the very heart of the rebel hinterland. Invading Samnium, he had gained a belated revenge for the Caudine Forks by ambushing a Samnite army in a mountain pass and then, having routed them, marched on the rebel capital, storming it in a brutal three-hour assault. Although Nola remained defiant, along with a few other isolated pockets of resistance, Sulla had effectively finished off the rebellion for good.
Such an achievement spoke for itself. This was just as well because that year, in the elections, there was particularly stiff competition. Supreme honour as the consulship was, it had begun to dawn on everyone that in 88 it might serve as the ticket to an even juicier prize. This, of course, was command of the war against Mithridates, a post that promised not only honour but fabulous profit as well – to say nothing of the pleasure of leaving Marius an also-ran. No wonder that Sulla wanted it so desperately – and increasingly what Sulla wanted Sulla tended to get. First, his aura as the conqueror of Samnium swept him into office. Then, a few weeks later, there was an even sweeter fulfilment: he was confirmed in the command against Mithridates. For Sulla triumph; and for Marius humiliation.
The public had little sympathy for their former favourite. Roman society was full of cruel double standards. The same moralists who warned old men that ‘there was nothing of which they should more beware than the temptations of idleness and inactivity’1would also mock them savagely should they refuse to age gracefully. When the new consul, keen to finish off the war in Italy before heading east, hurried back to the siege of the still-defiant Nola, Marius was advised to leave for Campania too. After all, as the satirists pointed out, it would be perfectly safe for him to settle in his villa now – thanks to Sulla. Instead of making himself look ridiculous in Rome, why did Marius not just bow to the inevitable, retire to the Bay of Naples and gorge himself silly on oysters?
Marius replied to this question by starting on a very public workout. Every day there he was on the training ground, pushing himself to the limit, running, riding, practising with javelin and sword. It did not take long for crowds to start gathering, to gawp and cheer. At the same time Marius also began looking around for political support. What he really needed, of course, was a man who could propose a law to the people, transferring Sulla’s command against Mithridates to himself. That, effectively, meant that he needed a tribune.
He found one in the person of Publius Sulpicius Rufus, a man blackened by subsequent propaganda as ‘cruel, reckless, avaricious, shameless, and lacking in any scruples whatsoever’2 – a rich description, considering that it most likely originated with Sulla. Whatever else he may have been, Sulpicius was not a man lacking in principle. Causes mattered to him, even to the point of destruction. Nowhere had this campaigning zeal been shown to better effect than in his lifelong advocacy of Italian rights, which still, even with the granting of full citizenship, required vigorous defence. Afraid that conservatives in the Senate were plotting to water down the enfranchisement, Sulpicius had drawn up legislation to ensure that it would be done fairly, canvassed the consuls, then presented his bill to the people. To his fury, however, both Sulla and his colleague in the consulship, Pompeius Rufus, having made what Sulpicius regarded as a commitment to support him, had opted instead to oppose the bill and ensure its defeat. Sulpicius was left nursing a bitter sense of betrayal. Previously, he had regarded Rufus as an intimate friend; now, vowing revenge, he scouted around for a fresh alliance. It was at this very moment that Marius came calling. The general and the tribune speedily reached a discreet compact. Marius agreed to support Sulpicius’ legislation, while in return Sulpicius promised to propose the transfer of Sulla’s command to Marius. With his hand thus strengthened, Sulpicius proceeded to reintroduce his bill. Simultaneously, his supporters took to the streets and rioting swept through the city.
News of the unrest was brought to Sulla at his camp outside Nola. Alarmed, he sped back to Rome. On his arrival he held a secret council with Pompeius Rufus, but Sulpicius, catching wind of it, led a band of his heavies to break up the meeting. In the resulting confrontation Rufus’ son was murdered, Rufus himself barely escaped with his life, and Sulla, mortifyingly, had to take refuge from the mob in Marius’ house. Worse humiliations were to follow. Consul though he was, Sulla now found himself powerless to resist Sulpicius’ demands, for it was the tribune’s mobs, not the fasces, who ruled Rome. Forced to agree that the pro-Italian legislation be passed and that Rufus, as payback for his treachery, be stripped of his consulship, Sulla himself appears to have been offered nothing more in exchange than the chance to continue in office and to return to the siege of Nola. At this stage there was no mention of the Mithridatic command. Sulla had no reason to doubt that his commission, at least, remained sacrosanct. All the same, returning to his camp, where the trappings of his office would have remained on magnificent and awful display, he cannot have helped but reflect bitterly upon the gap that had opened with such alarming speed between the show and the substance of his power. Such had been the damage to his prestige that only a triumphant Eastern war would ever repair it. Otherwise, far from covering him in glory, his consulship threatened to terminate his career.
For Sulla, then, as for Marius, the stakes had grown perilously high – except that Sulla, unlike Marius, was yet to realise just how high they still had to go. Then, with the dust of Rome upon him, another messenger came galloping down the road that led to Nola. Arriving among the siege works, he was brought before the consul. The messenger proved to be one of Marius’ staff officers, and Sulla had only to see him to know that the news was likely to be bad. Even so, just how bad still came as a shock. There had been a plebiscite, Sulla was informed. Proposed by Sulpicius, it had been ratified by the Roman people and passed into law. By its terms, Sulla was demoted from the command against Mithridates. His replacement – inevitably – was Marius. The staff officer had come to take command of the army. Sulpicius had paid off his debt.
Sulla, first in consternation and then in mounting fury, retired to his tent. There he did some quick calculations. With him at Nola he had six legions. Five of these had been assigned to the war against Mithridates and one to the continued prosecution of the siege – in all, around thirty thousand men. Although much reduced from the numbers Sulla had commanded the previous summer, they nevertheless represented a menacing concentration of fighting power. Only the legions of Pompeius Strabo, busy mopping up rebels on the other side of Italy, could hope to rival them. Marius, back in Rome, had no legions whatsoever.
The maths was simple. Why, then, had Marius failed to work it out, and how could so hardened an operator have chosen to drive his great rival into a corner where there were six battle-hardened legions ready to hand? Clearly, the prospect that Sulla might come out of it fighting had never even crossed Marius’ mind. It was impossible, unthinkable. After all, a Roman army was not the private militia of the general who commanded it, but the embodiment of the Republic at war. Its loyalty was owed to whomever was appointed to its command by the due processes of the constitution. This was how it had always been, for as long as the Republic’s citizens had been going to war – and Marius had no reason to imagine that things might possibly have changed.
But Sulla did have reason: his hatred of his rival, his fury at the frustration of his ambitions and his utter belief in the justice of his case all helped him to contemplate a uniquely audacious and dreadful possibility. No citizen had ever led legions against their own city. To be the first to take such a step, and to outrage such a tradition, should have been a responsibility almost beyond a Roman’s enduring. Yet it seems that Sulla, far from havering, betrayed not the slightest hesitation. All his most successful operations, he would later claim, had been the result not of a measured weighing of the odds but of a sudden flash of inspiration. Such flashes, it appeared to Sulla, were divinely sent. Baleful cynic though he was, he was also an unusually religious man. He believed with perfect certainty that a goddess was prompting him; a great goddess, more powerful than any of the gods who might be affronted by his actions. Whatever he did, however high he reached, Sulla could be confident of the protection of Venus, who granted to her favourites both sex appeal and fortune.
How else, after all, to explain his extraordinary rise? As a man who set great store by loyalty, he had never forgotten that he owed everything to the two women who had left him their fortunes. Did this influence how he saw his relationship with Venus herself ? Did he see the goddess as another woman to be seduced and worshipped, in return for all she could provide? Certainly, throughout his life, Sulla deployed his charm as a weapon, on politicians and soldiers as much as on whores. In particular, he was adept at winning the rank-and-file legionaries to his side. He could speak their language and enjoy their jokes, and he soon developed a reputation as an officer prepared to do his men a favour. When combined with his parallel reputation for extraordinary good luck, fostered over the years by a succession of military victories and daring personal escapades, Sulla’s popularity with his troops was hardly a surprise.
Yet, to many, there remained something sinister about his charm. It could be read in his physiognomy. For, handsome as Sulla was, he had a violent, purple complexion, and all over his face, whenever he grew angry, mysterious white spots would appear. Medical opinion explained this disfigurement as the consequence of sexual perversion, a diagnosis that was also reckoned to confirm the persistent story that Sulla lacked a testicle. The seamy nature of such rumours had always dogged him. When Sulla had been appointed to his first campaign, Marius, as his commander, had expressed disgust at his new officer’s frivolous reputation. Much later, when Sulla had more than proved his military worth, and was boasting to a nobleman of lesser achievement but greater pedigree, the nobleman would only comment that there was something not quite right about a man who had come into such wealth after being left nothing by his father. Such disquiet about Sulla’s triumphs was expressed too consistently for it to be dismissed as snobbery and jealousy alone. His great victories against the Samnites, for instance, had required him to appropriate legions from their legitimate commanders, and even, on one notorious occasion, to wink at murder. In the early months of 89 BC, during the siege of Pompeii, a particularly obdurate defence had led the Roman troops to suspect their commander of treachery and lynch him. When Sulla arrived to take control of the siege from the murdered officer, he conspicuously failed to punish the mutineers, and was even rumoured to have instigated the crime himself. It says much about the ambiguous character of his reputation that such a story could not only be believed, but apparently boost his popularity with his men.
Certainly, having clubbed one officer to death, it appears that Sulla’s troops had developed a taste for dispatching uppity legates. When Sulla summoned them to a meeting on the parade ground and broke the news that he had received from Rome, they immediately turned on Marius’ envoy and stoned him to death. Unprompted, they then clamoured for Sulla to lead them on the capital, a demand to which Sulla delightedly acceded. His officers were so appalled by this plan that all except one resigned, but Sulla, knowing that he had already set himself beyond the pale, could no longer turn back. Leaving behind a single legion to continue the siege of Nola, he marched northwards. The news of his approach was greeted in Rome with disbelief. Some, such as Pompeius Rufus, the deposed consul, welcomed the news and hurried off to join him, but most felt only consternation and despair. Frantic embassies were sent in an attempt to shame Sulla into turning back, but to every appeal he would only answer blithely that he was marching on Rome ‘to free her from her tyrants’.3 Marius and Sulpicius, all too aware who were the objects of this menacing aim, desperately sought to buy time. As Sulla approached the outskirts of Rome they sent one final deputation, promising that the Senate would be assembled to discuss his grievances, and that they too would attend its meeting and be bound by its decisions. All they asked in return was that Sulla stay camped five miles from the sacred boundary of Rome herself.
Everyone knew that to traverse this would be a gesture of awesome and terrible significance. Rome was numinous with the presence of gods, but there were few spaces more holy than the pomerium, the ancient boundary that marked the furrow ploughed by Romulus, and had not been altered since the time of the kings. To cross it was absolutely forbidden to any citizen in arms: within the pomerium was the realm of Jupiter, the city’s guardian, and the guarantor of her peace. He was a god it was perilous to anger, so when Sulla told Marius’ envoys that he would accept their terms they may even have believed him. But Sulla had been dissembling: no sooner had Marius’ envoys set off back for Rome than he ordered his legions to follow, advancing in separate divisions to seize three of the city gates. Mighty though Jupiter was, Sulla continued to rely upon the blessings of Venus, the goddess of fortune, and a divinity – he trusted – just as great.
As the legionaries passed over the pomerium and began pushing through the narrow streets, their fellow citizens greeted them with a hail of tiles flung down from the rooftops. Such was the ferocity of this assault that for a moment the soldiers quailed, until Sulla ordered that fire-arrows be shot at the roofs. As flames began to crackle and spread down the line of the city’s highways Sulla himself rode along the greatest of them all, the via Sacra, into the very heart of Rome. Marius and Sulpicius, after a futile attempt to raise the city’s slaves, had already fled. Everywhere, mail-clad guards took up their new posts. Swords and armour were worn outside the Senate House. The unthinkable had happened. A general had made himself the master of Rome.
It was a moment pregnant with menace. Later generations, with the benefit of hindsight, would see in it the great turning point of which the augurs had warned: the passing of an old age, the dawning of a new. Certainly, with the march on Rome of a Roman army, a watershed had been reached. Something like innocence had gone. Competition for honours had always been the lifeblood of the Republic, but now something deadly had been introduced into it, nor could its presence there, a lurking toxin, easily be forgotten. Defeat in elections, or in a lawsuit, or in a debate in the Senate – these had previously been the worst that a citizen might have had to dread. But Sulla, in his pursuit of Marius, was pushing rivalry and personal hatred to new extremes. From that moment on, the memory of it would haunt every ambitious citizen – both as a temptation and as a fear.
And naturally, having taken his fateful step, Sulla was desperate to force his advantage home. Summoning the Senate, he demanded that his opponents be branded enemies of the state. The Senate, with one nervous eye on Sulla’s guards, hurriedly obeyed. Sentences of outlawry were duly pronounced on Marius, Sulpicius and ten others, including Marius’ young son. Sulpicius, having been betrayed by a slave, was hunted down and murdered, but the other condemned men all escaped. Marius himself, after a series of hair-raising adventures that saw him hiding in reed beds and outfacing contract killers, eventually reached the relative safety of Africa. To that extent, Sulla’s gamble had failed: the snake had been scotched, not killed. Marius had survived to fight another day. But Sulla, although he was disappointed, was not unduly alarmed. The condemnation of his great rival had been something more than just a deeply satisfying act of personal vengeance. He had also intended it to give another message: by identifying his own cause with that of the Republic, he hoped to recast his march on Rome as an action in its defence. Backed by five legions he may have been, but to Sulla legitimacy remained more important than any naked use of power. During the outlawry debate, when a venerable senator had told him to his face that a great man such as Marius should never be made a public enemy, Sulla had accepted the old man’s right to dissent without demur. Whenever he could, he would behave with a similar regard towards the sensibilities of his compatriots. Far from playing the military despot, he preferred to pose as the defender of the constitution.
Nor was this mere hypocrisy. If Sulla was a revolutionary, then it was very much in the cause of the status quo. Hostile towards any hint of innovation, he had all of Sulpicius’ legislation declared invalid. To replace it, he brought in laws of his own, aimed at bolstering the traditional supremacy of the Senate. Despite distaste for its soi-disant champion, the Senate can hardly have been averse to such measures. Yet Sulla remained caught in a dilemma. Eager to leave Italy for the Mithridatic war, but afraid of what might happen in his absence, he knew that it was vital for him to leave supporters in positions of power. Interfere too blatantly in the annual elections, however, and his claim to embody the rule of law would become laughable. As it was, he suffered the humiliation of seeing his allies failing to gain either of the consulships. True, one of the successful candidates, Gnaeus Octavius, was a natural conservative, like himself, but the second, Cornelius Cinna, had gone so far as to threaten him with prosecution. In the circumstances Sulla accepted defeat with as good a grace as he could muster. Before he would agree to the new consuls taking up their office, however, he required them to swear a public oath on the sacred hill of the Capitol that they would never overturn his legislation. Octavius and Cinna, evidently unwilling to push their luck, agreed. As he took the oath Cinna picked up a stone and hurled it, publicly praying that if he failed to keep his word to Sulla he might similarly be hurled out of Rome.
And with that Sulla had to be satisfied. Before he crossed from Italy to Greece, however, he took one final measure. Wishing to reward a faithful ally at the same time as ensuring his own security, he arranged for the command of Strabo’s legions to be transferred to Pompeius Rufus, his colleague in the consulship of 88 BC. In fact, far from ensuring his friend’s safety, such a measure served only to demonstrate how blind Sulla had been to the implications of his troops’ willingness to march with him on Rome. Just as Marius’ legate had done, Rufus arrived at his new army’s camp armed with a bill and nothing more. Strabo welcomed the man come to take his place with a menacing politeness. He presented Rufus to the troops, then absented himself from the camp – on business, he claimed. The next day Rufus celebrated his new command by performing a sacrifice. A gang of soldiers clustered round him where he stood by the altar, and as he raised the sacrificial knife they seized him and struck him down, ‘as though he were the sacrificial offering himself’.4 Strabo, claiming to be outraged, hurried back to the camp but took no action against his murderous troops. Inevitably, the rumours that had dogged Sulla in similar circumstances now attached themselves to Strabo. There were few who doubted that he had ordered the murder of his replacement himself.
A consul butchered by his own soldiers: Rufus’ fate might seem to confirm the doom-laden judgement of a later generation, that after Sulla’s coup ‘there was nothing left which could shame warlords into holding back on military violence – not the law, not the institutions of the Republic, nor even the love of Rome’.5 In fact, it illustrated the opposite. Far from following up Rufus’ murder by launching a coup of his own, Strabo held back from committing himself to any course of action at all. Aware that with Sulla gonefrom Italy he now held the balance of power, he spent the year 87 veering from faction to faction, offering his support to the highest bidder, all the while making ever more extravagant demands. Such avarice and trimming served only to compound his already massive unpopularity. Then, towards the end of the year, nemesis struck. Following his spectacular death, when the tent in which he lay dying of plague was struck by lightning, crowds mobbed his funeral procession and dragged the corpse from its bier through the mud. Without the intervention of a tribune, it would have been torn to shreds. In a society where prestige was the principal measure of a man’s worth Strabo’s posthumous fate was a grisly warning to anyone tempted to gamble with the interests of the state. Yet not even Strabo, grasping as he was and armed with opportunity, had thought to aim for military dictatorship. Sulla’s coup had been an outrage but not, it seemed, a fatal one. The laws, the institutions of the Republic and the love of Rome still held good.
As was only natural. The Republic, in the eyes of its citizens, was something much more than a mere constitution, a political order to be toppled or repealed. Instead, hallowed by that most sacred of Roman concepts, tradition, it provided a complete pattern of existence for all those who shared in it. To be a citizen was to know that one was free – ‘and that the Roman people should ever not be free is contrary to all the laws of heaven’.* Such certainty suffused every citizen’s sense of himself. Far from expiring with Sulla’s march on Rome, respect for the Republic’s laws and institutions endured because they were expressions of the Romans’ profoundest sense of their own identity. Yes, a general had turned on his own city, but even he had claimed to be doing so in defence of the traditional order. There had certainly been no revolution. For all the trauma of Sulla’s march on Rome, no one could imagine that the Republic itself might be overthrown, because no one could conceive what might possibly replace it.
So it was that, even after the shocks of 88, life went on. The new year of 87 dawned with an appearance of normality. Two consuls, elected by the Roman people, sat in their chairs of state. The Senate met to advise them. The streets were empty of soldiers. Meanwhile, the man who had dared to march on Rome was disembarking in Greece. His ferocious talents, no longer turned against his own countrymen, could at last be deployed in a fitting manner. There was a war, sternest of all the Romans’ traditions, to be won; enemies of the Republic to overthrow and chastise.
Sulla was marching east.