Rome for sale

The alleged corruption, incompetence and snobbish exclusivity of leading senators were important topics in wide political debates throughout the last century of the Republic. These were the central theme of Sallust’s essay The War against Jugurtha, a devastating analysis of Rome’s long failure to deal with the North African ruler who from about 118 BCE – by a combination of dynastic murder, intrigue and indiscriminate massacre – had begun to extend his control along the Mediterranean coast of Africa. The essay is a virulently partisan account, written some seventy years after the war, hugely moralising, highly dramatised and, in modern terms, a partly fictionalised reconstruction. It is a loaded assault on senatorial privilege, venality and disdain from the pen of a ‘new man’ in the senate.

Roman territory in North Africa in the late second century BCE was divided between the province of Africa (the area around the site of Carthage, directly administered in the new style by a Roman governor) and other regions that were still part of the old-style empire of obedience, including the nearby kingdom of Numidia. After one compliant Numidian king died in 118 BCE, there was a long power struggle between his nephew Jugurtha and a rival heir, which ended in 112 BCE with Jugurtha killing the rival, along with a large number of Roman and Italian traders who had the misfortune to be in the same town at the same time; they have usually been assumed to be entirely innocent victims, though Sallust’s account hints that they may have been acting more like an armed militia. It was a lesson in the instability of that old style of control, which was always vulnerable to disobedience from those assumed to be obedient and to the inside knowledge that allies acquired through long contact with Rome. In Jugurtha’s case, previous service with the army of Scipio Aemilianus in Spain, as the commander of an allied detachment of Numidian archers, gave him useful experience of Roman military tactics and useful connections on the Roman side.

For years, Roman responses to Jugurtha’s activities ranged from cautious to ineffectual. The senate sent various deputations to Africa and tried in a rather desultory way to broker a deal between him and his rival. It was only after the massacre of the traders that Rome declared war, in 111BCE, and dispatched an army, whose commander quickly stitched up a peace deal. Jugurtha was summoned to Rome but was promptly sent back home when it came to light that he had engineered the murder of a cousin in Italy for fear that he too might become a rival. Roman armies once again pursued him in Africa, with mixed success. By 107 BCE Jugurtha had been somewhat contained but was still on the loose.

This lamentable record in North Africa raised big questions. Was the senate capable of running the empire and of protecting Rome’s interests overseas? If not, what kind of talent was required, and where could it be found? For several Roman observers, senatorial weakness for bribery was one major factor lying behind their failure: ‘Rome’s a city for sale and bound to fall as soon as it finds a buyer’, as Jugurtha was supposed to have quipped when he left the city. The general incompetence of the governing class was another. For Sallust, that incompetence was a consequence of their narrow elitism and their refusal to recognise talent outside their own small group. The exclusion of the plebeians from political office had long ago been broken down, but two hundred years later – so this argument went – the new mixed aristocracy of patricians and plebeians had become in practice almost as exclusive. The same families monopolised the highest offices and the most prestigious commands, for generation after generation, and were not keen to let competent ‘new men’ in. The senate was dominated by the ancient equivalent of the old boy network.

Sallust’s essay highlights the story of Gaius Marius, a ‘new man’ and experienced soldier who served in Africa in the war against Jugurtha as the second in command to one of those aristocrats, Quintus Caecilius Metellus. When Marius, who had reached the office of praetor, decided in 108 BCE to go back to Rome to stand for election to the consulship, with his eye on a big military command, he asked Metellus for support. Metellus’ response, at least as Sallust scripted it, was a classic example of patronising snobbery. To become a praetor was quite good enough for a man of Marius’ background, he sneered; let him not think of overreaching himself. Sallust sums it up even more sharply in his War against Catiline: ‘Most of the aristocracy believed that the consulship had been almost polluted if some “new man” obtained it, however excellent he might be.’ Marius was angry but not put off. He returned to the city to stand for the consulship. Once he had been elected, to the post he would hold for an unprecedented seven times, a vote in the popular assembly transferred the command against Jugurtha to him.

Sallust’s account cannot be taken entirely at face value. Jugurtha may have been adept at slipping money into senatorial purses – it was a conviction in the Roman courts for accepting bribes on a delegation to Africa that finally forced Gaius Gracchus’ murderer, Opimius, to retreat into exile. But Romans had a tendency to use bribery as a convenient excuse whenever war, elections or court verdicts did not go the way they hoped. Outright corruption of that kind was probably less common than they alleged. And, whatever the snobbery at the heart of the governing class, there was in practice more room for new, or newish, talent than Sallust’s angry assertions allow. Surviving lists of names, which by this period are largely accurate, suggest that about 20 per cent of consuls in the late second century BCE came from families whose extended network of relations had not produced a consul in the previous fifty years, if ever.

Marius’ career had an enormous impact on the rest of Republican history, in ways he can hardly have planned. First, when he returned to Africa to take command against Jugurtha, he enrolled in his army any citizen who was prepared to volunteer. Up to then, except in emergencies, Roman soldiers had officially been recruited only from families with some property. On that basis, recruitment problems had been evident for some time and may have lain behind Tiberius Gracchus’ anxieties about the landless poor; for, if they had no land, they could not serve in the legions.

By enrolling all comers, Marius cut through that, but in the process he created a dependent, quasi-professional Roman army, which destabilised domestic politics for eighty years or so. These new-style legions increasingly relied on their commanders not only for a share of the booty but also for a settlement package, preferably of land, at the end of their military service, which would give them some guarantee of making a living in the future. The effects of this were felt in many ways. The conflicts in the small town of Pompeii after Sulla foisted his veterans on the place in 80BCE were only one of many cases of local clashes, exploitation and resentment. Where the land for these soldiers was to come from, and at whose expense, became a perennial problem. But it was the relationship created between individual generals and their troops that had the most drastic consequences. In essence, the soldiers exchanged absolute loyalty to their commander for the promise of a retirement package – in a trade-off that at best bypassed the interests of the state and at worst turned the legions into a new style of private militia focused entirely on the interests of their general. When the soldiers of Sulla, and later of Julius Caesar, followed their leader and invaded the city of Rome, it was partly because of the relationship between legions and commanders forged by Marius.

Equally significant for the future was the role of the people in granting Marius his military commands. It was a vote of the assembly, proposed by a tribune and overturning the nomination of the senate, that put Marius in charge of the war against Jugurtha. This procedure had been used in one or two emergencies before. But in 108 BCE it came as a powerful assertion of the right of the people as a whole, rather than the senate, to decide who was to command Rome’s armies. No sooner had Marius secured Roman victory in Africa and returned to Rome with Jugurtha in chains than another general was sacked by popular vote, after suffering a terrible defeat at the hands of German invaders from across the Alps. In an atmosphere of panic, which included a rare repetition of state-sponsored human sacrifice in Rome, his command too was assigned to Marius – who proceeded to justify the people’s hopes and send the invaders packing.

Marius came to a sad end. He was already almost seventy years old when a tribune tried to use a vote of the popular assembly to transfer one last military command to him; this time it was without success. For this was 88 BCE, the command was against King Mithradates, and the rival commander was Sulla, who marched on Rome to prevent any such transfer (see pp. 241–2). While Sulla was away in the East, Marius died, a few weeks into his seventh consulship, to which he had been elected as an ‘anti-Sullan’ candidate. Some claimed that in his deathbed hallucinations, he acted as if he had won the command against Mithradates and issued instructions to his carers as if they were soldiers going to battle. It was a pitiful story of a deluded old man, but the principle of popular control of appointments abroad that he had championed was often reasserted over the following decades. Assemblies of the people repeatedly voted vast resources to those they were persuaded could best undertake the defence, or expansion, of Rome’s empire. In effect, they voted autocrats into power, as the case of Pompey shows: Pompey the Great, as he called himself, but the Butcher to others.