Anthony Everitt - The Rise of Rome

For the second time, the Senate passed the Final Decree. The tribune and his friends occupied the Capitol. Abandoning them to their fate, Marius put together an armed force and cut off their water supply. This was a turning point in the history of Rome, for soldiers in uniforms and carrying weapons were strictly forbidden within the city boundary; also, the ease and speed with which the consul found and deployed these men strongly suggests a personal loyalty to him rather than to the state.

The parched revolutionaries soon surrendered. Promised their lives would be spared, they were locked up, as a temporary expedient, in the Senate House at the foot of the Capitol. But a furious lynch mob climbed onto the roof, stripped off the roof tiles, and threw them down onto the rebels until most of them were dead.

That was the end of the affair. Marius completed his term as consul, but his lack of political skill and principle were embarrassingly obvious, and thereafter he was frozen out of public life. As Plutarch put it: “He lacked the abilities others had of making themselves agreeable socially and useful politically. So he was left on the side like military equipment in peace-time.” He traveled to the East, apparently on private business, and disappeared from view.

Ancient historians have not been kind to Saturninus, and we cannot now judge his value as a statesman. He may have been no more than an upper-class monster with a chip on his shoulder, or a worthy successor of the Gracchi, or a bit of both. But one truth stands out: where the old Republic used to solve problems through discussion, now the optimates and the populares had acquired an addiction to violence that they were unable to shake off.

IF THE ENTENTE in the Forum was dissolving, so, too, were relations between Rome and its allies throughout Italy. For years there had been talk of offering them full Roman citizenship, but proposals had always lapsed. The urban masses who voted at assemblies in Rome would not allow any measure that benefited others than themselves.

In 91, a bright young optimate, Marcus Livius Drusus, was elected tribune. He was hardworking but self-important. From his boyhood, he refused to take holidays. When he was building a house on the fashionable Palatine Hill, his architect thought of a way of designing it that would prevent it from being overlooked. “No,” replied Drusus. “Build it so that my fellow citizens are able to see everything I do.” The tribune had a solution to every political conundrum, and a talent for putting backs up—in the Senate and among the People and the equites . He correctly judged that the Italian allies should be given what they wished, and proposed that they should be enfranchised. But the opposition was too strong. Drusus was suspected of conspiring with allied leaders, some of whom he was known to have entertained in his house—no doubt because of its openness to observers. It was there, too, that he paid for his plans with his life. One evening, after conducting business in a portico, he dismissed the crowd. Then, suddenly, he shouted that he had been stabbed, and fell to the ground with the words on his lips. He had been fatally wounded in the groin. A leather worker’s knife was found, but not the assassin.

The allies laid secret plans for an uprising but awaited the outcome of Drusus’s attempts at reform. With his death, they abandoned negotiation for armed force. Their war aim was, to put it mildly, unusual: most of them sought not to overthrow the Republic but to join it. They intended to force the Romans to be their friends and equals, and to give them the vote. There was one exception, a community that had harbored hatred for their conquerors through long, bitter centuries of servitude. These were the Samnites. They had never accepted the verdict of defeat after defeat after defeat two centuries earlier. Whenever the opportunity arose, they enthusiastically took up arms against their ancient enemy once again.

By mischance the allies’ plans were detected too soon, and they were obliged to launch their attack rather late in the campaigning season. However, they held the initiative and swept all before them. After all, they regularly supplied more than half of Rome’s ever-victorious armies and knew all there was to know about their methods. The legions were fighting against old comrades.

Rome had the winter to gather its forces, and by spring of 90 put fourteen legions into the field. Every Roman of good family was called up. (Even the unmilitary young Cicero served as an officer.) There were two theaters of war—north-central Italy and Samnium. In both of them, the Italians scored a catalog of victories culminating in the defeat and death of a consul. Marius was recalled and held off the onslaught in the north (he soon retired, ostensibly on grounds of ill health, but perhaps because, as a man of Arpinum, he was not altogether trusted). Although much of the peninsula was in flames, the Latin and Roman fortress coloniae remained true.

As one disastrous month followed another, the revolt spread southward, and toward the end of the year the Etruscans and Umbrians in the north demanded the franchise. The Senate made a historic decision. The only way Rome could win the war was by conceding the main point at issue. A law was passed granting full Roman citizenship to any Latin or Italian communities that either had not revolted or had laid down their arms.

The war carried on for another two years, but this timely concession, later extended to everybody, threw a blanket over the flames. Sulla was successfully active in the south. The legions began to win victories, and even the Samnites lost heart. Gradually, the fighting petered out.

It had been a terrible convulsion. Many thousands of lives had been lost, and it was said that the devastation of the countryside exceeded that wreaked by Pyrrhus and Hannibal. In the long run, there were both positive and negative consequences. Every man south of the Po became a Roman citizen, and there was a growing sense of Italy as a single nation. Local identities continued to flourish, but within a larger commonwealth that the civitas Romana brought into being and guaranteed.

However, Italian enfranchisement weakened a constitution that had been designed for a city-state where most citizens were within a day or two’s traveling distance of Rome, and so were able to cast their democratic vote. In future, the interests of those attending Assembly meetings in Rome were not necessarily the same as those of the new larger, far-flung citizenship.

A FLAMBOYANT NEW actor now strode onto the stage—Mithridates, the king of Pontus, a remote realm on the southern littoral of the Black Sea. For the ordinary Roman, this was near the edge of the known world, but it had formed part of Alexander’s empire and had been duly Hellenized. The official language was Greek, and city-states in the Greek manner lined the coast. In the interior, mountains stood guard over a large, high plateau where Persian aristocrats presided over a native peasantry.

The royal house claimed descent from Darius, the luckless King of Kings whom the Macedonian conqueror overthrew in the fourth century. The character of Mithridates’ home life can be gauged by a glance at his family tree. His father was murdered, and his mother died in prison. Five siblings (from a total brood of seven) met untimely ends, all of them at the hands of their brother Mithridates, who was also responsible for the deaths of two of his own sons. None of this was particularly unusual in Hellenistic monarchies, where a ruler’s greatest enemies were usually his closest relatives.

Mithridates was born in about 120, the elder of two boys. When he was eleven, his father was poisoned at a banquet. The beneficiary, and perhaps the assassin, was his wife, a daughter of Antiochus the Great, who took over the reins of power during her sons’ minority. She seems to have preferred her youngest child, Chrestus, to Mithridates, or (just as likely) had no intention of letting either of them reach adulthood and claim the crown back from her.