A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate

by A. H. J. Greenidge

The period which witnessed the crowning of the efforts of the poor and struggling patrician was also sufficiently liberal, or sufficiently poor in aristocratic talent, to admit the initial steps in the official career of a genuine son of the people. It was now that Caius Marius was laboriously climbing the grades of curule rank, and showing in the pursuit of political influence at home the rugged determination which had already distinguished him in the field. A Volscian by descent, he belonged to Rome through the accident of birth in the old municipality of Arpinum, which since the early part of the second century had enjoyed full Roman citizenship and therefore gave its citizens the right of suffrage and of honours in the capital. Born of good yeoman stock in the village of Cereatae in the Arpinate territory,[799] he had passed a boyhood which derived no polish from the refinements, and no taint from the corruptions, of city life. In his case there was no puzzling discrepancy between the outer and the inner man. His frame and visage were the true index of a mind, somewhat unhewn and uncouth, but with a massive reserve of strength, a persistence not blindly obstinate, a patience that could wear out the most brilliant efforts of his rivals and opponents. He did not court hostility, but simply shouldered his way sturdily to the front, encouraged by Rome's better spirits, who saw in him the excellent officer with qualities that might make the future general, and appealing to the people, when they gradually became familiar with his presence, as a type of that venerable myth, the rustic statesman of the past. The poverty of his early lot was perhaps exaggerated by historians[800] who wished to point the contrast between his humble origin and his later glory, and to find a suitable cradle for his rugged nature; even the initial stages of his career afford no evidence of a struggle against pressing want, nor is there any proof that he was supported by the bounty of his powerful friends. Even if he entered the army as a common foot-soldier, he would merely have shared the lot of many a well-to-do yeoman who obeyed the call of the conscription. With Marius, however, military service was not to be an incident, but a profession. The needs of a widening empire were calling for special capacities such as had never been demanded in the past. The career of Scaurus had shown the successful pleader surmounting the obstacle of poverty; even the higher barrier of birth might be leaped amidst the democratising influences of the camp. The nobility was not sufficiently self-centred to be wholly blind to its own interests; and it was easier to patronise a soldier than a pleader. In the latter case the aspirant's political creed must be examined; in the former the last question that would be asked was whether the officer possessed any political creed at all. It might be a question of importance for the future with respect to the candidature for those offices which alone conferred high military command, even though there was as yet no dream of the sword becoming the arbiter of political life; but the genuine commander, engaged in the difficult task of remodelling an army, had no eye but for the bearing and qualities of the soldier, and would not scruple to cast aside his patrician prejudices in a despairing effort to find the fittest instruments for the perfecting of his great design. It was Marius's fortunate lot to enter the field at a time of trial, and to serve his first campaign under a general, who was combating the adverse forces of influence, licence and incompetence in the official staff supplied by the government and represented by the young scions of the nobility. To the camp before Numantia, where Scipio was scourging his men into obedience, rooting out the amenities of life, and astonishing his officers with new ideas of the meaning of a campaign, Marius brought the very qualities on which the general had set his heart. An unflinching courage, shown on one occasion in single combat when he overthrew a champion of the foe, a power of physical endurance which could submit to all changes of temperature and food, a minute precision in the performance of the detailed duties of the camp, soon led to his rapid advancement and to his selection as a member of the intimate circle which surrounded the commander-in-chief. Every great specialist has a small claim to the gift of prophecy; for he possesses an instinct which reveals more than his reason will permit him to prove; and we need not wonder at the story that, when once the debate grew warm round Scipio's table as to who would succeed him as the chosen commander of the Roman host, he lightly touched the shoulder of Marius and answered "Perhaps we shall find him here".[801]

The higher commands in the army could be sought only through a political career; and Marius, inspired with the highest hopes by Scipio's commendation, was forced to breathe the uncongenial atmosphere of the city and to fight his way upwards to the curule offices. There is no proof that he took advantage of the current of democratic feeling which accompanied the movements of the Gracchi. It was, perhaps, as well that he did not; for such an association might have long delayed his higher political career. The nobles who posed as democrats probably attached more importance to forensic skill than to military merit; and the support which Marius enjoyed was sought and found amongst the representatives of the opposite party. Scipio's death removed a man who might have been a powerful advocate on his behalf; the vague relationship of clientship in which the family of Marius had stood to the clan of the Herennii[802]—a relation common between Roman families and the members of Italian townships, and in this case probably dating from a time before Arpinum had received full Roman rights—seems never to have led to active interference on his behalf on the part of the representatives of that ancient Samnite house. Perhaps the Herennii were too weak to assist the fortunes of their client; they certainly give no names to the Fasti of this period. It is also possible that the proud soldier was galled by the memory of the hereditary yoke, and sought assistance where it would be given simply as a mark of merit, not as a duty conditioned by the claim to irksome reciprocal obligations. The all-powerful family of the Caecilii Metelli, who were at this time vigorously fulfilling the destiny of office which heaven had prescribed for their clan, stretched out a helping hand to the distinguished soldier;[803] a family born to military command might consult its interests, while it gratified its sympathies, by attaching to its clientèle a warrior who had received the best training of the school of Africanus. After he had held the military tribunate and the quaestorship,[804] Marius attained the tribunate of the Plebs with the assistance of Lucius Caecilius Metellus.[805] He was in his thirty-ninth year when he entered on the first office which gave him the opportunity of claiming the attention of the people by the initiation of legislative measures. The slowness of his rise may have led him to believe that he might accelerate his career by taking his fortune into his own hands; certainly if the law which bore his name was not unwelcome to the better portion of the nobility, the methods by which he forced it through did not commend themselves even to his patron. His proposal was meant to limit the exercise of undue influence at the Comitia, and although the law doubtless referred to legislative meetings summoned for every purpose, it was chiefly directed to securing the independence of the voter in such public trials as still took place before the people,[806] and was perhaps inspired by scenes that might have been witnessed at the acquittal of Opimius one year previously. One of the clauses of the bill provided that the exits to the galleries, through which the voters filed to give their suffrages to the tellers, should be narrowed,[807] the object being to exclude the political agents who were accustomed to occupy the sides of the passages, and influence or intimidate, by their presence if not by their words, the voting citizen at the critical moment when he was about to record his verdict. Such methods were probably found effective even where the ballot was used, but their success must have been even greater in trials for treason, at which voting by word of mouth was still employed. It was difficult for a government, which had accepted the ballot, to offer a decent resistance to a measure of this kind. The proposal attacked indifferently political methods which might be, and probably were, employed by both parties; and, although its success would no doubt inflict more injury on the government than on the opposition, it could not be repudiated by the senate on the ground that it was tainted by an aggressively "popular" character. The opposition which it actually encountered was apparently based on the formal ground that the heads of the administration had not been sufficiently consulted. The law was not the outcome of any senatorial decree, nor had the senate's opinion been deliberately taken on the utility of the measure. The consul Cotta persuaded the house to frame a resolution expressing dissatisfaction with the proposal as it stood, and to summon Marius for an explanation. The summons was promptly obeyed, but the expected scene of humiliation of the untried parvenu was rudely interrupted at an early period of the debate. Marius knew that he had the people and the tribunician college with him, and that even the most perverse ingenuity could never construe the measure as a factious opposition to the interests of the State. Obedience to the senate would in this instance mean the sacrifice of a reputation for political honesty and courage; it might be better to burn his boats and to trust for the future to the generosity of the people for the gifts which the nobility so grudgingly bestowed. He chose to regard the controversy as one of those cases of hopeless conflict between the members of the magistracy, for the solution of which the law had provided regular though exceptional means. He fell back on the majesty of the tribunician power, and threatened Cotta with imprisonment if he did not withdraw his resolution.[808] It is probable that up to this point no decree expressing wholesale condemnation of the bill had been passed, and the senate might therefore be coerced through the magistrate, without its authority being utterly disregarded. Cotta turned to his colleague Metellus, known to be the friend of the obstinate tribune, and Metellus rising gave the consul his support. Marius, undaunted by the attitude of his patron, hurried matters to a close. He summoned his attendant to the Curia, and bade him take Metellus himself into custody and conduct him to a place of confinement. Metellus appealed to the other tribunes, but none would offer his help; and the senate was forced to save the situation by sacrificing its vote of censure. So rapid and complete a victory, even on an issue of no great importance, delighted the popular mind. The senate was then in good favour at Rome; but a chance for realising their superiority over the greatest of their servants was always welcome to the people. They also loved those exhibitions of physical force by which the genius of Rome had solved the difficulties of her constitution: and the violence of a tribune was as impressive now as was that of a consul four years later. Marius had gained a character for sturdy independence and unshaken constancy, which was to produce unexpected results in the political world of the future, and was to be immediately tested in a manner that must have proved profoundly disappointing to many who acclaimed him. It seems as though this victory over the resolution of the senate may have urged certain would-be reformers to believe that measures of a Gracchan type might win the favour of the people, and secure the support of a tribunician college which seemed to be out of sympathy with the government. Some proposal dealing with the distribution of corn,[809] perhaps an extension of the existing scheme, was made. It found no more resolute opponent than Marius, and his opposition helped to secure its utter defeat. In this resistance we may perhaps see the genuinely neutral character of the man; for the attribution of interested motives, although the historian's favourite revenge for the difficulties of his task, endows his characters with a foresight which is as abnormal as their lack of principle; although it is questionable whether Marius would have gained by identifying himself with a cause which had not yet emerged from the ruin of its failure.

The lack of official support and the alienation of a section of the people may perhaps be traced in the successive defeats of his candidature for the curule and plebeian aedileships,[810] although in the elections to these offices the attention of the people was so keenly directed to the candidate's pecuniary means as a guarantee of their gratification by brilliant shows, that the aedileship must have been of all magistracies the most difficult of attainment by merit unsupported by wealth. Even when the rejected candidate had won favour on other grounds, the electors could salve their consciences with the reflection that the aedileship was no obligatory step in an official career, and that, where merit and not money was in question, they could show their appreciation of personal qualities in the elections to the praetorship. A year after his repulse Marius turned to the candidature for this office, which conveyed the first opportunity of the tenure of an independent military command. He was returned at the bottom of the poll, and even then had to fight hard to retain his place in the praetorian college.[811] A charge of undue influence was brought against the man who had struggled successfully to preserve the purity of the Comitia, and it was pretended that a slave of one of his closest political associates had been seen within the barriers mixing with the voters. That the charge was supported by powerful influences, or was generally believed to be correct, is perhaps shown by the conduct of the censors of the succeeding year who expelled this associate from the senate.[812] The jurors[813] before whom the case was tried—representatives, as we must suppose, of the equestrian order and therefore presumably uninfluenced by senatorial hostility—were long perplexed by the conflict of evidence. During the first days of the trial it seemed as though the doom of Marius was sealed, and his unexpected acquittal was only secured by the scrutiny of the tablets revealing an equality of votes, a condition which, according to the rules of Roman process, necessitated a favourable verdict.

His praetorship, in accordance with the rules which now governed this magistracy in consequence of the multiplication of the courts of justice, confined his energies to Rome. We do not know what department of this office he administered; but, as the charge of no department could make an epoch in the career of any one but a lawyer gifted with original ideas, we are not surprised to find that Marius's tenure of this magistracy, although creditable, did not excite any marked attention.[814] After his praetorship he obtained his first independent military command in Farther Spain. Such a province had always its little problems of pacification to present to an energetic commander, and Marius's military talents were moderately exercised by the repression of the habitual brigandage of its inhabitants.[815] His tenure of a foreign command may have added to his wealth, for provincial government could be made to increase the means of the most honest administrator. It was still more important that his tenure of the praetorship had added him to the ranks of the official nobility. His birth was now no bar to any social distinction to which his simple and resolute soul might think it profitable to aspire: and a family of the patrician Julii was not ashamed to give one of its daughters to the adventurer from Arpinum.[816] Thus Marius remained for a while; to Roman society an interesting specimen of the self-made man, marked by a bluntness and directness appropriate to the type and provocative of an amused regard; to the professed politician a man with a fairly successful but puzzling political career, and one that perhaps needed not to be too seriously considered. For to all who understood the existent conditions of Roman public life, his attainment of the consulship and of a dominant position in the councils of the State must have seemed impossible. There was but one contingency that could make Marius a necessary man. This was war on a grand scale. But the contingency was distant, and, even if it arose, the government might employ his skill while keeping him in a subordinate position.

The career of Marius is not the only proof that the tradition of successful opposition to the senate could be easily revived. In the year following his tribunate a new and successful effort was made in the direction of transmarine colonisation.[817] The pretext for the measure was the necessity for preserving command of the territory which had been won by the great victories of Domitius and Fabius on the farther side of the Alps; the strategic value of the foundation was undeniable, and the opposition of the government was probably directed by the form which it was proposed that the new settlement should take. It was not to be a mere fort in the enemy's country, like the already-established Aquae Sextiae,[818] but a true colonia of Roman citizens,[819] the creation of which was certain to lead to excessive complications in the foreign policy which dealt with the frontiers of the north. Such a colony would become the centre of an active trade with the surrounding tribes; though professedly founded in the people's interest, it would rapidly become a mere feeler for extending the operations of the great mercantile class; the growth of Roman trade-interests would necessarily involve a policy of defence and probably of expansion, which would tell heavily on the resources of the State. The success of the government was dependent on the restriction of its efforts, and there is nothing surprising in the hearty opposition which it offered to the projected colony of Narbo Martius. Even after the original measure sanctioning the settlement had passed the Comitia, senatorial influence led to the promulgation of a new proposal in which the people was asked to reconsider its decision.[820] But the project had found an ardent champion in the young Lucius Crassus, who strengthened the position which he had won in the previous year, by a speech weighty beyond the promise of his age.[821] In his successful advocacy of a national undertaking he was not afraid to impugn the authority of the senate, and reaped an immediate reward in being selected, despite his youth, as one of the commissioners for establishing the settlement.[822]

It is probable that without the support of the equestrian order the project for the foundation of Narbo Martius might have fallen through. The man of popular sympathies whose measures attracted their support was tolerably certain of success, and the man who posed as the champion of the order was still more firmly placed. The latter position was occupied for a considerable time by Caius Servilius Glaucia, whose tribunate probably belongs to the close of the period which we are describing.[823] Glaucia himself, probably one of those scions of the nobility whom an original bent of mind had alienated from the narrow interests of his order, was a man who, lacking in the gift of passionate but steadfast seriousness which makes the great reformer, possessed powers admirably adapted for holding the popular ear and inspiring his auditors with a kind of robust confidence in himself. Ready, acute and witty,[824] he possessed the happy faculty of taking the Comitia, under the guise of the plain and honest man, into his confidence. The very ignorance of his auditors became a respectable attribute, when it was figured as ingenuous simplicity which needed protection against the tortuous wiles of the legislator and the official draughtsman. On one occasion he told his audience that the essence of a law was its preamble. If, when read to them, it was found to contain the words "dictator, consul, praetor or magister equitum," the bill was no concern of theirs. But, if they caught the utterance "and whosoever after this enactment," then they must wake up, for some new fetter of law was being forged to bind their limbs.[825] A man of this unconventional type was not likely to be popular in the senate, and the opprobrious name, which he subsequently bore in the Curia,[826] is a proof of the liveliness which he imparted to debate.

At the time of Glaucia's tribunate some subtle movement seems to have been on foot for undoing the judiciary law of Caius Gracchus and ousting the knights from their possession of the court before which senators most frequently appeared. The law which dealt with the crime of extortion by Roman officials had been frequently renewed, and, whenever a proposal was made for recasting the enactment with a view to effecting improvements in procedure, the equestrian tenure of the court was threatened; for a new law might state qualifications for the jurors differing from those which had given this department of jurisdiction to the knights. The relief of the order was therefore great when the necessary work of revision was undertaken by one who showed himself an ardent champion of equestrian claims.[827] Glaucia's alteration in procedure was thorough and permanent. He introduced the system of the "second hearing "—an obligatory renewal of the trial, which rendered it possible for counsel to discuss evidence which had been already given, and for jurors to get a grasp of the mass of scattered data which had been presented to their notice—[828] and he also made it possible to recover damages, not only from the chief malefactor, but from all who had dishonestly shared his spoils.[829] These principles continued to be observed in trials for extortion to the close of the Republic, and may have been the only permanent relic of Glaucia's feverish political career. But for the moment the clauses of his law which dealt with the qualifications of the jurors, were those most anxiously awaited and most heartily acclaimed. He had stemmed a reaction and consolidated, beyond hope of alteration for a long term of years, the system of dual control established by Caius Gracchus.

The careers and successes of Marius, Crassus and Glaucia exhibit the spirit of unrest which broke at intervals through the apathetic tolerance displayed by the people towards the rule of the nobility. These alternations of confidence and distrust find their counterpart in the religious history of the times; but a panic springing from a belief in the anger of the gods was even more difficult to control than the alarm excited by the attitude of the government. Such a panic knew no distinctions of station, sex or age; it seized on citizens who cared nothing for the problems of administration, it was strong in proportion to the weakness of its victims, and gathered from the dark thoughts and wild words of the imbecile the poison which infected the sober mind and assumed, from the very universality of the sickness, the guise of a healthy effort at rooting out some deep-seated pollution from the State. The gloomy record of the religious persecutions of the past made it still more difficult for a government, which prided itself on the retention of the ancient control of morals, which gloried in its monopoly of an historic priesthood that had often set its hand to the work of extirpation, to stifle such a cry. The demand for atonement was the voice of the conserver of Rome's moral life, of the patriotic devotee who was striving earnestly to reclaim the waning favour of her tutelary gods. If it was further believed that the seat of the corruption was to be found amidst the families of the nobility itself, the last barrier to resistance had been broken down, for even to seem to shield the unholy thing was to make its lurking place an object of horror and execration.

The nerves of the people were first excited by various prodigies that had appeared; a confirmation of their fears might have been found in the utter destruction of the army of Porcius Cato in Thrace;[830] and a strange calamity soon gave an index to the nature of the offence which excited the anger of the gods. When Helvius, a Roman knight, was journeying with his wife and daughter from Rome to Apulia, they were enveloped in a sudden storm. The alarm of the girl urged the father to seek shelter with all speed. The horses were loosed from the vehicle, the maiden was placed on one, and the party was hastening along the road, when suddenly there was a blinding flash and, when it had passed, the young Helvia and her horse were seen prone upon the ground. The force of the lightning had stripped every garment and ornament from her body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the gods had not left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchastity. The destruction of the horse seemed to portend that a knight would be found to be a partner in the crime.[832] Evidence was invited and was soon forthcoming. The slave of a certain Barrus came forward and deposed to the corruption of three of the vestal virgins, Aemilia, Licinia and Marcia.[833] He pretended that the incestuous intercourse had been of long standing, and he named his own master amongst many other men whom he declared to be the authors of the sacrilege. The maidens were believed to have added to their lovers to screen their first offence; the sacrifice of their honour became the price of silence; and their first corrupters were forced to be dumb when jealousy was mastered by fear. The knowledge of the crime is believed to have been widely spread amongst the circles of the better class, until the conspiracy of silence was broken down by the action of a slave,[834] and all who would not be deemed accomplices were forced to add their share to the weight of the accusing testimony.

A scandal of this magnitude called for a formal trial by the supreme religious tribunal, and towards the close of the year[835] Lucius Metellus, the chief pontiff, summoned the incriminated vestals before the college. Aemilia was condemned, but Licinia and Marcia were acquitted. There was an immediate outcry; the pontiff's leniency was severely censured; and the anger and fear of the people emboldened a tribune, Sextus Peducaeus, to propose for the first time that the secular arm should wrest from the pontifical college the spiritual jurisdiction that it had abused. He carried a resolution that a special commission should be established by the people to continue the investigation.[836] The judges were probably Roman knights after the model of the Gracchan jurors; the president was the terrible Lucius Cassius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which had endowed his tribunal with the nickname "the reef of the accused," [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission condemned, not only the two vestals whom the pontiffs had acquitted, but many of their female intermediaries as well.[838] Some of their supposed paramours must also have been convicted; amongst the accused was Marcus Antonius, who was in future days to share the realm of oratory with Lucius Crassus. He was on the eve of his departure to Asia, where he was to exercise the duties of a quaestor, when he was summoned to appear before the court over which Cassius presided. He might have pleaded the benefit of his obligation to continue his official duties;[839] but he preferred to waive his claim and face his judges. His escape was believed to have been mainly due to the heroic conduct of a young slave, who, presented of his own free will to the torture, bore the anguish of the rack, the scourge and the fire without uttering a word that might incriminate his master.[840] The free employment of such methods in trials for incest throws a grave doubt on the value of the judgment which they elicited; and, when a court is established for the purpose of appeasing the popular conscience, a part at least of its conduct may be easily suspected of being preordained. Cassius's rigour in this matter was thought excessive;[841] but, even had he and the jurors meted out nothing but the strictest justice, the memory of their sentence would long have rankled in the minds of the influential families whose members they had condemned, and thus perpetuated the tradition of their unnecessary severity. It may be doubted, however, whether a secular court was competent to inflict the horrible penalties of pontifical jurisdiction, to condemn the vestal to a living grave and her paramour to death by the scourge;[842] interdiction, and perhaps in the more serious cases the death by strangling usually reserved for traitors, may have been meted out to the men, while the women may have been handed over to their relatives for execution. But even this exemplary visitation of the vices which lurked in the heart of the State was not deemed sufficient to appease the gods or to quiet the popular conscience. To punish the guilty was to offer the barest satisfaction to heaven and to conscience; a fuller atonement was demanded, and the Sibylline oracles, when consulted on the point, were understood to ordain the cultivation of certain strange divinities by the living sacrifice of four strangers, two of Hellenic and two of Gallic race.[843] The accomplishment of this act must have been a severe strain on the reason and conscience of a government which sixteen years later absolutely prohibited the performance of human sacrifice[844] and soon made efforts to stamp out the barbarous ritual even in its foreign dependencies.[845] Even this concession to the panic of the times could not be regarded as fraught with much worldly success. The gods seemed still to retain an unkind feeling both to the city and the government. Two years later there was a return of dreadful prodigies, and a great part of Rome was laid waste by a terrible fire. A few months more and news was brought from Africa which shook to its very foundations the fabric of senatorial rule.[846]