Marius (647).
V. The Gracchi had made themselves, so to say, the civil champions of the popular cause: Marius became its stern soldier. Born of an obscure family, bred in camps, having arrived by his courage at high grades, he had the roughness and the ambition of the class which feels itself oppressed. A great captain, but a partisan in spirit, naturally inclined to good and to justice, he became, towards the end of his life, through love of power, cruel and inexorable.[683]
After having distinguished himself at the siege of Numantia, he was elected tribune of the people, and displayed in that office a great impartiality.[684] It was the first step of his fortune. Having become the lieutenant of Metellus, in the war against Jugurtha he sought to supplant his general; and, at a later period, succeeded in allying himself to an illustrious family by marrying Julia, paternal aunt of the great Cæsar. Guided by his instinct or intelligence, he had learnt that beneath the official people there existed a people of proletaries and of allies which demanded a consideration in the State.
Having reached the consulship through his high military reputation, backed by intrigues, he was charged with the war of Numidia, and, before his departure, expressed with energy, in an address to the people, the rancours and principles of the democratic party of that time.
“You have charged me,” he said, “with the war against Jugurtha; the nobility is irritated at your choice: but why do you not change your decree, by going to seek for this expedition a man among that crowd of nobles, of old lineage, who counts many ancestors, but not a single campaign?... It is true that he would have to take among the people an adviser who could teach him his business. With these proud patricians compare Marius, a new man. What they have heard related by others, what they have read of, I have seen in part, I have in part done.... They reproach me with the obscurity of my birth and fortune; I reproach them with their cowardice and personal infamy. Nature, our common mother, has made all men equal, and the bravest is the most noble.... If they think they are justified in despising me, let them also despise their ancestors, ennobled like me by their personal merits.... And is it not more worthy to be oneself the author of his name than to degrade that which has been transmitted to you?
“I cannot, to justify your confidence, make a display of images, nor boast of the triumphs or consulships of my ancestors; but I can produce, if necessary, javelins, a standard, the trappings of war, twenty other military gifts, besides the scars which furrow my breast. These are my images, these my nobility, not left by inheritance, but won for myself by great personal labours and perils.”[685]
After this oration, in which is revealed the legitimate ardour of those who, in all aristocratic countries, demand equality, Marius, contrary to the ancient system, enrolled more proletaries than citizens. The veterans also crowded under his standards. He conducted the war of Africa with skill; but he was robbed of part of his glory by his questor, P. Cornelius Sylla. This man, called soon afterwards to play so great a part, sprung from an illustrious patrician family, ambitious, ardent, full of boldness and confidence in himself, recoiled before no obstacle. The successes, which cost so many efforts to Marius, seemed to come of themselves to Sylla. Marius defeated the Numidian prince, but, by an adventurous act of boldness, Sylla received his submission, and ended the war. From that time began, between the proconsul and his young questor, a rivalry which, in time, was changed into violent hatred. They became, one, the champion of the democracy; the other, the hope of the oligarchic faction. So the Senate extolled beyond measure Metellus and Sylla, in order that the people should not consider Marius as the first of the generals.[686] The gravity of events soon baffled this manœuvre.
While Marius was concluding the war with Jugurtha, a great danger threatened Italy. Since 641, an immense migration of barbarians had moved through Illyria into Cisalpine Gaul, and had defeated, at Noreia (in Carniola) the consul Papirius Carbo. They were the Cimbri, and all their peculiarities, manners, language, habits of pillage, and adventures, attested their relationship to the Gauls.[687] In their passage through Rhætia into the country of the Helvetii, they dragged with them different peoples, and during some years devastated Gaul; returned in 645 to the neighbourhood of the Roman province, they demanded of the Republic lands to settle in. The consular army sent to meet them was defeated, and they invaded the province itself. The Tigurini (647), a people of Helvetia, issuing from their mountains, slew the consul L. Cassius, and made his army pass under the yoke. It was only a prelude to greater disasters. A third invasion of the Cimbri, followed by two new defeats in 649, on the banks of the Rhine, excites the keenest apprehensions, and points to Marius as the only man capable of saving Italy; the nobles, moreover, in presence of this great danger, sought no longer to seize the power.[688] Marius was, contrary to the law, named a second time consul, in 650, and charged with the war in Gaul.
This great captain laboured during several years to restore military discipline, practise his troops, and familiarise them with their new enemies, whose aspect filled them with terror. Marius, considered indispensable, was re-elected from year to year; from 650 to 654, he was five times elected consul, and beat the Cimbri, united with the Ambrones and Teutones, near Aquæ Sextiæ (Aix), re-passed into Italy, and exterminated, near Vercellæ, the Cimbri who had escaped from the last battle and those whom the Celtiberians had driven back from Spain. These immense butcheries, these massacres of whole peoples, removed for some time the barbarians from the frontiers of the Republic.
Consul for the sixth time (654), the saviour of Rome and Italy, by a generous deference, would not triumph without his colleague Catulus,[689] and did not hesitate to exceed his powers in granting to two auxiliary cohorts of Cameria, who had distinguished themselves, the rights of city.[690] But his glory was obscured by culpable intrigues. Associated with the most turbulent chiefs of the democratic party, he excited them to revolt, and sacrificed them as soon as he saw that they could not succeed. When governments repulse the legitimate wishes of the people and true ideas, then factious men seize on them as a powerful arm to serve their passions and personal interests; the Senate having rejected all the proposals of reform, those who sought to raise disorders found in them a pretext and support in their perverse projects. L. Appuleius Saturninus, one of Marius’s creatures, and Glaucia, a fellow of loose manners, were guilty of incredible violences. The first revived the agrarian laws of the Gracchi, and went beyond them in proposing the partition of the lands taken from the Cimbri; a measure which he sought to impose by terror and murder. In the troubles which broke out at the election of the consuls for 655, the urban tribes came to blows with the country tribes. In the midst of the tumult, Saturninus, followed by a troop of desperadoes, made himself master of the Capitol, and fortified himself in it. Charged, in his quality of consul, with the repression of sedition, Marius first favoured it by an intentional inaction; then, seeing all good citizens run to arms, and the factious without support, even deserted by the urban plebeians, he placed himself at the head of some troops, and occupied the avenues to the Capitol. From the first moment of the attack, the rebels threw down their arms and demanded quarter. Marius left them to be massacred by the people, as though he had wished that the secret of the sedition might die with them.