Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading

by George Park Fisher

CHAPTER I. THE GRACCHI: THE FIRST MITHRIDATIC WAR: MARIUS AND SULLA (146-78 B.C.).

CONDITION OF ROME.—We come now to an era of internal strife. The Romans were to turn their arms against one another: Yet it is remarkable that the march of foreign conquest still went on. It was by conquests abroad that the foremost leaders in the civil wars rose to the position which enabled them to get control in the government at home. The power of the Senate had been more and more exalted. Foreign affairs were mainly at its disposal. The increase in the number of voters in the comitia, and their motley character, made it more easy for the aristocracy to manage them. Elections were carried by the influence of largesses and by the exhibition of games. Practically the chief officers were limited to a clique, composed of rich families of both patrician and plebeian origin, which was diminishing in number, while the numbers of the lower class were rapidly growing larger. The gulf between the poor and the rich was constantly widening. The last Italian colony was sent out in 177 B.C., and the lands of Italy were all taken up. Slaves furnished labor at the cost of their bare subsistence. It was hard for a poor man to gain a living. Had the Licinian Laws (p. 137) been carried out, the situation would have been different. The public lands were occupied by the members of some forty or fifty aristocratic families, and by a certain number of wealthy Italians. A great proletariate—a needy and disaffected lower class—was growing up, which boded no good to the state.

TIBERIUS GRACCHUS.—This condition of things moved Tiberius Gracchus, the son of Cornelia, who was the daughter of the great Scipio Africanus, to bring forward his Agrarian Laws. The effect of them would have been to limit the amount of the public domain which any one man could hold, and to divide portions of it among poor citizens. In spite of the bitter opposition of the nobility, these laws were passed (133). But Gracchus had been obliged to persuade the people to turn a tribune, who resisted their passage, out of office, which was an unconstitutional act. In order to carry out the laws, he would have to be re-elected tribune. But the optimates, led by the consul Scipio Nasica, had been still more infuriated by other proposals of Gracchus. They raised a mob, and slew him, with three hundred of his followers. This gave the democratic leaders a temporary advantage; but violent measures on their own side turned the current again the other way, and proceedings under the laws were quashed.

CAIUS GRACCHUS.—The laws of Caius Gracchus, the brother of Tiberius, were of a more sweeping character. He caused measures to be passed, and colonies to be sent out, by decrees of the people, without any action of the Senate. He renewed the agrarian law. He caused a law to be passed for selling corn for less than the cost, to all citizens who should apply for it. He also caused it to be ordained, that juries should be taken from the knights, the equites, instead of the Senate. These were composed of rich men. The tendency of the law would be to make the equestrian order distinct, and thus to divide the aristocracy. The proposal (122), which was not passed, to extend the franchise to the Latins, and perhaps to the Italians, cost him his popularity, although the measure was just. The Senate gave its support to a rival tribune, M. Livius Drusus, who outbid Gracchus in the contest for popular favor. In 121 Gracchus was not made tribune. In the disorder that followed, he, with several hundred of his followers, was killed by the optimates. Before long most of his enactments were reversed. The law for the cheap sale of corn, the most unwise of his measures, continued.

THE JUGURTHINE WAR.—An interval of tranquility followed. But the corruption of the ruling class was illustrated in connection with the Jugurthine war. Jugurtha, the adopted son of the king of Numidia, the ally of Rome, wishing the whole kingdom for himself, killed one of the sons of the late king, and made war upon the other, who applied to the Romans for help. The commission sent out by the Senate was bribed by Jugurtha. Not until he took the city of Cirta, and put to death the remaining brother, with all his army, was he summoned to Rome. There, too, his money availed to secure him impunity, although he caused a Numidian prince to be murdered in Rome itself. When the Romans finally entered on the war with Jugurtha, he bribed the generals, so that little was effected. The indignation of the people was raised to such a pitch that they would not leave the direction of the war in the hands of Quintus Metellus, whom the Senate had sent out, and who defeated Jugurtha (108), but insisted on giving the chief command to one of his subordinate officers, Caius Marius (107), the son of a peasant, wild and rough in his manners, but of extraordinary talents as a soldier. He brought the war to an end. Jugurtha was delivered up by the prince with whom he had taken refuge to L. Cornelius Sulla, one of the generals under Marius, and in 105, with his two sons, marched in chains before the triumphal car of Marius through the streets of Rome. Marius was now the leader of the popular party, and the most influential man in Rome.

THE CIMBRI AND TEUTONES.—The power of Marius was augmented by his victories over the Cimbri and the Teutones. These were hordes of barbarians who appeared in the Alpine regions, the Cimbri being either Celts, or, like the Teutones, Germans. The Cimbri crossed the Alps in 113, and defeated a Roman consul. They turned westward towards the Rhine, traversed Gaul in different directions, defeating through a series of years the Roman armies that were sent against them. These defeats the democratic leaders ascribed, not without reason, to the corrupt management of the aristocratic party. In 103 the Cimbri and the Teutones arranged for a combined attack on Italy. Marius was made consul; and in order to meet this threatened invasion, which justly excited the greatest anxiety, he was chosen to this office five times in succession (104-100). Having repulsed the attack of the barbarians on his camp, he defeated them in two great battles, the first at Aquce Sextice (Aix in Provence) in 102, and the second at Vercellce, in Upper Italy, in 101. These successes, which really saved Rome, made Marius for the time the idol of the popular party.

THE ARMY.—At about this time a great change took place in the constitution of the army. The occupation of a soldier had become a trade. Besides the levy of citizens, there was established a recruiting system, which drew into the ranks the idle and lazy, and a system of re-inforcements, by which cavalry and light-armed troops were taken from subject and vassal states. Thus there arose a military class, distinct, as it had not been of old, from the civil orders, and ready to act separately when its own interest or the ambition of favorite leaders might prompt.

SATURNINUS.—Marius lacked the judgment and the firmness required by a statesman, especially in troublous times. When Saturninus and Glaucia brought forward a series of measures of a radical character in behalf of the democratic cause, and the consul Metellus, who opposed them, was obliged to go into voluntary exile, Marius, growing ashamed of the factious and violent proceedings of the popular party, was partially won over to the support of the Senate. When C. Memmius, candidate for consul, was killed with bludgeons by the mob of Saturninus and Glaucia, and there was fighting in the forum and the streets, he helped to put down these reckless innovators (99). But his want of hearty cooperation with either party made him hated by both. Metellus was recalled from banishment. Marius went to Asia, and visited the court of Mithridates.

THE MURDER OF DRUSUS.—Nearly ten years of comparative quiet ensued. The long continued complaints of the Italians found at last a voice in the measures of M. Livius Drusus, a tribune, who, in 91, proposed that they should have the right of citizenship. Two other propositions, one referring to the relations of the Equites and the Senate, and the other for a new division of lands, had been accepted by the people, but were by the Senate declared null. Before Drusus could bring forward the law respecting Italian citizenship, he was assassinated. Neither Senate nor people was favorable to this righteous measure.

THE ITALIAN OR SOCIAL WAR (90-88 B.C.).—The murder of Drusus was the signal for an insurrection of the Italian communities. They organized for themselves a federal republic. The peril occasioned by this great revolt reconciled for the moment the contending parties at Rome. In the North, where Marius fought, the Romans were generally successful: in the South, the allies were at first superior; but in 89, in spite of Sulla's bold forays, they were worsted. But it was by policy, more than by arms, that the Romans subdued this dangerous revolt. They promised full citizenship to those who had not taken part in the war, and to those who would at once cease to take part in it (90). Finally, when it was plain that Rome was too strong to be overcome, the conflict was ended by granting to the allies all that they had ever claimed (89). Rome had now made ALL ITALY (south of Cisalpine Gaul), except the Samnites and Lucanians, EQUAL WITH HERSELF. But Italy had been ravaged by desolating war: the number of small proprietors was more than ever diminished, and the army and the generals were becoming the predominant force in the affairs of the state.