The Comic History of Rome

by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett

These noble animals had been the gift of a Mauritanian king, and as Sulla might have wished the present absent, if he had been saddled with the cost of the keep of no less than one hundred monarchs of the forest, the donor forwarded a band of Moors, who were to serve as food for the lions, by being turned into the arena with them when occasion required.

Sulla had excited the jealousy of Marius during the Jugurthine War, and the latter, though now a man of seventy, still cherished his old animosity with all the obstinacy of a most inveterate veteran. He was still ambitious of the laurel, though he should have been thinking only of the cypress; and with one foot in the grave, he was anxious to march with the other at the head of an army. Limping into the Campus Martius, where the soldiers were being drilled, he placed himself by the side of the youngest, and hobbled through the exercise with an air of ill-assumed juvenility. His feeble evolutions excited a mixed feeling of ridicule and disgust among the lookers-on, instead of obtaining for him the command to which he aspired. Having been disappointed of producing the effect he had anticipated, he had recourse to his friend, the tribune P. Sulpicius, who exercised a sort of reign of terror by means of 3000 gladiators, whom he always had about him. This formidable band of armed ruffians went by the name of the Anti-Senate of Sulpicius, who employed them to carry any measure he proposed, by showing the point of the sword to those who did not see the point of his argument. In order to gain time, the Senate appointed a series of holidays, or Feriæ, during which all business was suspended for the celebration of public sports, which often enabled the authorities to play a game of their own, by delaying any measure that was opposed to their interests. After a brief interval, the Senate appointed Sulla to the chief command, whereupon the Anti-Senate appointed Marius; and the former had no sooner heard the news, than he marched upon Rome with the whole of his army. The utmost consternation ensued; for no army having been expected at Rome, there had been no preparations for defence; and though the gates were closed, they were almost as crazy and unhinged as the terrified inhabitants.

Marius discovered in the Marshes at Minturnæ.

A feeble attempt was made to bolt the doors against Sulla and his soldiers, but it was impossible to bar their entrance. As they marched through the streets, they were assailed from the houses with showers of brick, which, though very destructive, could not have been so damaging as the modern mortar. Some of the inhabitants were armed with slings, and now and then an arrow was discharged from a bow window. Orders were immediately given to set fire to the quarters whence the annoyance proceeded, and the directions were acted upon with that indiscriminate ferocity which is too often displayed by an incensed soldiery against an unarmed populace. The anger excited by the few was vented on the unoffending many, and the troops performed, with savage alacrity, the most humiliating service on which they could have been employed—the butchery of their defenceless fellow-citizens.

"Who dares kill Marius?"

The leaders, or, rather, the mis-leaders of the people in this miserable conspiracy, were the first to seek their own safety in flight, and the tribune P. Sulpicius, who had set the example of employing brute force, evinced the most cowardly haste in running away from it, when he seemed likely to become one of its victims. Marius made for the marshes near Minturnæ, where he stuck in the mud, and covered his reputation with a number of stains that are quite indelible. On being discovered in his ignoble retreat, by those who had pursued him through thick and thin, he was dragged to the town and lodged in the nearest station. A price had been put upon his head, but the article does not seem to have been worth much, for he had shown very little sense in the part he had been playing. His gray hairs, or, perhaps, rather, his total baldness, still commanded so much of sympathy, that nobody evinced a disposition to become his executioner, until a Cimbric soldier undertook the discreditable office. He approached the veteran with a drawn sword, but Marius had got into a dark corner, and succeeded in frightening the man-at-arms by putting on a voice of the most dismal character. The soldier fancying himself in the presence of a ghost, failed in plucking up a sufficient spirit; and when a moan was heard—inquiring, "Who dares kill Caius Marius?" the would-be assassin, having flung down his sword, ran away, exclaiming—"Not I, for one, at any rate!" The soldier, of course, exaggerated the cause of his fears, and declared that the eyes of Marius had appeared to him like two candles burning in their sockets. The inhabitants of Minturnæ became as nervous as the panic-stricken soldier, and put Marius on board a ship, which, after being tossed about for several days, came to an anchor, or ran aground, high and dry, on the fine old crusted port of Carthage. Here he rambled about the ruins, and rested his aching head upon its broken temples. The Roman Governor, Sextilius, not knowing what to do with such an embarrassing visitor, sent a messenger to request him to "move on;" but the exile, with a dignified air, claimed his right to repose upon the dry rubbish. "Tell thy master," he observed to the officer on duty, who had respectfully told him he must "come out of that," in compliance with the orders of the authorities,—"Tell thy master that thou hast seen Marius, sitting on the ruins of Carthage." The intelligence was not new, but it seems to have been rather startling, for it had the effect of causing Marius to be allowed to remain; and we will, therefore, leave him there, while we proceed with the march of our history.

Sulla having reduced the city to the most complete subjection, made a merit of not pursuing his vengeance farther against the defenceless inhabitants; and so great was his confidence in the efficacy of his work, that he acquiesced in the appointment of L. Cornelius Cinna, a partisan of Marius, to the consulship. Sulla proceeded to Greece, where he blockaded Athens, whose inhabitants he plundered, as a practical acknowledgment of their worth; and he spared their lives, to show how he valued their ancestors. He manifested his respect for their arts by robbing their city of its chief ornaments; and he paid their learning the compliment of stealing their principal libraries.

In the meantime Cinna had entered on the duties of the consulship at Rome, but there the truth of the maxim, that two heads are better than one, was rendered extremely doubtful by the constant dissensions between himself and his colleague. The latter was Cn. Octavius, who opposed whatever the former recommended; and while one tried to carry his measures by brute force, the other endeavoured to defeat them by armed violence. Cinna appealed to the mob, and Octavius trusted to the army, both forces being the principal movers under a republican rule or misrule, and both being equally repugnant to the spirit of constitutional government. The arms of such a republic might have for its supporters the bludgeon and the sword, with the figure of Liberty battered and bleeding, slashed and sabred, gagged and fettered, in the middle. Octavius and the sword had, on this occasion, got the upper hand; and Cinna, the clubbist, was glad to break his bludgeon or cut his stick, in flying from the city.