The pressure of this war and of the great Mithradatic war which began simultaneously in Asia led to a serious economic crisis at Rome. Debt and usury were the symptoms, and when a prætor tried to meet it by reviving the old laws against usury he was murdered in his priestly robes at sacrifice. Now we begin to hear the ominous cry of “Novæ tabulæ”—the clean slate for debtors. A popular orator named Sulpicius Rufus, whose programme included the exclusion of all bankrupts from the senate, protected his valuable person with a bodyguard of 3000 hired roughs, and organised a mock senate of 300 high-spirited young bloods. Then, since Sulla with his army threatened opposition, he passed a decree giving the command of the great army destined to fight Mithradates to the old Marius. During the Social War both these generals had held command with some success, but on the whole the reputation of Marius had declined while that of Sulla had increased. Without hesitation Sulla now marched his army into Rome, and won a battle in the streets of the city. Sulpicius was of course executed, his head was nailed to the rostra, and Marius escaped under circumstances of romantic adventure. Sulla was thus in the year 88 completely master of Rome.
At this moment his real ambition was for more fighting. Mithradates, King of Pontus,[16] was then in full career of rebellion against the Roman dominion in Asia, where 80,000 Roman traders and money-lenders were murdered in a sudden mutiny. Sulla saw in Mithradates a worthy foeman, and much preferred glory on the fields of Asia to Roman politics; and besides, his army was clamouring for plunder. So he hastily flung out a series of constitutional reforms designed to restore the senate to more than its ancient predominance, and then set out for the East, heedless or ignorant of the fact that he had not really changed anything. On the contrary he had left at Rome in sole charge the new consul, Cinna, the worst and most dangerous of all the demagogues. Sulla—most innocent of reprobates—seems to have fancied that an oath to obey his constitution would restrain such a man at such a time.
Consequently as soon as his back was turned a fresh revolution broke out. Cinna also brought an army to Rome and invited Marius to return. Then the old general, furious with all his disappointments, began a fearful debauch of bloodshed. Every distinguished senator left in Rome, including statesmen like L. Cæsar, soldiers like Catulus, orators like Antonius and Crassus, were butchered by his slaves and their heads displayed in the forum. In 86 Marius gained the goal of his ambition, that seventh consulship which had been promised him long ago by a prophet. In the same year he died. Now for four years Cinna ruled as monarch at Rome. Year after year he assumed the consulship and nominated the other magistrates at his own choice without the formality of election. He repealed the laws of Sulla, equalised all the citizens in the tribes, and reduced all debts by 75 per cent. It is the last measure which is truly typical of Roman democracy. Meanwhile, of course, the reckoning was in preparation across the seas. Sulla was winning glorious victories in Greece and Asia, and at length in 84, drove Mithradates to surrender temporarily. Cinna, who does not seem to have understood that a Roman army belonged not to the republic but to its general, audaciously set out to supersede Sulla, and was murdered by the troops.
Plate XIV. GN. POMPEIUS MAGNUS
Sulla, having offered terms which the government very foolishly declined, came home in 83 after five years’ absence bearing not peace but a sword. He had five veteran legions of his own, the exiled aristocrats joined him, and among them a young man called Pompeius with three more legions. The lead of the democratic party had now fallen into the hands of a young Marius, and he having no troops to oppose the returning veterans decided to join the Samnite rebels who remained unconquered from the Social War. Before leaving the city they ordered a final and still more bloody massacre of the surviving aristocrats; practically all the men of distinction left in the city suffered death. Sulla had to fight 40,000 Samnites at the Colline Gate of Rome, and after a desperate struggle was victorious. The young Marius committed suicide. Thus Sulla was once more master of Rome. His 8000 Samnite prisoners were slaughtered in the Circus. Of the Roman democrats, 80 senators, 3600 equites, and over 2000 private citizens were proscribed, and their heads nailed up in the forum. In Spain, Sertorius, an honest and valorous democrat, maintained a gallant struggle by the aid of a miraculous deer, and a native Spanish army trained on the Roman model, until at last he fell by treachery.
For two years Sulla was monarch at Rome. For the purpose he invented a sort of revival of the obsolete dictatorship, without limit of time and without a colleague. If we care for the term, Sulla was at that time as much “Emperor” as Augustus. He enacted a whole constitution of his own—which it is scarcely necessary to recount since scarcely anything of it survived—all destined to put the senate on its throne again, and then simply abdicated and retired into private life. I think he was bored with Rome and politics. It is generally admitted that he had a sense of humour. It was a very foolish thing to do. But Sulla’s star was with him and he died in his bed. His dying moments were comforted by the apparition of his deceased wife (he had had five) and son, who invited him to join them in the land of peace and bliss beyond the grave.
Sulla was hardly dead before another consul had marched against Rome with his army and suffered defeat in the city. But these were mere episodes. The streets of the sacred city were in a perpetual state of war: every serious politician had to organise his gang of roughs, and when the very senate-house was burnt down in one such encounter it only seemed an excessive display of political zeal. Of constitutional government there was little pretence. The seas were swarming with pirates, no longer isolated rovers who preyed upon commerce, but an organised pirate-state with head-quarters in Cilicia, and a great fleet consisting of all the broken men and desperate outlaws of the unhappy Mediterranean world. They sailed the high seas in fleets under admirals who voyaged in state like princes. For their homes they had impregnable citadels among the creeks of the Cilician and Dalmatian coasts where they stored their families and their plunder. They were not afraid to march inland to sack a city or loot a rich temple. Commerce at sea was ruined, even the food-supply of the capital was occasionally cut off. On land and even in Italy things were not much better. All through Republican history (but seldom afterwards) we hear of risings among the slaves of Italy. Now, under the plantation system, the inaccessible Apennine highlands were swarming with desperate runaways who constantly committed minor acts of brigandage. In 73 they found a leader in Spartacus, the gladiator who was said to be of royal descent in Thrace. Starting as a mere handful the band swelled in the course of a few months to 40,000. Roman armies one after another and ten in all marched against them in vain. Two consuls were defeated, many eagles were captured, Italy was at their mercy. Respectable towns like Thurii and Nola were seized, their prisoners were crucified like slaves or forced with grim irony to fight one another to the death like gladiators. Thus the most frightful form of civil war was devastating Italy. It was necessary to raise an army of eight legions to crush the slaves, and the command was entrusted to Marcus Crassus, who even then had to decimate a legion before he could get his cowardly troops to stand and fight. After several stubborn battles, and aided by the want of discipline which was even more conspicuous among the slaves than among the Romans, Crassus accomplished his task. Six thousand crucified slaves who lined the road from Capua to Rome testified to the restoration of order.
Abroad matters were little better. The war against Mithradates, which had provided so many Roman triumphs and had so often been proclaimed at an end, actually lasted for twenty-five years, and its duration was due rather to the ineptitude of the government than to the prowess of the unmilitary Asiatics. In Spain it took ten years to defeat Sertorius with his native troops, and even then the result was only accomplished by assassination. If a Hannibal had entered Italy in these latter days the state could not have survived. But there was only one military power of any consequence left in the world in those days, the Parthians. Here there were half-hellenised despots ruling over tribes of warriors only lately descended from the Caucasian and Armenian highlands, and still nursing a fierce mountain spirit though they occupied the rich plains of Mesopotamia. Crassus, the victor over the slaves, was sent to fight them with a great army, but the millionaire displayed wretched ignorance of strategy and especially of the perils of Eastern warfare. He blundered on into the wilderness and tried to meet the terrible horse-bowmen and mail-clad lancers of the East with his legions in a hollow square. The result was the great disaster of Carrhæ in 53, a defeat which amid all the shameful ignominies of this period rankled continually owing to the loss of the eagles and the tragic fate of the leader. Marcus Crassus himself was an almost wholly repulsive character, who had amassed a fortune, colossal even in those days of millionaires, by the most discreditable method. The foundations of his millions had been laid by speculating in the property of the victims of Sulla’s proscriptions. He had been a slave-trainer on a large scale and at one time he had organised a private fire-brigade which he used for acquiring house-property cheaply by blackmail. By lending money to the young spendthrifts of the aristocracy he obtained great influence at Rome, and indeed figures in the wretched politics of his day as a statesman on equality with really great men like Cæsar and Pompeius. But he had no policy and was only of importance through his wealth and influence.