Marius and Cinna declared themselves consuls of Rome for the year 86 B.C. without any election and without even the formality of summoning a meeting of the comitia tributa. Much more serious than this was the disregard which was manifested by Marius and his followers for the life and property of the Roman citizens. For several days Rome was given up to almost indiscriminate plunder and murder by the soldiers in the armies of Marius and Cinna; and after a stop was finally brought to this extra-judicial pillage and murder it was succeeded by a series of prosecutions almost as destructive, and fully as unjust.
It was with these days of slaughter, the most sanguinary and unjust of Marius's whole career, that his life was to end. He was now an old man of seventy, enfeebled by sickness and hardship, and after his desire for vengeance on his enemies had been satisfied there appeared to him nothing left in life worth living for. Reports from the East indicated the military triumph of his great rival Sulla, and the prospect of the speedy return of the leader. To his other worries there was added the belief that the present triumph of his party was but temporary. Finally, overcome by sickness and melancholy, he took to his bed, and died at the end of seven days. Many believed that he had committed suicide, but the truth of this theory can never be anything but a matter of conjecture.
Of the character of Marius little need be said. He was primarily a soldier, and only incidentally a politician. The debt which Rome owed to the military ability of Marius can hardly be overestimated. It is probable that but for his services the Roman republic might have been destroyed on either of two different occasions.
As a politician Marius exerted little influence on the course of the development of Roman history. The part which he played was rather forced upon him by circumstances and the conditions of the times than one which he himself created. His sympathies throughout were on the side of popular rights and equal justice. He supported the popular party at Rome against the oligarchical party, and was one of the strongest sympathizers with the Italians in their efforts for the Roman franchise. He was the first to draw the sword to protect the rights of the people against the oligarchy, but the members of the oligarchy had themselves drawn it to overthrow the Gracchi, and force, having been entered into Roman politics, must be met with force, unless the people were willing to surrender all their claims to right and justice and permit the whole control of the state to pass to the aristocracy.
The only real blemish upon the record of Marius is found in the cruel revenge which he took upon his enemies in the last years of his life. Even on this occasion there was something more than mere revenge and cruelty in the policy of Marius. If the control of the popular party in Rome was to be permanent, it was necessary that the aristocratic party should be completely crushed before the return of Sulla from the East.
In concluding the career of Gaius Marius, summaries of his character given by two historians are here inserted:
"'When Caius Gracchus fell,' said Mirabeau, 'he seized a handful of dust tinged with his blood and flung it toward the sky; from that dust was born Marius.' This phrase of Mirabeau's, though a whit rhetorical, is historically true. The patricians were willing to cede nothing to the Gracchi, and they were decimated by Marius. The struggle changed its methods: one fought no more with laws as the only weapons, but yet more with proscriptions. Marius was the incarnated pleb; as ignorant, pitiless, formidable, he had something of Danton, except that Danton was no soldier." (J. J. Ampère, L'Empire romaine à Rome.)
"The judgment pronounced on Marius by posterity is not, like that on many other eminent men, wavering and contradictory. He is not one of those who to some have appeared heroes, to others malefactors, nor has he had to wait for ages, like Tiberius, before his true character became known. Disregarding the conscious misrepresentations of his personal enemies, we may say that he has always been taken for a good specimen of the genuine old Roman, uniting in his person in an exceptional degree the virtues and the faults of the rude illiterate peasant and the intrepid soldier. No one has ever ventured to deny that by his eminent military ability he rendered essential service to his country. Nobody has doubted his austere virtues, his simplicity and honesty, qualities by which, no less than by his genius for war, he gained for himself the veneration of the people. On the other hand, it is universally admitted that as a politician he was incompetent, and that he was only a tool in the hands of those with whom he acted. But morbid ambition and revengeful passion urged him at last to deeds which make it doubtful whether it would not have been better for Rome if he had never been born. He has, therefore, neither deserved nor obtained unmixed admiration; but as his darkest deeds were committed in moments when he was half mad from sufferings and indignities he had endured, and when perhaps he hardly knew what he was doing, he may, in the opinion of humane judges, gain by comparison with Sulla, who acted from reflection and in cool blood when he consigned thousands to death and enacted the horrid spectacle of the proscriptions." (William Ihne, The History of Rome.)
Marius was succeeded as consul by Valerius Flaccus, who had held the same office fourteen years before. The two consuls Cinna and Flaccus now attempted to fulfill the pledges to the Italians, and censors were elected for the express purpose of doing away with the eight (or ten) new Italian tribes and distributing the Italians throughout the whole thirty-five tribes.
Another important law passed at this time was in the nature of a temporary bankruptcy law for the relief of the Roman debtors. By this new law all debtors were enabled to clear themselves of their debts by paying one fourth of the amount owed.
Sulla, in the meantime, had brought to a successful close the war against Mithridates, although, on account of his anxiety to return to Italy as soon as possible, he did not completely crush the king of Pontus, as he could have done easily at this time. Disregarding the decree removing him from command of the army and appointing his successor, Sulla retained the command of his victorious army and returned with it to Italy, with the express purpose of crushing the popular party, and placed Rome once more completely under the control of the oligarchy.