Marius had formed an army barely in time to save Italy from being totally overwhelmed. A vast migratory wave of population had been set in motion behind the Rhine and Danube. The hunting-grounds were too strait for the numbers crowded into them, and two enormous hordes were rolling westward and southward in search of some new abiding-place. The Teutons came from the Baltic down across the Rhine into Luxemburg. The Cimbri crossed the Danube near its sources into Illyria. Both Teutons and Cimbri were Germans, and both were making for Gaul by different routes. Each division consisted of hundreds of thousands. They traveled with their wives and children, their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians and with the modern South African Dutch, being their homes. Two years had been consumed in these wanderings, and Marius was by this time ready for them.
Marius was continued in office, and was a fourth time consul. He had completed his military reforms, and the army was now a professional service with regular pay. Trained corps of engineers were attached to each legion. The campaigns of the Romans were henceforth to be conducted with spade and pickaxe as well as with sword and javelin, and the soldiers learned the use of tools as well as of arms. The Teutons were destroyed on the twentieth of July, 102 B.C. In the year following the same fate overtook their comrades. The victories of Marius mark a new epoch in Roman history. The legions were no longer the levy of the citizens in arms, who were themselves the state for which they fought. The legionaries were citizens still. They had votes and they used them; but they were professional soldiers with the modes of thought which belong to soldiers, and besides the power of the hustings was now the power of the sword.
The danger from the Germans was no sooner gone than political anarchy broke loose again. Marius, the man of the people, was the savior of his country. He was made a consul a fifth time, and then a sixth. An indifferent politician, however, he stood aloof in the fierce faction contest between the aristocrats and the popular party. At last he had almost withdrawn from public life, as he had no heart for the quarrel, and did not care to exert his power. For eight years both he and his rival Sylla kept aloof from politics and were almost unheard of.
When Sylla came to the front, it was as leader of the aristocratic power in the state. Sulpicius Rufus, once a champion of the senate and the most brilliant orator in Rome, went over to the people, and as tribune demanded the deposition of Sylla. The latter replied by leading his legionaries to Rome. Sulpicius was killed; Marius, the savior of his country, had to fly for his life, pursued by assassins, with a price set upon his head.
While Sylla was absent in the East prosecuting that magnificent campaign against Mithridates, King of Pontus, which stamped him the first soldier of his time, the popular party again raised its head. Old Marius, who had been hunted through marsh and forest, and had been hiding with difficulty in Africa, came back at the news that Italy had risen again. Marius and Cinna joined their forces, appeared together at the gates of the capital, and Rome capitulated. There was a bloody score to be wiped out. Marius bears the chief blame for the scenes which followed. A price had been set on his head, his house had been destroyed, his property had been confiscated, he, himself, had been chased like a wild beast, and he had not deserved such treatment. He had saved Italy, when but for him it would have been wasted by the swords of the Germans.
His power had afterward been absolute, but he had not abused it for party purposes. The senate had no reason to complain of him. His crime in their eyes had been his eminence. They had now shown themselves as cruel as they were worthless; and if public justice was disposed to make an end of them, he saw no cause to interfere. From retaliatory political vengeance the transition was easy to plunder and wholesale murder; and for many days the wretched city was made a prey to robbers and cut-throats.
So ended the year 87, the darkest and bloodiest which the guilty city had yet experienced. Marius and Cinna were chosen consuls for the ensuing year and a witch’s prophecy was fulfilled that Marius should hold a seventh consulate. But the glory had departed from him. His sun was already setting, redly, among crimson clouds. He lived but a fortnight after his inauguration, and died in his bed at the age of seventy-one. “The mother of the Gracchi,” said Mirabeau, “cast the dust of her murdered sons into the air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius.”
MITHRIDATES, KING OF PONTUS.[10]
By THEODOR MOMMSEN.
[Surnamed “the Great,” born about 132 B.C., died in 63. This powerful Eastern monarch, who greatly extended his frontiers beyond his original kingdom, was one of the most formidable barriers to Roman power in Asia. He organized a league and severely taxed the military resources of the republic. Sulla spent four years in compelling him to submit to an honorable peace. In the second Mithridatic war he was successively defeated by Lucullus and Pompey. He finally committed suicide by the hands of one of his mercenaries. References: Mommsen’s “History of Rome,” Arnold’s “History of Rome.”]
Partly through the constant growth of oppression naturally incident to every tyrannic government, partly through the indirect operation of the Roman revolution—in the seizure, for instance, of the property of the soil in the province of Asia by Caius Gracchus, in the Roman tenths and customs, and in the human hunts which the collectors of revenue added to their other avocations there—the Roman rule, barely tolerable from the first, pressed so heavily on Asia, that neither the king’s crown nor the peasant’s hut there was any longer safe from confiscation, that every stalk of corn seemed to grow for Roman tribute, and every child of free parents seemed born for the Roman slave-driver.