Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (11 page)

One of his former officers, inspecting the villa, could only exclaim in rueful approbation that, compared to his old commander, everyone else was blind. In the summer of 89
BC
that officer had good reason to appreciate the qualities that made for an exemplary encampment. Down the coast from Marius’ villa, smoke billowed out over the orchards and vineyards of Campania as Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in command of a vast army of thirteen legions, blockaded the rebel-held cities of the plain, forcing their surrender one by one. No more apprenticeships for Sulla. Instead, a career marked by the struggle to emerge from Marius’ shadow had finally brought him a reputation as perhaps the ablest officer in the war. Yet even though the rivalry between the two men, veteran general and ambitious protégé, had long since grown poisonous, Sulla never made the mistake of underestimating his old commander. Where others saw marks of flabby degeneracy in Marius’ villa, Sulla found inspiration.

It was not only that its siting served as an object lesson in the science of entrenchment. On a coastline thronged with the resorts of the ruling classes the magnificence of Marius’ estate stood out. Traditional Roman morality may have frowned upon conspicuous consumption, but it also fostered competition as the essence of life. It was his clients’ scrabbling after status symbols that had enabled Orata to make such a killing. No Roman could afford to lose face, not even when it came to having a swimming pool installed. To the nobility, a villa was less important as a holiday home than as a public display of its owner’s splendour and high birth.

And yet Marius was a provincial. His breeding lacked pedigree, his manners polish. He had won his prestige on raw ability alone. If his villa loomed above those of the aristocracy, then it served as all the more vivid a symbol of the status that an outsider could hope to win in the Roman Republic. And Marius’ status was indisputable. Not only had he won election to just about every magistracy going – often several times over – but he had even married a bona fide Julian, patrician and still proud of it, despite her family’s decline. So it was that a nobody from Arpinum could claim that he slept with a descendant of the goddess of love. Naturally, none of this did anything to boost the great man’s popularity with the establishment. Even so, Marius’ example was one that Sulla, though himself a patrician, would have been eager – and indeed anxious – to absorb.

For the younger man’s career too had been a struggle against the circumstances of his upbringing. Despite his noble birth, his father had died leaving him virtually penniless, and throughout his youth Sulla’s means had been humiliatingly disproportionate to his pretensions. He had gradually sunk into a world of seedy lodgings and even seedier companions – comics, prostitutes and drag-queens – to whom, however, he would display a touching loyalty all his life, to the immense scandal of his peers. Sulla had relished the
demi-monde
even as he struggled to escape from it; nor was he ever to lose his taste for slumming. Hard drinking and wisecracking, he combined the aptitudes of a bar-fly with the natural talents of a gigolo, being as physically striking as he was charming, with piercing blue eyes and hair so golden that it was almost red. Ultimately, indeed, it had been sex appeal that had redeemed him from the ranks of the déclassé, for one of Rome’s best-paid courtesans had grown so obsessed with him that in her will she had left him everything she owned. At around the same time Sulla’s stepmother had also died, having similarly appointed him her sole heir. Only at thirty, an age when most nobles had already spent years climbing the slippery
pole of advancement, had Sulla at last found himself with the funds to launch his political career.

From that point on he had sought and gained prestige with a rare brilliance. His talents may have been exceptional, but not his ambition, for in Rome a man was reckoned to be nothing without the fame that accrued from glorious deeds. Whether won in warfare or political office, the reward such fame brought was the opportunity to try for ever greater achievements and ever greater renown. And at the summit of this relentless uphill race, a summit to which Sulla was now drawing close, the supreme prize beckoned. This, of course, was the consulship – still, more than four centuries after its inauguration, a magistracy of literally regal scope. If Sulla could only win election to this office, then his authority would be sanctioned by the trappings, as well as the powers, of the ancient kings. Not only would he inherit the toga bordered with royal purple and a special chair of state; he would also be accompanied by lictors, a bodyguard of twelve men, each bearing on his shoulder the
fasces
, a bundle of scourging rods, most dreaded of all the attributes of monarchy. An escort, in short, sufficient to reassure anyone that he had indeed reached the very top.

Not that he would ever stay there for long. A consul was no tyrant. His
fasces
served as symbols not of oppression but of an authority freely bestowed by the people. Subject to the whims of the voters, limited to a single year in power, and accompanied in office by colleagues their precise equal, magistrates of the Republic had little choice but to behave in office with scrupulous propriety. No matter how tempestuous a citizen’s ambitions, they rarely broke the bounds of the Romans’ respect for tradition. What the Republic fostered it also served to trammel.

And so it had always been. Rare was a high achiever who had not been oppressed by the resulting sense of tension. The ideals of the Republic served to deny the very hunger they provoked. As a result,
the fate of a Roman who had tasted the sweetness of glory might often be a consuming restlessness, the gnawing, unappeasable agony of an addict. So it was that Marius, even in his sixties, and with countless honours to his name, still dreamed of beating his rivals to the command of the war against Mithridates. And so it was that Sulla, even were he to win the consulship, would continue to be taunted by the example of his old commander. Just as Marius’ villa outshone all others on the Campanian coast, so too did his prestige outrank that of any other former consul. Most men were confined by precedent and opportunity to holding the consulship once in their lives. Marius had held the office an unprecedented six times. He liked to claim that a fortuneteller had promised him a seventh.

No wonder that Sulla loathed him. Loathed him, and dreamed of winning the same greatness that Marius had won.

Late autumn 89
BC
. Election time. Sulla left his army and headed north to Rome. He arrived there with a reputation brightly burnished by his recent exploits. First, he had forced the capitulation of all the rebel-held cities in Campania, until only Nola, bristling with her strengthened defences, had continued to hold out. Ignoring the threat that this presented to his rear, Sulla had next launched a dagger-thrust at the very heart of the rebel hinterland. Invading Samnium, he had gained a belated revenge for the Caudine Forks by ambushing a Samnite army in a mountain pass and then, having routed them, marched on the rebel capital, storming it in a brutal three-hour assault. Although Nola remained defiant, along with a few other isolated pockets of resistance, Sulla had effectively finished off the rebellion for good.

Such an achievement spoke for itself. This was just as well because that year, in the elections, there was particularly stiff competition. Supreme honour as the consulship was, it had begun to dawn on everyone that in 88 it might serve as the ticket to an even juicier prize. This, of course, was command of the war against Mithridates, a post that promised not only honour but fabulous profit as well – to say nothing of the pleasure of leaving Marius an also-ran. No wonder that Sulla wanted it so desperately – and increasingly what Sulla wanted Sulla tended to get. First, his aura as the conqueror of Samnium swept him into office. Then, a few weeks later, there was an even sweeter fulfilment: he was confirmed in the command against Mithridates. For Sulla triumph; and for Marius humiliation.

The public had little sympathy for their former favourite. Roman society was full of cruel double standards. The same moralists who warned old men that ‘there was nothing of which they should more beware than the temptations of idleness and inactivity’
¹
would also mock them savagely should they refuse to age gracefully. When the new consul, keen to finish off the war in Italy before heading east, hurried back to the siege of the still-defiant Nola, Marius was advised to leave for Campania too. After all, as the satirists pointed out, it would be perfectly safe for him to settle in his villa now – thanks to Sulla. Instead of making himself look ridiculous in Rome, why did Marius not just bow to the inevitable, retire to the Bay of Naples and gorge himself silly on oysters?

Marius replied to this question by starting on a very public workout. Every day there he was on the training ground, pushing himself to the limit, running, riding, practising with javelin and sword. It did not take long for crowds to start gathering, to gawp and cheer. At the same time Marius also began looking around for political support. What he really needed, of course, was a man who could propose a law to the people, transferring Sulla’s command
against Mithridates to himself. That, effectively, meant that he needed a tribune.

He found one in the person of Publius Sulpicius Rufus, a man blackened by subsequent propaganda as ‘cruel, reckless, avaricious, shameless, and lacking in any scruples whatsoever’
²
– a rich description, considering that it most likely originated with Sulla. Whatever else he may have been, Sulpicius was not a man lacking in principle. Causes mattered to him, even to the point of destruction. Nowhere had this campaigning zeal been shown to better effect than in his lifelong advocacy of Italian rights, which still, even with the granting of full citizenship, required vigorous defence. Afraid that conservatives in the Senate were plotting to water down the enfranchisement, Sulpicius had drawn up legislation to ensure that it would be done fairly, canvassed the consuls, then presented his bill to the people. To his fury, however, both Sulla and his colleague in the consulship, Pompeius Rufus, having made what Sulpicius regarded as a commitment to support him, had opted instead to oppose the bill and ensure its defeat. Sulpicius was left nursing a bitter sense of betrayal. Previously, he had regarded Rufus as an intimate friend; now, vowing revenge, he scouted around for a fresh alliance. It was at this very moment that Marius came calling. The general and the tribune speedily reached a discreet compact. Marius agreed to support Sulpicius’ legislation, while in return Sulpicius promised to propose the transfer of Sulla’s command to Marius. With his hand thus strengthened, Sulpicius proceeded to reintroduce his bill. Simultaneously, his supporters took to the streets and rioting swept through the city.

News of the unrest was brought to Sulla at his camp outside Nola. Alarmed, he sped back to Rome. On his arrival he held a secret council with Pompeius Rufus, but Sulpicius, catching wind of it, led a band of his heavies to break up the meeting. In the resulting confrontation Rufus’ son was murdered, Rufus himself
barely escaped with his life, and Sulla, mortifyingly, had to take refuge from the mob in Marius’ house. Worse humiliations were to follow. Consul though he was, Sulla now found himself powerless to resist Sulpicius’ demands, for it was the tribune’s mobs, not the
fasces
, who ruled Rome. Forced to agree that the pro-Italian legislation be passed and that Rufus, as payback for his treachery, be stripped of his consulship, Sulla himself appears to have been offered nothing more in exchange than the chance to continue in office and to return to the siege of Nola. At this stage there was no mention of the Mithridatic command. Sulla had no reason to doubt that his commission, at least, remained sacrosanct. All the same, returning to his camp, where the trappings of his office would have remained on magnificent and awful display, he cannot have helped but reflect bitterly upon the gap that had opened with such alarming speed between the show and the substance of his power. Such had been the damage to his prestige that only a triumphant Eastern war would ever repair it. Otherwise, far from covering him in glory, his consulship threatened to terminate his career.

For Sulla, then, as for Marius, the stakes had grown perilously high – except that Sulla, unlike Marius, was yet to realise just how high they still had to go. Then, with the dust of Rome upon him, another messenger came galloping down the road that led to Nola. Arriving among the siege works, he was brought before the consul. The messenger proved to be one of Marius’ staff officers, and Sulla had only to see him to know that the news was likely to be bad. Even so, just how bad still came as a shock. There had been a plebiscite, Sulla was informed. Proposed by Sulpicius, it had been ratified by the Roman people and passed into law. By its terms, Sulla was demoted from the command against Mithridates. His replacement – inevitably – was Marius. The staff officer had come to take command of the army. Sulpicius had paid off his debt.

Sulla, first in consternation and then in mounting fury, retired to his tent. There he did some quick calculations. With him at Nola he had six legions. Five of these had been assigned to the war against Mithridates and one to the continued prosecution of the siege – in all, around thirty thousand men. Although much reduced from the numbers Sulla had commanded the previous summer, they nevertheless represented a menacing concentration of fighting power. Only the legions of Pompeius Strabo, busy mopping up rebels on the other side of Italy, could hope to rival them. Marius, back in Rome, had no legions whatsoever.

The maths was simple. Why, then, had Marius failed to work it out, and how could so hardened an operator have chosen to drive his great rival into a corner where there were six battle-hardened legions ready to hand? Clearly, the prospect that Sulla might come out of it fighting had never even crossed Marius’ mind. It was impossible, unthinkable. After all, a Roman army was not the private militia of the general who commanded it, but the embodiment of the Republic at war. Its loyalty was owed to whomever was appointed to its command by the due processes of the constitution. This was how it had always been, for as long as the Republic’s citizens had been going to war – and Marius had no reason to imagine that things might possibly have changed.