CHAPTER 5 
THE SPOILS OF VICTORY
For the first time resistance was offered to the insolence of the nobles, the beginning of a struggle which threw everything, human and divine, into confusion, and rose to such a pitch of frenzy that civil discord ended in war and the devastation of Italy.
SALLUST1
SOMETIME AFTER 120 BC, A GREAT NORTHERN TRIBE CALLED the Cimbri left their homeland near modern Denmark and migrated south. Over the following months and years they progressed toward the Danube, and then followed the course of the river west toward the Alps. Since no one is thrilled when a horde of three hundred thousand strangers comes wandering over the horizon, wherever the Cimbri went, they were met by hostile natives. But since the Cimbri were not a conquering horde, they were willing to move on when faced with hostility from the existing inhabitants. All they were looking for was a peaceful place to settle where they could build a new life.2
Like so many “barbarian” tribes who inhabited the world beyond the Mediterranean, identifying who the Cimbri were, and where they came from, is difficult for historians. The Romans were never too particular about getting the details right and had a tendency to make sweeping generalizations, lumping completely different peoples into single catch-all categories. The Cimbri are alternatively described as being Gauls, Scythians, Celts, and Germans—and even when they are successfully identified in 114 as the “Cimbri,” the sources are unclear whether it was really one homogenous people or whether it was a roving confederation that also included groups like the Teutones and Ambrones. The Romans also tended to describe every barbarian tribe as enormous, hairy, painted, dirty, and loud—more beasts than men. Mustering every ounce of hackney stereotyping, the historian Diodorus says the Cimbri “had the appearance of giants, endowed with enormous strength.” But since this is how the Romans described every Germanic tribe, it is difficult to know what the Cimbri really looked like.3
If we can’t say exactly who the Cimbri were, we also can’t say exactly why they started migrating. The geographer Strabo says it was an “inundation of the sea” that forced them to relocate from their ancestral home on the North Sea. But whether it was ecological change, overcrowding, intertribal war, or a combination of those factors, by 120, a mass of two hundred to three hundred thousand Cimbri packed their bags and began walking south. By 113, the Cimbri had reached modern-day Slovenia, putting them just on the other side of the Alps from Italy. A local tribe warned the Romans of the sudden appearance of this new horde and asked the Senate for protection.4
Alarmed at the potential threat on their northern border, the Senate ordered consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo—brother of the Gracchan land commissioner who had been driven to suicide—to take legions north to guard the frontier. Carbo placed his legions in the principal Alpine passes to make sure the Cimbri did not enter Italy. Whether it was the presence of the legions or because they never planned to enter Italy in the first place, the Cimbri kept moving west into what is today the Austrian Alps. After they bypassed his initial positions, Carbo reformed his legions and followed the Cimbri at a safe distance to monitor their movements and make sure they did not get any ideas about taking a left turn into Italy.5
Eventually, the Cimbri took notice of the Romans and sent ambassadors to meet with Carbo. The consul was surprised by their civilized manners and pleased when they said they sought no quarrel and were simply looking for an uninhabited territory to live in. In an apparent gesture of friendship, Carbo assigned some local guides to show the Cimbri the best route to Gaul—which he said would take them past the city of Noreia. But either because Carbo was genuinely suspicious of Cimbric intentions, or was spoiling for an opportunity to win a triumph, this gesture of friendship was a deadly ruse. Carbo instructed the guides to take the Cimbri on a circuitous route through the mountains while Carbo took his legions on a shortcut to Noreia. There Carbo’s troops took up a hidden position and waited to pounce when the unsuspecting Cimbri finally arrived.6
Philosophers of war have maintained that victory in the field often goes to the general who is either able to choose the terrain of battle or maintain the element of surprise. At Noreia Carbo had both, but it did him little good because he dramatically underestimated the size of the enemy. When Carbo sprang his trap, the legions were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of Cimbric warriors, who smashed Carbo’s army and forced them into a disorganized retreat. It was a humiliating defeat.7
Luckily for the Romans, the Cimbri did not follow up their victory by invading Italy. It really did seem like they were searching for a peaceful homeland to settle and had no wish to tangle further with the duplicitous and warlike Romans. But the fate of the two nations was now linked—the Battle of Noreia was only the beginning of the Cimbrian Wars.
EVEN BEFORE THE arrival of the Cimbri, the Senate was not thrilled about the state of their northern border, which now seemed to be under constant and perhaps fatal pressure from migrating hordes.
The trouble began on the Macedonian border in 114. The Scordisci, a Thracian tribe that dominated the Danube, began making incursions south into Roman territory. To stop the incursions, the Senate dispatched consul Gaius Porcius Cato, grandson of the legendary Cato the Elder, but Cato’s army was crushed. With the Roman defenses in Macedonia shattered, the Scordisci overwhelmed the reserve garrisons and carved a wide swath of destruction. One scandalized Roman colorfully described the Scordisci invasion: “They left no cruelty untried, as they vented their fury on their prisoners; they sacrificed to the gods with human blood; they drank out of human skulls; by every kind of insult inflicted by burning and fumigation they made death more foul.” This culminated with the sack of the Oracle of Delphi, one of the most famous and sacred institutions of the Greek world. Though known to hold a rich depository of treasure, the Oracle was protected by its universally recognized sanctity. But as the Scordisci recognized no such sanctity, they plundered Delphi at will.8
As the Scordisci had their way in Macedonia, the Senate was forced to send legion after legion for the next two years. One of the Metelli cousins led the Roman armies in 113 and the following year he was succeeded by our old friend Marcus Livius Drusus, the crafty tribune who successfully undercut Gaius Gracchus during their shared tribunate a decade earlier. Now a consul, Drusus successfully brought the conflict to a close, ending his year on campaign with a major victory that finally pushed the Scordisci out of Roman territory. The Scordisci remained a constant threat, however, so in 110 the Senate had to send yet another consul to aggressively patrol the Macedonian border against further invasion.9
With the Scordisci running amok in Macedonia and Greece, and the huge mob of Cimbri wandering around near the Alps, the Senate prioritized the stability of the northern border during these years. The crisis in the north certainly helps explain the Senate’s anemic response to Jugurtha. Senatorial leaders like Scaurus hoped that negotiation and patience would bring order back to Numidia—which had, after all, been a faithful ally to Rome for nearly a century. What later Roman historians like Sallust blamed on scandalous bribery could simply have been the realistic recognition of the greater dangers in the north. Why send troops to Numidia when Italy itself was threatened by barbarian invasion?
The uncertain defense of the northern borders also had another impact on Roman politics: defeated commanders started facing legal prosecution for their failures. After his defeat at the hands of the Scordisci in 114, Cato was hauled before the Assembly and only narrowly avoided exile—the common belief being that Cato had only dodged prosecution by bribing the jurors. Less fortunate was Gnaeus Carbo. In 111, the Assembly called Carbo to account for provoking, and then losing, the Battle of Noreia. Marcus Antonius led the prosecution and easily secured a conviction. Like his brother, Carbo committed suicide rather than depart for exile. With both brothers now dead after being hounded by the refined optimate orators Crassus and Antonius, their sons would bear the optimates a special hostility in the years to come.10
DESPITE THE TROUBLE in the north, the people of Rome remained inflamed by the conduct of Jugurtha. After fleeing Rome in 111, Jugurtha returned to Numidia and raised an army. Unable to ignore Jugurtha’s insulting behavior, the Senate sent more legions across the Mediterranean in 110. In response to the invasion, Jugurtha launched a yearlong campaign of evasion, delay, and trickery to bog the Romans down. Finally, in January 109, Jugurtha lured the legions into a trap. With the Romans hopelessly surrounded Jugurtha offered simple terms: leave Numidia within ten days or you will all die. Adding insult to injury, Jugurtha also demanded the defeated legionaries “pass under the yoke,” a humiliating ritual of physically walking under a harness to acknowledge submission. The trapped Romans accepted the terms, passed under the yoke, and left Numidia.11
The humiliating defeat only confirmed the belief back in Rome that the pathetic campaigns in Numidia needed fresh leadership. In the elections for 109, the Assembly elected the sixth and final Metelli cousin to the consulship: Quintus Caecilius Metellus. Stern and disciplined, Metellus was both honest and intelligent, but an aristocratic pride defined his worldview. As the youngest of the Metelli, he was raised in a world where his brothers and cousins controlled the levers of power. He marched up the cursus honorum with ease, serving as quaestor in 126, tribune in 121, aedile in 118, and then praetor in 115. Politically rigid and unyielding, Metellus had little use for populare agitation because as a Metellan prince, his aristocratic connections were more than enough to secure his future prospects. After being elected consul, Metellus was assigned to take over the frustrating war in Numidia.12
With the previous year’s army defeated, it was clear Metellus was going to have to raise more troops from a population already stretched thin by continued economic dislocation and war. The historical record is vague, but we know Metellus secured an exemption from various restrictions on conscription, including lifting the six-year maximum on service and broadening the age range from which he could draw. Both exemptions would have allowed Metellus to draw from experienced veterans who had already done their time—every one of which was worth five raw recruits.13
In his search for experienced soldiers, Metellus also made a point of enrolling the best officers he could find. The paucity of available talent goes a long way toward explaining what may otherwise be an inexplicable decision. Metellus asked Gaius Marius to serve as a legate. Though Marius had run afoul of the Metelli politically, there was no question that he was among the most capable officers in Rome. Marius did not hesitate to join the campaign. With the conflict in Numidia going so poorly and with the Senate clearly to blame, there would be plenty of opportunities for a mere novus homo to make a name for himself.14
Back in Numidia, Jugurtha was well informed of these developments and he did not like what he heard. Not only were the Romans preparing to come back, but his informants were clear that Metellus was not a man who could be bribed. So when Metellus and his army arrived in Africa in the spring of 109, Jugurtha abruptly changed tactics. He sent envoys offering to surrender to Metellus with only one string: that he and his children be spared. But Metellus was not going to be taken in by the wily king. Turning Jugurtha’s tricks against him, Metellus bribed the envoys over to the Roman side. They were told to deliver a message of peace, but then to work secretly to arrest the king and deposit him at Metellus’s feet. But Jugurtha was cautious to the point of paranoia and evaded the subsequent plots. Recognizing that there would be no negotiation, Jugurtha resolved to defeat the Romans in battle. Again.15
Jugurtha used his superior knowledge of the terrain to stay one step ahead of Metellus until he was able to lay an ambush in the late summer of 109. At the Muthul River, Jugurtha cut the Romans off from their source of water. But rather than forcing a quick surrender, Jugurtha found himself locked in a battle with Metellus that lasted all day. The legions managed to hold out until nightfall, at which point Jugurtha withdrew and the Romans built a network of fortified camps.16
The Romans spent the next few days in camp, where Metellus got troubling news. Jugurtha was riding around the countryside raising thousands more men from the surrounding communities to replace the men he had just lost. Despite the casualties the Romans had just inflicted, the Numidians would soon be back stronger than ever. With Jugurtha fielding an almost unlimited number of men, Metellus determined this was not a war that could be won by a series of battles. It would instead require a steady envelopment of the entire country to eliminate Jugurtha’s access to men. The next phase of the war would offer few opportunities for glorious heroics, but Metellus was here to win the war.17
BACK IN ROME, the ex-tribune Gaius Memmius used the debacles in Numidia to widen his crusade against senatorial misconduct. Just as Metellus left for Africa in 109, an allied tribune named Gaius Mamilius created a special tribunal later dubbed the Mamilian Commission to investigate corruption and treason. Memmius served as the principal prosecutor. Staffed by Equestrian jurors and run by populare leaders looking to settle old scores, the prosecution moved seamlessly from specific charges of bribery to a general attack on the Senate. Memmius and his fellow prosecutors “conducted the investigation with harshness and violence, on hearsay evidence and at the caprice of the commons.”18
The first man hauled before the commission was Lucius Opimius, who had long been a bête noire of the populare—guilty of the uncompromising sack of Fregellae in 125 and the slaughter of the Gracchans in 121. Having avoided punishment for a decade, the time had come for Opimius to feel the wrath of the people. Opimius was charged with treason for his conduct leading the first embassy to Numidia. He was found guilty of accepting bribes from Jugurtha and exiled. Opimius departed Rome and “spent his old age in infamy, hated and abused by the people.”19
Next up was the former consul Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, who had sailed off to Numidia in 111 to bring Jugurtha to heel and instead pocketed some cash and gave Jugurtha a slap on the wrist. The princeps senatus Scaurus personally defended Bestia before the commission, but Bestia too was convicted and exiled. Two men of consular rank had now been banished by the wrath of the populare.20
The commission then continued its general attack on the optimates who had failed Rome. Gaius Porcius Cato was prosecuted on trumped up charges—his real crime being his defeats in the north back in 114. And of course the officers who had led the campaign in Numidia that ended with the legions passing under the yoke were accused of treason and exiled. In the end, the Mamilian Commission convicted four men of consular rank in an unprecedented strike at the alleged authority of the Senate.21
The work of the Mamilian Commission was one of the key reasons that Sallust decided to write on the Jugurthine War: it marked the aggressive return of the populare as a force in Roman politics. A decade after the fall of Gaius Gracchus, the populare were returning with a vengeance. The populare assault on the Senate also cleared space for the rise of a new generation of novus homo. Men who could run for office and make their case on explicitly antisenatorial terms, to turn being novus homo from a negative to a positive. The chief beneficiary of this new environment would be Gaius Marius.22
THE ROMANS WERE able to focus on the political drama swirling around Jugurtha in part because the northern border had remained relatively quiet. The Macedonian frontier was silent and the Cimbri had departed for parts unknown after the Battle of Noreia in 113. But four years after that last contact, the Cimbri reappeared. They had apparently failed to find a permanent home and were now descending south through the Rhône valley, ready to try their luck in southern Gaul again.23
With Metellus having departed for Numidia, the Senate ordered his colleague Marcus Junius Silanus to muster what forces remained in Italy. But with Metellus already requiring a special dispensation to raise recruits for Numidia, Silanus found himself drawing from an even thinner manpower pool. But the consul managed to dredge the last warm bodies out of that pool and march them through the Alps into Gaul. As the two sides squared off, a small party of Cimbric ambassadors traveled to Rome to say that “the people of Mars should give them some land by way of pay and use their hands and weapons for any purpose it wished.” The Senate refused to grant the Cimbris’ request—Rome made treaties with defeated enemies, not defiant tribes.24
After the Cimbri received their answer, Silanus encouraged the Cimbri to move along, but that provoked a battle. Details of the battle are nonexistent and all we really know is the outcome: once again the Cimbri crushed the legions. The casualties were staggering. It was said that “after so many men had been killed, some were crying for sons or brothers; others, orphaned by the death of their fathers, lamented the loss of their parents and the desolation of Italy; and a very large number of women, deprived of their husbands, were turned into poor widows.” But beyond the individual suffering, the Cimbric victory meant that the road to Italy was now clear.25
But, as before, the Cimbri showed no interest in pillaging Italy. Their new objective may have been to simply contain the Romans on the Italian peninsula as they set themselves up as the premier power in south-central Gaul. Their victories certainly upended the political situation in the region. Many of Rome’s allies in Gaul tore up their treaties now that a bigger bully had moved onto the block.
BACK IN ROME, the plebs urbana were horrified by the failure of Silanus, and there was little happening in Numidia to take their minds off the looming menace of the Cimbri. Metellus’s decision to seek a more methodical reduction of Numidia was militarily sound, but it fed the general belief that the only thing the nobles did in Numidia was drag their feet. Though Metellus was not actually dragging his feet, his image still took a hit back in Rome.26
In late 109, Metellus broke his army into smaller units and sent them out to ravage communities that remained loyal to Jugurtha. After he made a few brutal examples, communities started surrendering the minute the Romans arrived. To combat this war of intimidation, Jugurtha turned to guerrilla tactics. Allowing his peasant conscripts to go home, Jugurtha and his best cavalry units shadowed the legions wherever they went, harassing Roman communication and supply lines and picking off individual units if they ever strayed too far from the main force. They also rode ahead of the Romans to likely campsites, spoiling fields that might be used to feed Roman horses and poisoning any freshwater springs.27
But as weeks turned into months, the inhabitants of Numidia tired of the crisscrossing armies and blamed Jugurtha for provoking the Romans to war. Metellus attempted to exploit that resentment. He opened clandestine talks with Jugurtha’s loyal lieutenant Bomilcar, who was last seen in Rome orchestrating the assassination of Massiva. After a mix of bribes and threats Bomilcar agreed to convince Jugurtha to surrender. Returning from the secret rendezvous, Bomilcar painted a dismal picture for Jugurtha: The Romans are going to win. The country is in ruins. The people are unhappy. It is time to give up for the good of all Numidia. Coming from such a close friend, Jugurtha relented and resigned himself to defeat. He sent an envoy to Metellus asking for terms of surrender.28
Metellus was not going to let Jugurtha off lightly. Jugurtha was to be stripped of his wealth and the means to make further war. He was to promptly deliver “two hundred thousand pounds of silver, all his elephants, and a considerable quantity of horses and arms.” But with the darkness closing in, Jugurtha’s survival instincts kicked back to life. When Metellus ordered the king to present himself in person, Jugurtha balked. The king refused the final order to surrender and instead rode deep into the interior of Numidia, far from the Romans. There, in distant seclusion, he could plot his return.29
Metellus was frustrated that his plan to end the war had been stymied at the eleventh hour, but he knew he had considerably weakened Jugurtha. Metellus was also gratified to learn shortly thereafter that the Senate had extended his command; he would have another year to capture the elusive king. But while Metellus focused on Jugurtha, an even greater danger lurked within his own ranks.30
GAIUS MARIUS HAD always kept his eye on the consulship. Though the path of his political career had been uneven, he felt that it was his destiny to one day achieve high office. He was now approaching his fiftieth birthday and continued to carry those ambitions of power. Marius was convinced that if given the chance he could outshine the stagnant optimates and become the most dominant man in Rome.
A year of fighting under Metellus had reminded everyone that Marius was an excellent soldier and popular with the men under his command. He was generous with spoils, mingled easily with the common legionaries, and joined in with camp labor. As Plutarch later wrote, “It is a most agreeable spectacle for a Roman soldier when he sees a general eating common bread in public, or sleeping on a simple pallet, or taking a hand in the construction of some trench or palisade. For they have not so much admiration for those leaders who share honor and riches with them as for those who take part in their toils and dangers.” Marius personified this type of leadership.31
In early 108, Marius went to the port city of Utica to attend to some business and make a few necessary sacrifices to the gods. During these rituals, Marius asked a soothsayer to take stock of his own personal situation. The soothsayer told him “a great and marvelous career awaited him” and encouraged Marius to keep “trusting in the gods, to carry out what he had in mind and put his fortune to the test as often as possible.” There was only one thing on Marius’s mind at the moment, and the message from the gods could not be clearer. Marius resolved to return to the legionary camp and request Metellus grant him a leave of absence so he could return to Rome and run for the consulship.32
However, Metellus wasn’t interested in letting Marius leave. He told Marius that such dreams were not for all men, that Marius really ought to content himself with the success he’d already won and not seek to rise above his station. But Marius refused to let it go, pestering Metellus until Metellus caustically put an end to the debate. “Don’t be in a hurry to go to Rome,” he said. “It will be soon enough for you to be a candidate when my son becomes one.” Since Metellus’s oldest son was then just twenty years old, the implication was clear: Metellus would never grant Marius’s request for leave.33
Furious but undeterred, Marius activated the extensive network of support he had built up both back in Rome and among the soldiers and merchants in Numidia. Marius openly griped that Metellus was dragging his feet and that if he were in charge the war would be over in a matter of weeks. He also curried favor with the remnants of the Numidian royal family that had fled into exile. Another grandson of the long-dead King Micipsa named Gauda approached Metellus, requesting to be recognized as the rightful king when Jugurtha was dethroned. But Metellus refused to treat the young man with any royal honors. Marius tracked down the offended would-be king and promised that he would be king if Marius was in charge. Marius’s politicking in Numidia led to a steady stream of letters back to Rome claiming that Metellus was turning into a slow-moving tyrant who was now too much in love with imperious power to end the war properly. Marius boldly claimed that if “but half the army were put in his charge, he would have Jugurtha in fetters within a few days.”34
AS THESE POLITICAL machinations unfolded in the Roman camp, King Jugurtha was himself back to work—rebuilding his treasury, recruiting soldiers, and generally undermining the Roman occupation of Numidia. In the winter of 109–108, he made contact with the Roman-occupied city of Vaga and induced its people to revolt. With the revolt erupting on a holiday, the Roman garrison was caught off guard and slaughtered to a man. Well, almost to a man. The commander of the garrison, a well-liked officer named Titus Turpilius Silanus, somehow escaped unharmed.35
When word of the revolt reached Metellus, he raced his army to Vaga, overwhelmed its meager defenses, and sacked it mercilessly. The fate of the garrison commander Silanus, meanwhile, was still up in the air. Hauled before Metellus to explain how he lost the city but not his life, Silanus had no clear answers. In the closed-door deliberations that followed, Marius allegedly urged Metellus to sentence Silanus to death for treason. Metellus was fond of Silanus but ultimately agreed. Silanus was scourged and executed.36
But in the aftermath of the execution, Marius went around whispering that Metellus had done wrong by Silanus, and that his cruel punishment far outweighed the crime—doubly so because it was not even in Metellus’s power as consul to hand down such a sentence without right of appeal to the Assembly. The incident was depressing to Metellus, especially because now his men doubted him and looked openly to Marius for leadership.37
Metellus likely hoped that all this carping and behind-the-back undermining of his authority would soon be irrelevant as his secret connection to the traitorous Bomilcar seemed about ready to bear fruit. But instead, Jugurtha discovered Bomilcar’s treachery and executed his once faithful lieutenant. Metellus’s latest plan to capture Jugurtha had failed, but it did help drive Jugurtha into paranoid isolation. From that point on Jugurtha “never passed a quiet day or night; he put little trust in any place, person, or time; feared his countrymen and the enemy alike.”38
Since the failure to capture Jugurtha meant the war would continue, Metellus admitted that a disgruntled Marius would be more a hindrance than a help in the next campaign. So just twelve days before the consular election Metellus finally gave Marius leave to return to Rome. His hope was that even if Marius won election that the Senate would not appoint him to take over Metellus’s command in Numidia.39
AFTER MARIUS DEPARTED, Metellus marched out to finish the war. At that point, Jugurtha’s campaign was in dire straits. The king’s increasing paranoia drove many former supporters away, and conscripts deserted almost as soon as they were pressed into service. In the closing months of 108, Metellus managed to chase Jugurtha all the way to the city of Thala, deep in the interior of Numidia. The city was supposedly impervious to siege as it sat atop the only source of freshwater for fifty miles. But thanks to a fortuitous rain that filled Roman water sacks, the legions were able to batter down the gates. The sack of Thala turned out to be a hollow victory, however: by the time the Romans entered the city, Jugurtha had already fled. Meanwhile, the leaders of Thala gathered up anything the Romans might seize as profitable plunder and loaded it into the main palace in the center of town. There they threw themselves one last grand banquet and afterward, set fire to the building, destroying everything in it, including themselves.40
Though the capture of Thala was not decisive, it did change the dynamic of the war. Thala had been Jugurtha’s last great stronghold in Numidia and its fall forced him out of his own kingdom entirely. Jugurtha kept constantly on the move, riding southwest into the wild territory beyond the reach of the “civilized” powers. It was there that he finally found refuge with a tribe of nomads inhabiting the Atlas Mountains. Thanks to the treasure he carried with him, Jugurtha convinced these nomadic horsemen to form the core of a new army.41
But the mercenary nomads alone would not be enough to continue the war with Rome, so Jugurtha also wrote to King Bocchus of Mauretania to propose an alliance. The Kingdom of Mauretania bordered Numidia to the west, covering the region of northwest Africa that roughly corresponds to modern-day Morocco. The two monarchs already shared a familial tie, though the exact nature isn’t clear: some sources say Jugurtha married Bocchus’s daughter; others say Bocchus married Jugurtha’s daughter. Regardless, the king of Mauretania turned out to be amenable to a closer alliance as he had no love for the Romans or their habit of imperial expansion.42
The first joint operation of the new anti-Roman coalition was to attack the great city of Cirta. The city had been in Roman hands for many years now, and Metellus had used Cirta as the primary storehouse for his own treasury, baggage, and captured prisoners. Informed of the alliance between Jugurtha and Bocchus, Metellus decided not to rush out into battle, instead staying close to his defensive base, waiting for the kings to come to him. He sent out repeated letters of warning to Bocchus about getting mixed up with Jugurtha’s inevitably doomed resistance. Bocchus wrote back hinting at a peaceful solution but always seeking leniency for Jugurtha. It is not clear whether Bocchus was stalling for time or genuinely trying to negotiate a settlement.43
It was while he corresponded with Bocchus that Metellus was hit with a broadside from Rome. Not only had Gaius Marius been elected consul, but the Assembly had voted to override the Senate’s decision to keep Metellus in command of Numidia. Marius would soon be on his way to take over the job. Crushed and angry, Metellus was “more affected by this news than was right or becoming, neither refraining from tears nor bridling his tongue; although he had the other qualities of a great man, he showed little fortitude in bearing mortification.”44
MARIUS’S CAMPAIGN FOR the consulship marked the culminating blow against the optimates in the Senate. What had begun with Memmius’s attacks in 111, and then continued through the Mamilian Commission corruption trials in 109, now climaxed with the consular campaign of a proudly defiant novus homo. For Marius this day had been a long time coming.
Marius campaigned with a thunderous fury. In yet another clear break with mos maiorum, Marius routinely denounced Metellus for his conduct during the war. It was unheard of for a subordinate to criticize his general so openly, but Marius refused to be a slave to tradition—especially after Metellus tried to block him from the consulship. Above all, Marius made a single forthright promise: “If they would make him consul, he would within a short time deliver Jugurtha alive or dead into the hands of the Roman People.” Not surprisingly, Marius was elected.45
After his victory, Marius’s attacks on the Senate only intensified. He denounced the old nobles as men of lineage but not merit: “I personally know of men, citizens, who after being elected consuls began for the first time to read the history of our forefathers and the military treatises of the Greeks!” He said if they made mistakes that “their ancient nobility, the brave deeds of their ancestors, the power of their kindred and relatives, their throng of clients, are all a very present help.” He himself could not “display family portraits or the triumphs and consulships of my forefathers; but if occasion requires, I can show spears, a banner, trappings and other military prizes as well as scars on my breast. These are my portraits.” He then ended by saying triumphantly of the Senate that he had “wrested the consulship from them as the spoils of victory.”46
But his election alone did not guarantee that he would take over the Numidian campaign. Indeed, the Senate had already determined Numidia would remain Metellus’s province for another year. But as they had previously done for Scipio Aemilianus, the Assembly overrode the Senate and made Numidia Marius’s province. The bonds of mos maiorum loosened still further.47
As he prepared to raise new legions, Marius ran into the same problem that had plagued Rome for a generation. As more and more families were pushed off their land, fewer and fewer men met the minimum property requirement for service in the legions. But while the consuls were forced to scrape the bottom of a very dry barrel looking for potential legionaries, tens of thousands of young men sat idle. The only mark against them was that they did not own land. So to fill his legions, Marius took a fateful step in the long history of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic—he requested exemption from the property qualification. Of this request to recruit from among the poorest plebs, Sallust says: “Some say that he did this through lack of good men, others because of a desire to curry favor… As a matter of fact, to one who aspires to power the poorest man is the most helpful, since he has no regard for his property, having none, and considers anything honorable for which he receives pay.” Any man, no matter how poor and destitute, could now serve in the army. With the promise of plunder and glory dangled before their eyes, poor men from across Italy rushed to sign up for Marius’s open legions.48
Emergency suspension of the property requirements was not without precedent. An ancestor of the Gracchi had even led a legion composed of slaves and gladiators during the darkest days of the Second Punic War. But what makes this moment so important is that it marked a permanent transition from temporary armies conscripted from among the free citizens to professional armies composed of soldiers who made their careers in the army—whose loyalties would be to their generals rather than to the Senate and People of Rome. But Marius wasn’t thinking about the grand sweep of history. For the moment, he just wanted to raise an army of men to go fulfill his promise to win the war.49
Eager to begin, Marius sailed for Africa before his new army was completely assembled. New cohorts of cavalry were still in the process of being raised, so Marius left his newly elected quaestor to finish the job. That quaestor’s name was Lucius Cornelius Sulla.