CHAPTER 10

THE RUINS OF CARTHAGE

Envoys met him on the road and asked him why he was marching with armed forces against his country. “To deliver her from tyrants,” he replied.

APPIAN¹

THE KINGDOM OF PONTUS STRETCHED ACROSS WHAT IS today the Black Sea coast of Turkey. In the 500s BC the Greeks had planted a ring of colonies around the Black Sea that were later absorbed into the Hellenic kingdoms that emerged after the death of Alexander the Great. The first King Mithridates of Pontus hailed from the mountainous interior of Anatolia, but in the 280s he expanded his domains north to the shores of the Black Sea. His successors continued this expansion, culminating with the capture of the Greek city of Sinope in 183. Hemmed in by east-west-running mountains, the new Kingdom of Pontus occupied the fertile and mineral-rich strip of land between the mountains to the south and the coast to the north. Mixing Greek and Persian elements, the Pontic kings took advantage of the soil, metal, and trade connections they now controlled. But in the mid-second century, Pontus remained a minor eastern kingdom in a world full of minor eastern kingdoms.²

Mithridates VI was born in Sinope fifty years after it became the capital of Pontus. The eldest son of the king, Mithridates was expected to one day reign over Pontus, but his path to power would not be easy. Like any self-respecting Hellenic king, his father was assassinated by poison in 120, leaving a power vacuum in the kingdom. With Mithridates still a minor, his mother, Queen Laodice, stepped in and took over as regent. But contrary to all parental morality, Laodice clearly favored her younger son. The teenage Mithridates dodged an assassination attempt by his mother and ran away from the palace. According to legend, Mithridates embarked on a seven-year-long training montage—hunting, swimming, reading, studying the people, learning fifty languages—until he had become the embodiment of the ideal prince. At the end of the heroic montage, Mithridates returned to Sinope in 113 and evicted his wicked mother and brother, both of whom soon died of “natural causes.”³

Upon his ascension to the throne, Mithridates built up a mercenary army to further project Pontic authority. In the 110s, he answered a call for help from Greek cities in the Crimea, on the other side of the Black Sea, who were under attack from raiding Thracians. Mithridates expelled the Thracians and won the justifiable submission of the Crimean communities. Now joined under his benevolent protection, Mithridates controlled the entire circuit of Black Sea trade—with Russia to the north, Persia to the east, Greece and Italy to the west, and the entire Mediterranean to the south. Mithridates controlled access to wealth, resources, and manpower that would make his Black Sea empire one of the strongest powers Rome ever encountered.⁴

Early in his career, Mithridates allied with his neighbor King Nicomedes III of Bithynia to divvy up territory in Anatolia. Roman ambassadors ordered them to desist, but with Roman attention tied up with Jugurtha and the Cimbri, there was little the Romans could do. Eventually, Mithridates and Nicomedes had a falling out over control of Cappadocia, which bordered both kingdoms and served as the overland trade link between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In 101, Mithridates personally slit the throat of the king of Cappadocia and placed his own son on the throne. This was the settlement Mithridates wanted ratified when his ambassadors were abused in Rome by Saturninus.⁵

With Mithridates now commanding an international reputation, Gaius Marius made a point to meet the Pontic king on his circuit of the east in 98. After a conference, Marius told Mithridates, “Either strive to be stronger than Rome, or do her bidding without a word.” Some say Marius already had his eye on a future war with Mithridates, but for the moment Pontus was just another random eastern kingdom. There was no reason for Marius to suspect what would become obvious a decade later: that Mithridates VI was not just Mithridates VI—he was Mithridates the Great.⁶

A few years later, Mithridates’s ambitions provoked the Senate to intervene in Cappadocia when they ordered Sulla to place the client king Ariobarzanes on the throne. But despite this minor setback, Mithridates recovered. Not only did he secure a marriage alliance with the powerful King Tigranes I of Armenia, but his old rival Nicomedes III died in 94 leaving a mere boy on the Bithynian throne. With the Romans mired in the Social War, Mithridates induced Tigranes to invade Cappadocia while he invaded Bithynia. Both the puppet king Ariobarzanes and the boy king Nicomedes IV fled to Rome.⁷

THE REFUGEE KINGS of Cappadocia and Bithynia arrived in Rome just as the Social War was breaking out. The Senate had more important things to worry about than who controlled a few dusty goat paths in Anatolia, so they ignored the entreaties of the two young kings. To gin up interest in their plight, the kings promised lavish indemnities in exchange for help, so the Senate relented and sent an embassy to escort Nicomedes and Ariobarzanes back across the Aegean. The man they selected for the job was Manius Aquillius, Marius’s former lieutenant and victor of the Second Servile War.⁸

When the Romans arrived, Mithridates and Tigranes withdrew back to their own kingdoms rather than tangle with the Romans. Reinstalling the two kings, Aquillius leaned heavily on them to make good on the lavish promises they had made back in Rome. The kings sputtered about poverty, but Aquillius told them all wealth they ever needed was in Pontus for the taking. A charitable reading of Aquillius pushing the kings to invade Pontus is that he believed Mithridates an empty shirt. So far any time the Roman gaze turned to him, the Pontic king averted his eyes and retreated to his den. But it has also been suggested that as a close friend and ally of Marius, Aquillius was deliberately provoking Mithridates so Marius could lead the eastern command he coveted. Of course, it’s also possible Aquillius was just being stupid.⁹

In the spring of 89, Nicomedes IV invaded Pontus. But Mithridates was not an empty shirt, and the Pontic army sent the Bithynians limping home in a broken heap. Mithridates complained to Aquillius about the encroachment, but got no response. So the king concluded that Rome planned to use its client kingdoms to squeeze Pontus off the map. But Mithridates had no intention of being squeezed off the map. After years of careful groundwork, the king of Pontus was ready to reveal the full potential of his Black Sea empire.¹⁰

To get Aquillius’s attention, Mithridates sent armies into Cappadocia and once again chased Ariobarzanes out of the country. Then he fortified the frontier with Bithynia and sent an embassy to Aquillius in Pergamum. These ambassadors read aloud a list of all Mithridates’s foreign alliances, and gave a full accounting of the resources at his disposal—from the size of his treasury, to the number of men he could conscript, to the number of ships in his fleet. The ambassadors then said that if Rome was not careful they risked losing their dominions in Asia. It was not a declaration of war. But it was an invitation for a declaration of war.¹¹

With only a single legion of true Roman soldiers at his disposal, Aquillius had to rely on local conscripts to guard the border with Pontus. But what these conscripts lacked in skill, they made up in abundance. Within a few months, Aquillius could call on four armies of 40,000 soldiers each. One army was led by Nicomedes IV, and the other three by subordinate Roman praetors. But though Aquillius soon had 150,000–200,000 men guarding every pass in and out of Bithynia, that did not mean he was a match for Mithridates. With his legitimacy based on military strength from the beginning, Mithridates’s core Pontic army was trained, disciplined, and experienced. Around this core, Mithridates could call in new conscripts of his own from across the known world. In this first campaign, Mithridates marched against Aquillius with 150,000 men. At their height, the Pontic armies would bulge to 250,000 infantry and 40,000 cavalry.¹²

When Mithridates advanced on Bithynia, he crushed Aquillius’s conscripts “guarding” the passes. All four armies disintegrated and the Roman officers evacuated the mainland to the island city of Rhodes. Aquillius himself retreated to Pergamum and evacuated to the island of Lesbos. As if this land invasion was not enough, Mithridates also sent a war fleet through the Bosporus. The Romans had hired a Greek navy to block the straights, but they too disintegrated upon contact with the enemy. Now Pontic forces controlled both the land and the sea. If Aquillius had really come to provoke Mithridates into a war, he had done a fine job.¹³

Mithridates proceeded to envelope the entire province of Asia. Being an enlightened model of an ideal king, Mithridates knew exactly how to introduce himself. He announced that he was here to liberate the people of Asia from the yoke of the Roman oppression. A generation of publicani abuse in Asia gave Mithridates the perfect propaganda tool: he declared a five-year tax holiday and canceled all outstanding debts owed to Italians. Then, when Mithridates promised leniency to the people of Lesbos in exchange for handing over Aquillius, the people complied. Now a prisoner, Aquillius became a frequent target of humiliating jokes in Mithridates’s court.¹⁴

WHILE AQUILLIUS LOST control of Asia, his patron Marius stewed back in Rome. After being shunted aside during the Social War, Marius had gone home and watched with increasing bitterness as the next generation of rising stars took over. Pompey Strabo was building a powerful base in Picenum and Cisalpine Gaul. Down in the south, Metellus Pius—son of Marius’s late rival Numidicus—would soon be consul. And then there was Sulla, whose success ate at Marius most of all. Sulla’s exploits in Campania and Samnium were added to the list of heroic deeds on Sulla’s resume that went all the way back to his capture of Jugurtha in 105. As the Social War wound down, Sulla’s star burned hotter than any man’s in Italy.¹⁵

Casting a dejected eye on the situation in Italy, Marius looked further afield for a chance to quench the thirst for glory, and spied the deteriorating situation in Asia. But if Marius really thought he could secure an eastern command, he was deluding himself. He was almost seventy years old. The Romans did not send seventy-year-olds to run their wars. To prove he could handle the job, Marius came down to the Campus Martius daily to exercise and display his physical prowess. He cut a comic, and somewhat pathetic, figure going through his regimen. Crowds gathered to watch, some cheering him on but most “moved to pity at the sight of his greed and ambition, because, though he had risen from poverty to the greatest wealth and from obscurity to the highest place he knew not how to set bounds to his good fortune.” On top of his age, Marius had already been maneuvered out of commands during the Social War, so why on earth he thought anyone would let him take five legions to Asia is a mystery. Marius was never in serious consideration for the job. The men who were in serious contention were off waging the Social War, not doing jumping jacks in the Forum.¹⁶

The consular elections in 89 were delayed until the end of the year due to the ongoing war. By then Rome probably knew about Mithridates’s capture of Cappadocia and provocative letter to Aquillius. A consulship now meant a chance to run a great war in the east, and candidates came hard for the job, “every one striving to be general in the war against Mithridates, lured on by the greatness of the rewards and riches to be reaped in that war.” When the elections finally came at the end of December, there was intense jockeying for the command. Sulla and his close friend Quintus Pompeius Rufus (whose son had recently married Sulla’s daughter) ran as a team, with Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo Vopiscus trying to push his way in between them.¹⁷

But Vopiscus was trying to cut in line. He had never served as praetor and was thus ineligible. With the elections approaching, the old optimate faction in the Senate sought to block Vopiscus, who was a notoriously unstable populare. To deny Vopiscus the consulship, they turned to newly enrolled tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus. Sulpicius seemed like the perfect guy for the job: “a man of eloquence and energy, who had earned situation by his wealth, his influence, his friendships, and by the vigor of his native ability and his courage, and had previously won great influence with the people by honorable means.” Sulpicius had grown up at the feet of the Metellan optimates and was one of the young students present for the dialogue at Crassus’s villa in September 91. Sulpicius vetoed Vopiscus’s request for a dispensation. But since the word of a tribune wasn’t what it used to be, it took a few rounds of street clashes before Vopiscus conceded defeat.¹⁸

Sulla and Pompeius won the consulship and Sulla received the eastern command—one of the signs he took to mean that fortune favored his every undertaking. Far from allowing his pride to reject the idea that his accomplishments were the result of luck, Sulla embraced Fortuna as his personal deity: “Being well endowed by nature for Fortune rather than for war, he seems to attribute more to Fortune than to his own excellence, and to make himself entirely the creature of this deity.” Shortly after his election he received another fortunate break—securing a new marriage to Metella, the widow of Scaurus. With this marriage, Sulla took the reins of the old Metellan faction and began to re-form it in his own image.¹⁹

BUT AFTER PAVING the way for the election of Sulla and Pompeius, the tribune Sulpicius turned on his optimate friends. The old Metellan faction seemed to be entering permanent eclipse. Crassus had died in 91. Scaurus died in 89. And of course, the cohort of six Metellan cousins had now come and gone, leaving behind only their uneven sons to carry the mantle. Despite the recent marriage of Sulla and Metella that might revive the family’s fortunes, Sulpicius decided to throw in his lot with Marius. Where once Sulpicius had followed the optimate path to power, he now embraced the populares.²⁰

For this betrayal, Sulpicius is roundly denounced in the sources “so that the question was not whom else he surpassed in wickedness, but in what he surpassed his own wickedness. For the combination of cruelty, effrontery, and rapacity in him was regardless of shame and of all evil.” Cicero later wailed, “For why should I speak of Publius Sulpicius? Whose dignity, and sweetness, and emphatic conciseness in speaking was so great that he was able by his oratory to lead even wise men into error, and virtuous men into pernicious sentiments.” But it would not be until the early months of 88 that Sulpicius’s betrayal revealed itself.²¹

Sulpicius’s turn against the optimate was not entirely unpredictable. He was known to be an “admirer and an imitator of Saturninus, except that he charged him with timidity and hesitation in his political measures.” Any man who believed Saturninus timid must have had a ferocious spirit. But in Sulpicius’s final analysis, it was not courage that Saturninus lacked, but organization. The Gracchi, Saturninus, and Drusus had all relied on random mobs raised in an emergency to fight their battles. So Sulpicius’s great contribution to Roman politics was the invention of the professional street gang. Surrounding himself with three hundred armed men of Equestrian rank whom he called the Anti-Senate, Sulpicius also kept thousands of mercenary swordsmen on retainer. If Sulpicius gave the word they would be ready to fight.²²

But beyond his alliance with Marius, Sulpicius saw that his real path to power went through the Italians. In early 88, he proposed a law to recall the men exiled by the anti-Italian Varian Commission. And with the question of civitas for the Italians settled, Sulpicius announced his intention to give them full suffragium to go with it. Rather than bury the Italians in new tribes that voted last, or lump them into the four urban tribes, Sulpicius planned to disperse them equally throughout the 31 rural tribes. If Sulpicius carried this measure, the Italians could command majorities in the Assembly. Sulpicius would not just win a new host of grateful clients, he would control the Assembly itself.²³

Both the Senate and the plebs urbana were threatened by Sulpicius’s proposal. Old noble patrons, working merchants, and common artisans alike could see the Roman voice in government was about to be diminished and wanted the Italians kept separate, “so that they might not, by being mingled with the old citizens, vote them down in the elections by force of numbers.” Having surrendered the issue of citizenship, the Romans built a new line at suffrage. Sulpicius’s proposal led to clashes in the streets between angry plebs urbana and the Anti-Senate.²⁴

With these riots breaking out, Sulla was at his camp at Nola. As soon as he heard the news, he hurried back to Rome. When he reached the Forum, Sulla and his colleague Pompeius staged a dramatic intervention. Tribunician vetoes not being what they once were, they decided to see how Sulpicius liked a taste of full consular authority. Standing on the rostra of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, Sulla and Pompeius used their religious authority to declare a feriae, a holiday that triggered the cessation of all public business. Sulpicius did not care for this taste of this consular authority, but instead of meekly submitting, his Anti-Senate pulled out hidden weapons. With the crowds hostile and the threats getting specific, Sulla and Pompeius retreated from the rostra. The consuls got away but Pompeius’s son was not so lucky. An outspoken defender of his father, the younger Pompeius went too far, and Sulpicius’s gang killed him on the spot.²⁵

Sulla found the closest safe haven near at hand: Marius’s house at the foot of the Palatine Hill. What was said between the two men is unknown, but Marius must have told Sulla the only way he was getting out of this alive was to rescind the feriae and allow the vote on Sulpicius’s laws to proceed. Left with no other choice, Sulla agreed. It would be the last time they were in the same room together.²⁶

Emerging from his consultation with Marius, Sulla remounted the rostra and withdrew the holiday decree, allowing public business to return to normal. Then he departed the Forum. Cleared of these distractions, Sulpicius convened the Assembly and carried his bills on Italian suffrage. Then he tossed in the surprise kicker, something no one was expecting. He convinced the Assembly to withdraw Sulla’s appointment to the eastern command and transfer it to Marius. Already on his way back to the army, Sulla had no idea he had just lost his job.²⁷

THE SIX LEGIONS Sulla led during the Social War were still camped outside Nola. This army had been fighting under Sulla for a year, and he had earned their devoted loyalty. Sulla always had an easygoing rapport with common soldiers. Though he had the unmistakable air of an arrogant aristocrat, he never shirked his duty or let his men down. And now that he had been elected consul, he was about to lead them east to pacify some wayward king on the far side of the Aegean. Fighting a civil war in your own backyard is neither fun nor profitable, but conquering a rich eastern kingdom sounded mighty fine indeed. So as the soldiers sat around Nola waiting for Sulla to come back, they dreamed of the campaign to come.²⁸

When Sulla returned a few days later he likely did not ride with his usual resplendent vigor. He was still consul, and still slated to run the eastern war, but he had been embarrassed in the head-to-head confrontation with Sulpicius and Marius. He had been forced by violence to humiliate himself and withdraw his own decree. Sulla’s agitation turned to fury when a messenger arrived bearing the incredible news: The Assembly had stripped Sulla of the eastern command. Gaius Marius would now lead the expedition.²⁹

The shock of the revelation cannot be understated. Old Marius’s pathetic pursuit of the command was well known. His calisthenics out on the Campus Martius were a joke, not a prelude to getting the job. Especially not after Sulla had won the consulship and drawn the Mithridatic command. But after years of enduring Sulla’s arrogant vanity, Marius was finally ready to get his revenge. His plan was to bury Sulla under a wave of humiliations from which Sulla could not recover. Following either the letter of the law or the unwritten codes of mos maiorum would be the end of Sulla; if he wanted to survive he was going to have to break both.

This news of the change in command would have been impossible to contain. Restless shockwaves rippled through the camps at Nola. What happened next? Was Sulla still their commander? Were they still going east? Then the notice went around that Sulla planned to address his troops. Throughout Roman history, generals had addressed their troops only to discuss military business—usually matters of pay, discipline, and strategy. Now for the first time, a Roman general delivered a political speech to his men. Sulla described what had happened back in Rome, told them about his maltreatment at the hands of Marius and Sulpicius, and then revealed the latest outrage: he had been stripped of the eastern command. The soldiers were outraged—not only at the treatment of their chief, but also out of fear that they would be left behind. Marius had his own vast recruiting network of veterans, friends, and clients to draw on. The troops under Sulla’s command were likely to be left in Italy and miss out on the riches they had already spent in their minds.³⁰

Believing he had successfully euthanized Sulla’s political career, Marius began the process of taking over the legions and sent two military tribunes to Nola with orders to remove Sulla from command. These two guys—whose names are unrecorded—became unfortunate early casualties of the Civil War. Assuming command of the army was supposed to be a matter of routine paperwork, but when the two officers arrived they were seized by Sulla’s inflamed legions and stoned to death.³¹

With his men ready to follow him anywhere, Sulla took a conference with his senior officers and made his audacious proposal. If Sulpicius and Marius were going to run roughshod over consular authority, then they were going to have to live with the consequences. Sulla told them he was going to lead his six legions back to Rome. Almost to a man his officers refused to participate in any such march. Never before had a Roman general marched legionaries against Rome itself. So left with only a quaestor and some centurions, Sulla led his legions onto the Via Appia and began a slow march on Rome.³²

SULLA WAS NOT in any great hurry. He hoped the very fact of his approach would have the intended effect of forcing Marius and Sulpicius to back down. Unlike Marius, whose entire career was built on careful planning, Sulla was likely improvising each step and trusting himself to the goddess Fortuna. He later said, “Of the undertakings which men thought well-advised, those upon which he had boldly ventured, not after deliberation, but on the spur of the moment, turned out for the better.” For now it was enough that his army was moving toward Rome—what he would do when he got there was anyone’s guess. Including Sulla himself.³³

Sulla’s march triggered a flurry of activity in Rome. Sulpicius used his own considerable powers as tribune, combined with Marius’s new military authority, to seize control of the situation. Partisans of Sulla were identified and assassinated, while the Senate was cowed into submission by Sulpicius’s Anti-Senate. Those who managed to dodge the assassins, including the consul Pompeius, slipped out of Rome for the safety of Sulla’s army. On the other side, many soldiers—either for personal or patriotic reasons—refused to help Sulla conquer Rome. They deserted the march and raced ahead to Rome. This created a whirlwind of movement, as families coming to and from Rome jammed the streets, both sides carrying exaggerated rumors and reports about the situation in the old camp. Marius is murdering everyone! Sulla wants to raze Rome! Needless to say, it was not a time for careful contemplation.³⁴

The old guard in the Senate found themselves adrift in this chaotic storm. Certainly not friends with Marius and Sulpicius, they were now equally horrified that Sulla was marching six legions against Rome. So a moderate faction of senators attempted to find a way to broker a peace. They dispatched two praetors to Sulla’s approaching army, but with both linked to the Marians, Sulla scoffed at their demands. The praetors themselves were then severely maltreated. Though they got out alive, Sulla’s men smashed their symbols of office and tore off their togas. They returned to the Senate in a pitiful state. The Senate then sent another group of envoys who asked Sulla why he was marching his army against his own country, to which Sulla responded: “To deliver her from tyrants.”³⁵

When Sulla arrived at the outskirts of Rome he invited the Senate to further talks. The Senate’s representatives revealed that they had already decreed Sulla be given his command back. But everyone knew their decree was useless if Sulpicius controlled the Assembly. To bridge the impasse, Sulla said he was prepared to meet Marius and Sulpicius out on the Campus Martius and would pitch camp until a summit could be arranged.³⁶

But as soon as the envoys left Sulla told his men to suit up for battle. Word had already reached him that his friends inside the city were turning up dead. He also learned that Marius and Sulpicius were arming their supporters, promising freedom to slaves and gladiators who fought for them. The tales coming out of the city were more exaggerated than Sulla realized at the time. The call for slaves to join turned up a pitiful response; six veteran legions were marching on Rome—any slave who joined Marius would likely enjoy his freedom for all of five minutes before dying in the service of another man’s ambitions. But not knowing how weak the Marians really were, Sulla wanted to quickly secure a decisive victory. He ordered one of his legions forward to capture and hold the Esquiline Gate.³⁷

Marius and Sulpicius were alerted that Sulla’s men were moving and they prepared their own forces for battle. The two sides clashed in the forum of the Esquiline Hill. Marian partisans beat back the encroaching legionaries and pelted them from rooftops with tiles. Appian says that after a generation of street fights, this was “the first fought in Rome with bugle and standards in full military fashion, no longer like a mere faction fight. To such extremity of evil had the recklessness of party strife progressed among them.” With fighting under way, Sulla turned up personally with reinforcements and used archers with flaming arrows to drive the Marians off the roofs.³⁸

The Marians could hold against a single legion but never six, and they fell back as Sulla entered the city. Marius took temporary refuge in the Temple of Tellus and called for the citizens of Rome to join him in this patriotic defense against Sulla’s treacherous invasion—but his call went unheeded. To the plebs urbana, this was a grudge match between nobles that they wanted no part of. With Sulla seizing control of the main streets, Marius, Sulpicius, and their chief accomplices fled the city.³⁹

SULLA MARCHED THROUGH Rome following the path of Roman triumphs toward the Capitoline Hill. With a last clutch of Marians having captured the Capitoline Hill, Sulla led an entire legion across the Pomerium, the sacred inner boundary of Rome, within which no citizen was to bear arms. One of the last and most sacred lines of mos maiorum had been crossed.⁴⁰

Sulla was now left in the awkward position of being the first Roman to ever conquer Rome. He went out of his way to deflect the odium, singling out men under his command caught looting and punishing them for all to see. After a nervous night during which both he and Pompeius stayed up until dawn crisscrossing the city to make sure everything was under control, Sulla called for a public meeting the next morning in the Forum.⁴¹

When the crowd assembled, Sulla told them that his anger was only directed at a few select enemies. To prove his point, he announced the names of just twelve men he now considered enemies of the state. Marius and Sulpicius were at the top of the list. As public enemies, these twelve could now be killed on sight. But Sulla stressed that other than those twelve men, the rest of the population could expect no further trouble—even if they had taken part in the fighting. Sulla just wanted things to go back to normal.⁴²

But by “normal” Sulla did not just mean the way things had been the day before. He wanted the Romans to return to their roots. He said that the Republic had fallen into a terrible state of disrepair and needed to return to the virtuous constitution of their elders. A bill presented to the Assembly should first gain approval from the Senate. Voting should be heavily tilted toward major landowners. Taking a page from Drusus’s reforms, Sulla proposed adding three hundred Equestrians to the Senate to bulk up their numbers and make the institution robust and powerful again. But before he got those wider reforms dispensed, Sulla addressed more specific business. He announced that every law passed since Sulla and Pompeius declared the holiday was null and void. Sulla and Pompeius would still be consuls. Sulla would still have the eastern command. The plan to disperse the Italians throughout the thirty-one rural tribes would disappear into thin air.⁴³

Under the watchful eye of the Sullan legions, the Assembly turned Sulla’s suggestions into law. But after the reforms passed, Sulla sent his men back to Nola to prove that he was not a tyrant or a king. The Senate was, by now, convulsed with mixed emotions. Sulla was clearly acting as their savior and benefactor, but they bristled at Sulla’s pretensions to now be the patron of the Senate—as if they were now his clients. And crossing the Pomerium with an entire army was unforgivable sacrilege.⁴⁴

But Sulla studiously maintained that he was following a chain of precedent that linked Opimius in 121, to Marius in 100, to Sulla here in 88. What he had done was no different than what they had done: he took extraordinary consular action to quell a violent political faction. But of course, both Opimius and Marius had operated under the senatus consultum ultimum. The Senate had passed no such decree this time. Sulla acted under his own authority only. Legal scholars in the Senate were vexed, but Sulla’s legions spoke for themselves.

IN THE AFTERMATH of their defeat, the inner-circle Marians bolted out of Rome in every direction. Sulpicius ran for the coast but never made it outside the vicinity of Rome. Within a day of taking flight he was betrayed by a slave and executed the moment he was apprehended. Sulla later thanked the slave and said the man “deserved freedom in return for his services in giving information about the enemy.” But as soon as the manumission was complete Sulla “decreed that he should be hurled from the Tarpeian Rock because he had betrayed his master.”⁴⁵

Marius, meanwhile, fled that night to one of his estates twelve miles outside the city with his son, grandson, and a small party of loyal partisans. Knowing they could not stay in the area they agreed to sail for North Africa, where they would take refuge in the veteran colonies set up in the wake of the Numidian war. These communities had been planted more than fifteen years ago, but hopefully they would remember their former general and patron.⁴⁶

The next morning Marius and his party set sail from Ostia. Marius’s ship was not quite one hundred miles down the Italian coast when storms threw her against the shore near the city of Terracina. With the ship wrecked, the party had to continue on foot. Knowing Terracina was currently run by one of his enemies, Marius led the party along the coast toward the city of Minturnae, where Marius said he had friends. On the way, some shepherds told them the countryside was lousy with Sulla’s cavalry patrols. Unable to complete the trip before nightfall, Marius and his beleaguered compatriots spent a miserable night hiding in the woods without food or shelter.⁴⁷

The next morning, Marius led the party back to the shore to continue the walk to Minturnae. While they walked, Marius lifted their spirits by telling them a story from his childhood. When he was a boy he saw an eagle’s nest fall from a tree. Gathering the nest in his cloak, he saw that it contained seven tiny eagles. As an eagle traditionally lays no more than two eggs, the unprecedented little flock was a fabulous find. His parents took the birds to a local seer to inquire if it had any special meaning. The seer was amazed and said their son would “be most illustrious of men, and was destined to receive the highest command and power seven times.” Now on the run and condemned as enemies of the state, Marius reminded his friends that this could not possibly be the end for he had only been consul six times and was yet destined for one more. Somehow, some way, he would be consul again.⁴⁸

But just miles from Minturnae, they were spotted by a cavalry patrol. With nowhere to turn, someone in Marius’s party saw two ships sailing close to shore. Without waiting for permission from the sailors, the fugitives jumped in the water and swam. Most of the party reached one boat, forced the sailors to take them on board, and used very colorful threats to force the captain to sail them away. The older and slower Marius meanwhile dragged himself aboard the second boat and presented himself to the dumbfounded captain.⁴⁹

The cavalry detachment hailed the captain from shore and said the wet old man on his boat was the fugitive Gaius Marius. The captain now faced the dilemma Marius would impose on everyone he met during his ordeal: hand over Marius and risk the wrath of his friends, or protect Marius and risk the wrath of his enemies. The captain decided he could not hand Marius over and sailed away. Not immediately following the boat that had sped off with Marius’s companions, the captain steered the craft to the mouth of a nearby river. The captain told Marius to go ashore, rest, and gather some provisions from the trip. As soon as Marius disembarked the captain sailed away. His solution to the dilemma was to set Marius down and run away.⁵⁰

The abandoned Marius sat for a time and contemplated his sorry state. Then he picked himself up and moved inland, tromping through swampland, still aiming for Minturnae. With night falling, he ran into a peasant and begged shelter for the night. The peasant complied, but then a cavalry patrol rode up and banged on the door. While the frightened peasant confessed everything, Marius tore off his clothes and dove into a nearby swamp. He hid in the murky water with “his eyes and nostrils alone showing above the water.” But the patrol found him anyway. Gaius Marius, six-time consul and Third Founder of Rome, was dragged out of the swamp “naked and covered with mud.” Then he was led into Minturnae by a rope around his neck.⁵¹

Though it had only been five days since Sulla had captured Rome, word had already spread that the fugitive Marius was to be killed on sight. But the leaders of Minturnae anguished over the dilemma of what to do with him. After placing Marius under house arrest they brought out a slave and ordered him to go kill Marius. According to the story, this slave was either Gallic or Cimbric and thus likely made a slave by Marius himself. Overawed rather than filled with vengeance, the slave refused. He said, “I cannot kill Gaius Marius,” and ran out of the room.⁵²

Unable to kill Marius, the leaders of Minturnae decided to put him on a boat: “Let him go where he will as an exile, to suffer elsewhere his allotted fate. And let us pray that the gods may not visit us with their displeasure for casting Marius out of our city in poverty and rags.” From the mainland, he sailed to the island of Aenaria, on the north end of the Bay of Naples, where he reunited with the men he had been separated from. Finally able to point themselves toward Africa, they sailed around Sicily, eventually putting in at Eryx on the northeast coast for supplies. But the quaestor in Eryx had been alerted to Marius’s general route and pounced as soon as the Marians put ashore. After a bloody battle on the docks that left sixteen dead, Marius and his remaining men cut loose their ship and put back out to sea.⁵³

Finally, Marius landed on the island of Cercina off the coast of Africa. One of his veteran colonies had been established on the island after the Numidian war and he was welcomed into the homes of the inhabitants. The governor of Africa, meanwhile, had been told Marius was likely heading toward him and now faced the great dilemma of the fugitive Marius. The governor’s duty was clear—he must arrest Marius and kill him. But the province was full of Marius’s veterans. If the governor killed Marius, he was likely signing his own death warrant.⁵⁴

After a few days, Marius crossed to the mainland and was greeted by an official bearing a decree from the governor: “The governor forbids you, Marius, to set foot in Africa; and if you disobey, he declares that he will uphold the decrees of the senate and treat you as an enemy of Rome.” Dejected, Marius sat brooding. When the official finally asked for Marius’s reply, the old general said, “Tell him, then, that you have seen Gaius Marius a fugitive, seated amid the ruins of Carthage.” Not far from where Scipio Aemilianus had once wept tears of dread foreboding, old Marius now sat and “as he gazed upon Carthage, and Carthage as she beheld Marius, might well have offered consolation the one to the other.” He did not fight the decree and returned to Cercina.⁵⁵

MEANWHILE, FAR OFF to the east, Mithridates had completed the envelopment of Anatolia. Because he needed the entire region to be united in opposition to Rome, the Pontic king ordered a blood pact. As spring gave way to summer in 88, Mithridates sent out a letter to every Asian city now under his dominion. As a sign of mutual solidarity the local magistrates were to wait thirteen days after receipt of the letter and then apprehend and murder every Italian in their jurisdiction—including women and children.⁵⁶

Under the circumstances, there was little anyone could do but comply. No one was going to risk the wrath of Mithridates just to save a few Italians they didn’t really like anyway. So on the thirteenth day after receiving the letter, every city across Asia arrested and systematically executed all resident Italians. Informers were offered a share of confiscated Italian property, leading neighbor to betray neighbor. Each city soon had a pile of bodies. In total, the dead numbered as many as eighty thousand people. Mithridates himself undertook the central sacrifice of this gruesome pact. Bringing out the captured Manius Aquillius, Mithridates ordered molten gold poured down his throat. There was no going back now. The massacre of the Italians was an act of calculated genocide to bind the eastern cities against Rome. Each was now individually complicit in the murder of Romans. It was now either fight and win with Mithridates, or face the vengeance of Rome alone.⁵⁷