RULE OF THE RESTORATION
The structure which Gaius Gracchus had reared became a ruin upon his death. His murder, like that of his brother, was primarily an act of vengeance, but it was at the same time a very real step toward restoring the old constitution, in that the monarch was removed just as the monarchy was about to be established. It was all the more so because, after the fall of Gaius and the sweeping and bloody prosecutions of Opimius, there was no one who by blood relationship to the fallen chief or by outstanding ability might feel even tempted to fill the vacant place. Gaius was childless, and Tiberius’ son died before reaching manhood; thus the whole popular party was leaderless. The Gracchan constitution resembled a fortress whose walls and garrison were uninjured, but without a commander; and there was no one to fill the leader’s place save the very government that had been overthrown.
So it happened. After Gaius’ death the Senate spontaneously resumed its place—which was the more natural, because it had not been formally abolished by the tribune, but had been merely reduced to impotence by his exceptional proceedings. Yet we should greatly err if we regarded this restoration as nothing more than a return of the state-machine into the old track that had been trodden for centuries. Restoration is always revolution, but in this case it was rather the old governor than the old government that was restored. The oligarchy reappeared decked in the armor of the overthrown tyrant. As the Senate had beaten Gracchus with his own weapons, so it continued to govern substantially with the Gracchan constitution—though certainly with the idea of purging it in due course of the elements hostile to the aristocracy.
At first the reaction was directed mainly against individuals. Publius Popillius was recalled from banishment after the enactments against him had been canceled (121 B.C.), and a warfare of prosecution was waged against the adherents of Gracchus. The attempt of the popular party to have Lucius Opimius condemned for high treason after his consulship was frustrated by the government. The character of the restoration is significantly shown by the progress of the aristocracy in soundness of sentiment. The convert Gaius Carbo, once the ally of the Gracchi, had but recently shown his zeal and usefulness by defending Opimius. But he remained the renegade: when the same accusation was raised against him as against Opimius, the government was not unwilling to let him fall, and Carbo, seeing himself lost between the two parties, died by his own hand.
Thus the men of the reaction showed themselves true aristocrats in personal questions. But they did not immediately attack the grain distribution, the taxation of the province of Asia, or the Gracchan arrangement as to the jurymen and courts. On the contrary, they not only spared the mercantile class and the city proletariat, but continued to render homage to these groups (as formerly in introducing the Livian laws), cultivating the proletariat even more than the Gracchi had done. This course was not adopted merely because the Gracchan revolution thrilled the minds of contemporaries and protected its creations. The fostering and cherishing of the populace was quite compatible with the interests of the aristocracy, for nothing was sacrificed save the public welfare.
All those measures which Gaius Gracchus devised to promote the general good—the best, but understandably the least popular part of his program—were allowed by the aristocracy to drop. The most speedily and successfully assailed was the noblest of his projects, the scheme of introducing legal equality first between the Roman citizens and Italy, and thereafter between Italy and the provinces, and—since the distinction between the ruling and consuming members of the state and the merely serving and working members was thus done away with—at the same time solving the social question by the most extensive and systematic emigration in history. With all the determined and peevish obstinacy of dotage the restored oligarchy clung to the hoary principle that Italy must remain the ruling land and Rome the ruling city in Italy.
Even in Gracchus’ lifetime the claims of the Italian allies had been flatly rejected, and the great idea of overseas colonization had been attacked so seriously as to become the immediate cause of his downfall. After his death the government party easily set aside the scheme of restoring Carthage, although individual allotments already distributed were not disturbed. True, the aristocracy could not prevent the popular party from succeeding at another point: in the course of the conquests beyond the Alps which Marcus Flaccus had begun, the colony of Narbo (Narbonne) was founded in 118 B.C., the oldest city of Roman citizens outside Italy, which, probably protected by the mercantile interests, held its ground against repeated attacks by the government party and despite a Senate proposal to abolish it. But apart from this isolated and relatively unimportant exception, the government was uniformly successful in preventing further distribution of land outside Italy.
The Italian land question was settled in a similar spirit. The Italian colonies founded by Gaius, especially Capua, were canceled, and such of them as had already been planted were again broken up; only the unimportant one of Tarentum was allowed to continue, in the form of the new town of Neptunia, alongside the former Greek community. The domains already distributed by noncolonial assignment remained in the hands of the recipients, the restrictions imposed on them by Gracchus in the public interest—the ground rent and the prohibition of sale—having already been abolished by Marcus Drusus. On the other hand, the domains still possessed by right of occupation—which, except for the domain land enjoyed by the Latins, must have consisted mostly of estates left with their holders in accordance with the Gracchan maximum—were definitely reserved for their occupants, thus precluding the possibility of future distribution. It was primarily from these lands, it seems, that the 36,000 new farm allotments promised by Drusus were to have been formed. But the aristocrats saved themselves the trouble of inquiring where those hundreds of thousands of acres of Italian public land were to be found, and quietly shelved the Livian colonial law as having served its purpose. (The small colony of Scolacium is perhaps the only one attributable to the colonial law of Drusus.) On the other hand, under a law carried by the tribune Spurius Thorius at the Senate’s instigation, the allotment commission was abolished in 119 B.C., and the occupants of public land were charged a fixed rent, whose proceeds went to the benefit of the populace, apparently being added to the fund for grain distribution. More sweeping proposals, including perhaps an increase in the largesses of grain, were averted by the judicious tribune Gaius Marius.
The final step was taken eight years afterward (111 B.C.), when by a new decree of the people the occupied public land was made the rent-free private property of the former occupants. The decree added that henceforth public land was not to be occupied at all, but was either to be leased or was to lie open as public pasture; in the latter case a very low maximum of ten head of large and fifty head of small cattle was set, so that the small herdowner would not be excluded. In these judicious regulations the character of the occupation system was at last officially recognized as baneful—but only after the state had been denuded of practically all its lands. While the aristocracy thus took care of itself by converting to private property whatever occupied land was still in its hands, it also pacified the Italian allies, not by conferring on them the title to the Italian public lands which they and more especially their municipal aristocracy enjoyed, but merely by preserving unimpaired the rights to it guaranteed by their charters. The popular party was in the unfortunate position that the most important material interests of the Italian allies ran diametrically counter to those of the proletariat in the capital. In fact, the Italians entered into a kind of league with the Senate, which protected them from the extravagant designs of various popular demagogues.
While the reaction was thus careful to eradicate the germs of civic betterment in the Gracchan constitution, it remained powerless in the face of the darker forces that had been aroused by Gracchus. The city mob retained its recognized right to be fed, and the Senate acquiesced in the selection of jurymen from the mercantile order, repugnant though this yoke was to the better and prouder portion of the aristocracy. The fetters which the aristocracy wore did not beseem its dignity, but we do not find that it seriously sought to get rid of them. The law of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus in 122 B.C., which enforced the constitutional restriction on the voting of freedmen, was for long the only attempt (and that a very tame one) by the senators to restrain their mob tyrants. The proposal which the consul Quintus Caepio introduced in 106 B.C. for again entrusting trials to senatorial jurymen showed what the government wished, but it also showed how little it could do when the question was not one of squandering the public domains, but of carrying a measure against the desire of an entrenched order.
Not only was the government not emancipated from the inconvenient associates who shared its power, but these measures probably contributed further to disturb the uneasy agreement of the ruling aristocracy with the merchant class and with the proletariat. Both the latter were well aware that the Senate granted its concessions reluctantly and only from fear; neither group was permanently attached to the rule of the Senate by considerations of either gratitude or interest; both were ready to render similar services to any other master who offered more, or even as much; neither would hesitate, if opportunity arose, to thwart or undermine the Senate. Thus the restoration combined the sentiments of a legitimate aristocracy with the governmental machinery of a tyrant. Its rule not only rested on the same foundations as that of Gracchus, but was less soundly consolidated. It was strong when it joined hands with the populace to overthrow useful innovations, but it was utterly powerless when it had to face the street mob or the entrenched merchants. It sat on the throne with bad conscience and divided hopes, indignant at the institutions of the state which it ruled, and yet incapable even of systematically assailing them, vacillating in all its conduct except where its own material advantage prompted a decision, a picture of faithlessness toward its own as well as the opposite party, of inward inconsistency, of pitiful impotence, of the meanest selfishness—an unsurpassed ideal of misrule.
It could not be otherwise when the whole nation was in a state of intellectual and moral decline, especially the upper classes. The aristocracy before the period of the Gracchi was not overly rich in talent, and the senate benches were crowded by a pack of cowardly and dissolute nobles. Nevertheless there sat in it Scipio Aemilianus, Gaius Laelius, Quintus Metellus, Publius Crassus, Publius Scaevola, and numerous other respectable and able men, and a friendly observer might maintain that the Senate showed a certain moderation in injustice and a certain decorum in misgovernment.
On this aristocracy, overthrown and then reinstated, lay the curse of restoration. For more than a century they had governed without appreciable opposition; then crisis revealed like a flash of lightning in a dark night the abyss yawning beneath their feet. Was it any wonder that thereafter rancor always, and terror whenever they dared, characterized the government of the nobility? Or that those who governed confronted the non-governing multitude as a united and compact party, with far more sternness and violence than before? Or that family interests prevailed again, just as in the worst patrician days of old, so that the four sons and (probably) the two nephews of Quintus Metellus (not to mention sons-in-law and collateral relations)—with a single exception utterly insignificant men, some of whom, indeed, were called to office because of their very simplicity—within a fifteen-year period (123-109 B.C.) attained not only the consulship but military triumphs as well? Or that the more violent and cruel was the bearing of their partisans toward the popular party, the more signally were they honored, while every outrage and infamy were pardoned in the genuine aristocrat? Or that rulers and ruled resembled two parties at war, and in a warfare which recognized no international law? It was unhappily only too palpable that if the old aristocracy beat the people with whips, this restored aristocracy chastised it with scorpions. It returned to power, but it returned neither wiser nor better. Never before had the Roman ruling class been so utterly deficient in men of statesmanly and military capacity.1
The administration, internal and external, was what might be expected from such a government. The social ruin of Italy spread with alarming rapidity. Since the aristocracy had given itself legal permission to buy out the small holders, and in its new arrogance allowed itself with growing frequency to drive them out without pretense of purchase, the small farms disappeared like raindrops in the sea. That the economic oligarchy at least kept pace with the political is shown by the opinion of Lucius Marcius Philippus, a man of moderate democratic views, that about 100 B.C. there were hardly 2,000 well-to-do families in the whole state. A practical corroboration was furnished by the Italian slave revolts which during the early years of the Cimbrian war broke out at Nuceria, at Capua, and in the territory of Thurii. This last conspiracy was so important that the urban praetor had to march against it with a legion, and actually overcame the insurrection not by force of arms but by treachery.2
The provinces suffered still more. The legislation which gave the mercantile class control over the magistrates compelled the latter to make common cause with the former, and to purchase unlimited liberty of plundering without impeachment by unlimited indulgence toward the capitalists in the provinces. In addition to these official and semiofficial robbers, pirates and freebooters pillaged all the Mediterranean countries. In Asiatic waters especially the buccaneers carried their outrages so far that even the Roman government was forced in 102 B.C. to dispatch to Cilicia a fleet, mainly composed of vessels of the dependent mercantile cities, under the praetor Marcus Antonius, who was invested with proconsular powers. This fleet captured a number of pirate vessels and destroyed some strongholds, and the Romans even settled themselves permanently in strong military positions—the first step toward establishing the province of Cilicia, which thereafter appears among the Roman dominions. The purpose was commendable, but the increase of piracy in Asiatic waters, and especially in Cilicia, showed with what inadequate means the pirates were combated from the new position.
Nowhere were the impotence and stupidity of the Roman provincial administration so conspicuously revealed as in its handling of the slave insurrections, which seemed to have revived simultaneously with the restoration of the aristocracy. These uprisings, swelling from revolts into wars—the one that emerged about 134 B.C. was perhaps the immediate cause of the Gracchan revolution—were renewed and repeated with dreary uniformity. Again, as thirty years before, a ferment pervaded the body of slaves throughout the empire. We have already mentioned the Italian conspiracies. The miners in the Attic silver mines rose in revolt, occupied the promontory of Sunium, and issuing thence pillaged freely in the surrounding country. Similar movements appeared at other places.3 But the chief seat of these fearful commotions was once again Sicily, with its vast plantations and its hordes of slaves brought from Asia Minor. Anyone who still required proof of the quality of the internal government of the restored aristocracy might be referred to the origin and conduct of this second Sicilian slave war, which lasted for five years.
Wherever the eye might turn throughout the empire, the same causes and the same effects appeared. If the Sicilian slave war showed the government’s incompetence even in its simplest task of keeping the slaves in check, simultaneous events in Africa highlighted the skill with which the Romans governed satellite states. At the same time the Sicilian slave war broke out, the astonished world beheld the spectacle of an insignificant dependent prince carrying out a fourteen years’ usurpation and insurrection against the very republic which had shattered the kingdoms of Macedonia and Asia with one blow of its mighty hand.
The kingdom of Numidia was bordered on the one side by the Mauretanian kingdom of Tingis (the modern Morocco) and on the other by Cyrene and Egypt; it surrounded on the west, south, and east the narrow strip of coast that formed the Roman province of Africa. In addition to the old possessions of the Numidian chiefs, it embraced the great bulk of the African territory which Carthage had possessed during her heyday, including such important cities as Hippo Regius (Bona) and Great Leptis (Lebidah)—altogether the largest and best part of the rich North African coast. Next to Egypt, Numidia was unquestionably the most important Roman protectorate. After the death of Numidia’s king Massinissa in 149 B.C., Scipio had so divided the powers of that prince among his three sons Micipsa, Gulussa, and Mastanabal that the firstborn obtained the palace and treasury, the second the command of the army, and the third the administration of justice. Following the death of his two brothers, the eldest, Micipsa, reigned alone, a feeble, peaceful old man, more interested in the study of Greek philosophy than in affairs of state. As his sons were not yet grown, the reins of government were practically held by his illegitimate nephew, Jugurtha.
Jugurtha was a worthy grandson of Massinissa. He was a handsome man and a skilled and courageous rider and hunter. His countrymen esteemed him as a clear and sagacious administrator, and he had displayed his military ability as leader of the Numidian contingent before Numantia under the eyes of Scipio. His position, and his influence through his numerous friends and war comrades, made Micipsa decide to adopt him (120 B.C.), and to make a will providing that his adopted son, Jugurtha, and his own two elder sons, Adherbal and Hiempsal, should jointly inherit and govern the kingdom just as he himself had done with his two brothers. For greater security, the Roman government guaranteed this arrangement.
Soon afterward, in 118 B.C., Micipsa died. But despite the provisions of the will, his legitimate sons—the vehement Hiempsal still more than his weak elder brother—soon came into violent collision with their cousin, whom they regarded as an intruder. The idea of a joint reign had to be abandoned. An attempt was made to divide the heritage, but the quarrelsome trio could not agree on their quotas of land and treasure, while the Roman government, which had the power to decide the matter, stood idly by as usual. A rupture took place, with Adherbal and Hiempsal characterizing their father’s testament as spurious and disputing Jugurtha’s claim, and Jugurtha coming forward as pretender to the whole kingdom. While the partition was still being discussed, Hiempsal was murdered by hired assassins; then a civil war broke out between Adherbal and Jugurtha. With his less numerous but better-disciplined and better-led troops Jugurtha seized the whole kingdom, cruelly persecuting the chiefs who adhered to his cousin. Adherbal escaped to the Roman province and proceeded to Rome to lodge his complaint.
Jugurtha had expected this, and was prepared for the threatened intervention. In the camp before Numantia he had learned more from Rome than military tactics. The Numidian prince, moving in Roman aristocratic circles, was at the same time initiated into the intrigues of Roman political cliques, and learned at first hand what might be expected from Roman nobles. Even then, sixteen years before Micipsa’s death, he had entered into disloyal negotiations with influential Romans regarding the Numidian succession, and Scipio had found it necessary to admonish him that foreign princes should properly seek the friendship of the Roman state rather than that of individual Romans. Now, in the negotiations over the partition, the envoys of Jugurtha appeared in Rome armed with more than words, and the result showed that they had chosen the right means of persuasion. Adherbal’s most zealous champions were convinced with incredible rapidity that Hiempsal had been put to death by his subjects on account of his cruelty, and that Adherbal was the aggressor in the war between him and Jugurtha.
Even the leading men in the Senate were shocked at the scandal, which Marcus Scaurus vainly sought to check. The Senate silently passed over what had taken place. It ordained that the two surviving heirs should divide the kingdom equally between them, and that, in the interests of amity, the division should be supervised by a commission of the Senate. This was done: the ex-consul Lucius Opimius, well known for his services in crushing the Gracchan revolution, embraced the opportunity of reaping the rewards of his patriotism, and got himself placed at the head of the commission. Its decision turned out thoroughly in favor of Jugurtha, and not to the disadvantage of the commissioners. It is true that the capital, Cirta, with its port of Rusicade, was given to Adherbal. But by the same token there also fell to him the eastern part of the kingdom, consisting almost wholly of desert, while Jugurtha obtained the fertile and populous western half.
This was bad enough, but matters soon became worse. In order to defraud Adherbal of his portion, Jugurtha, under the pretext of self-defense, sought to provoke him to war. But when that weak man, rendered wise by experience, allowed Jugurtha’s horsemen to ravage his territory unhindered and contented himself with lodging complaints at Rome, Jugurtha impatiently began the war without pretext. Adherbal was totally defeated near Rusicade, and threw himself into his adjacent capital of Cirta. While the siege was in progress, and Jugurtha’s troops were skirmishing daily with the numerous Italians who were settled in Cirta and who took a more vigorous part in the defense of the city than the Africans themselves, the commission dispatched by the Senate on Adherbal’s first complaint made its appearance. It was composed, of course, of inexperienced young men, such as the government then regularly employed in ordinary missions of state.
The envoys demanded that Jugurtha should allow them to enter the city, and that he should suspend hostilities and accept their mediation. Jugurtha summarily rejected both demands, and the envoys hastened home—like the boys they were—to report to the city fathers. The Senate listened to the report, and allowed their countrymen in Cirta to fight on as long as they pleased. It was not until a messenger of Adherbal’s stole through the enemy’s entrenchments in the fifth month of the siege, with a letter to the Senate full of the most urgent entreaties, that the latter roused itself and actually adopted a resolution. It did not declare war, as the minority demanded, but sent a new embassy—an embassy, however, headed by Marcus Scaurus, the great “conqueror” of the Taurisci and the freedmen, the imposing hero of the aristocracy, whose mere appearance would surely bring the refractory prince to heel. Jugurtha did indeed appear at Utica as he was bidden, to discuss the matter with Scaurus. Endless debates were held, until the conference was at last concluded without the slightest result having been obtained. The embassy returned to Rome without declaring war, and the king returned to the siege of Cirta. Adherbal, reduced to the last extremity, despaired of Roman support; and the Italians in Cirta, weary of the siege and relying for their own safety on the terror of the Roman name, urged a surrender. The town capitulated. Jugurtha condemned his adopted brother to death by torture, and ordered the entire adult male population of the town, Italians as well as Africans, to be put to the sword.
A cry of indignation arose throughout Italy. The minority in the Senate and all citizens outside the Senate unanimously condemned the government, which seemed to regard the honor and interest of the nation as mere commodities for sale; and loudest of all was the outcry of the mercantile class, which was most directly affected by the sacrifice of the Roman and Italian merchants at Cirta. Even now the majority of the Senate still struggled. They appealed to the class interests of the aristocracy, setting in motion all the contrivances of delay with a view to preserving a little longer the peace that they loved. But when Gaius Memmius, tribune-elect, an active and eloquent man, threatened publicly to call the worst offenders to trial, the Senate permitted war to be declared against Jugurtha.
The step seemed taken in earnest. The envoys of Jugurtha were summarily dismissed from Italy without a hearing; the new consul Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, who was distinguished at least among his fellow senators by his judgment and activity, vigorously prepared for war; Marcus Scaurus himself took a post as commander in the African army. In a short time a Roman force was on African ground, marching upward along the Bagradas and advancing into the Numidian kingdom, where the towns most remote from the seat of royal power, such as Great Leptis, voluntarily sent in their submission. Bocchus, king of Mauretania, though the father-in-law of Jugurtha, offered friendship and alliance to the Romans. Jugurtha himself lost courage, and sent envoys to the Roman headquarters to request an armistice.
The end of the contest seemed near, but it came even more rapidly than was expected, and with an unforeseen result. The treaty with Bocchus broke down because that king, unfamiliar with Roman customs, had conceived that he should be able to conclude a treaty so advantageous to the Romans without bribery, and had therefore neglected to furnish his envoys with the usual market price of Roman favors. Jugurtha knew better, and had not failed to support his proposals for an armistice with an accompaniment of money. But he too was deceived: after the first negotiations it turned out that not merely an armistice but a final peace was purchasable at the Roman headquarters. The royal treasury was still rich with the savings of Massinissa, and the transaction was soon settled. The treaty was concluded after a routine submission to a council of war, which gave its consent after an irregular and extremely summary discussion. Jugurtha ostensibly submitted, but the merciful victor returned his kingdom undiminished, in consideration of his paying a moderate fine and delivering up the Roman deserters and the war elephants. Most of the latter the king afterward repurchased by bargaining with individual Roman officers.
With this news a storm again broke in Rome. Everybody knew how the peace had been brought about; evidently even Scaurus was bribable, only at a higher than average price. The legality of the peace was seriously assailed in the Senate. Gaius Memmius declared that if the king had really surrendered unconditionally, he could not refuse to appear in Rome, and that he should therefore be summoned with a view to hearing from both sides how the thoroughly irregular negotiations for peace were carried on. The senators yielded to the inconvenient demand, but at the same time granted a safe-conduct to the king—inconsistent with his status, for he came not as an enemy, but as a suppliant.
Thereupon the king actually appeared at Rome and sought to be heard before the people, who were with difficulty restrained from tearing him to pieces as the murderer of the Italians at Cirta. But scarcely had Gaius Memmius addressed his first question to the king when one of his colleagues interposed his veto and enjoined the king to be silent. Here again African gold had been more powerful than the will of the sovereign people and their supreme representatives. Meanwhile the Senate debated the validity of the peace, with the new consul Spurius Postumius Albinus zealously seeking to cancel it in the expectation that the chief command in Africa would then devolve upon himself. This induced Massiva, a grandson of Massinissa living in Rome, to assert before the Senate his claim to the vacant Numidian kingdom. Thereupon Bomilcar, one of Jugurtha’s confidants and doubtless acting on his instructions, had his master’s rival assassinated, and when he was prosecuted for it, escaped from Rome with Jugurtha’s aid.
This new outrage committed under the very nose of the Roman government at least had the effect that the Senate now canceled the peace treaty and dismissed the king from the city. The war was resumed, and the consul Spurius Albinus was placed in command. But the African army was as disorganized as might be expected under such political and military superintendence. Not only had discipline ceased, and the looting of Numidian townships and even of Roman provincial territory become during the armistice the chief business of the Roman soldiery, but not a few officers had imitated their generals and made secret understandings with the enemy. Such an army was obviously powerless in the field, and if Jugurtha bribed the Roman general into inaction, as was afterward charged, he was but gilding the lily. Spurius Albinus therefore contented himself with doing nothing.
On the other hand, his brother, the equally foolhardy and incapable Aulus Postumius, who after Spurius’ departure assumed the interim command, came up with the idea of seizing the treasures of the king by a bold midwinter coup de main. The gold was kept in the town of Suthul, which was difficult even to approach, and still more difficult to conquer. The army reached the town, but the siege was totally unsuccessful. Then the king, who had remained for a time with his troops in front of the town, went into the desert, and the Roman general sought to pursue him. This was precisely what Jugurtha wanted. In a nocturnal assault, favored both by the difficulties of the ground and Jugurtha’s secret understandings with certain officers, the Numidians captured the Roman camp and drove the largely unarmed Romans before them in a complete and disgraceful rout. The terms of the capitulation—the marching off of the Roman army under the yoke, the immediate evacuation of all Numidia, and the reinstatement of the canceled treaty—were dictated by Jugurtha and accepted by the Romans early in the year 109 B.C.
This was too much to be borne. So exultant were the Africans at the sudden and incredible prospect of an overthrow of alien domination that numerous tribes of the desert flocked to the standards of the victorious king. But public opinion in Italy vehemently rose against the corrupt and pernicious governing aristocracy, and broke out in a storm of prosecutions, reflecting the special exasperation of the mercantile class, which swept away a succession of victims from the highest circles of the nobility. On the proposal of the tribune Gaius Mamilius Limetanus, and despite the timid attempts of the Senate to avert the threatened punishment, an extraordinary jury commission was appointed to investigate the alleged high treason in connection with the Numidian succession settlement and the conduct of the war. It exiled the two former commanders, Gaius Bestia and Spurius Albinus, and also Lucius Opimius, the head of the first African commission and the executioner of Gaius Gracchus, along with numerous less notable men of the government party.
That these prosecutions, however, were only a sop to a section of public opinion, especially in mercantile circles, and that there was little trace of popular indignation against the contemptible government itself, is shown clearly by the fact that no one ventured to attack the guiltiest of the guilty—the prudent and powerful Marcus Scaurus. On the contrary he was elected censor and, incredible as it may seem, was also chosen as one of the presidents of the extraordinary commission. Still less was there any attempt to interfere with the functions of the government, and it was left solely to the Senate to end the Numidian scandal in the gentlest manner possible for the aristocracy. That it was time to do so was probably becoming clear even to the most Bourbon of the aristocrats.
The Senate first canceled the second treaty of peace—it somehow did not seem necessary to surrender to the enemy the commander who had concluded it—and determined to renew the war, this time in all earnest. The supreme command in Africa was naturally entrusted to an aristocrat, but to one of the few men of quality militarily and morally equal to the task. Quintus Metellus was, like the whole powerful family to which he belonged, a rigid and unscrupulous aristocrat. As a magistrate, he doubtless reckoned it honorable to hire assassins for the good of the state, and would presumably have ridiculed the act of Fabricius toward Pyrrhus 4 as impractical knight-errantry. But he was an inflexible administrator accessible neither to fear nor to corruption, and he was also a judicious and experienced warrior.
In this last respect he was so free from prejudice that he selected as his lieutenants not men of rank, but such excellent officers as Publius Rutilius Rufus, esteemed in military circles for his exemplary discipline and as the author of an improved manual of drill, and the brave Latin farmer’s son Gaius Marius, who had risen from the ranks. Attended by these and other able officers, Metellus presented himself to the African army in 109 B.C. as consul and commander-in-chief. He found the army in such disorder that the generals had not dared to lead it into enemy territory; it was formidable only to the unhappy inhabitants of the Roman province. It was sternly and speedily reorganized, and in the spring of 108 B.C. Metellus led it over the Numidian frontier.
When Jugurtha saw the new face of things he gave himself up for lost, and before beginning the struggle made earnest proposals for an accommodation that would ultimately have guaranteed nothing more than his life. Metellus, however, was determined and perhaps even instructed not to end the war except with unconditional surrender and the death of the daring prince—in fact the only outcome that could satisfy the Romans. Since his victory over Albinus, Jugurtha was regarded as the deliverer of Libya from the rule of the hated foreigner. Unscrupulous and cunning as he was, and unwieldy as was the Roman government, he might, if not crushed, at any time rekindle the war. Tranquillity could not be restored and the African army withdrawn until Jugurtha was in his grave. Officially Metellus gave evasive answers to the king’s proposals; secretly he sought to persuade the envoys to deliver up their master, alive or dead. But the Roman general met his match in the field of assassination. Jugurtha saw through the plan, and prepared for desperate resistance.
Beyond the barren mountain range over which lay the route into the interior, a desert plain some eighteen miles wide extended as far as the river Muthul, which ran parallel to the mountains. This plain was bare of trees except in the immediate vicinity of the river, and was only intersected by a low ridge covered with brushwood. On this ridge Jugurtha awaited the Roman army. His troops were arranged in two masses: the first, consisting of a part of the infantry and the elephants, was disposed under Bomilcar at the point where the ridge abutted the river; the second, including the flower of the infantry and all the cavalry, was concealed in the brush higher up toward the mountain range. Upon leaving the mountains, the Romans saw the enemy in a position completely commanding their right flank; yet they had to leave the arid crests and reach the river over an open plain eighteen miles broad, under the eyes of the enemy’s horse, and without light cavalry of their own. To solve this difficult problem Metellus dispatched a detachment under Rufus straight toward the river to pitch a camp, while the main body marched from the defiles of the mountains obliquely across the plain toward the ridge to dislodge the enemy there.
This march, however, threatened to destroy the army; for while Numidian infantry occupied the mountain defiles as the Romans evacuated them, the main Roman column was assailed on all sides by swarms of enemy horsemen charging down from the ridge. Their constant onset hindered the advance and threatened to turn the battle into a series of confused and detached conflicts. At the same time Bomilcar detained the corps under Rufus, to prevent it from returning to help the main Roman army.
At last Metellus and Marius with a couple of thousand soldiers succeeded in reaching the foot of the ridge; and the Numidian infantry defending the heights, despite their superior numbers and position, fled almost without resistance when the legionaries charged rapidly up the hill. The Numidian infantry facing Rufus held its ground equally ill: it scattered at the first charge, and all its elephants were killed or captured. Late in the evening the two Roman divisions, each victorious and each anxious as to the other’s fate, met between the two fields of battle. The engagement attested alike Jugurtha’s uncommon military talent and the indestructible solidity of the Roman infantry, which alone had converted the strategic defeat into a victory. Jugurtha sent most of his troops home after the battle, and restricted himself to a skillful guerilla warfare.
The two Roman columns, one led by Metellus and the other by Marius—who, though of humble birth and rank, occupied the highest staff position since the battle on the Muthul—occupied the Numidian towns, putting to death the adult male population of any place that did not open its gates. But the largest of the eastern towns, Zama, offered the Romans serious resistance, which Jugurtha energetically supported. He even succeeded in surprising the Roman camp, and the Romans were at last compelled to abandon the siege and go into winter quarters. To provision his army more easily, Metellus transferred it to the Roman province, leaving garrisons in the conquered towns, and used the respite to institute fresh negotiations promising the king a tolerable peace.
Jugurtha readily responded. He agreed to pay 200,000 pounds of silver, and even delivered his elephants and 300 hostages, plus 3,000 Roman deserters, who were immediately put to death. At the same time, however, Bomilcar—who feared quite reasonably that upon the restoration of peace Jugurtha would surrender him to the Roman courts as the murderer of Massiva—was promised by Metellus rich rewards and judicial immunity if he would deliver the king dead or alive. But neither the official negotiation nor the intrigue was successful. When Metellus suggested that the king give himself up as a prisoner, the latter broke off negotiations. Bomilcar’s confidential dealing with the Romans was unmasked, and he was arrested and executed.
These contemptible cabals admit of no apology, but the Romans had every reason to aim at securing the person of their antagonist. The war had reached the point where it could neither be carried further nor abandoned. The state of feeling in Numidia was shown by the revolt of Vaga, the most considerable of the occupied cities, where the whole Roman garrison was put to death except for the commandant Titus Turpilius Silanus, who was afterward (whether justly or not we cannot say) condemned by a Roman court-martial for dealing with the enemy. The town was surprised by Metellus on the second day of the revolt, and given over to the rigors of martial law. If such was the temper of the accessible and submissive dwellers on the banks of the Bagradas, what must have been the mood of the roving desert tribes? Jugurtha was the idol of the Africans, who readily overlooked a double fratricide by the liberator and avenger of their nation. When twenty years afterward a Numidian corps fighting for the Romans in Italy had to be sent back in all haste to Africa, because the son of Jugurtha appeared in the enemy ranks, we may infer how great was the influence which the king exercised over his people. How could a war be ended in a country whose geography and population allowed a leader who had won the sympathies of the nation to protract the struggle in endless guerilla conflicts, or even to let it die for a time in order to revive it afresh at the right moment?
When Metellus took the field in 107 B.C., Jugurtha nowhere held his ground. He appeared now at one point, now at another far distant, and it seemed as if one could as easily conquer the desert lions as these horsemen. A battle was fought, a victory was won, but it was difficult to say what the victory had gained, for the king had vanished into the distance. In the interior of modern Tunis, on the edge of the great desert, lay the fortified oasis Thala, where Jugurtha had retired with his children, his treasures, and his best troops to await better times. Metellus followed the king across a desert where the troops had to carry their water in skins for forty-five miles. Thala fell after a forty days’ siege, but the Roman deserters destroyed the most valuable part of the booty, along with the building in which they ended their lives in a flaming pyre after the capture of the town. And more important, Jugurtha escaped with his children and his treasure.
Thus the virtual conquest of all Numidia seemed only to extend the war over a wider and wider area. In the south the free desert tribes heeded Jugurtha’s call for a national war against the Romans. In the west King Bocchus of Mauretania, whose friendship the Romans had despised, seemed now disposed to make common cause with his son-in-law. He received him in his court and, uniting his own numberless swarms of horsemen with Jugurtha’s followers, marched into the Cirta region where Metellus was in winter quarters. They began to negotiate, for it was clear that Bocchus held in the person of Jugurtha the real prize of the struggle. But whether his intentions were to sell his son-in-law dearly, or to take up the national war together with him, neither the Romans, nor Jugurtha, nor perhaps even the king himself knew; and he was in no hurry to abandon his ambiguous position.
At this point Metellus left the province, compelled by decree of the people to yield his command to his former lieutenant Marius, who was now consul. In 107 B.C. the latter assumed his new duties. For his high position he was indebted in some degree to a revolution. Relying both on the services he had rendered and on oracles which had been communicated to him, he had resolved to seek the consulship. If the aristocracy had supported the constitutional and quite proper candidacy of this able man, who was not at all inclined toward the opposition, nothing would have occurred but the enrollment of a new family in the consular list. Instead, this man of non-noble birth, who aspired to the highest public honor, was reviled by the whole governing crowd as a daring innovator and revolutionist—just as plebeian candidates had formerly been treated by the patricians, but now without any legal ground. Metellus sneered at the brave officer in sharp language: Marius was advised to delay his candidacy until Metellus’ son, a beardless boy, could be his colleague, and he was allowed with the worst possible grace a leave of absence from military service that he might appear in Rome as a candidate for the consulship for 107 B.C.
There he amply requited his general for the insults he had suffered by criticizing before the gaping populace the conduct of the African war and the administration of Metellus in a disgracefully unfair and unmilitary manner. He did not disdain to serve up to the multitude (always whispering incredible inside stories about secret conspiracies among their noble masters) the silly tale that Metellus was purposely protracting the war in order to remain commander-in-chief. To the idlers of the street this seemed quite obvious, while numerous persons unfriendly to the government, and especially the justly indignant mercantile order, desired nothing so much as an opportunity to goad the aristocracy at its most sensitive point. Marius was not only elected to the consulship by an enormous majority, but, although the law of Gaius Gracchus left with the Senate the assignment of consuls to their respective functions, in this case the arrangement which left Metellus at his post was revoked by decree of the sovereign people, and the supreme command of the African war was given to Marius.
Marius replaced Metellus in 107 B.C., and held the command during the campaign of the following year. But his confident promise to deliver Jugurtha bound hand and foot was more easily given than fulfilled. He carried on a desultory warfare with the desert tribes, reducing several previously unoccupied towns. He mounted an expedition to Capsa in the extreme southeast of the kingdom, surpassing in difficulty even that against Thala. He took the town by capitulation, and, in violation of the convention, ordered all the adult men to be slain—the only means, no doubt, of preventing a renewal of revolt in that remote city. He attacked a mountain stronghold on the river Molochath where Jugurtha had conveyed his treasure-chest, and just as he was about to abandon the siege as hopeless, he gained possession of the virtually impregnable place through the exploit of some daring climbers.
Had Marius’ object merely been to harden the army by bold raids, or to procure booty for the soldiers, or even to eclipse Metellus’ desert march by an expedition going still farther, his method of campaign might be justified. But the main object which Metellus had steadfastly and perseveringly kept in view—the capture of Jugurtha—was in this way quite forgotten. Marius’ expedition to Capsa was as aimless a venture as that of Metellus to Thala had been judicious, while the expedition to the Molochath, which passed along the border of Mauretanian territory, was directly contrary to sound policy. King Bocchus, who could end the war favorably for the Romans or prolong it endlessly, now concluded a treaty with Jugurtha in which he promised active support to his son-in-law against Rome.
The Roman army, returning from the river Molochath, one evening found itself surrounded by immense masses of Mauretanian and Numidian cavalry, and was obliged to fight just as the divisions stood without forming in proper order and without any plan of battle. The Romans deemed themselves fortunate when their sadly thinned troops achieved safety for the night on two hills not far from each other. But the culpable negligence of the rejoicing Africans cost them the fruits of victory. They allowed themselves to be surprised in a deep sleep during the early dawn, and were dispersed by the Roman troops, which had been partly reorganized during the night. Thereafter the Roman army continued its retreat in better order and with greater caution; but it was again assailed simultaneously on all sides, and was in great danger until the cavalry officer Lucius Cornelius Sulla first dispersed the squadrons opposed to him and then, rapidly returning from their pursuit, threw himself upon Jugurtha and Bocchus where they personally led the onslaught against the Romans. Thus this attack also was successfully repelled, and Marius brought his army back to Cirta, its winter quarters.
We can understand why the Romans even now began to make the most zealous overtures to King Bocchus, whose friendship they had at first spurned, and who was now openly an enemy. There had been no formal declaration of war by Mauretania. King Bocchus was willing to resume his ambiguous role: without dissolving his agreement with Jugurtha or dismissing him, he began negotiations with the Roman general regarding an alliance with Rome. When agreement seemed to have been reached, the king requested that, for concluding the treaty and receiving the royal captive, Marius would send to him Lucius Sulla, who was known and acceptable to the king partly as a former envoy at the Mauretanian court, and partly because of the esteem of Mauretanian envoys to Rome whom Sulla had befriended.
Marius was in an awkward position. To decline the suggestion would probably lead to a breach of the negotiations; to accept it would throw his bravest and most aristocratic officer into the hands of an untrustworthy man who was patently playing a double game, and who seemed almost to have contrived the scheme to provide himself with hostages from both sides in the persons of Jugurtha and Sulla. But the desire to end the war outweighed all else, and Sulla agreed to undertake the perilous task. He boldly departed under the guidance of King Bocchus’ son Volux, nor did he waver even when his guide led him through the midst of Jugurtha’s camp. He rejected his attendants’ cowardly proposals of flight, and marched beside the king’s son uninjured through the enemy. The daring officer showed the same decisiveness in the discussions with Bocchus, who was at last compelled to make his choice.
Jugurtha was sacrificed. Under the pretext that all his requests were to be granted, he was lured into an ambush by his own father-in-law, his attendants were killed, and he himself was taken prisoner. The great traitor thus fell by the treachery of his closest kin. Sulla brought the crafty African in chains, together with his children, to the Roman headquarters.
The war which had lasted for seven years was at an end. The victory was primarily associated with the name of Marius. King Jugurtha in royal robes and in chains, along with his two sons, preceded the triumphal chariot when Marius entered Rome on the first of January, 104 B.C. By Marius’ order the desert fox perished a few days later in the subterranean city prison, the old Tullianum at the Capitol—the “bath of ice,” as the African called it when he crossed the threshold to be strangled or to perish from cold and hunger there.
But it could not be denied that Marius had the least important share in the final victory. The conquest of Numidia up to the desert’s edge was the work of Metellus; the capture of Jugurtha was the work of Sulla; between the two Marius played a part scarcely in keeping with the dignity of an ambitious upstart. He reluctantly tolerated Metellus’ assumption of the name of conqueror of Numidia, and he flew into a violent rage when King Bocchus consecrated a golden effigy at the Capitol representing the surrender of Jugurtha to Sulla. Yet in the eyes of unprejudiced judges the services of these two put the generalship of Marius very much in the shade—especially Sulla’s brilliant expedition, which made his courage, his presence of mind, his acuteness, and his power over men apparent to the general himself and to the whole army. These military rivalries would have been trifling if they had not been mixed up with political conflicts, if the opposition had not supplanted the Senate’s general by Marius, and if the government party had not, with deliberate intent to exasperate, praised Metellus and still more Sulla as military celebrities preferable to the nominal victor. The fatal consequences of these animosities will be seen in narrating the internal history.
Except for this, the Numidian insurrection passed without producing notable changes in political relations generally or even in those of the African province. Contrary to general policy in this period, Numidia was not converted into a Roman province, doubtless because it could not be held without an army to protect the frontier against the barbarians of the desert; and the Romans were certainly not disposed to maintain a standing army in Africa. They accordingly contented themselves with annexing the most westerly district of Numidia to the kingdom of Bocchus, and handing over the rest of Numidia to the last legitimate grandson of Massinissa, Jugurtha’s half-brother Gauda, feeble in body and mind, who in 107 B.C. at the suggestion of Marius had asserted his claims before the Senate. At the same time the Gaetulian tribes of the interior were received as free allies among the independent nations that had treaties with Rome.
Of more importance than this regulation of the African protectorates were the political consequences of the Jugurthan war, though these have often been overestimated. To be sure, the evils of the government were revealed in all their nakedness. It was now judicially established, so to speak, that Rome’s rulers regarded everything as venal—the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the ramparts of the camp and the life of the soldier. Jugurtha merely spoke the truth when on leaving Rome he remarked that, if he had enough gold, he could buy the city itself.
The whole external and internal government of this period showed the same miserable baseness. The accidental fact that the war in Africa is more fully recounted to us than the other contemporary events distorts the perspective: nothing but what everybody had long known and what every diligent patriot had long been able to prove was revealed to contemporaries by these events. The fact, however, that they now had fresh, stronger, and more irrefutable proofs of the baseness of the restored senatorial government—a baseness surpassed only by its incompetence—might have been of importance if there had been an opposition and a public opinion to which the government must answer. But this war exposed the utter impotence of the opposition no less than it revealed the corruption of the government. It was impossible to govern worse than the restoration governed in the years 117-109 B.C.; it was impossible to be more defenseless and forlorn than was the Roman Senate in 109 B.C. Had there been a real opposition—that is, a party seeking a fundamental change in the constitution—it would at least have made the attempt to overturn the restored Senate. No such attempt took place. The political question was converted into a personal one, the generals were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were banished.
Thus it was settled that the so-called popular party neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were possible in Rome, a tyranny or an oligarchy; that so long as there was nobody sufficiently prominent to grasp the reins of state, the worst mismanagement merely endangered individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; and that as soon as a vigorous pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs. In this respect the appearance of Marius was significant, just because it was so utterly unwarranted. It would have been only natural if the citizens had stormed the senate house after the defeat of Albinus. But after Metellus had taken charge of the Numidian war, there was little further mismanagement and still less danger to the commonwealth; yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing what the elder Africanus had once threatened, and secured one of the principal military commands against the will of the governing body. Public opinion, powerless in the hands of the popular party, became irresistible in the hands of the future king of Rome.
This is not to say that Marius meant to play the pretender, at least when he asked the people for the supreme command in Africa. But whether or not he understood what he was doing, it was the beginning of the end of the restoration government when the comitial machine began to make generals, or, what amounted to the same thing, when every popular officer was legally able to nominate himself as general. Only one new element emerged in these preliminary crises—the introduction of military men and of military power into the political revolution.
Whether the appearance of Marius presaged an immediate attempt to supersede the oligarchy by a tyranny, or whether it would pass away as a mere isolated encroachment on the prerogatives of the government, could not yet be determined; but it could be foreseen that if these beginnings should develop, their leader would not be a statesman like Gaius Gracchus but a commander of legions. The reorganization of the military system introduced by Marius in recruiting his African army, which did away with the property qualification formerly required and accepted the poorest citizen, if physically fit, for military service, may have been promulgated on purely military grounds, but it was none the less a momentous political event. The army was no longer composed of those who had something to lose, but became transformed into a host of people with nothing but their arms and what the general bestowed on them. The aristocracy ruled in 104 B.C. just as absolutely as in 134 B.C. But the portents of disaster had multiplied, and the sword had begun to appear on the political horizon alongside the crown.
The Jugurthan War had scarcely ended when Rome was seriously threatened by the wild tribes north of the Alps. The Cimbri and Teutones, allied with certain Swiss Celtic tribes (Helvetii), invaded eastern Gaul, defeated several Roman armies, and in 102 B.C. prepared for a major invasion of Italy. After a difficult and dangerous campaign they were finally destroyed by Marius (aided by Sulla and Catulus) in two great battles at Aquae Sextiae (modern Aix) and Vercellae in 102 and 101 B.C. Marius, again the military hero and savior of Rome, was elected consul (for the sixth time) for the year 100 B.C.
His consulship was turbulent. A demagogic tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, and a praetor, Servilius Glaucia, attempted to force through legislation which the Senate regarded as radical, including an agrarian law for the benefit of Marius’ veterans. After much disorder and at least one political murder, a decree of martial law by the Senate (the so-called senatus consultum ultimum) called on the consuls Marius and Valerius to defend the state by arms; and Saturninus and Glaucia were both killed in the ensuing street riot. Although details regarding this ominous year are scanty and untrustworthy it clearly marked a further step in the progress of the revolution, and the first use of professional troops in civil dissension.
1. A paragraph omitted here describes Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, a leading “statesman” of his day, who, though “quite as accessible and bribable as any other upright senator,” could “discern with some cunning the moment when the matter began to be hazardous.”
2. In the original, Mommsen proceeds to describe briefly the leader of the Thurian revolt, a debt-crazed Roman knight named Titus Vettius, and notes the fear that led the Senate to halt certain gold-washing operations lest too many slaves be concentrated in one place.
3. A short section here omitted describes the Sicilian slave war of 104-99 B.C., in which the diligence of the slave leaders was more than matched by the incompetence of a succession of Roman commanders. The Roman victory was finally won in 99 B.C. by the consul Manius Aquillius.
4. Gaius Fabricius, a Roman envoy to King Pyrrhus of Epirus early in the third century B.C., refused the king’s bribe and also arranged for the temporary release of some Roman prisoners on the solemn promise that they would return. Over the years the incident came to symbolize honesty carried to the point of a fault.