SULLA’S DECISION TO RECONSTRUCT AN edited version of the Republic after the massive destruction and violence of the Social War and then the civil wars of the 80s prevented Rome from falling into a permanent autocracy. It did not, however, return Rome to the functional republic of the past. With its expanded Senate, neutered tribunate, and senatorial juries, Sulla’s Republic was in fact a radical departure from the political system that preceded it—and it was one founded on widespread murder and theft. The historian Sallust, who was a young boy during Sulla’s dictatorship, wrote that Sulla’s success depended on “crime and treachery since he thinks that he cannot be safe unless he is worse and more detestable than your dread of him.”1 For this reason, Sulla created a climate in which men of “great family names” with “excellent examples among their ancestors”—men who, in different times, would have been comfortable competing for offices and honors within the rules of a functional republic—instead “gave their submission to Sulla in exchange for dominance” over other Romans.2 Sulla deliberately co-opted these men so that they would share his guilt. He gave them public honors, sponsored them for public offices, and encouraged them to profit from the properties confiscated from the men Sulla proscribed. In some cases, Sulla even fronted these men the money that they used to purchase these confiscated properties. The guilt stained others as well. It was not just co-opted members of the Roman elite who profited from Sulla’s proscriptions. He settled tens of thousands of his veterans on lands seized from the proscribed—one source counts 120,000 such men—and elevated many of his former soldiers into the reconstituted Roman Senate. Sallust called these minions who followed Sulla “satellites,” a Latin word that meant morally suspect attendants. Sulla had ensured that the guilty were so numerous and powerful that the innocent feared confronting them.3
Sulla’s powerful venom lingered in the Roman body politic as the 70s dawned, even after his retirement in 79 and his death in 78 removed the figure these “satellites” protected. Indeed, Sulla’s departure from the scene only prompted more chaos. Some of those who embraced Sulla opportunistically quickly began to stray once he had no more to offer. Others had entered Sulla’s orbit at the head of private armies whose soldiers were loyal primarily to their commanders, secondarily to Sulla, and not at all to Rome. These warlords lurked, some of them still commanding armies and others with enough new wealth that they could assemble another private army if needed. Their example inspired other Sullans to dream about circumstances in which they too might attract a large enough following to build an army of supporters.4
Sulla had created many opportunities for such mischief. Outside of Italy, forces loyal to Sulla’s opponents in the recent civil war controlled Spain until 72 BC. In the Eastern Mediterranean, Sulla’s hasty peace treaty with Mithridates of Pontus in 85 BC had left that king still strong enough to challenge Rome. Roman distraction had also opened the door for pirate raids at sea that could threaten both Rome’s food supply and its security.
Sulla’s heirs faced even more significant problems within Italy. Italy had yet to fully recover from the Social War, and Sulla had made its recovery much more difficult. While Sulla was in the East, the regime of Cinna and Carbo held a census. Their work offered the first count of the many new Roman citizens created in Italy by the settlement of the Social War and constructed a basic municipal governing structure that could organize their cities.5 Sulla’s punitive measures undid much of this work. Sulla stripped citizenship from many of the newly enfranchised Romans who had opposed him in the civil wars. More prominent Italians suffered even more serious penalties as Sulla and his allies set about disrupting the historical power and economic orders in their cities. In Umbria, Sulla proscribed Sextus Roscius, a wealthy man who owned thirteen farms, and confiscated his land even though Roscius’s son apparently murdered his father in an effort to avoid losing the family property. In the Southern Italian city of Larinum, Oppianicus, a local man acting in Sulla’s name, replaced the local municipal board and proscribed many of its members. And an aspiring twenty-three-year-old warlord named Pompey—later to be known as Pompey the Great—did something similar in the towns of his home region of Picenum. These actions enriched Sulla’s partisans and left large numbers of prominent and ordinary Italians furious. It was with good reason that Sallust could write that Sulla, “alone of all men of human memory, has devised punishments against later generations, so that they might be assured of injury before being born” by giving the fruits of generations of Italian labors to his supporters.6
Further instability grew out of the increasing use of slave labor on some of the large estates carved out of this confiscated property. It remains unclear exactly how much the slave population in Italy increased in the aftermath of Sulla’s victory in the civil wars, but there is undeniable evidence that the political chaos of the late 90s and 80s led Roman senators to enslave some free Italians who, by the end of the Social War, should have been Roman citizens.7 By the 70s, it seems that large populations of agricultural slaves (some of whom were formerly free Italians) worked some of the best land in Campania and other parts of Southern Italy, in many cases alongside some of the Italians whose families had been stripped of property and citizen rights by Sulla. Sulla had ripped up the basic social compacts that protected the life, freedom, and property rights of Italians and Romans in order to create a new Italy dominated by his supporters. Even the Italian farmers who kept their land struggled to compete economically with the larger and more efficient farming operations that some of their Sullan neighbors put together.
Tensions even simmered in Rome itself. Sulla had eliminated the financial supports for grain purchases that helped many urban residents pay for food, and he had lifted the price controls that kept grain from becoming too expensive. The lack of ambitious and capable tribunes who could make law or effectively advocate for the city’s population prompted many urban residents to see rioting as the only option available for them to express their displeasure with rising food prices. The powers of tribunes and larger questions of political representation thus became increasingly contentious issues.8
Any one of these challenges had the potential to unravel the post-Sullan Republic and, during the years between 78 and 70, each of them posed a real threat to Roman stability. The problems began as soon as Sulla died. Catulus and Lepidus, the consuls elected for the year 78, immediately began arguing about whether Sulla should be given a state funeral. Sulla had opposed Lepidus’s consular candidacy and, perhaps in response, Lepidus fought hard against giving Sulla the public commemoration, unprecedented in its lavishness, that he ultimately received with Catulus’s support. A funeral procession composed of armed men, enthusiastic new senators, and people “afraid of his army” led Sulla’s body to the Forum.9
After the funeral, Lepidus began agitating more aggressively against Catulus and the other Sullan supporters. He backed a measure to reinstate the distribution of subsidized grain in the city. He promised to restore to Italians the land that Sulla had taken from them. Despite strongly opposing a similar measure just a few months prior, he now advocated publicly for the restoration of the powers of the tribunes.10
This was an inopportune moment to have such divisions arise between the consuls. In Faesulae, a city located in the hills above the modern city of Florence, the people who had lost their land to the Sullan appropriations attacked those of his veterans who had been settled to colonize the area. Fearing a larger revolt in Etruria, the Senate directed Lepidus and Catulus to lead armies into the region and suppress the uprising, apparently ignoring rumors in Rome that “all Etruria was suspected of being inclined to revolt alongside Lepidus.”11 Things proceeded as one would expect. Although the Faesulae violence did not ultimately metastasize into a wider revolt, this seems to have happened more because Lepidus enlisted the rebels to support his own ambitions than because the two consuls worked together to suppress them.
Backed by these insurgents, Lepidus pushed his quarrel with Catulus even more aggressively. As the tensions between the consuls increased, the Senate intervened and compelled both consuls to swear an oath to keep the peace. It then attempted to further defuse the situation by sending Lepidus to govern Transalpine Gaul.12 Lepidus set out to his province with no intention of returning to Rome before his term of office ended. Suspecting that Lepidus might be planning to build forces to eventually attack the city, the Senate soon summoned him back to Rome to superintend the consular elections for the year 78. Lepidus instead returned to Rome at the head of an army of Roman soldiers and insurgents from Etruria, demanding that he be awarded a second consulship. When he was prevented from bringing the army into the city, he ordered his men to take up arms. They were quickly defeated and Lepidus soon killed, but the survivors of his army fled Italy to join the anti-Sullan Roman commander Sertorius in Spain.13
Everyone in Rome recognized that Lepidus had attempted a rather clumsy, but still quite dangerous, imitation of Sulla. Although Lepidus had lacked the support, resources, and strategic intelligence to actually take control of Rome, he had come far closer than a man like him should have. His attempt underlined the inherent instability of the new political order that Sulla had created. And it escaped no one’s notice that, even in defeat, Lepidus’s supporters had still managed to reinforce the army of Sertorius in Spain.14
Things would not improve over the next few years. A grain shortage in 75 hit the city of Rome, Roman territory in Gaul, and even Rome’s armies fighting in Spain. The Roman commanders battling Sertorius threatened to return to Italy if the Senate did not send additional supplies for the troops.15 In Rome, the food shortage caused a different sort of problem. Stripped of a tribunate with the capacity to effectively address the problems of regular citizens and stuck with a political system designed to minimize their ability to influence policy, Romans reacted to the spike in food prices with the only weapon they still had. They took to the streets. The protests in 75 seem to have been spontaneous (and apparently leaderless) eruptions of popular frustration, but they were no less dangerous than the armed gangs mobilized by figures like Saturninus and Sulpicius in the 90s and 80s. At one point, hungry citizens attacked the consuls Gaius Cotta and Lucius Octavius when they were escorting a member of the Metellus family into the Forum. They overwhelmed the lictors (the civil servants who acted as bodyguards for the consuls and other magistrates who held imperium) and forced the consuls to flee to safety in Octavius’s home.16
This protest had some important immediate effects on the Republic. Sallust describes Cotta changing into mourning clothes, addressing the crowd, telling them that war requires civilians to sacrifice, and then offering himself up for punishment if they felt that food prices had surged because of misconduct by the consuls. His dramatic display apparently calmed the situation for a time, as did a subsequent decision to send military forces against the pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean who had supposedly caused the grain shortage.17 But the consuls and Senate recognized that this issue, or one like it, would erupt again if they did not tweak the Sullan system. Cotta took the first step by pushing forward a law, the lex Aurelia, that removed the restriction Sulla had placed on tribunes of the plebs ever holding another magistracy. In 73, the consuls sponsored a grain law that gave a limited number of citizens a small monthly grain allowance.18 The Republic was slowly stumbling back toward the old order that Sulla had tried to replace.
These steps did not calm political life in the city of Rome or outside of it. Popular agitation for a more robust tribunate that was again able to propose legislation on which the people would vote grew as the 70s progressed. In 73, the tribune Macer argued vehemently for a full restoration of the traditional powers of the people and their tribunes. When Sallust dramatized this moment, he described a speech that contrasted “the rights left to you by your forefathers and the slavery imposed on you by Sulla” and exhorted Romans “not to change the names of things to suit your own cowardice” by “substituting the term ‘tranquility’ for ‘slavery.’”19 By 71, this call for a full restoration of the tribunate and the legislative powers it once possessed had become a centerpiece of successful consular campaigns. But no consul had yet been able to actually restore the pre-Sullan powers of the tribunes.
Outside of Rome, the Republic continued to be buffeted by the grinding war with Sertorius in Spain and then, in 73 BC, by a slave revolt led by the Thracian gladiator Spartacus. Both the Sertorian war and the Spartacus revolt found fuel in the anger of those left behind by the post-Sullan Republic. In Spain, Sertorius commanded an army made up both of Spaniards and of Romans who had fled from Sulla or his successors. In Italy, Spartacus mobilized tens of thousands of slaves from the gladiatorial training schools, farms, and plantations in the south of the peninsula. A not inconsiderable number of free Italians also fled their work in the fields to join his force, dramatically highlighting the desperation among those hit hardest by the Sullan land confiscations. Rome would ultimately put down both revolts. The Sertorian war ended after Perpenna, one of the followers of Lepidus who fled to Spain, turned on and assassinated Sertorius, and was then himself defeated in battle by Pompey. Spartacus defeated two armies commanded by praetors and, in 72 BC, a force jointly commanded by the two consuls, but his revolt was suppressed and most of his followers killed following a series of defeats in 71 BC inflicted on him by Crassus, another Sullan supporter from an elite family who, like Pompey, first came to prominence by recruiting a private army that served the dictator. After Crassus defeated Spartacus’s army on the battlefield, Pompey then slaughtered the survivors as they fled toward Northern Italy.20
Sertorius and Spartacus both lost, but the conflicts they sparked emphasized to all that Sulla’s Republic remained weak. Not only did significant resentment still course through Rome and its empire, but, more than a decade after Sulla’s victory, the Republic still had not fully rebuilt the public monopoly on the use of violence that the dictator had destroyed. It could suppress revolts and stop riots eventually, but it had not shown the ability to prevent them from occurring in the first place. And, when violence erupted, Rome still had to depend on Pompey and Crassus, two of the warlords whose wealth and privately recruited armies had brought Sulla to power. It was not clear that the Republic could survive without such men. Even more alarming, as Pompey and Crassus led their victorious armies toward the city following the end of the Spartacus revolt in 71, many in Rome doubted that the Republic had the ability to stop them from bringing their armies into the field against one another, should the two rivals decide to do so. If Pompey or Crassus wanted one, the formal power of the state could likely do nothing to prevent another civil war.
Pompey seemed the more frightening of the two. He was the son of Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, a cruel and calculating man who was the first in his immediate family to achieve senatorial status and to win a consulship. Strabo had earned this office in 89 BC by combining undeniable military skill with a mastery of Roman power politics. Strabo was committed to holding power through the normal offices and military commands the Republic sanctioned, but he was not averse to securing these offices and commands through the implicit threat of extraconstitutional action. Strabo’s background required him to play this outsider’s game—and he played it expertly. Thrust into command by the emergencies of the Social War, Strabo rode military success in the year 90 BC to the consulship in 89. He then retained command of his army as proconsul in 88, sat out Sulla’s initial attack on Rome, and killed the man Sulla sent to take over his command in 88 BC. Strabo retained command of his army through the year 86, fighting both for and against Cinna in the hope that he could prolong the conflict, profit from the fighting, and use his army as a chip to bargain for a second consulship. He died before any deal could be struck, but his greed and disregard for the public good infuriated those in Rome who nervously waited for public order to return. His power had ensured that Strabo remained unassailable in life, but nothing constrained people from expressing their anger after his death. As his funeral procession wound through the city, a crowd pulled his body down from the bier and dragged it through the filthy streets.21
Pompey was twenty years old when his father died, young enough that he could have tried to sit out the civil war but intelligent enough to realize that he would be unlikely to survive unscathed if he did. His father had died a hated man, but he had left his son some considerable advantages, including the money and lands in the central Italian region of Picenum that he had used to build a network of loyal clients. Pompey understood that Strabo had used these reservoirs of wealth and supporters to consolidate a particular sort of power in the tottering Republic of the early 80s. Pompey knew too that they would be vital if he hoped to survive and thrive during the looming civil war.22
Pompey also had learned how to play power politics from his father. Strabo never had the power that Sulla or Marius or Cinna did, and he knew that he would be soundly defeated if he had followed their lead and tried to seize Rome. He could not take power extraconstitutionally. But the threat that he might try to do so allowed Strabo to name the price for his continued cooperation with the Republic. He was savvy enough to realize that, if the price he set involved an office or a command that seemed consistent with normal Republican practices, it was likely to be met.
Pompey took these lessons to heart. Immediately after his father’s death, the family home was ransacked and Pompey himself was put on trial for personally taking plunder during the capture of the city of Asculum that rightfully belonged to the Republic. But Pompey proved to be both too valuable and too charismatic to convict. The future consul Carbo was among the senators to defend Pompey, and Pompey so charmed the man presiding over the trial, P. Antistius, that he ended up engaged to his daughter Antistia. The wedding took place four days after Pompey’s inevitable acquittal.23
Pompey remained allied with Cinna, Carbo, and the Sullan opposition until 84 BC, but, perhaps sensing the erosion in Cinna’s position, Pompey left their camp just before the revolt that led to Cinna’s death, later claiming that he had heard rumors of plots against his own life. He retreated to Picenum and waited to see how the civil conflict developed. When he heard of Sulla’s landing in Italy, Pompey decided to side with Sulla. Many elites fled to Sulla alone or with their families, but Pompey had learned from his father’s example. He knew that he could capitalize on changing sides in the civil war only if he approached Sulla with something substantial. Pompey thus marshaled his supporters in Picenum and urged them to revolt against the senatorial regime headed by Carbo. Pompey set himself at the head of a tribunal in the city of Auximum, ordered the city magistrates loyal to Carbo to leave, and then “proceeded to raise troops and appointed centurions and officers for them.” Once he had collected troops in Auximum, he then did the same thing in all of the neighboring cities in the district. This legion would serve Sulla, but it was recruited and paid by Pompey. In due course, he would add to his army two more legions of soldiers drawn from the district.24
Pompey moved toward Sulla, fighting a number of engagements with enemy forces on his way to ensure that Sulla knew the quality of the support Pompey brought. When Pompey arrived at Sulla’s camp, he offered Sulla the army he had recruited, the loyalty of the district from which it came, and the promise of additional troops should Sulla need them. In response, Sulla rose, uncovered his head, and greeted the twenty-three-year-old general as “imperator,” a title that conveyed his respect for what Pompey had already achieved as a commander. Sulla then sent Pompey and his forces to Cisalpine Gaul to help Metellus Pius root out resistance there.25
When Sulla had nearly secured control of Italy, he tasked Pompey and his army with defeating those of his opponents who controlled Sicily and North Africa. The Senate voted Pompey some form of imperium over Sicily, a step that, for the first time, gave Pompey the official standing to command what remained of his private army. Pompey first defeated Carbo in 82, then took the province of Africa from Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, capturing and executing both men despite the fact that Carbo was still serving as consul. In Carbo’s case, Pompey added even greater indignity by binding the consul in heavy chains and ensuring that he soiled himself just before the execution took place. Both were enemies of Sulla and certainly subject to death, but the brutal way in which they were executed shocked people to such a degree that Pompey earned the nickname adulescentulus carnifex, or “the teenaged butcher.” Pompey, however, realized that harsh vengeance against a few leading men gave him the chance to show mercy to others and, potentially, transform those who survived into his own supporters. He used the victories in Sicily and North Africa to build relationships with people in those provinces who might later prove useful to him.26
Pompey’s successes in battle and his skill in building a network of political allies outside of Italy seems to have disquieted Sulla. Pompey was not strong enough to directly threaten the dictator, but Sulla decided it was prudent to try to domesticate the young commander before he became capable of such a challenge. In 82, Sulla persuaded (or perhaps compelled) Pompey to divorce Antistia, the daughter of the judge at his trial, and instead marry Sulla’s stepdaughter Aemilia, a match that Sulla had enabled by forcing Aemilia’s husband to divorce her. Sulla hoped that this marriage would bind Pompey both to Sulla and to Aemilia’s Metellan relatives, but Aemilia’s death soon afterward while giving birth to a child fathered by her ex-husband thwarted this plan.27
After the defeat of Domitius in Africa, Sulla took an even stronger action. He ordered Pompey to send two of his legions back to Italy, with Pompey staying in Africa with his one remaining legion until another general came to replace him. Sulla evidently hoped that this would offer a way to integrate Pompey’s private army back into the military structure of the Roman state by removing his soldiers from the commander to whom they were personally loyal. Perhaps just as importantly, this would diminish Pompey’s power. Pompey had never held any Roman office and, though he had been given a command by the Senate, Pompey’s authority over what remained a private army derived from the force of his personality and the power of his family, not the authority of Rome. Sulla knew that, if Pompey could be induced to relinquish command of his army, he would return to Italy extremely (and possibly fatally) diminished.
Pompey knew this too. He reacted to Sulla’s orders much as his father would have, though with considerably more skill than Strabo ever managed. Pompey allowed news of the recall to spread among his army without publicly reacting to it. The soldiers quickly became alarmed, claiming that “they would never forsake their general” and telling Pompey “never to trust himself to the tyrant.”28 Pompey then called an assembly of the soldiers in which he asked his men to follow Sulla’s orders, telling them that to do anything else would be treasonous. But it was likely clear to all that, despite what Pompey had said, he really hoped the army would refuse Sulla. And they did. When his words had no effect on the mood of the army, Pompey retired to his tent. As his legions continued to noisily demand that Pompey refuse Sulla’s order, he reemerged in their midst and “swore solemnly that he would kill himself if they forced him to act as they hoped he would.”29
Pompey had not revolted, but when word got back to Sulla about this display of loyalty by his men, it was enough to convince him that there was significant danger in compelling Pompey’s army to leave their commander. He instead allowed Pompey and his private army to return to Italy together and, when the twenty-four-year-old commander arrived, Sulla greeted him as “Pompeius Magnus,” Pompey the Great. Even this, though, was not enough to make up for the effort to take away Pompey’s army, and Pompey responded to Sulla’s welcome with a brazen request that Sulla grant him a triumph. Such a thing was unprecedented. Pompey was far younger than any commander who had ever celebrated a triumph, he had won his victory with an army that he commanded without holding any Roman office, and Pompey was not even a member of the Senate. Sulla pointed out to Pompey that granting him a triumph would be illegal, because Roman law reserved triumphs for consuls or praetors, and he told Pompey that he would personally oppose the request and prevent the triumph if Pompey persisted in asking for it.30
Pompey persisted. He told Sulla to remember that “more people worship the rising sun than the setting sun,” implying that Pompey’s star was on the rise while Sulla’s was soon to be eclipsed.31 Pompey was again playing his father’s game, this time leveraging both his personal potential and the loyalty of his troops to secure for himself an honor the Republic had always reserved for a very different sort of commander. Sulla again relented. Pompey then staged a spectacular triumph that impressed Romans even though the narrowness of the city gate forced Pompey to abandon his plan to enter the city in a chariot drawn not by horses but by four African elephants.32
Pompey dismissed his army just before the triumph, and upon his return to Rome, he married his third wife Mucia (who like Aemilia had connections to both Sulla and the Metelli) in 79 BC. That year also saw Pompey make a strategic decision to break ranks with Sulla and back Lepidus in his campaign for the consulship of 78, a decision perhaps prompted by an expectation that Pompey would benefit from the political disorder Lepidus’s victory would create.33 Although Pompey did intervene against Lepidus’s efforts to prevent Sulla’s public funeral, his support for Lepidus so infuriated Sulla that, before the former dictator’s death, he cut Pompey out of his will.34
The events of 79 and early 78 offered Pompey a chance to become something more than Sulla’s adulescentulus carnifex. He had carefully managed to position himself in the middle between Lepidus, whom he had supported for consul, and the Sullans, whom he had supported in their push for a public funeral. Pompey’s exclusion from Sulla’s will emphasized that he truly belonged to neither camp but had instead carved out a place in the pragmatic middle between them. This made it natural that, when the Senate condemned Lepidus as a public enemy following his rebellion, it also granted imperium to Pompey to command an army that would help the consul Catulus suppress the rebellion.35
Although the Senate had given Pompey this command, he nevertheless refused the call of the consul Catulus to dismiss his army after the initial defeat of Lepidus. Instead, he pressed on to attack, defeat, and execute M. Junius Brutus, the Lepidan ally who governed Cisalpine Gaul. Then, after refusing again to dismiss his army, Pompey sought and received senatorial sanction to pursue those of Lepidus’s forces that had joined Sertorius in Spain. His military authority now shifted from the emergency imperium granted so that he might suppress Lepidus to a command akin to that exercised by a consul, with a status to match. The army he commanded was no longer a private force recruited by a private citizen. It was instead an army of the Republic that Pompey commanded legally with senatorial sanction. Pompey, however, cleverly hedged his position to ensure that this command would not be taken away easily. Until the food shortages of 75–74 made it untenable, Pompey elected to use his own money to pay the salaries of his troops and the expenses of the campaign, a situation that was both publicly known and undoubtedly an excellent way to build loyalty among the soldiers. He also continued the pattern he established in Sicily and North Africa of building relationships with influential people in Spain and, in some cases, even sponsoring grants of Roman citizenship to them. After Sertorius’s death and the petering out of his rebellion, the consuls of the year 72 ratified Pompey’s extensions of citizenship and thereby more closely joined these Spanish notables to their patron. Pompey also took the dramatic step of burning a set of papers given to him by Perpenna, the old ally of both Lepidus and Sertorius, that supposedly documented treasonous activities by a large number of senators. Though these alleged traitors were not bound to Pompey in the way that his Spanish clients were, they too undoubtedly owed him a debt of gratitude.36
When Pompey returned to Rome following his defeat of what remained of Spartacus’s rebels in 71 BC, he did so as the most powerful man in the Republic. He led an experienced and loyal army, he possessed numerous supporters both within Italy and across Rome’s western provinces, and he had even joined the growing calls for the full restoration of the tribunate as a way to build even greater popular support.37 Pompey could have perhaps seized power at that moment, but he did not want or need to do so. Instead, he chose to stand for the consulship of the year 70, despite the fact that, under the terms set by Sulla’s reforms, he was too young and had held none of the lower offices that legally qualified one to be consul. But this did not matter. Pompey was capable, popular, and likeable. He had worked to build ties with members of the traditional Roman elite and had also developed a profile that endeared him to the Roman masses. He was, Sallust memorably remarked, “moderate to all things except domination.” As Pompey embarked on his campaign for the consulship, his moderation served to put a virtuous face on the “shameless heart” that had fueled his rise.38
Crassus, Pompey’s most formidable competitor for the consulship in 70, brought different qualities to the campaign. The son of P. Licinius Crassus, a former consul and censor who had held a triumph in Rome, Crassus came from a well-established Roman family that had been deeply affected by the Marian and Cinnan capture of Italy in 87 BC. When the city of Rome fell, Crassus’s father elected to commit suicide rather than be killed by the victors. Soldiers loyal to the new regime then killed Crassus’s brother.39 Crassus avoided death by fleeing to Spain and staying there until he heard about Sulla’s imminent return to Italy. Like Pompey, Crassus decided to personally recruit an army that he could lead to Sulla and place in his service. He selected twenty-five hundred men out of a larger group of volunteers and sailed to North Africa to join up with the pro-Sullan forces Metellus Pius commanded there. Crassus soon left Africa and met up with Sulla in Italy.
Although Crassus and Pompey both came to Sulla leading armies, the reception the two men received from Sulla differed dramatically. Pompey was younger than Crassus, but he presented Sulla with twice as many men as Crassus and, unlike the troops Crassus commanded, Pompey’s forces had already proved their worth in battles within Italy. Whereas Sulla greeted Pompey as an imperator, Sulla treated Crassus as a noticeably less influential figure. Crassus further diminished his standing in Sulla’s eyes when he took for himself most of the plunder from the capture of an Umbrian city during the civil war. Even Crassus’s heroic actions that secured Sulla’s victory at the Battle of Colline Gate did not fully make up for the damage to his reputation that his greed had caused.40
Crassus continued profiting from his association with Sulla after the latter’s victory in the civil war. He was one of the most eager and strategic buyers of property taken from the proscribed. It was even said that he personally added people to the proscription lists in order to secure their property. Over time, he diversified his holdings to include mines, farmland, and even many of Rome’s notorious tenements, which he renovated or rebuilt using a large team of slaves trained as architects and builders.41
Crassus saw his wealth as a tool to enhance his political power.42 After his experience in the 80s, Crassus understood that money could buy military protection and often commented that one was not wealthy unless he could buy a legion.43 But Crassus also appreciated that extreme wealth had other, more subtle applications in the post-Sullan Republic. Sulla’s expansion of the Senate had made senators of men from families without any history of Roman officeholding. Even though Sulla surely expected these new senators to serve primarily as jurors, the fact that they now shared the same rank as scions of old Roman families like Metellus Pius inspired many of them to compete for public offices their ancestors could not have dreamed of reaching. Aspiration was costly, however, and Crassus set himself up as the lender of last resort to those who wished to chase high office. Crassus bankrolled the political campaigns of Sulla’s new senators and their peers, offering interest-free loans as well as the strategic application of his political influence. Crassus argued cases for them, appointed them as officers during his campaign against Spartacus, and even allowed them to advertise his support for their legislation when Crassus’s backing might conceivably aid a law’s passage.44 These men became Crassus’s political allies, bound to him by a loyalty he either bought or earned.
Crassus understood that his wealth could also help him build a following among ordinary Roman voters. Plutarch wrote that “his home was open to all” and at his regular dinner parties, “the people he invited were ordinary people not members of great families.” Crassus served inexpensive meals, but “they were good and there was a friendliness about them which made them more agreeable than the most lavish entertainments.”45
It seems that Crassus chose to develop this sort of public profile in part because he realized that he would never be able to achieve the notoriety as a military commander that Pompey did. Whereas Pompey built his reputation through a series of military commands he secured without ever being elected to office, Crassus channeled his power and influence toward elected offices within the constitutional framework of the post-Sullan Republic. He made alliances with tribunes, secured election to a praetorship, and was given an enhanced command when he took over the war against Spartacus from the discredited former consul Cassius Longinus.46 Pompey had expanded his influence by seizing command of armies without the formal constraints of an office; Crassus used his network of political supporters to climb the ladder of Republican offices until he gained a prestigious military command. Perhaps because Crassus had received his command through a regular political process, he ran the army he led against Spartacus differently from how Pompey commanded his forces. Pompey understood that his authority derived in large part from the enthusiasm that his soldiers had for serving under him. If this enthusiasm diminished, Pompey’s soldiers would never go along when their commander sought to defy orders by holding on to command. Crassus, however, entered the war with six new legions and assumed command of the soldiers remaining in the two consular legions that Spartacus had defeated earlier in 72 BC. His authority over this army came from the office he held, not his personal popularity with the soldiers. This freed him to take dramatic steps to restore discipline.
Discipline would prove essential in defeating the slave rebellion. Much of Spartacus’s success against earlier Roman commanders had been due to the terror that his troops inspired in Roman soldiers. His followers had nothing to lose—they would either die fighting the Romans or be executed by the Romans if they surrendered—so they fought with a ferocity that the first Roman levies sent to confront them could not match. Crassus saw the danger this posed early in the campaign when two legions under the command of one of Crassus’s deputies broke, dropped their arms, and fled. In response to the mass desertion, Crassus revived the old, draconian Roman punishment of decimation: he took five hundred of the survivors, divided them into fifty groups of ten men, and then executed one man chosen randomly from each group. The Roman levies understood that they now faced a difficult battle if they fought but brutal punishments if they fled.47
This tactic could not have made Crassus beloved by his soldiers, but they did fight hard and effectively for him during the campaigning season in 72 BC and into the winter of 72–71. Crassus first prevented Spartacus from crossing to Sicily and then pinned him in Southern Italy for most of the winter. By the spring of 71, Roman reinforcements were entering Italy from both the east and, as Pompey’s Spanish army returned to Italy, from the north. Crassus decided to try to force a decisive battle with Spartacus before anyone arrived with whom he would need to share credit.48
Rash decisions like this one had backfired on many Roman commanders in the past, most notably the consuls who repeatedly stumbled into Hannibal’s traps in the Second Punic War. In the troubled 70s, however, Crassus’s decision was also, perversely, a hopeful sign for those who valued the norms the preceding decades had shredded. Crassus wanted sole credit for the victory over Spartacus because he hoped to pursue a conventional political career according to the traditional Republican pattern. Like Fabricius in the 280s, Crassus sought the honors and offices that only the Republic could provide, and he hoped to get them through the consent of the organs of the Roman state the Republic had empowered to award them. Crassus did not want to seize the consulship using force or the threat of force. He hoped to earn it through the connections he had built across Roman society and the prestige he had acquired by defeating Spartacus. Like Flaminius 150 years before, Crassus decided to risk a catastrophic military defeat because he trusted that the benefits of victory would be so significant.
Crassus’s gamble only partially paid off. Crassus did force Spartacus into a decisive battle in which he defeated the slave forces and, apparently, killed Spartacus himself. And Crassus did receive public credit for “conquering the slaves in open battle.” But Pompey had captured and killed the fugitives who escaped Crassus. This meant that Pompey was able to say that he alone had ended the war.49
Crassus and Pompey both returned to Rome with their armies by the middle of 71 to participate in public recognitions of their victories. Indeed, the last months of the year were filled with public commemorations of Roman military successes across the Mediterranean. Lucullus had returned from Greece with a massive cache of statues to display in a triumphal procession that celebrated a victory he had earned in Thrace. Metellus Pius was honored for his victories over Sertorius’s armies in Spain. And Pompey celebrated a triumph for his Spanish victory, the second triumph he had celebrated despite not holding one of the requisite offices. Although Crassus’s praetorship and the nature of his command both qualified him to celebrate a triumph, that honor was reserved only for commanders who had defeated foreign adversaries, and the slave Spartacus did not count as such an enemy. Crassus was instead voted an ovatio, a lesser celebratory procession during which the general marched in on foot rather than riding in a triumphal chariot. After lobbying from allies in the Senate, Crassus was permitted to wear the laurel wreath normally worn by one celebrating a triumph.50
Whereas Metellus and Lucullus both apparently had dismissed their armies before their triumphs, Crassus and Pompey did not. Pompey had already demonstrated a propensity for keeping his armies together even after they had accomplished the military objectives set for him, and it is possible that Crassus did not dismiss his forces so that they might serve as a check on possible mischief by Pompey. Within Rome, however, the presence of two armies commanded by two political rivals evoked uncomfortable memories of Sulla and Marius. Both Pompey and Crassus hoped to run for the consulship and, perhaps sensing the popular mood, the two men ultimately decided to dismiss their armies after the public celebrations of their victories had concluded.51
Crassus then decided on a remarkable course of action: he proposed an electoral alliance with Pompey. Because Pompey’s military success and his recent strong support for a restoration of the tribunate virtually ensured his election, Crassus understood that he would be competing with other candidates for the second consular slot. Pompey’s support would likely ensure that Crassus would enter office, but he would do so as Pompey’s junior colleague. Pompey was receptive to the idea because he saw it as a way to get a “junior colleague devoted to him” while the two men were in office. He also assumed that this would put Crassus under an obligation to return Pompey’s favor even after their consulships ended.52 As expected, Pompey and Crassus both secured the consulship for 70.
The alliance that Pompey and Crassus struck did not last long past the election. Part of this had to do with the aggressive way in which Pompey pushed his reformist agenda. The first public speech Pompey gave following his election promised to undo many of the reforms Sulla had made to the Republic. Pompey called for the removal of the remaining limits Sulla had placed on the tribunate and a return to a system in which tribunes proposed laws that the concilium plebis voted to approve. Perhaps in response to complaints Pompey heard from his clients in Sicily, he proposed a reform of provincial government that would make it more difficult for senators to extort money from provincials. And, perhaps most controversially, Pompey pushed for a reform of the courts that judged senatorial misconduct so that their juries again included nonsenators. And as ambitious as this program was, Pompey hoped to do even more. Later in 70, a friendly tribune sponsored a law to award land to Pompey’s and Metellus Pius’s veterans from the Spanish war. Pompey clearly saw an opportunity both to create the same sort of geographically diffuse, intensely loyal following that Sulla’s veterans settlements had provided him and to increase the personal loyalty that troops serving under him in the future might feel.53
Crassus may have always intended to break with Pompey once they were in office, but, after cooperating with Pompey on the restoration of the powers of the tribunes, Crassus seems to have become alarmed at the enthusiasm of Pompey’s supporters both within Rome and in the provinces. Instead of serving as the loyal junior partner that Pompey expected, Crassus began mobilizing whatever resources he could to block his colleague. Crassus largely failed, however. Pompey succeeded in changing the composition of juries and even got a law passed that provided land to his veterans, though its implementation stalled when the Senate claimed that it lacked the funds to actually purchase the necessary land. By the middle of 70, frustrated at his inability to stop Pompey’s proposals, it seems that Crassus busied himself with disparaging his colleague rather than trying to achieve anything on behalf of the public good.54
As the year progressed, people in Rome again became alarmed about where the rivalry between Pompey and Crassus might lead. The anxiety finally boiled over near the end of their term, at a public assembly at which both men presided. The details of the event vary slightly in the surviving accounts. Plutarch describes a man who jumped onto the platform where the consuls were seated and cried out that Jupiter had told him in a dream that Pompey and Crassus should not be allowed to step down from their office unless they reconciled with one another. Appian indicates that the call for reconciliation came instead from a college of soothsayers. But both sources agree that this divinely inspired call gave the people attending the meeting the courage to voice their concerns about the two men’s rivalry. They implored Pompey and Crassus to reconcile, reminding them of the horrors that grew out of the personal feud between Marius and Sulla and becoming louder and more frantic as neither man moved to resolve their differences.55
Crassus finally blinked. He stepped down from his consular chair, walked toward Pompey, and extended his hand. Pompey then rose to meet him. The two leading men in the Roman state then shook hands and agreed to put aside their rivalry for the good of Rome, its Republic, and their fellow citizens. In this way, Appian would write, “the conviction that another civil war would happen was happily dispelled.” The two consuls may not have much liked each other, but they had agreed to place the good of the Republic above their own personal rivalry. Instead of mobilizing their considerable resources against one another as Sulla and Marius had done in the 80s and Lepidus and Catulus had done in 78, Rome’s richest man and its most powerful general agreed to a truce. In years to come, both Crassus and Pompey would continue to chase the offices and honors the Republic offered, but they would do so only by using the tools that the political system permitted. For the first time in nearly two decades, the most powerful men in the Roman state clearly specified that they trusted the system to protect them from their rivals and to allow them to compete fairly within the rules it set. Romans could, for the moment, imagine that the Republic again set firm rules and enforced established norms that governed all ambitious Romans as they pursued offices and military glory. If it could, Rome might finally and fully emerge from both the horror of the civil war and the social, political, and economic distortions of its Sullan aftermath.