The Life of Gaius Marius
—Chrissie
Listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/user/bqn1/hwts199
When one thinks of great Roman generals, the first one who usually comes to mind is Gaius Julius Caesar. As successful as he was, he followed the lead of two other men, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Marius created the Roman soldier which Caesar used, and Sulla created the precedent of using those soldiers to invade their home city for his benefit.
Gaius Marius was what the Romans called a Novus Homo, a New Man, the first in his family to reach the highest office of the Roman Republic, the consulship. He was often described by his contemporaries as a provincial and a “man who knew no Greek,” a generic insult that meant he had no formal education. While it is true that he did come from a farming family in the rural area of Arpinum and his family was not one of the elite patrician families, he did have a formal education. Plutarch tells us that never bothered to learn Greek fully because he saw no use in learning the language of a conquered people.
Though his family was not rich, they did have enough resources to equip Marius to join the army. In that era, the Roman Army was an all-volunteer force who equipped themselves. Because of this, there was a minimum property requirement. Also, these soldiers were not paid, they expected to get a share of the spoils. The base of the army, its infantry, was comprised of the sons of the smallholding farming families from across Italy, who volunteered to protect their country and expected nothing in return. This reflects the ideology of war for Rome in this era: they only got involved if they were invaded, they did not conquer. This changed with the Punic Wars.
The Punic Wars are a series of wars fought between Rome and Carthage, beginning in 264 BCE and ending with Rome’s complete destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE. Over the course of this near-century, Rome moved away from an ideology of purely defensive wars to conquest of the Mediterranean. This conquest enriched some Romans as never before and, keeping to their agrarian roots, many purchased land The land had been owned by small holders who found themselves impoverished while fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers fought for Rome. These small farms were brought together into huge farms, called latifundia. And these rich men did not hire the newly landless to work these farms, they used the enslaved spoils of the conquests. They also added parts of the ager publicus where they could. These are the public lands that were supposed to be available to everyone for grazing livestock and other public use. Within a generation of the final destruction of Carthage, the Roman army was feeling the effects of this shift in land ownership. No longer could Rome rely on volunteers who kittened themselves, there simply weren’t enough of them. The difference could be made up with armies of the Socii, the allies in Italy. This, however, would create its own problems, ones that Marius would fight firsthand.
Marius rose through the ranks, making a name for himself politically at the same time. He, like many political men who came from plebeian families, had help from a patrician patron; Marius’ patron was the Metelli family, and he worked closely with Quintus Caecilius Metellus. After his election as plebeian tribune in 120 BCE, he began to alienate them with opposing political stances. This opposition cost him the aedileship a few years later and would present further problems down the road. After a term as propraetor in Further Spain, he returned to Rome in 113. He was now very wealthy, but still lacked the social bona fides of the senatorial class, so he married a Julia. This showed Rome without question that he was respectable; if a family as ancient as the Julio Caesari, a family who traced their lineage to the Aeneas and, through him, the goddess Venus, allowed one of their daughters to marry him, the rest of the patricians could not keep him on the outside. His new wife’s family benefitted as well, gaining an influx of funds that allowed Julia’s brothers to have political careers in line with their social rank, something the family had not managed in a few generations. And, without this, Julia’s nephew Gaius Julius might never have gained the heights for which he is known and which made the family name a byword for Emperor. The marriage seems to have been a happy one, at least as far as arranged marriages go. They had only one child who survived to adulthood, Gaius Marius the Younger.
In 109, Marius travelled to Numidia to become legate to his former patron, Quintus Metellus, who was one of Rome’s generals in the Jugurthine War. There was still enmity between the two men, and this was exacerbated their very different ways of conducting themselves with the soldiers. Metellus stayed distant and commanding, but Marius shared the work with those in his command. His willingness to do so, and to share in the poor provisions and quartering, earned him the respect and admiration of many, and did nothing to endear Metellus to them. This military reputation is one on which he would capitalize for Rome, and himself, in later years. As the summer of 108 came on, Marius requested leave to return to Rome in order to present himself as a candidate for the consulship; Metellus refused to let him go, and mocked him by saying he should wait a while longer, until he could stand with Metellus’ young son as a colleague. Young Metellus was twenty years away from being eligible for the office. But, Quintus Metellus was faced with an increasingly ornery legate, one who knew that the majority of soldiers backed him over their mutual commander, so he finally released him, just when he thought it would take Marius too long to get back to Rome in time for the elections. He was wrong, Marius was elected as one of the consuls for 107.
He had hoped to take the Numidian command from Metellus, not only for any personal reasons that existed between them, but because he truly thought he could conduct the war more successfully; he wasn’t wrong. However, the Senate refused to take the generalship away from Metellus, so Marius arranged for a tribune to put the matter in front of the People’s Assembly, as the Gracchi had done with their reform efforts a few decades previously. The people voted in favor of Marius and Quintus Caecelius Metellus was removed from his command. Marius next step was to recruit more soldiers; finding the usual methods difficult, he began to recruit from the landless citizens in Rome, the capite censi, or head count, so called because they had nothing but their citizenship, by which they were counted and included in the rolls of citizens. He had to get special permission from the Senate for this recruitment, because these men would require a great deal more training than the traditional volunteers, and would also need to be equipped and paid. This was the beginning of the professional Roman army, with standardized training, uniforms, equipment, and pay. This method proved its worth in Marius’ defeat of Jugurtha the following year. Also key to that defeat was Marius’ Questor, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, whose connections gave him access to the court of Bocchus, king of Mauritania and father-in-law to Jugurtha. It was through Bocchus that Jugurtha was ultimately captured, and it was Sulla who accepted his surrender. Here we again see Marius’ disregard for social status: Sulla was of a noble patrician family, but one that had become impoverished and had almost disappeared; he sought to reattain the family’s position and so wanted at least some credit for the successful end of this war. Marius refused even a small acknowledgement. This was his right, in terms of tradition and of legality, as he was the commanding officer, but a small concession here might have saved Marius a great deal of difficulty later. Marius celebrated a triumph on his return.