The Life of Gaius Marius, pt. 2
—Chrissie
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While the Jugurthine War was raging in North Africa, Rome faced a threat which shook them to the core: Germanic tribes were moving through Gaul toward Roman territories and the Italian peninsula itself. This brought back visceral memories of the only time the city of Rome had been taken by a foreign enemy three hundred years earlier. In a not-quite-panic, the Roman senate took the extraordinary measure of appointing Marius to the consulship for the year 104 and giving him the command against these migrating tribes. While it was not unusual for a man to be elected to the consulship more than once, it was tradition, and almost unwritten law, that a decade pass between his terms of office. To break from that shows how scared the Senate and People of Rome truly were.
Marius brought along some of his army from Numidia and recruited more, using the same methods as he had previously. This would be the last time a special dispensation to do so would be needed from the Senate; the successes of this army would convince them of their value: the minimum property requirements for volunteers disappeared soon after. It took until the year 102 for Marius to meet the enemy in battle. He set up a camp in southern Gaul at Aquae Sextiae and waited for the Germanic tribes, specifically the Cimbri, Teutones, and Ambrones, to make their way toward the Alps. A battle erupted near the Roman camp, when some of the Romans ran into some of the Germans unexpectedly. The Teutones and Ambrones were slaughtered. Marius reported back to the Senate that a force of 37,000 Romans defeated 100,000 Germans. In July of the next year, Marius and his generals, including Lucius Cornelius Sulla, defeated the Cimbri forces at Vercellae in Northern Italy. The threat of barbarian invasion was ended. A fifteen-day thanksgiving was observed by the city of Rome; and Marius celebrated a triumph with his consular colleague and fellow general Quintus Lutatius Catulus. Marius sought a sixth consulship, with the idea of securing land grants for his soldiers’ retirement. He also sought to get in the way of the election of his former commanding officer and rival, Quintus Metellus Numidicus; in this he was successful. He had the support of a tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, who was a radical and used questionable and illegal tactics to achieve his goals. Marius found him useful in securing the land grant, but tried to distance himself when it became known that Saturninus had at least one political opponent murdered. Marius tried to hold him and an accomplice, Glaucia, accountable, but they were attacked and killed by a mob. Marius had tried to maintain the respect of the Senate and the upper classes, despite his poor background, but found this was a task much easier accomplished when in the field as a general. He spent more time in Rome during this consulship than he had in all of the five previous, and found the office much more difficult because of it. He went into a semi-retirement at the end of his term as consul at the beginning of the year 99.
Marius travelled in Asia Minor during the next few years, paying his respects at a shrine of Magna Mater in Galatia and visiting King Mithridates of Pontus. In this latter case, he was either plotting with the king to cause a war (as Marius’ opponents claimed) or assessing the intentions of the king as to whether he had plans to go to war (as his supporters claimed). Some of the sources say he removed himself from Rome because he had made enemies of both the people and the Senate, but this is, at worst, an exaggeration. During his absence, he was honored with a seat in the College of Augers; and he was influential in some important court proceedings shortly after his return.
Rome had a short period of peace in the early 90s BCE, which was broken by the Senate’s actions toward the Socii, the Italian Allies. Questions about the status of these groups had been asked in the Senate for decades, but with no resolution. The suggestion of including them in the Roman citizenship had been one of the issues that ended Gaius Gracchus’ political career and led to the end of his life. So, in 91 BCE, when the Tribune Marcus Livius Drusus put forth a bill to grant the Socii the full Roman citizenship, it was not terribly surprising that he was found dead soon after. This sparked the Social War, which was essentially a civil war within Italy, between Rome and its allies, over whether those allies could become Roman. Gaius Marius was given a command in this war and did well, but was relieved when the new consuls for the year 89 were sworn in. We cannot be sure of the reasons, but his health and his age (he was 66) seem likely reasons. The Social War ended in 88: Rome won the war, but did so, in part because they granted the citizenship to each of the Socii groups as they surrendered.
While Italy was fighting itself, Mithridates of Pontus had taken control of the neighboring kingdoms of Bithynia and Cappadocia and was pushing into Roman-held territory in Asia Minor. Sulla, now consul, prepared to go to war, collecting his troops at Nola in Southern Italy before setting out east. While there, two military tribunes arrived with the information that Sulla had been replaced in this command by Marius, on orders of the People and at the behest of one of the Plebeian Tribunes, Publius Sulpicius Rufus. As of this point, Marius’ actions become difficult to understand from a strategic point of view. He should have, by all accounts, travelled to personally take command of this army, as his presence would have been much more forceful than that of messengers. Sulla called together his soldiers so they could be informed of the change of command directly by the two tribunes; we are told the army tore them to pieces. Sulla then led his army back to Rome, in order to regain his command and his authority.
Sulla’s legions took the city easily, pushing Marius and his faction out with little fighting. Marius had not expected Sulla to march on his own people, Rome’s sacred boundary had not been breached by her own soldiers before. Marius travelled to North Africa to collect some of his veterans and wait. Sulla oversaw a small proscription and death sentences on Marius and his compatriots. He stayed through the scheduled elections, which returned one ally, Gnaeus Octavian, and one of Marius’ supporters, Lucius Cornelius Cinna. He thought, it seems, that this would be a balance that would keep the peace. After having his command restored by the Senate, Sulla set out against Mithridates.
No sooner had Sulla left than did the consuls turn on each other. Cinna was forced out of the city, but found backing with the Italians, whose cause he had supported before the Social War. He was able to raise ten legions. By this time, Marius had returned from North Africa and his recruits were added to Cinna’s. The two men led a march on Rome. The Senate opened the gates to them; having no way to stop them anyway. While Sulla had been careful to discourage looting when he had taken the city, Marius and Cinna gave no such orders but allowed their men to terrorize the city for three days. The major supporters of Sulla were executed; the heads of Octavian and a few dozen others were displayed in the Forum. Sham elections were held: Marius won his seventh consulship with Cinna as his colleague. Within two weeks, Marius was dead. We cannot be sure of his cause of death except that it was not violent, but natural, causes. The conflict continued, with Cinna and then Young Marius at the head of that faction. When Sulla returned from the east after two years, he was named dictator by the Senate in order to restore the government to some semblance of normalcy.
This war is often framed as a conflict specifically between Marius and Sulla, but it was a symptom of a much larger problem. Sulla stepped down from the dictatorship believing he had restored the Republic, but it was only a few decades before another civil war was at hand. Marius’ legacy is a mixed one: he reformed the Roman Army and won important victories with it, but also, as the historian H. H. Scullard put it, created “semi-professional soldiers, bound to their commanders by ties of personal interest, [which] made possible the rise of a series of military dictators who, in the end, overthrew the Republic.”[1]
[1] Scullard, H.H. From the Gracchi to Nero, 55-56.