Roman Civil War: Marching on the Senate (Part 3)

The Rest Is History

In the third part of 'Roman Civil War: Marching on the Senate,' Tom and Dominic explore the pivotal moment when Sulla, after being stripped

Key takeaways

• Sulla's decision to march on Rome was unprecedented and violated all established Roman traditions.
• Marius underestimated Sulla's resolve, failing to anticipate that a general would use his army against the capital.

Main topics

• The rivalry between Marius and Sulla
• Roman civil war and the first use of legions against Rome

Notable quotes

"He answered, to deliver her from tyrants." – Sulla's justification for marching on Rome.

Conclusion

Sulla's march on Rome in 88 BC was a defining moment that shattered republican

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) So it happened that Marius was selected to command the war against Mithridates in place of Sulla. When Sulla was brought the news of this, his instinct was to Speaker 1 (0:24) rely on military force to oppose his demotion, and so he summoned his men to an assembly. Speaker 2 (0:30) They were all desperate to fight Mithridates, since the war promised them a great deal of plunder, and they were worried that Marius might recruit other soldiers in their place. Sulla spoke to them of how disgracefully he had been treated by Sulpicius and by Marius. And while he did not openly allude to his secret intention, since he was nervous how this might go down with the soldiers, he urged them to prepare for such orders as he might give them. The soldiers, however, perfectly understood his meaning. And since they were anxious not to miss the campaign against Mithridates, they boldly articulated for Sulla what he had hesitated to put directly into words, then told him. to be of good courage and to lead them on to Rome. Sulla was delighted by this, and promptly set out with his six legions for the city. All his senior officers, however, saving only a single quaestor, deserted him, since they refused to be complicit in Speaker 1 (1:35) an attack on their own country. Speaker 2 (1:38) As for Sulla, when envoys from Rome met him on the road and asked him why he was marching with his legions against his native city, he answered, to deliver her. from tyrants. So what an extraordinary moment. So that's an account by Arian, the Greek historian, and he's writing about one of the landmark moments in all Roman history, one of the most melodramatic moments in all classical history. We're in 88 BC, and it is the decision by a Roman commander to lead an army for the very first time against Rome. itself to attack his own capital city. Tom, this is a monumental moment in Roman history, and you could argue a key step in the process that leads from the Roman Republic to, in a century's time, the launch of the Roman Empire under Augustus. So why don't you fill us in on the circumstances that have brought us to this extraordinary point? I Speaker 1 (2:43) mean, it really is that fateful. It is, as you say, a stupendous moment. And the circumstances that have led us to this point, we covered them in our previous two episodes, but just to give a synopsis. So we've been talking about this venomous rivalry between the two greatest generals in Rome. There's the old bruiser Gaius Marius, and there is the man who had once been his lieutenant, who is louche, ruthless. much younger than Marius and much posher. So this is Sulla, who is a patrician. And the Romans have been fighting a very brutal war against their own Italian erstwhile allies for three years. And by 88, it's not yet over. But the Romans are by now on the front foot. At one point, it looked very bad for them, but they've made a really, really good recovery. And Sulla has been the great hero of this war. His reward has been that the people have voted him consul, which is the highest magistracy in the Roman Republic. And it's been the great object of Sulla's entire political career to get it. But the consulship has also won him something perhaps even more valuable. And this is a command against a king in what is now Turkey. It's a region called Pontus abutting the Black Sea. The king of this area, the king of Pontus, is called Mithridates, and he has invaded the Roman province of Asia, which abuts the Aegean Sea, and astoundingly, he has driven the Romans into the Aegean. Speaker 1 (4:23) To get this command is the great prize in Roman politics at this point, because in Rome, it is universally assumed that Eastern kings, oriental despots as they would describe them, are vicious but fundamentally effeminate. And they are also sensationally rich. And so the command against Mithridates seems to promise whoever has it very easy pickings. So glory and riches, which for any kind of self-respecting Roman commander is the absolute essence of what you want. And so this is why it's not just Sulla who wants to go off and have a crack at Mithridates. It's his men as well. I think this is why they're so keen to follow him when the command gets stripped from him. Speaker 2 (5:11) Of course, what has happened? We ended the last episode. There has been a great twist. So Gaius Marius, that's Sulla's old commander. You know, his old... patron in some ways i suppose but of course now his great rival marius who is basically elvis presley circa 1972 he is living on the like seafront real estate he's been stuffing himself with you know i don't know what he's at oyster burgers oysters surely um despite the fact that he's 69 and that he is a thousand stone he wants the command himself doesn't he you talked before about marius from a provincial background this gnawing need for fame for success to stick it to the elites who've looked down on him and Speaker 1 (5:57) seller is part of that elite right exactly so that enhances the sense of rivalry between them and i think also um we've been alluding throughout this series to a prophecy supposedly given to marius when he was a boy, that he would come to hold seven consulships, which would be a record total. And so far, he's only had six. So I think that Marius may well be dreaming of that elusive seventh consulship as well. And Marius and Sulla absolutely detest each other. And Marius's hatred for Sulla has grown because he now feels put in the shade. by the person who was formerly his deputy. And there's a sense in which that kind of resentment is the most toxic of all. The resentment of someone who had always been preeminent and who now finds himself being put in the shade by someone that he always slightly looked down upon. So what Marius does, Sulla is away. He's besieging this town called Nola in Campania beside the Bay of Naples. Marius seizes his chance while Sulla, the consul, is absent from Rome, and he teams up with this tribune called Salpicius, who presents a bill to the Roman people. And by the terms of this bill, Sulla is to be deprived of his command and Marius is to get it. And the plebiscite is duly passed. It becomes law. And Marius sends one of his staff officers to inform Sulla of this plebiscite. But more than that, to take command of his army on behalf of... Marius. So Marius' staff officer rides from Rome down to Nola and he arrives in Sulla's camp. And Sulla has with him six legions, of which five are earmarked to go with him on the expedition against Mithridates. So this is about 30,000 battle-hardened men in total. And listeners at this point may be wondering, well, if Sulla has six legions with him, how many legions does Marius have with him in Rome? And the answer is Marius has absolutely no legions whatsoever. So you would think this is pretty basic maths. How can as hardened an operator as Marius has always been throughout his life, how could he possibly have been so stupid as to drive his greatest rival into this corner? where there are six legions kind of at his back. This seems to, I would guess, completely mad to people today listening. But it's not, Speaker 2 (8:37) I mean, I'm going to hazard a guess at the answer to this, which is that marching in Rome has never been done before. And you say Sulla has the legions, but the legions, you know, Sulla's borrowed the legions from Rome. They're not his personal legions. We're not in the first century or second century AD. Speaker 2 (8:55) absolute convention, surely, is that Sulla just says, fine, I don't like it, but I'll have to go along with it. And off he goes back to Rome. You Speaker 1 (9:04) don't want to earn the opprobrium of your Speaker 2 (9:07) fellow elitists in Rome who would, you know, it's unthinkable, basically, that you Speaker 1 (9:12) wouldn't obey the order, isn't it? I think for Marius, it is literally unthinkable. He hadn't even crossed his mind, because as you say, it goes against every custom, tradition, and law. of the Roman Republic, the notion that an army of Rome might choose to behave like the private militia of its own commander. It's just unthinkable. Speaker 2 (9:34) Imagine when Harry Truman sacked Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War. Imagine if General MacArthur had called his troops and said, fine, we're marching on Washington. I mean, it's that level of unthinkability, right? Yeah, I think so. Or, you know, Montgomery marching on London in 1944 or something. I mean, it would be an insane thought. And that's why it doesn't occur to Speaker 1 (9:57) Marius that it's remotely possible. But of course, it does occur to Sulla. And what is striking is that he doesn't seem to have hesitated at all. I mean, there's no kind of standing on the backs of a Rubicon thinking, oh, should I or shouldn't I? He just goes for it. And I think this reflects a number of factors. So firstly. Sulla knows that his men think he's absolutely brilliant. Sulla, all his life, has used his charm when he chooses to as a weapon. And I don't think it's any different with the rank and file legionaries. They are ready to follow him basically wherever he leads. Sulla is charming, but he is also a very, very dangerous man to offend. And although he's a very good looking man, people have noted throughout his career that when he gets angry, mysterious white spots start to appear across his face. And when these white spots start to appear, it's probably not a good sign. So I think that's something very ominous and a clear marker that Sulla is not a person that you want to put into a strop. On top of that, as we've said, Sulla has a deep personal rivalry with Marius. He really detests him. He is furious. at the frustration of his ambitions and of a deal that he thought was absolutely done. And so he therefore has an utter belief in the justice of his own cause. And this matters because Sulla, above all, is very superstitious. He believes that he is what the Romans called Felix, lucky, a favourite of the goddess Venus. And so he trusts on fortune. on Venus, on everything that is right and proper, that they will back him, that they will give him the good luck that Sulla regards essentially as his kind of divine right. Can I ask a question? So in Speaker 2 (11:49) later years, it was quite common for generals to think that their armies belonged to them. So Pompey the Great, Caesar, Crassus, you know, Antony, Octavian, these commanders who end up fighting for supreme power in Rome. And, you know, taking the city, being Speaker 1 (12:05) kicked out of the city, Speaker 2 (12:06) retaking all of this. And that's a result, obviously, of the structural circumstances. You know, this isn't their own willfulness. This is just what people do at this point. Sulla's the first person that does this. Now, is this, as it were, great man history? Sulla could have decided differently. This is about his own individual, you know, genius or whatever. Genius is the wrong word, but you know what I mean. Or is it that by this point... Roman politics has degenerated. It's already begun to corrode the partisanship, the polarisation or whatever, which makes it possible for him to make this decision. So in other words, is he genuinely thinking completely outside the box? Or if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have done Speaker 1 (12:47) it pretty soon afterwards. I think there are all kinds of circumstances, but there are two obvious ones. And the first is that as Rome's supplies of manpower have grown larger, and as campaigns require armies to be away and in the field for longer. So the opportunities for individual commanders to establish a personal link with their men and identify their own interests with those of their men starts to grow. So I guess that what Sulla decides to do is something that a general at some point in Roman history was almost bound to do. And on top of that, political life in Rome has been quite brutal over the previous decade. So that we talked in the first episode, two tribunes were murdered. Sulla himself was menaced by heavies when he went back to Rome as consul. And so there is a kind of a coarsening, I think, of the traditional respect that the Romans had for their kind of constitutional norms. But having said that, I mean, those constitutional norms remain very, very strong. And when Sulla leads his legions on Rome, the news of his advance is greeted with utter shock and consternation. People cannot believe what has happened. And I think the fact that it hadn't crossed Marius's mind, it's the kind of the best indicator of how still at this point, it was basically seen as something inconceivable, except for someone as bold and ruthless as Sulla. So as he leads the legions towards Rome, everyone in Rome is going, what the hell's going on? What's happening? And they send envoys out to beg Sulla not to cross this kind of, dare I say, sacral boundary, which encloses Rome, called the pomerium. And to cross that for a citizen in arms is an utter taboo. No one ever does it. But Sulla dares to do it. He brushes all the appeals aside. His soldiers cross the pomerium into the sacred. space that is Rome itself, and they start pushing through the narrow streets. And as they do so, their fellow citizens, who are appalled by what is happening, clamber up the stories of their various houses up onto the tops of the insulae, the blocks of flat, and start hurling tiles down at their fellow citizens, these legionaries, as they are advancing through the streets. And for a moment, the legionaries quail. I guess they... Maybe they're stunned to be greeted by such violence and maybe there's a kind of a wave of shame and anxiety. But Sulla does not allow them time to think. He orders archers to dip their arrows in fire and then to fire these arrows at the roofs where the people are throwing tiles down. And flames begin to crackle and spread down the line of the city's highways, these highways that the legionaries are marching down. And as they go, Sulla follows them and he is riding down the greatest of all the highways, the broadest road in Rome. It's called the Via Sacra, the Sacral Way. And he advances into the very heart of Rome, where the Senate House stands. And he orders his legionaries to stand guard on the Senate House. The city is his. The unthinkable has happened. A general in arms has made himself the master of Rome. And just to emphasize, I mean, this is such an incredibly fateful step. And having taken it, Sulla moves very, very fast. to take advantage of what he's done. He can't afford not to. Speaker 2 (16:16) He still takes the political and legal side of things seriously, doesn't he? Because he wants basically political and legal sanction for what he's Speaker 1 (16:22) done retrospectively. Yes, completely. And this is always the case in coups, isn't it? That a coup will work if the person who conducts the coup... can present himself as being on the side of legitimacy because that then transforms the former defenders of legitimacy into rebels. I mean, you see it throughout the course of history. And so it is now in 88 BC in Rome. So the key for Sulla is to have Marius and Salpicius, this tribune who had presented the bill to the people, to have him stripped of his command. He wants them declared public enemies because then Sulla can... frame everything that he's doing as a defence of the Republic. Sulla is there in his armour in the Senate House telling them, this is what you've got to do. Everyone in the Senate is well aware that he has his soldiers outside. So unsurprisingly, they do indeed proclaim Marius, Salpicius, Marius' son, and nine other of his leading henchmen outlaws. The death squads then start fanning out. Salpicius is betrayed by a slave. He is hunted down and murdered. But the other 11 outlaws do manage to get away. Marius briefly tries to resist with his own attempted armed force. It's obviously not going to work. So he slips away and he vanishes and he is not caught. And clearly for Sulla, this is an, it's probably an annoyance rather than a catastrophe. I mean, he's now the master of Rome, but he would really like to have dispatched Marius. And the fact that Marius is still out there somewhere. Well, that is a factor that will continue to be a Speaker 2 (17:59) feature of the story as it develops. So for the time being, he's master of Rome, and we've already talked about how his priority is to establish his own legitimacy, to present himself as the guardian of the constitution, to present Marius as the person who's a threat to it. And we talked in the previous episode about how Sulla... you know, golden haired, swashbuckling, ruthless, sort of sexy. He is the