Roman Civil War: Rise of the General (Part 1)

The Rest Is History

This episode explores the rise of Gaius Marius, a pivotal figure in Roman history during the first century BC, as he emerges from obscurity

Key takeaways

• Gaius Marius rose from humble origins to become a transformative military and political leader, reshaping Rome's power structure.
• The Teutons and Cimbri represented an unprecedented existential threat to Rome, with their massive migration across Europe.

Main topics

• The Roman Republic in the 1st century BC
• Gaius Marius's political and military ascent

Notable quotes

"It's like an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, or scientists experimenting with some zombie mutation—people are going about their everyday lives, just waiting for this kind of appalling apocalypse to hit them."

Conclusion

The rise of Gaius Marius marks the beginning of a transformative era in Roman history, where military power

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) Hello. Now, before we go to today's episode, I have some insanely exciting news for you. On Friday, the 4th of September, Dominic and I will be forming live at the South Bank Centre in London. And better yet, we will be doing something completely new, something that no one has ever heard before on The Rest Is History, the ultimate Victorian adventure. So Speaker 4 (0:28) to give you just a little taste, we will be in Africa. In 1868, the Emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore II, has kidnapped 59 Europeans and he is holding them hostage after descending into this demented rage because one of his fellow monarchs, Queen Victoria, has declined to answer his letters. I'm not making this up. And the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting... have lost patience and they have sent a military expedition under General Napier halfway around the world to save them. An expedition that includes thousands of mules, loads of elephants, and they've even had to build their own railway across the highlands of Abyssinia or Ethiopia to try to get to his mountain citadel. It is a bonkers story. Speaker 2 (1:20) Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary, full-blown British imperial epic. full of ludicrous behaviour, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on The Rest Is History. It is, though I say so myself, a guaranteed classic in the making. So you're Speaker 4 (1:39) probably thinking, how can I get a ticket for this extraordinary Victorian adventure? Here is the answer. If you want to get a ticket for this event on Friday, the 4th of September, all you have to do is to go to therestishistory.com. It is as simple as that. You maybe have to part with some money, but it will be money very, very, very, very well spent. See you there. Speaker 4 (2:11) And now it was. The news began to reach Rome of the Teutons and the Cimbri. Initially, the reports detailing the numbers and strength of these invaders seemed fantastical. But it soon became clear that all the rumours were in reality underestimates of the truth. 300,000 warriors were on the march, accompanied by even larger numbers of women and children, all of them looking for lands and cities in which to settle. Who were these people? From what distant part of the world had they emigrated? It was unclear, for prior to their descent on Gaul and Italy, Speaker 3 (2:50) no one Speaker 4 (2:51) had ever heard of them. The best guess? They were Germans, and had travelled from the lands that border the Northern Ocean. This supposition derived from various clues. Firstly, their enormous size. Next, the light blue colour of their eyes, and finally, the fact that Kimberley is a word which in the language of the Germans means plunderer. That was the Greek historian Plutarch. And he's describing in very chilling and spine-tingling terms one of the most terrifying moments in Roman history, a migration of barbarians which by the year 113 BC had arrived at the gates of Roman Italy. Speaker 4 (3:44) These people, the Teutons and the Kimberi. Tom, am I stretching a point to say that effectively they're the Danes? Speaker 2 (3:51) Yeah. Plutarch says that they come from the lands that border the Northern Ocean. And the general thinking is that this was probably Jutland and the regions north of it. I mean, it's a kind of proto-Viking invasion, if you like. And it would have taken them a long time to get from Jutland down to the Alps. So it could well have taken... the Teutons and the Cimbri, anything up to a decade to get there. And if so, for most of that decade, obviously the Romans and the people of Italy had no idea what was approaching them. And it always kind of makes me think of those kind of Hollywood dramas where there's an asteroid hurtling towards planet Earth, or there are scientists experimenting with some zombie mutation in a lab and people are going about. their everyday lives, just waiting for this kind of appalling apocalypse to hit them. Speaker 4 (4:46) Yeah. It's December 2019 and you're hearing the first reports from Wuhan of people with Speaker 2 (4:52) unusual colds. And around the breakfast table, people are discussing their summer holidays. Speaker 4 (4:57) Exactly. Speaker 2 (4:58) And so in today's episode, we are going to be looking at what is going on in Rome as this migrationary apocalypse is hurtling towards them. And just to give people a sense of where we are in the history of Rome, we are a century before the age of Augustus, so before the establishment of the rule of the Caesars. And Rome at this point is still a republic. It is not ruled by an autocrat. And the star of this episode, the star of the show. is the dominant figure of this period in the kind of the 110s, the 100s BC. And he is a brilliant soldier. He is a superb political operator. And he has emerged seemingly from nowhere to become the city's great popular hero. And this is a man called Gaius Marius. And he is a man whose achievements, whose ambitions, over the course of the 110s and the 100s have increasingly put the whole of Rome in his shadow and will continue to do so for several decades after he is a titanic figure in the history of the Roman Republic. Speaker 4 (6:14) Yeah, and we'll be tracing his story, won't we? So he has this great confrontation, doesn't he, with the Teutons and the Kimberley, but that's merely the beginning of his extraordinary career. I Speaker 2 (6:24) mean, spoiler alert, he is the guy who is going to see off this apocalyptic threat. He is the kind of the Bruce Willis seeing off the asteroid. Then in 91 BC, when he's considerably older, he plays an important role in one of the most desperate wars that the Romans ever fight. It's not very well known, but it brought Rome almost to the brink. And this was a war that was fought against the Socci, they called them, their comrades in arms. And these were the Italian allies who had been by the side of the Romans for centuries by this point. And suddenly they erupt and there's this terrible war that rages across Italy. And then most fatefully of all, and escalating gradually throughout the series to an incredibly bloody climax, we have the bitter rivalry. between Marius and a younger man who had once been Marius's deputy. And this is a man called Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Speaker 4 (7:19) So I've been looking forward to this since we started The Rest is History because when I was a teenager, I read a series of books by Colleen McCulloch, I think, who wrote The Thorn Birds. And she wrote this Roman sequence in which the Marius-Sulla rivalry played a huge part. It was a brilliant, if you're a teenage boy interested in Rome. You know, this is absolute catnip. And the great thing about them is they seem such archetypes. So Marius, the representation, this is how she portrayed it anyway. Marius was ordinary, kind of rough-hewn. He was sort of unpolished. He's the representative of the ordinary people. And Sulla is decadent and he's golden haired and he's cosmopolitan and sophisticated. And he's the representative of the upper classes. And I'm looking forward to finding out if this is absolute tosh or if this Speaker 2 (8:07) is actually true. And you can tell from their names. So Gaius Marius, he just has the two names. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, if you have three, that's a giveaway. You are from a kind of a higher class. background and Sulla is actually a patrician, which is the kind of the grandest of the grand in Rome. So there is definitely a class animus there. But the two of them in lots of ways are not entirely dissimilar. So both of them are intensely ambitious and both of them are kind of dazzlingly ruthless opportunists. So they are completely worthy rivals. And Dominic, this rivalry, as you were implying, between The self-made man and the patrician, the one-time commander and the one-time subordinate, the guy with the two names and the guy with the three names. This is going to end up shaking the very foundations of Rome's Republic because it's going to result for the first time ever in a Roman army marching on Rome itself. Then there will be a murderous civil war. prescription lists will be posted in the heart of the city and Rome will end up being ruled by a military dictatorship. And this is a crucial turning point in the history of Rome. And it is a massive waystep on the road that will lead to the final collapse of the Republic and the establishment of the autocracy of the Caesars. Speaker 4 (9:32) So in some ways it anticipates, doesn't it, the civil wars between, you know, Brutus and Cassius in one hand and Antony and Octavian. on the other. And as you said, it's the first step in this process that Speaker 2 (9:42) leads to the empire. Well, I think more saliently between Pompey and Julius Caesar. And Pompey, we are going to see the young Pompey towards the end of the series. And Marius, as we see, is going to develop links with the family of Julius Caesar. And so it's a kind of preface to that great Titanic struggle. But Speaker 4 (10:01) it's more than just a story about Rome, isn't it? About Rome as a city. Because we're at a point in Rome's history where Rome is a real geopolitical player. And so what happens here matters across the Mediterranean. Speaker 2 (10:12) Yes, absolutely. And this has been signalled in incredibly brutal fashion. A few decades previously, in 146 BC, when the Romans had wiped out two of the oldest and most celebrated cities in the whole of the Mediterranean. And the first of these was a city called Carthage. We did three whole series on the terrible wars that Rome fought against the Carthaginians. It was their old enemy. It was the kind of the great rival superpower in the Western Mediterranean. And those three wars had culminated in the complete annihilation of Carthage. And then in the same year, The Romans wipe out the Greek city of Corinth, which again, I mean, it's one of the most famous cities in Greece. It's a place rich in mythology and culture and history, absolutely obliterated. And this obviously serves as a devastating warning to the Greeks that there's very much a new sheriff in town. You do not want to mess with the Romans. And to be honest, the destruction of these two cities is a shock that reverberates across the Mediterranean. But there are plenty of people in Rome itself that feel a bit queasy about it. That there are Romans who start saying, well, you know, are we actually the baddies here? And this worries them because the conceit of the Romans throughout their rise to superpower status has always been that they are the most moral of people. and that everything they do is in self-defense. And if it's not in self-defense, then the gods won't back them. And so the fact that they have this great empire is proof that the gods have been backing them. So in a way, they kind of conquer the world in self-defense. And so they don't want to think that they're bad people. They don't want to think that the gods are against them. You talk about them conquering Speaker 4 (12:00) the world. But actually, have they conquered the world? I mean, their empire, territorially, it's not enormous at this point, is it? So just give us a sense of the panorama of Roman power. They Speaker 2 (12:10) have a kind of informal hegemony, I guess, over much of the Mediterranean. But you're right that the formal empire, the sense in which they have provinces, it is at this point still relatively small. So if you think of Rome in the centre of Italy and you go clockwise round the western Mediterranean. Sicily, that was Rome's first province. They had instituted it as Speaker 4 (12:30) a Speaker 2 (12:30) province in 241 BC as a result of the first great war that they'd fought against Carthage. So Sicily had been the kind of the prize that they'd taken in that war. Then across the sea from Sicily, you have what's now Tunisia, what the Romans call Africa. This is where Carthage had stood and the Romans have annexed the hinterland of what? had been the carthage's territory in north africa then southern and central spain again the romans had taken that from carthage in the second war the war that featured hannibal and at this point the romans are advancing northwards into the kind of the northern reaches of spain and then you have the southern strip of gaul what the romans called the provincia the province and this is the the latin word that ultimately gives us the word provence so it's you know, what's now southern France. And so there's no question with Carthage gone, with all these former provinces of Carthage absorbed or new territories conquered, that Rome is undisputed as the great hegemon of the western Mediterranean. But what is ominous, I think, for people in the eastern Mediterranean is that Rome by this point also has a couple of provinces in the eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea. And this, of course, is... These are lands that previously had been ruled by Macedonian kings, so the heirs of Alexander the Great. So one of these provinces had been the former kingdom of Alexander the Great. It's become the Roman province of Macedon in that fateful year 146 that had seen Corinth and Carthage destroyed as well. And across the Aegean from Greece. So what is now the Aegean seaboard of Turkey? there is another province which the Romans call Asia. And this had been the kind of the Greek ruled kingdom of Pergamum. Pergamum is a Greek city that controlled the kind of, you know, the western half of what's now Turkey. And in 133 BC, its last king, a man called Attalus, he didn't really have an obvious successor. He was nervous at the Romans of what the Romans might do. And so basically he thought, well, Maybe the obvious solution is just to give it to the Romans in my will. And so that's what he does. And it's one of the most spectacular bequests in the whole of history, because Pergamum is fabulously rich, quite apart from giving the Romans a toehold in Asia. And it offers the Romans all kinds of decadent pleasures that they had. barely even realized existed until that moment. So everything from celebrity chefs to sex manuals, they're all brought back to Rome, where the elites, of course, think secretly they're brilliant, but lots of them pretend to be very disapproving. And lots of Roman moralists are genuinely disapproving. And I think it's, I guess the closest parallel in modern history would be Puritan American tourists in the Gilded Age going to Paris. Speaker 4 (15:35) Right. Speaker 2 (15:35) Yeah. The flesh pots of Europe. The flesh pots of Europe. And, of Speaker 4 (15:39) course, bringing them back to the East Coast. Going to the Folly Berger with Toulouse-Lautrec or something. Speaker 2 (15:45) Yes, exactly. And so Pliny the Elder, very much friend of the show, when he's writing about this, he sees this whole period from the conquest of Macedon to the... granting by Attalus of his kingdom of Pergamum to the Romans as a period that is disastrous for Rome's moral character. So Pliny wrote that the Romans were becoming a people who didn't just admire foreign opulence, but had learned to covet it. And Pliny identifies the appropriation of Asia as a province as having been a particularly disastrous blow to Roman morals. And it is a feature of the way the Romans think about geopolitics and the functioning of their own state that morals are incredibly important because as we've said if they're not a moral people then the gods won't favor them and their empire will collapse that's a tiny bit Speaker 4 (16:37) like the british with india in the 18th century and the sort of anxiety that great uh wealth and expansion would bring corruption you know which kind of wrapped up with people like warren hastings and all these people who came back and built great palaces Speaker 2 (16:51) And I think it's there with Jefferson and that kind of tradition in America as well, isn't it? The anxiety about wealth and power, about empire. So yes, absolutely. This sense that... The very greatness that Rome is winning threatens the moral foundations on which that greatness has been raised. And also, of course, the influx of enormous wealth into Rome contributes to a kind of a growing sense of resentment in the slums of the city, that the rich are getting richer and the poor is getting poorer. And again, this is something with which subsequent periods of history, I mean, people will be completely familiar with it, that influxes of wealth tends to heighten. class divisions, divisions in living standards. And the poor in Rome, you know, they're all citizens of a republic. They're meant to be part of a kind of, you know, a common project, res publica means kind of things that are shared in common, things that are public. The poor in Rome are increasingly suspicious that the aristocratic class, the nobiles, as they're called in Latin, that they no longer care anything for the the mass of their poorer fellow citizens. Metropolitan elites are out of touch. Exactly. And so this is generating a pretty febrile mood in Rome. And it's the kind of mood, again, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the present day, in which an outsider, if he has luck, if he has talent, if he has boldness on his side, you know, he might be able to prosper. He might, you know, people from from not the obvious backgrounds, might be able to get to the top of the tree, might be able to make themselves the masters of the Republic. And Speaker 4 (18:37) this brings us very neatly, doesn't it, to our protagonist, to Gaius Marius. So Marius is born in 157 BC in Arpenum, which is about 80 miles outside Rome. And is there a British town that would be a nice equivalent for Arpenum, Tom? I guess it's kind of Swindon, basically. Wow, roundabouts. roundabouts and warehouses i Speaker 2 (19:01) mean having said that uh arpino is actually a kind of very old city so perhaps the the parallel doesn't exactly hold but i guess that the people in rome would view arpinum as i don't know people in w1 might view swindon right yeah as being not exactly the obvious breeding ground of um of great dominant figures in the state. And actually, Arpinum is a classic example of how the kind of the immediate hinterland around Rome, so Latium as it's called, has come to be knitted into the fabric of the Republic and basically kind of turned into, the people of Latium have been turned into Romans. So Arpinum had been conquered back in 305 BC and its people initially had been given a slightly inferior form of Roman citizenship. So the Romans called it civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without, well, without suffrage, without the vote. They have lots of rights, but they don't have the right to vote for magistrates. But then in 188 BC, Arpinum finally gets the full deal, so citizenship with the right to vote. And that means that the parents of Marius, who belonged to the local