Roman Civil War: The Barbarian Invasion (Part 2)

The Rest Is History

This episode of 'The Rest Is History' explores Rome in the first century BC, focusing on the political and military upheavals surrounding Gaius Marius and Lucius

Key takeaways

• Rome's chaotic urban environment was seen as a symbol of its political liberty rather than disorder.
• Marius' rise from a 'novus homo' (new man) to consul marked a shift toward populist politics in Rome.

Main topics

• The urban landscape and social chaos of Rome in 105 BC
• Gaius Marius as a populist military leader and political outsider

Notable quotes

"Rome is not yet the mega city that it will become under the Emperor Augustus... It's probably about 400, 500,000 people max."

Conclusion

The episode ends on a dramatic cliffhanger as Sulla learns that Marius has been appointed to lead the campaign

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Even citizens found their city confusing. The only way to negotiate it was to memorize notable landmarks, a fig tree perhaps, or a market's colonnade, or best of all, a temple large enough to loom above the maze of narrow streets. Fortunately, Rome was a devout city, and temples abounded. The Romans' reverence for the past meant that ancient structures were hardly ever demolished, not even when the open spaces in which they might once have stood had long since vanished under brick. Temples loomed over slums or meat markets. They shentered veiled statues whose very identities might have been forgotten, and yet no one ever thought to demolish them. These fragments of an archaic past preserved in stone Speaker 1 (1:00) fossils from the earliest days of the city provided the Romans with the desperately needed sense of bearing. Eternal, like the gods whose spirits pervaded them, they stood like anchors dropped in a storm. Meanwhile, on all sides, amid a din of hammering, rumbling wagon wheels and crashing rubble, the city was endlessly being rebuilt, torn down and rebuilt. Again. Now, that's a description of Rome, the great teeming city, the great metropolis of the Mediterranean world. And listeners may be wondering which great writer, which master of the English language constructed those sentences. Was it Edward Gibbon? Was it Dan Brown? Well, dear listeners, it was our very own. Speaker 1 (1:57) Tom Holland in his book Rubicon, the book that catapulted him to greatness. So Tom, Rome, 105 BC, biggest city in the Mediterranean. It's not yet the mega city that it will become under the Emperor Augustus 100 years later. It's probably about 400, 500,000 people max. But to visitors, as your wonderful prose conveyed. It is overwhelming, isn't it? Rather like your prose, actually. I think for visitors, it's experienced as a kind of monstrous city. It's crowded. It's confusing. It's completely chaotic. It has this terrible haze of brown smog which hangs over it and which can be seen many, many miles before you actually see the city itself. And then you arrive in the city and it's crammed with teetering, jerry-built. Speaker 1 (2:53) apartment blocks, insulae they were called, islands. They were islands rising above the chaos of the streets below, which are notorious as death traps. If there's a fire and you are on the top stories, that's it. You're burnt to a cinder. Everywhere, there are shanties sprouting up. If there's a fire, the shanties will immediately emerge in the space that's been left, and they're spreading out through the gates along the roads that lead into Rome. and there is also an incredible lack of the kind of monumental architecture that most people, I imagine, when they think of ancient Rome would be in their mind's eye. Rome in this period is not the Rome of gladiator. There are no amphitheaters, there are no palaces, there's very little gleaming marble. Speaker 1 (3:40) And so Greek ambassadors who are used to exactly that kind of cityscape, things that are elegant, that are planned, that are spacious, that are centrally organized, when they come to Rome, they think this is an absolute dump. I suppose it's like someone from New York going to a third world city, something like that. They think it's backward. They think it's ramshackle. They think it's disorganized. But the Roman response to this is to say that the chaos of their city is the index. of its liberty. The kings can impose urban plans on cities because they are autocrats, but because Rome is a republic and its great men are much too jealous of one another to allow any of them to build pompous imposing monuments, this means that its chaotic brick-fronted cityscape is an expression of the fact that the Romans are a free people. It's telling Speaker 1 (4:37) that it's only under the rule of Augustus, the first of the Caesars, the first of the autocrats, that it will start its transformation into a city from brick into marble. He's the Napoleon III of Roman history. So Napoleon III who transforms Paris. Well, I think Napoleon III is surely... The would-be Augustus. Yeah, correct. Because also Napoleon III was an absolutely ludicrous man, whereas Augustus was arguably the greatest politician who ever lived. Anyway, that's by the by. So Rome, 105 BC. One thing obsesses the city more than anything else, and that, of course, is politics. Because we ended last time with the great political drama of Marius effectively stabbing his patron, Metellus, in the back. Speaker 1 (5:22) But Marius, you ended last time by saying how worried Marius was about his own lieutenant, Sulla, and we will come on to this. But just give us a sense. So it's a great kind of theatre, isn't it? It's a theatre for political show. It's a great stage, yes. You know, that's why Romans don't feel that they, you know, they need to have a kind of cultural cringe towards the Greeks, because the Greeks were all ruled by monarchs, or indeed by Rome. But the Romans are a free people. and it is their right to elect their own magistrates. And so the city is constantly bearing witness to this. Everywhere you go, there is graffiti. If people don't like candidates, then they may literally piss on them. Wow. So if there are statues of them, they will go and... Speaker 1 (6:10) express their contempt for them in the most literal manner. There's a hint for people if they have strong views about Britain's politicians. I suppose they don't tend to have statues, but there might be alternative ways in which they could do that. And we said in the previous episode how Marius, while he's in Africa, his agents are busy promoting his name. I mean, this is the chief for which they're doing it. They're going around writing graffiti, pissing on his rivals, all of that. And so I guess Rome stands supreme as the Speaker 1 (6:39) the great theatre of ambitions and dreams. There's nowhere like it anywhere else in the world. This is where you have to be if you want to shape politics. And as a citizen of Rome, you have the opportunity to do that, either by running as a candidate or even if you're the very poorest of the poor, you have a vote. Your opinion matters. So, although Rome is a republic, there is one man in 105 BC. who stands head and shoulders above all his rivals, who in a sense is the princeps, the top man of the city. This is Gaius Marius, the protagonist of our first episode. We tracked his early career in that episode. He's an out-of-towner, he's burly, he's uncultured, but he's a natural politician. He's a brilliant soldier. Speaker 1 (7:25) and in 108, he'd been elected consul, so the top magistrate in the Roman Republic, because the voters and the Senate were fed up with a war that had been dragging on in Numidia in North Africa, what's now Algeria, and they wanted it sorted out. Marius had been the guy that they had said, go and sort this out. It is amazing that Marius had ever got the nod because he is what the Romans called a novus homo, a man without any consular pedigree. And these things really matter to the voters. So if you're a novice homo and you get elected, it's a massive, massive deal. And it's a huge tribute to his reputation because it essentially marks him out as the go-to person if there is some massive military crisis. Yeah. So he has come back to Rome late 105. Speaker 1 (8:14) And he came back with Jugurtha of Earlobe's fame, the bloke whose earrings were ripped off at the end of the last episode, the defeated enemy. Who grins horribly as he's being chucked into a dungeon. Right. Are all the baths as cold as this or whatever great banter, mad banter Jugurtha came out with as he was on his way to his demise. But more importantly. Marius has come back to Rome with his number two. So he's a man who really first featured at the end of the last episode. And this is Lucius Cornelius Sulla. It's the man with whom Marius, in all the history books, is always bracketed. And you described him last time, golden haired, patrician, daring, swashbuckling, all of this. Speaker 1 (8:58) And Sulla has made his name during, I mean, he's really made his name, hasn't he, in the campaign against Jugurtha in a way that Marius finds, his boss finds a little bit unsettling. Yeah, because Jugurtha had fled to the neighbouring king. And so it required a mission of great daring to get him out from there. And Sulla had gone in. I mean, he might easily have been killed. But he is very brave and he's very diplomatically skilled. And he manages to extract Jugurtha and bring him back for his horrible death in a dungeon in Rome. And Sulla is enormously proud of this. The Romans are not people who approve of modesty. And so he has had a signet ring made, which illustrates the process by which Jugurtha is being handed over by the king who he'd taken refuge with. And this infuriates Marius. Speaker 1 (9:49) We will be hearing more about Sulla in due course in this episode. But for now, it's all about Marius because on the 1st of January, 104 BC, As we described at the end of our last episode, Marius celebrates this great triumph, this military parade through Rome in which he's able to display Jugurtha, display his treasure. All his legions who'd fought with him on that campaign are cheering him. It's great. You couldn't want for anything more if you're a Roman general. It's absolutely brilliant. He rides in this chariot. He's arrayed in triumphal robes. I think the idea that you have a slave who stands behind you and says, remember you're mortal, It's not 100% validated, but you can absolutely see why that story emerges. There is Speaker 1 (10:35) a sense that this is the greatest kind of experience that any Roman can have. However, even as Marius is riding through the streets of Rome and being cheered by the watching crowds, there is a mood of panic, maybe even desperation in the city because Jugurtha may have been defeated. The dignity of the Roman name may have been upheld in Africa, but to the north, Beyond the Alps, there is a much more terrifying threat than some African king massing on the frontiers of Rome's empire. And again, we mentioned this in the previous episode. It's an immense migration of Germans, the Teutons and the Cimbri from Jutland to the frontiers of the Roman world. So it's almost a kind of proto-Viking. Speaker 1 (11:33) Yeah. So in the last episode, to please people who online like to count how often we refer to either the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, I compared them with the white walkers, the people who in the Game of Thrones TV series you see right at the beginning. They're massing all the time. You know, all the internal politics of Westeros is nothing compared with the existential apocalyptic threat that these blokes represent. Speaker 1 (11:55) And actually, I'm going to congratulate myself on my own comparison. I think it's an absolutely superb comparison. Yeah. Because, I mean, these people, the Teutons and the Kimberi, they're massive. They're terrifying. They look weird. They are an existential threat. They're reputed to be cannibals. Right. This is Plutarch on them. He said they were impervious to cold because they'd been brought up in ice-bound countries full of forests. I mean, Tom, the parallels are stacking up. You're absolutely right. And also... Speaker 1 (12:24) I think, isn't this also the case with the White Walkers? The Teutons and the Kimberley are accompanied by women and children. Yeah, because some of them are women and children, yeah. And in fact, actually, in Game of Thrones, the children are the most frightening. There's always something terrifying about a murderous, sinister child. And frankly, if you've ever met a German child, you know, it's the same story. Well, they're Danes, really, aren't they? Yeah, they're the worst. Speaker 1 (12:50) And the women also are very frightening because they're said to fight alongside the men. And it's an entire people on the move. So there are tens of thousands of them, according to the Roman sources. I mean, we don't know how accurate they are, but basically there are loads and loads of them. And they are experienced by the Romans less as an army than as some kind of force of nature. You know, a great flood, a tide, a tsunami, whatever you want to reach for. You know, the news had been brought to them that... this monstrous tide of people is advancing towards you. So they sent an army under a consul into a region called Norikam, which is basically Austria today in 113 BC. The consul had set an ambush for these barbarians, and the barbarians had rumbled it and had outsmarted the consul and given him a serious mauling. So he'd withdrawn. Speaker 1 (13:41) He had assumed that the barbarians would pursue him and invade Italy. In fact, they don't. They swing westwards into Gaul, which is a big relief to the Romans. But I think it's also a little bit unsettling because it's clear that the Cimbrian and the Teutons are unlike any enemy that they've come up against before. There's no predicting what they'll do. When you're fighting Carthaginians or Greeks or even Gauls, There's a sense in which the Romans understand what makes these people tick. But with these barbarians from the far north, and again, this is maybe the White Walker comparison, the Romans don't understand what they want. They don't understand what's going to motivate them. They don't understand how they're going to behave. That means it's very difficult, I think, for the Romans to devise a strategy to cope with this onslaught. This becomes manifest in Speaker 1 (14:34) a succession of disastrous Roman attempts to go and be proactive and meet the Teutons and Cimbri and wipe them out beyond the limits of Roman power. Because the barbarians, they're just roaming around Gaul looting and pillaging and killing and all that kind of stuff. The Romans keep going and trying to attack them, and they keep being defeated. So first in 109 BC, and then two years later near what today is Bordeaux. And one consul in that battle is killed and the other one is cornered. And the only way that he can extract himself is to agree that he and his army will go beneath the yoke. Oh my God. Yeah. Ultimate humiliation. You put up two spears and put another spear across it and everyone has to symbolically bend and crawl. Well, not symbolically. I mean, you literally do it, but it's obviously a symbol of humiliation. So that's very bad. And then... Speaker 1 (15:29) I had forgotten the full details of this defeat. So it happens in 105, and it's a culminating disaster in the Roman attempts to stop the barbarians. It happens outside Arausio, which is the town in southern Gaul, which gives its name to Orange. So ultimately to the Orange Order. I mean, that's an amazing thought. And in this battle, the Romans, it's said, lose over 100,000 men. which is more than they lose in Cannae. Is that plausible, really, that they lost that many? I mean, these figures are all made up, aren't they, really? I don't think they're made up. It's clearly a massive defeat, and yet it's barely remembered. And you think how much it's written about Cannae and the impact it had on the Romans. At the time, it must have just seemed overwhelming. It must have seemed a disaster on par with that. And when the news of it is brought to Rome, there is this... Speaker 1 (16:24) terrible mood of panic. And they call it the terror cimbricus. And that phrase ever afterwards is applied by the Romans to a kind of mood of civic panic, the mood of terror that can sweep an entire city. And everyone, even Marius's old enemies in the Senate, agree that basically faced with this crisis, there is only one man for the job. Obviously. I mean, this is Marius. So Rauscher was 105. Then in 104, Marius has been elected as one of the two consuls, hasn't he, for the year. So this is his second consulship already. You said, remember, Plutarch predicted that he, well, Plutarch reported the prophecy that he would get seven. And you said he'd be a big stretch for him to get even one. You were wrong, Tom. He's now got two. To justify myself. Speaker 1 (17:17) We also said in the previous episode that it is essentially, it's either illegal or massively frowned upon for someone who's had a consulship then to have a second consulship. Yeah, you did. You did say that. And if you do have a second consulship, then at the very least, it should be at a kind of decent distance from the original one. But Marius, you know, he'd been consul in 107. This is only three years later. So that, I think, is the measure of the state of absolute panic that everyone in Rome... is feeling that they haven't really got any choice. Constitutional proprieties don't really count when your city is facing an existential threat. So it is that as Marius is riding through the streets of Rome in his triumphal robes on his chariot, enjoying his triumph, Speaker 1 (18:03) You've got to wonder, if that story was true, if the nest full of seven eaglets fell into his arms and it did indeed prophesy that he was going to have seven consulships. I mean, is he thinking about that? Maybe. It would be nice to think so. Yeah. Although there is still tension, isn't there? I mean, he is still a self-made man. He is still an outsider. There must be people in Rome from the old elite. who are just like, really, this guy, this parvenu again? Yeah, for sure. And Marius, on the day of his triumph, the