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Napoleon III
History of Julius Caesar Vol. 1 of 2

The question of Italian emancipation was not foreign to the revolt of Saturninus. It is certain that the claims of the Italiotes, rejected after the death of C. Gracchus, and then adjourned at the approach of the Cimbri, who threatened all the peninsula with one common catastrophe, were renewed with more earnestness than ever after the defeat of the barbarians. The earnestness of the allies to come to the succour of Italy, the courage which they had shown in the battle-fields of Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ, gave them new claims to become Romans. Yet, if some prudent politicians believed that the time was arrived for yielding to the wishes of the Italiotes, a numerous and powerful party revolted at the idea of such a concession. The more the privileges of the citizens became extended, the more the Roman pride resisted the thought of having sharers in them. M. Livius Drusus (663), tribune of the people, son of the Drusus already mentioned, having under his command in Rome an immense body of clients, the acknowledged patron of all the Italiote cities, dared to attempt this salutary reform, and had nearly carried it by force of party. He was not ignorant that there was already in existence a formidable confederacy of the peoples of the south and east of Italy, and that more than once their chiefs had meditated a general insurrection. Drusus, trusting in their projects, had had the art to restrain them and to obtain from them the promise of a blind obedience. The success of the tribune seemed certain. The people were gained over by distributions of wheat and concessions of lands; the Senate, intimidated, appeared to have become powerless, when, a few days before the vote of the tribes, Drusus was assassinated. All Italy accused the senators of this crime, and war became inevitable.

The obstinate refusal of the Romans to share with the Italiotes all their political rights, had been long a cause of political agitation. More than two hundred years before, the war of the Latins and the revolt of the inhabitants of Campania, after the battle of Cannæ, had no other motives. About the same time (536), Spurius Carvilius proposed to admit into the Senate two senators taken from each people in Latium. “The assembly,” says Livy,⁶⁹¹ “burst into a murmur of indignation, and Manlius, raising his voice over the others, declared that there existed still a descendant of that consul who once, in the Capitol, threatened to kill with his own hand the first Latin he should see in the curia;” a striking proof of this secular resistance of the Roman aristocracy to everything which might threaten its supremacy. But, after this epoch, the ideas of equality had assumed a power which it was impossible to mistake.

Wars of the Allies (663).

VI. This civil war, which was called the War of Allies,⁶⁹² showed once more the impotence of material force against the legitimate aspirations of peoples, and it covered the country with blood and ruins. Three hundred thousand citizens, the choice of the nation, perished on the field of battle.⁶⁹³ Rome had the superiority, it is true, and yet it was the cause of the vanquished which triumphed, since, after the war, the only object of which was the assertion of the rights of citizenship, these rights were granted to most of the peoples of Italy. Sylla subsequently restricted them, and we may be convinced, by examining the different censuses, that the entire emancipation was only accomplished under Cæsar.⁶⁹⁴

The revolt burst out fortuitously before the day fixed. It was provoked by the violence of a Roman magistrate, who was massacred by the inhabitants of Asculum; but all was ready for an insurrection, which was not long before it became general. The allies had a secret government, chiefs appointed, and an army organised. At the head of the peoples confederated against Rome were distinguished the Marsi and the Samnites; the first excited rather by a feeling of national pride than by the memory of injuries to be revenged; the second, on the contrary, by the hatred which they had vowed against the Romans during long struggles for their independence – struggles renewed on the invasion of Hannibal. Both shared the honour of the supreme command. It appears, moreover, that the system of government adopted by the confederation was a copy of the Roman institutions. To substitute Italy for Rome, and to replace the denomination of a single town by that of a great people, was the avowed aim of the new league. A Senate was named, or rather a Diet, in which each city had its representatives; they elected two consuls, Q. Pompædius Silo, a Marsian, and C. Papius Mutilus, a Samnite. For their capital, they chose Corfinium, the name of which was changed to that of Italia, or Vitelia, which, in the Oscan language, spoken by a part of the peoples of Southern Italy, had the same signification.⁶⁹⁵

The allies were wanting neither in skilful generals nor in brave and experienced soldiers; in the two camps, the same arms, the same discipline. The war, commenced at the end of the year 663, was pursued on both sides with the utmost animosity. It extended through Central Italy, from the north to the south, from Firmum (Fermo) to Grumentum, in Lucania, and from east to west from Cannæ to the Liris. The battles were sanguinary, and often indecisive, and, on both sides, the losses were so considerable, that it soon became necessary to enrol the freedmen, and even the slaves.

The allies obtained at first brilliant successes. Marius had the glory of arresting their progress, although he had only troops demoralised by reverses. Fortune, this time again, served Sylla better; conqueror wherever he appeared, he sullied his exploits by horrible cruelties to the Samnites, whom he seemed to have undertaken to destroy rather than to subdue. The Senate displayed more humanity, or more policy, in granting spontaneously the right of Roman city to all the allies who remained faithful to the Republic, and in promising it to all those who should lay down their arms. It treated in the same manner the Cisalpine Gauls; as to their neighbours on the left bank of the Po, it conferred upon them the right of Latium. This wise measure divided the confederates;⁶⁹⁶ the greater part submitted. The Samnites, almost alone, continued to fight in their mountains with the fury of despair. The emancipation of Italy was accompanied, nevertheless, with a restrictive measure which was designed to preserve to the Romans the preponderance in the comitia. To the thirty-five old tribes, eight new ones were added, in which all the Italiotes were inscribed; and, as the votes were reckoned by tribes, and not by head, it is evident that the influence of the new citizens must have been nearly null.⁶⁹⁷

Etruria had taken no part in the Social War. The nobility was devoted to Rome, and the people lived in a condition approximating to bondage. The law Julia, which gave to the Italiotes the right of Roman city, and which took its name from its author, the consul L. Julius Cæsar, produced among the Etruscans a complete revolution. It was welcomed with enthusiasm.

While Italy was in flames, Mithridates VI., king of Pontus, determined to take advantage of the weakness of the Republic to aggrandise himself. In 664, he invaded Bithynia and Cappadocia, and expelled the kings, allies of Rome. At the same time he entered into communication with the Samnites, to whom he promised subsidies and soldiers. Such was the hatred then inspired by the Romans in foreign countries, that an order of Mithridates was sufficient to raise the province of Asia, where, in one day, eighty thousand Romans were massacred.⁶⁹⁸ At this time the Social War was already approaching its end. With the exception of Samnium, all Italy was subdued, and the Senate could turn its attention to the distant provinces.

Sylla (666).

VII. Sylla, appointed consul in recompense for his services, was charged with the task of chastising Mithridates. While he was preparing for this mission, the tribune of the people, P. Sulpicius, had formed a powerful party. A remarkable man, though without scruples, he had the qualities and the defects of most of those who played a part in these epochs of dissension.⁶⁹⁹ Escorted by six hundred Roman knights, whom he called the Anti-Senate,⁷⁰⁰ he sold publicly the right of citizen to freedmen and foreigners, and received the price on tables raised in the middle of the public place.⁷⁰¹ He caused a plebiscitum to be passed to put an end to the subterfuge of the law Julia, which, by an illusory re-partition, cheated the Italiotes of the very rights which it seemed to accord to them; and instead of maintaining them in the eight new tribes, he caused them to be inscribed in the thirty-five old ones. The measure was not adopted without warm discussions; but Sulpicius was supported by all the new citizens, together with the democratic faction and Marius. A riot carried the vote and Sylla, threatened with death, was obliged to take refuge in the house of Marius, and hastily quit Rome. Master of the town, Sulpicius showed the influences he obeyed, by causing to be given to the aged Marius the province of Asia, and the command of the expedition against Mithridates. But Sylla had his army in Campania, and was determined to support his own claims. While the faction of Marius, in the town, indulged in acts of violence against the contrary faction, the soldiers of Sylla were irritated at seeing the legions of his rival likely to snatch from them the rich booty which Asia promised; and they swore to avenge their chief. Sylla placed himself at their head, and marched from Nola upon Rome, with his colleague, Pompeius Rufus, who had just joined him. The greater part of the superior officers dared not follow him, so great was still the prestige of the eternal city.⁷⁰² In vain deputations are addressed to him; he marches onwards, and penetrates into the streets of Rome. Assailed by the inhabitants, and attacked by Marius and Sulpicius, he triumphs only by dint of boldness and energy. It was the first time that a general, entering Rome as a conqueror, had seized the power by force of arms.

Sylla restored order, prevented pillage, convoked the assembly of the people, justified his conduct, and, wishing to secure for his party the preponderance in the public deliberations, he recalled to force the old custom of requiring the previous assent of the Senate before the presentation of a law. The comitia by centuries were substituted for the comitia by tribes, to which was left only the election of the inferior magistrates.⁷⁰³ Sylla caused Sulpicius to be put to death, and abrogated his decrees; and he set a price on the head of Marius, forgetting that he had himself, a short time before, found a refuge in the house of his rival. He proscribed the chiefs of the democratic faction, but most of them had fled before he entered Rome. Marius and his son had reached Africa through a thousand dangers. This revolution appears not to have been sanguinary, and, with the exception of Sulpicius, the historians of the time mention no considerable person as having been put to death. The terror inspired at first by Sylla lasted no long time. Reprobation of his acts was shown both in the Senate and among the people, who seized every opportunity to mark their discontent. Sylla was to resume the command of the army of Asia, and that of the army of Italy had fallen to Pompeius. The massacre of this latter by his own soldiers made the future dictator feel how insecure was his power; he sought to put a stop to the opposition to which he was exposed by accepting as a candidate at the consular comitia L. Cornelius Cinna, a known partisan of Marius, taking care, however, to exact from him a solemn oath of fidelity. But Cinna, once elected, held none of his engagements, and the other consul, Cn. Octavius, had neither the authority nor the energy necessary to balance the influence of his colleague.

Sylla, after presiding at the consular comitia, went in all haste to Capua to take the command of his troops, whom he led into Greece against the lieutenants of Mithridates. Cinna determined to execute the law of Sulpicius, which assimilated the new citizens to the old ones;⁷⁰⁴ he demanded at the same time the return of the exiles, and made an appeal to the slaves. Immediately the Senate, and even the tribunes of the people, pronounced against him. He was declared deposed from the consulate. “A merited disgrace,” says Paterculus, “but a dangerous precedent.”⁷⁰⁵ Driven from Rome, he hurried to Nola to demand an asylum of the Samnites, who were still in arms. Thence he went to sound the temper of the Roman army employed to observe Samnium, and, once assured of the dispositions of the soldiers in his favour, he penetrated into their camp, demanding protection against his enemies. His speeches and promises seduced the legions: they chose Cinna for their chief by acclamation, and followed him without hesitating. Meanwhile two lieutenants of Marius, Q. Sertorius and Cn. Papirius Carbo, both exiled by Sylla, proceeded to levy troops in the north of Italy; and the aged Marius landed in Etruria, where his presence was immediately followed by an insurrection. The Etruscan peasants accused the Senate as the cause of all their sufferings; and the enemy of the nobles and the rich appeared to them as an avenger sent by the gods. In ranging themselves under his banner, they believed that they were on the way with him to the pillage of the eternal city.

War was on the point of re-commencing, and this time Romans and Italiotes marched united against Rome. From the north, Marius, Sertorius, and Carbo were advancing with considerable forces. Cinna, master of Campania, was penetrating into Latium, while a Samnite army invaded it on the other side. To these five armies the Senate could oppose but one; that of Cn. Pompeius Strabo, an able general, but an intriguing politician, who hoped to raise himself under favour of the disorder. Quitting his cantonments in Apulia, he had arrived, by forced marches, under the walls of Rome, seeking either to sell his services to the Senate or to effect a conciliation with Marius. He soon saw that the insurgents were strong enough to do without him. His soldiers, raised in the Picenum and in the country of the Marsi, refused to fight for the Senate against their old confederates, and would have abandoned their general but for the courage and presence of mind of his son, a youth of twenty years of age, the same who subsequently was the great Pompey. One day the legionaries, snatching their ensigns, threatened to desert in mass: young Pompey laid himself across the gateway of the camp, and challenged them to pass over his body.⁷⁰⁶ Death delivered Pompeius Strabo from the shame of being present at an inevitable catastrophe. According to some authors, he sank under the attacks of an epidemic disease; according to others, he was struck by lightning in the very midst of his camp. Deprived of its chief, his army passed over to the enemy; the Senate was without defenders, and the populace rose against it: Rome opened her gates to Cinna and Marius.

The conquerors were without pity in putting to death, often with refinements in cruelty unknown to the Romans, the partisans of the aristocratic faction who had fallen into their hands. During several days, the slaves, whom Cinna had restored to liberty, gave themselves up to every excess. Sertorius, the only one of the chiefs of the democratic party who had some feelings of justice, made an example of these wretches, and massacred nearly four thousand of them.⁷⁰⁷

Marius and Cinna had proclaimed, as they advanced upon Rome in arms, that their aim was to assure to the Italiotes the entire enjoyment of the rights of Roman city; they declared themselves both consuls for the year 668. Their power was too considerable to be contested, for the new citizens furnished them with a contingent of thirty legions, or about 150,000 men.⁷⁰⁸ Marius died suddenly thirteen days after entering upon office, and the democratic party lost in him the only man who still preserved his prestige. A fact which arose out of his funeral, paints the manners of the epoch, and the character of the revolution which had just been effected. An extraordinary sacrifice was wanted for his tomb: the pontiff Q. Mucius Scævola, one of the most respectable old men of the nobility, was chosen as the victim. Conducted in pomp before the funeral pile of the conqueror of the Cimbri, he was struck by the sacrificer, who, with an inexperienced hand, plunged the knife into his throat without killing him. Restored to life, Scævola was cited in judgment, by a tribune of the people, for not having received the blow fairly.⁷⁰⁹

While Rome and all Italy were plunged in this fearful anarchy, Sylla drove out of Greece the generals of Mithridates VI., and gained two great battles at Chæronea (668) and Orchomenus (669). He was still in Bœotia, when Valerius Flaccus, sent by Cinna to replace him, landed in Greece, penetrated into Thessaly, and thence passed into Asia. Sylla followed him thither immediately, in haste to conclude with the King of Pontus an arrangement which would enable him to lead his army back into Italy. Circumstances were favourable. Mithridates had need to repair his losses, and he found himself in presence of a new enemy, the lieutenant of Valerius Flaccus, the fierce Flavius Fimbria, who, having by the murder of his general become head of the army of Asia, had seized upon Pergamus. Mithridates subscribed to the conditions imposed by Sylla; he restored all the provinces of which he had taken possession, and gave plate and money. Sylla then advanced into Lydia against Fimbria; but the latter, at the approach of the victor of Chæronea, could not restrain his soldiers. His whole army disbanded and passed over to Sylla. Threatened by his rival, the murderer of Flaccus was driven to slay himself. Nothing now stood in the way of Sylla’s projects on Italy, and he prepared to make his enemies at Rome pay dearly for their temporary triumph. At the moment of setting sail, he wrote to the Senate to announce the conclusion of the war in Asia, and his own speedy return. Three years, he said, had been sufficient to enable him to re-unite with the Roman empire Greece, Macedonia, Ionia, and Asia, and to shut up Mithridates within the limits of his old possessions; he was the first Roman who received an embassy from the King of the Parthians.⁷¹⁰ He complained of the violence exercised against his friends and his wife, who had fled with a crowd of fugitives to seek an asylum in his camp.⁷¹¹ He added, without vain threats, his intention to restore order by force of arms; but he promised not to repeal the great measure of the emancipation of Italy, and ended by declaring that the good citizens, new as well as old, had nothing to fear from him.

This letter, which the Senate ventured to receive, redoubled the fury of the men who had succeeded Marius. Blood flowed again. Cinna, who caused himself to be re-elected consul for the fourth time, and Cn. Papirius Carbo, his colleague, collecting in haste numerous troops, but ill disciplined, prepared to do their best to make head against the storm which was approaching. Persuaded that Sylla would proceed along the Adriatic to invade Italy from the north, Cinna had collected at Ancona a considerable army, with the design of surprising him in the midst of his march, and attacking him either in Epirus or Illyria. But his soldiers, Italiotes in great part, encouraged by the promises of Sylla, and, moreover, full of contempt for their own general, said openly that they would not pass the sea. Cinna attempted to make an example of some of the mutineers. A revolt broke out, and he was massacred. To avoid a similar lot, Carbo, who came to take the command, hastened to promise the rebels that they should not quit Italy.

Sylla landed at Brundusium, in 671, at the head of an army of forty thousand men, composed of five legions, six thousand cavalry, and contingents from Peloponnesus and Macedonia. The fleet numbered sixteen hundred vessels.⁷¹² He followed the Appian Way, and reached Campania after a single battle, fought not far from Canusium.⁷¹³ He brought the gold of Mithridates and the plunder of the temples of Greece, means of seduction still more dangerous than his ability on the field of battle. Hardly arrived in Italy, he rallied round him the proscripts and all those who detested the inapt and cruel government of the successors of Marius. The remains of the great families decimated by them repaired to his camp as to a safe place of refuge. M. Licinius Crassus became one of his ablest lieutenants, and it was then that Cn. Pompeius, the son of Strabo, a general at twenty-three years of age, raised an army in the Picenum, beat three bodies of the enemies, and came to offer to Sylla his sword, already redoubtable.

It was the beginning of the year 672 when Sylla entered Latium; he completely defeated, near Signia, the legions of the younger Marius, whose name had raised him to the consulship. This battle rendered Sylla master of Rome; but to the north, in Cisalpine Gaul and Etruria, Carbo, in spite of frequent defeats, disputed the ground with obstinacy against Pompey and Sylla’s other lieutenants. In the south, the Samnites had raised all their forces, and were preparing to succour Præneste, besieged by Sylla in person, and defended by young Marius. Pontius Telesinus, the general of the Samnites, finding it out of his power to raise the siege, conceived then the audacious and almost desperate idea of carrying his whole army to Rome, taking it by surprise, and sacking it. “Let us burn the wolves’ den,”⁷¹⁴ he said to his soldiers: “so long as it exists, there will be no liberty in Italy.”

By a rapid night-march, Telesinus deceived the vigilance of his adversary; but, exhausted with fatigue, on arriving at the foot of the ramparts of Rome, the Samnites were unable to give the assault, and Sylla had time to arrive with the choicest of his legions.

A sanguinary battle took place at the very gates of the town, on the day of the calends of November, 672, and it continued far into the night. The left wing of the Romans was beaten and took to flight, in spite of the efforts of Sylla to rally it; Telesinus perished in the fight, and Crassus, who commanded the right wing, gained a complete victory. At daylight, the Samnites who had escaped the slaughter laid down their arms and demanded quarter.⁷¹⁵

More than a year still passed away before the complete pacification of Italy, and it was only obtained by employing the most violent and sanguinary measures. Sylla made this terrible declaration, that he would not pardon one of his enemies. At Præneste, all the senators who were the partisans of Marius had their throats cut, and the inhabitants were put to the sword. Those of Norba, surprised through treason, rather than surrender, buried themselves under the ruins of their city.

Sylla had scrupled at nothing in his way to power; the corruption of the armies,⁷¹⁶ the pillage of towns, the massacre of the inhabitants, and the extermination of his enemies; nor did he show any more scruples in maintaining himself in it. He inaugurated his return to the Senate by the slaughter, near the Temple of Bellona, of three thousand Samnites who had surrendered prisoners.⁷¹⁷ A considerable number of the inhabitants of Italy were deprived of the right of city which had been granted them after the war of the allies;⁷¹⁸ he invented a new punishment, that of proscription,⁷¹⁹ and, in Rome alone, he banished four thousand seven hundred citizens, among whom were ninety senators, fifteen consulars, and two thousand seven hundred knights.⁷²⁰ His fury fell heaviest upon the Samnites, whose spirit of independence he feared, and he almost entirely annihilated that nation.⁷²¹ Although his triumph had been a reaction against the popular party, he treated as prisoners of war the children of the noblest and most respectable families, and, by a monstrous innovation, even the women suffered the same lot.⁷²² Lists of proscription, placarded on the Forum with the names of the intended victims, threw terror into families; to laugh or cry on looking at these was a crime.⁷²³ M. Pletorius was slaughtered for having fainted at the sight of the punishment inflicted on the prætor, M. Marius;⁷²⁴ to denounce the hiding-place of the proscripts, or put them to death, formed a title to recompenses paid from the public treasury, amounting in some cases to twelve thousand drachmas (about 11,640 francs [£460]) a head;⁷²⁵ to assist them, to have had friendly or any other relations with the enemies of Sylla, was enough to subject the offender to capital punishment. From one end of Italy to the other, all those who had served under the orders of Marius, Carbo, or Norbanus, were massacred or banished, and their goods sold by auction. They were to be struck even in their posterity: the children and grandchildren of the proscripts were deprived of the right of inheritance and of being candidates for public offices.⁷²⁶ All these acts of pitiless vengeance had been authorised by a law called Valeria, promulgated in 672, and which, in appointing Sylla dictator, conferred upon him unlimited powers. Yet, though Sylla kept the supreme power, he permitted the election of the consuls every year, an example which was subsequently followed by the emperors.

Calm re-established in Rome, a new constitution was promulgated, which restored the aristocracy to its ascendency. The dictator fell into the delusion of believing that a system founded by violence, upon selfish interests, could survive him. It is easier to change laws than to arrest the course of ideas.

The legislation of the Gracchi was abolished. The senators, by the law judiciaria, acquired again the exclusive privilege of the judicatory functions. The colony of Capua, a popular creation, was destroyed and restored to the domain. Sylla assumed to himself one of the first privileges of the censorship, which he had suppressed – the nomination of the members of the Senate. He introduced into that assembly, decimated during the civil wars, three hundred knights. By the law on the priesthood, he removed from the votes of the people and restored to the college the choice of the pontiffs and of the sovereign pontiff. He limited the power of the tribunes, leaving them only the right of protection (auxilium),⁷²⁷ and forbidding their access to the superior magistracies.⁷²⁸ He flattered himself that he had thus removed the ambitious from a career henceforward profitless.

He admitted into Rome ten thousand new citizens (called Cornelians),⁷²⁹ taken from among the slaves whose masters had been proscribed. Similar enfranchisements took place in the rest of Italy. He had almost exterminated two nations, the Etruscans and the Samnites; he re-peopled their deserted countries by distributing the estates of his adversaries among a considerable number of his soldiers, whom some authors raise to the prodigious number of forty-seven legions,⁷³⁰ and created for his veterans twenty-three military colonies on the territory taken from the rebel towns.⁷³¹

All these arbitrary measures were dictated by the spirit of reaction; but those which follow were inspired by the desire to re-establish order and the hierarchy.

The rules formerly adopted for the succession of the magistracies were restored.⁷³² No person could offer himself for the consulship without having previously held the office of prætor; or for the prætorship before he had held that of questor. Thirty years were fixed as the age necessary for the questorship, forty for the prætorship, and forty-three for the consulship. The law required an interval of two years between the exercise of two different magistracies, and often between the same magistracy, a rule so severely maintained, that, for having braved it in merely soliciting for the consulship,⁷³³ Lucretius Ofella, one of Sylla’s most devoted partisans, was put to death. The dictator withdrew from the freedmen the right of voting, from the knights the places of honour in the spectacles; he put a stop to the adjudications entrusted to the farmers-general and the distributions of wheat, and suppressed the corporations, which threatened a real danger to public tranquillity. Lastly, to put limits to extravagance, the sumptuary laws were promulgated.⁷³⁴

By the law de provinciis ordinandis, he sought to regulate the provinces and ameliorate their administration. The two consuls and the eight prætors were retained at Rome during their year of office by the administration of civil affairs. They took afterwards, in quality of proconsuls or proprætors, the command of one of the ten provinces, which they exercised during a year; after which a new curiate law became necessary to renew the imperium; they preserved it until their return to Rome. Thirty days were allowed to them for quitting the province after the arrival of their successors.⁷³⁵ The number of prætors, questors, pontiffs, and augurs was augmented.⁷³⁶ Every year twenty questors were to be named, which would ensure the recruitment of the Senate, since this office gave entrance to it. Sylla multiplied the commissions of justice. He took measures for putting a stop to the murders which desolated Italy (lex de sicariis), and to protect the citizens against outrages (lex de injuriis). The lex magistratis completed, so to say, the preceding.⁷³⁷ In the number of crimes of high treason, punished capitally, are the excesses of magistrates charged with the administration of the provinces; quitting their government without leave of the Senate; conducting an army beyond the limits of his province; undertaking a war unauthorised; treating with foreign chiefs: such were the principal acts denounced as crimes against the Republic. There was not one of them of which Sylla himself had not been guilty.