The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

CHAPTER XVIII. MARIUS AND SULLA

The personal rivalry of her two most fortunate generals becomes now the main channel of the history of Rome herself. In the year which closed the contest of the republic with her dependent allies (88), Sulla was forty-nine years old, Marius about seventy. The former was enjoying the full breeze of popularity and renown, while the latter, wearied but not sated with accumulated honours, was moodily throwing away the advantages he had earned in his earlier career. From campaign to campaign Sulla, as we have seen, had dogged the steps of the elder warrior, always ready to step in and seize the opportunities which the other cast recklessly in his way. Not that Marius in his exalted station was even from the first indifferent to this incipient rivalry. He was deeply jealous of his subordinate. He felt chagrin at the contrast presented by their respective birth and origin; for Sulla, though needy in point of fortune, was a scion of the illustrious house of the Cornelii, and plumed himself on the distinction and advantage such a lineage conferred. Sulla, moreover, was trained in the accomplishments of Hellenic education, which Marius, conscious of his want of them, vainly affected to despise. Sulla wrote and spoke Greek; his memoirs of his own life became the text-book of the Greek historians of Rome, from whom we principally derive our acquaintance with him. But this varnish of superior culture seems to have failed in softening a rough plebeian nature. Sulla was one of many noble Romans who combined with pretensions to literary taste the love of gross debauchery, and pleasure in the society of mimes and vulgar jesters. He was a coarse sensualist and by his disregard of the nuptial tie offended even the lax morality of his age. His eyes, we are told, were of a pure and piercing blue, and their sinister expression was heightened by the coarseness of his complexion and a countenance disfigured by pimples and blotches, compared by the raillery of the Greeks to a mulberry sprinkled with meal. His manners, except when he unbent in the society of his inferiors, were haughty and morose; nor is there any act of kindliness or generosity recorded of him. The nobles who accepted him as their champion had no personal liking for him. But selfish and ambitious though he was, the aggrandisement of his party and order was with Sulla a species of fanaticism. He despised the isolated ascendency of a Marius, and aspired to rule in Rome at the head of a dominant oligarchy.

Marius had quitted the camp at the most critical moment of the war, and while he buried himself in a distant retreat, Sulla brought the contest to a close, having obtained his election to the consulship for the year 88. The imminence of a new war with Mithridates had hastened the arrangements for the peace, and Sulla was still consul when it became necessary to select a general to command in the East. For this important service both his merits and his position gave Sulla the highest claim; but Marius was mortified and jealous, and cursed his own folly in having at such a moment withdrawn himself from the public eye. He returned impatiently to Rome, and showed himself once more among the young soldiers who trained and exercised themselves in the Field of Mars, running, wrestling, and climbing poles in rivalry with the most vigorous and active among them, to prove that, though old in years, he possessed the energy requisite for command. But the nobles had no wish to gratify the man they feared and distrusted, while they had found one of their own order, on whose fidelity they could rely as implicitly as on his valour. They mocked the clumsy feats of the veteran candidate, and persuaded the people to follow their example, and send their old favourite with jeers to his retreat in Campania.

The enterprise demanded a man of the maturest powers and the highest abilities. Pontus, on the eastern shores of the Euxine Sea, the region from which Mithridates derived his title, constituted but a small part of the dominions over which he ruled. His patrimonial kingdom he inherited from a succession of princes of high Persian extraction, and he was himself the sixth sovereign of his own name. To the north he had extended his sway over the tribes of the Cimbric Bosporus as far as the banks of the Borysthenes or Dnieper, while to the south he had received from his father the sovereignty of Phrygia, which the republic had sold for a sum of money. This country, indeed, the Romans had again wrested from him at an early period of his reign; but he had taken advantage of their dissensions to interfere in the affairs of Cappadocia, to murder, it is said, its sovereign, and at last to place upon its throne an infant child of his own. The armies of Mithridates were recruited from the hardy barbarians of the Caucasus and the Taurus; but his generals were mostly perhaps of Greek extraction, skilled in military science hardly less than the Romans themselves. Nor had he failed to enlist in his service many able citizens of the republic, for the allegiance of the Romans sat but loosely upon them in the provinces, and they were easily swayed from their principles by the seductions of eastern civilisation. His own genius was conspicuous both in war and peace. He was robust in bodily frame, and expert in martial exercises. The story that he had fortified his system against poison by the constant use of antidotes is a mere romance which modern science has pronounced impossible; nor is it much more credible that he could converse, as has been asserted, with the various tribes of which his kingdom was composed, in twenty-five different languages or dialects. Our accounts of the great king of Pontus are derived entirely from Roman sources, and we cannot rely implicitly upon the particular instances of ferocity and perfidy recorded of him. As an Oriental, however, it is but too probable that he maintained himself in power by the usual arts of oriental conquerors, by shameless fraud and remorseless cruelty.

THE FIRST MITHRIDATIC WAR

[92-88 B.C.]

In the year 92, the Romans interfered to overturn the appointment Mithridates had made to the throne of Cappadocia. Mithridates did not venture to resist, but he secretly instigated Tigranes, king of Armenia, to invade the country and expel the nominee of the republic. Ariobarzanes fled to Rome, and there obtained assurance of support. Sulla, at this time prætor in Cilicia, was ordered to reinstate him, while the king of Pontus still remained tranquil. But the state of the republic’s affairs in Italy soon emboldened him. The death of a king of Bithynia gave him an opportunity; and he dared to defy the western conquerors by setting up a pretender to the throne of which they claimed the disposal. At the same time he made a descent upon Cappadocia in person, and expelled the luckless Ariobarzanes a second time.

The disasters of the Social War were now carrying dismay and consternation to the heart of the republic. Sulla had been recalled to aid the efforts of her best commanders in her defence. Nevertheless, when the fugitive appeared once more before the senate with entreaties for its support, he did not appeal in vain to the old Roman constancy. An army was despatched to restore him, and once more Mithridates bowed to the storm, and retired from the disputed territory. But the Roman officers in the East were not satisfied with this act of submission. They incited their allies to harass and invade his dominions, and when appealed to by him, refused to check their aggressions. Then at last did Mithridates arm in his own defence. With an immense force he burst upon the territories both of the republic and its allies. He chased Ariobarzanes a third time from his dominions, defeated the king of Bithynia, supported by the legions of Rome, in a great battle on the river Amnias in Paphlagonia, routed the Roman commander in a second engagement, overran Phrygia and Galatia, and proclaimed himself a deliverer to the subjects of the republic in the East. His advent was hailed by the provincials with acclamations. The insolence of the conquerors and the tyranny of their fiscal agents had excited deep discontent among them. On the mainland almost every city joyfully opened its gates to Mithridates, and when in the intoxication of his triumph he issued, as we are told, a decree for the massacre of all the Roman residents in Asia, it was promptly obeyed, if indeed, as we may fairly conjecture, it had not been spontaneously anticipated. Eighty thousand citizens—some say 150 thousand, though even the lesser number is probably a gross exaggeration—are stated to have fallen by this bloody act of retribution.