Cataclysm 90 BC: The Forgotten War that Almost Destroyed Rome

by Philip Matyszak

Aristocracy by its very nature degenerates into oligarchy. Then the common people become infuriated with this government and take revenge on it for its unjust rule. So we get the development of democracy. In due course the permissiveness and lawlessness of this type of government degenerates into mob-rule, and the cycle is complete.

Thus Polybius saw societies as revolving through six stages – from anarchy to monarchy, through monarchy to tyranny, from tyranny to aristocracy, from aristocracy to oligarchy, and from oligarchy to democracy. Then from democracy to anarchy and round and around again.

In the Greece that Polybius knew, and in the Rome of his day, the army was made up of citizens under arms. Many of these citizens enrolled in the levy at the start of the campaigning season in the expectation that they would go home to their family farms or businesses at the end of the year. When ‘the people’ of such a state become disaffected, the result is not public demonstrations and the hurling of brickbats, or even rioting, which might be controlled by calling in the army. When the army is the people, things much more substantial than brickbats are thrown, and they are thrown with organized professionalism – and since they are the army, the only thing that can stop them is another army.

The fundamental problem was the failure of inclusivism. This itself had two parts. Firstly, after the second Punic War the Roman Republic, originally one of the most open societies in the ancient world, changed its policy of absorbing communities into the Roman citizen body. Instead Rome began to guard the citizenship jealously, creating divisions between those who had the privileges and rights of citizenship and those who wanted them. Secondly, the Roman leadership, also once open and inclusive, fell into the hands of a largely closed community of aristocrats. This community defended its privileges and came increasingly to identify its interests as being those of the

Roman state as a whole. That is, the Roman political elite, which until then had seen its duty as service to the state, now increasingly adopted the view that the state existed to serve it. This was a substantial change with far-reaching effects to which we shall return.

Given unfriendly neighbours and local hill tribes with a penchant for pillage, early Rome had to get big or die. To survive, Rome needed new people, and the city was

not fussy about how it acquired them.

Eventually, as Rome expanded, lack of space on the seven hills meant that bringing home entire conquered populations along with the booty became unrealistic. Still, the Romans did not stop making citizens out of those they had conquered. A new policy left those defeated by the legions in place, but now as involuntary Romans amid the still-smouldering ruins of homes which they were free to rebuild as extensions of the Roman state, far from the city of Rome. Recognizing that defeated peoples might harbour hard feelings about recent events, the constitution instituted a special status for them. They became cives sine suffragio –

citizens without the vote. This made a conquered people sort of probationary Romans, entitled to the legal protection of citizenship, but unable (for example) to vote for the immediate execution of the general who had conquered them. If a community behaved itself – and almost all did – then the vote would come along in a generation or two. By that time the grandsons of the defeated were in the legions, enthusiastically expanding the Roman state yet further and forcibly recruiting yet more members of the Roman citizen body.

One reason for this exclusivity was that as the Roman state expanded, so did the rewards of being Roman and of holding office in Rome. This is not to say that Rome was corrupt, because ‘corruption’ implies an alternative system to be corrupted. In ancient Rome nepotism, back-scratching, and the exchange of favours did not corrupt the system – they actually were the system. Without them the administration could not function. The senate was very much an ‘old-boy network’ and took pride in that fact. If a man had done a senator a favour – such as giving him an interest-free loan – not only would that senator support that man in politics, but he would freely admit the reason.

Firstly politics in Rome – never a gentle occupation – became increasingly cut-throat and the high stakes meant that elections became ever more competitive. Secondly, Roman aristocrats had their hands full competing with one another. They were extremely reluctant to widen the field by allowing outsiders to join the fray. Thirdly, those who were elected to office were those who had the financial resources to woo voters, buy allies and buy off competitors. As time went on and expenses went up, the only people who could afford to pay for all this were those who had held office already and had reaped the huge financial rewards that came with it. Since they had held office, these men did not pay for their own electoral campaigns, but for those of their children. At this point the top jobs in Rome became virtually monopolized by a small group of very wealthy families.

Throughout Roman history the aristocracy had been powerful. Once Rome had become a Mediterranean-wide empire, the aristocracy reaped a disproportionate share of the rewards and became more powerful still. The nobiles controlled access to public

office, the administrative functions of the state, the top priestly offices and the courts. But they had always been influential in these areas. The problem came when the nobiles began to monopolize land ownership as well. When Rome conquered an enemy, especially in Italy, a commission was sent by the senate to organize how that conquered state would function thereafter. If a city occupied a strategic location, it was highly likely that the original occupants would be displaced and the city occupied by retired Roman legionaries. In such an event, the city became an extension of Rome itself – a colonus. More often, Rome made the conquered city an involuntary ‘ally’ and was content to levy tribute on the original population. This tribute often came in the form of soldiers who then fought alongside the Roman legions in further campaigns. In these cases, Rome also usually took for itself a percentage of the land of the conquered state.

Italians had no such protection. They could and did complain loudly. However, there were no votes to be obtained from Italians, so no aristocrat had anything to gain by taking their case. On the other hand, the aristocrat the Italians were complaining about would certainly take offence with anyone who listened to such complaints. Therefore anyone who took up the cause of Italians unfairly dispossessed of their lands would be making a powerful enemy of the aristocratic dispossessor and getting nothing in return. So the Italians had few defenders in Rome, and by the middle of the second century the Italian peninsula was steaming with resentment.

Firstly, with the prospect of Roman citizenship offered as compensation, many Italian communities would be content with the inferior land deals they were currently being offered. Secondly, when a land dispute came before a Roman magistrate, both plaintiffs and defendants would be Roman citizens, and the magistrate – who was also a politician seeking re-election – would make a fairer decision if he alienated one set of voters in the course of appeasing another. At present the magistrate adjudicating a land dispute could appease the Romans and let the Italians go hang, and he generally did just that. Those Italians who wished to remain independent of the Roman body politic, proposed Flaccus, should have the right of appeal against ‘tyrannical’ decisions by Roman magistrates.

There already existed a halfway house towards the Roman citizenship known as the Latin Right. This right was originally given to the peoples of Latium to compensate for the dissolution of the Latin League in 338 BC. It allowed Latins the same mutual privileges as they had enjoyed under the league – that is commercium, connubium and the ius migrationis. This meant that anyone with Latin rights could make a legal contract with someone else possessing such rights, could legally marry such a person, and could move to another Latin city and obtain citizenship thereof. The Latin Right had been extended well beyond Latium as the Roman empire expanded.

One reason why the Latin Right was so desirable was because Rome sponsored it and therefore the privileges of the Latin Right were protected by Roman law. Consequently someone with the Latin Right who held a land contract could insist that the Roman courts enforce that contract. It has been seen that the Roman courts were often lax in their duty, but even this was better than nothing. Other Italians had not even that much recourse. So now Gaius Gracchus proposed that the present holders of the Latin Right become Romans, and the other Italian allies should get the Latin Right. From there, with the precedent established, a process would exist by which conquered people could first become involuntary allies, then Latins and finally Roman citizens. This, as with much of Gaius Gracchus’ other legislation, was reasonable, far-sighted and addressed one of the fundamental problems underlying the structure of the Roman Republic.

With the complacency that followed their ‘victory’, the Roman aristocracy saw no need to mend their ways. The Italian allies were Roman subjects, and they would simply have to do as they were told. Yet at the same time, the Romans insisted that the Italian allies supply their army with troops trained and armoured to the standard of Roman legionaries. The incompatibility of these two polices – treating the Italians as a conquered people, and simultaneously insisting that they have large numbers of highly competent soldiery ready for action – never appears to have struck the senate as dangerous enough to worry about.

Rome’s famed technique of ‘divide and conquer’ continued to hold down Italy even after most of that peninsula had in fact been conquered. Individual Italians who reached a certain status within a community might individually aspire to the citizenship that Rome denied to their fellow burghers, and individual communities competed with one another for the Latin Right, or simply for Roman patrons among the aristocracy. Among the Italians mutual incomprehension of each other’s language and culture, together with rivalry for Roman favour prevented them from working together, and the Romans smugly assumed it would always be so.

This move raised a few eyebrows at the time, but no one noted the wider implications – that once they had completed their time of service, these men would have no smallholdings to go home to, and they might look to their general to provide for their retirement. Two decades later this would be a major issue, which further destabilized what had become a wildly unstable republic.

The events surrounding the capture of Jugurtha set in motion events far more consequential. Firstly, Marius was deeply irked that although he had won the war, the Roman nobility made much of the fact that it was one of their own who had actually effected the capture of Jugurtha. Secondly, and much more importantly, the Roman people decided that Marius’ exemplary generalship made him uniquely qualified to lead the state in its hour of peril. For Rome now faced a danger that made the African war look like the sideshow it was. In the north, the barbarians were coming.

It appears that Mallius opened negotiations with the Cimbri without consulting Caepio, and Caepio launched a surprise attack on the Cimbri without telling Mallius. So instead of a combined army of 80,000 Romans acting together, the Cimbri had to cope with two rather confused armies of 40,000 men acting separately, and the Cimbri coped rather easily. The biggest Roman army since the battle of Cannae suffered the greatest Roman defeat since the battle of Cannae. Almost all of the 80,000 strong army were killed. Two notable survivors were the generals Caepio and Mallius who both fled from the battlefield.

With yet another of its armies wiped out, the Roman state was both exhausted and defenceless. All that saved Italy from invasion and sack that year was the fact that it was late in the campaigning season, and the Cimbri did not fancy tackling the Alps in autumn. Instead, they turned off towards Iberia, giving the Romans valuable time in which to regroup before the enemy returned. Once Rome had mustered enough of an army to have a sporting chance of fighting off the Cimbri, it surprised no one that the Roman people were vehemently opposed to putting a Roman noble in charge of it. In fact, now that a prospective German invasion of Italy had put their necks on the line, the Roman nobility were inclined to agree. So instead of promoting another highly bred idiot, the state turned for salvation to Caius Marius.

The Romans discovered that chasing the highly mobile Numidians was fruitless with the army as it was currently constituted. So Roman flying columns developed the habit of loading onto individual soldiers much of the kit formerly carried on the baggage train. Now a Roman soldier went to war loaded down with some 60 pounds (27kg) of equipment, including rations, weapons and entrenching tools. While fighting in Africa and Spain, the Romans had found that small flexible handfuls of men made the best formations. However these ‘handfuls’ (‘maniples’ in Latin) were easily overwhelmed by a mass of barbarians. So the Roman legion adopted the cohort, a unit of 480 men. The cohort was not a total innovation – it certainly existed in the Roman army prior to 105 BC – but Marius may have been responsible for making this the standard tactical unit. There were six centuries in a cohort (despite the name, a ‘century’ contained around eighty fighting men) apart from the First Cohort, which was double-strength. The larger cohort allowed a legion to be more flexible than a phalanx, but the individual components now maintained their internal integrity better under pressure than had maniples. Also at about this time – though it is uncertain how

the implementation happened – the legions abandoned other animal totems to give primacy to the eagle.

The situation now required highly trained and disciplined soldiers, so Marius adopted the technique first thought up by Metellus’ second-in-command in Africa, and started training his men like gladiators. This rigorous regime, which emphasized stamina, was constantly maintained throughout a soldier’s period of enrolment, and kept the troops at a constant high level of fitness and discipline. Naturally, both since the salvation of Italy made this necessary, and because no Roman commander would imagine doing otherwise, the Italian allies were organized in the same manner and trained with the same techniques.

If the Roman senate had proposed the Lex Licinia Mucia with the express purpose of uniting the Italians against Rome, they could hardly have done a better job. Resentment in the peninsula rose from simmering to boiling point. The Italian people were a diverse lot, but resentment of Rome in all its facets gave them common ground.

So difficult did the Apennine range make travel to the region that in imperial times Rome found it easier to import grain from Egypt than from the farmlands of the Po Valley.

Therefore the fertile region from which Rome drew its local resources consisted of Italy’s western uplands and plains. These stretched from the foothills of the Alps in the east down through Etruria and past Rome to Campania in the south. This region comprised the Roman heartland – the chunk of Italy that Rome would have to hold at all costs if it were to survive. Apples, olives and cereals all grew well here, but even at this relatively early stage in the city’s development, the urban mass of Rome

consumed more than this region could supply. Grain had to be imported from Sicily and increasingly from the new colony on the site of Carthage in Africa.

Firstly, the settlers tended to be former legionaries and their families. Secondly, the land they were settled on tended to be the richest and most fertile lands in the territory the Romans were occupying, and thirdly, even more than rich farmlands, Roman colonies were founded on defensible sites of strategic importance. There were a great many such colonies, because the Romans had a great deal of Italy both to keep down and also to defend. Therefore some colonies were not Roman but Latin, though many volunteers for these settlements were raised from the poor of Rome itself.

Roman colonies developed as a consequence of the traumatic Latin War, which finished in 338 BC. Before then Rome had looked at the other states of Latium as colleagues in mutual defence. The fact that these states sided with other local tribes against Rome was a sobering experience that convinced the Romans that they needed to look to their own defence. The idea of doing so with military colonies was not a new one. There were plenty of examples from earlier Greek history from which the Romans could learn, though some aspects of the foundation process made Roman writers think that the original inspiration came from the Etruscans.

Overall, there were almost a hundred Roman and Latin colonies scattered across strategic locations all over Italy. In later centuries the political commentator Machiavelli considered Roman colonies as the most effective source of Roman strength. Not only did the colonies have a strategic role, but they were also effective instruments of romanization, the process that was later to knit Italy into a unified cultural entity. From the point of view of those plotting rebellion against the power of Rome, the colonies were collectively and individually a royal pain in the neck. They were too numerous and too well-defended to be defeated individually and too well situated to be ignored. And, as it turned out, they were also too loyal to be subverted – apart from one notorious exception, which we will come to later. It is reasonable to claim that without the colonies, Rome might well have lost the approaching war. With the colonies, Roman armies, even those deep in otherwise hostile territory always had a secure base on which to fall back and mountain passes and river crossings were secured for them even as they were denied to the rebels. It was the existence of the Roman colonies as much as any lingering sentiments of moderation that made the Italians of the late 90s BC decide to give peace one last chance. At this time, their hopes that the coming cataclysm might be averted rested on the shoulders of one man – Livius Drusus.

For years the Roman Republic had been sliding toward disaster. If we are to pick a single point when the entire crumbling structure lurched past the point of no return, it is probably the moment when the senate voted to undo all that Drusus had done and was trying to achieve. Those present had no idea of the events their vote would set in motion. Within the next decade a huge number of those senators – by some estimates between half and three-quarters – would be dead, and most would have died violently.

note any suspicious activity. Particular attention would have been paid to the tribe of the Marsi. These were a highly warlike people who lived close to Rome, and one of their leaders was Quintus Pompaedius Silo. Silo was a known firebrand, the man who had led his 10,000 protesters to Rome and who had only been dissuaded from violence at the last moment (p.58

Thus while Arpinum was now a Roman town, nearby Allifae was not, and nor were many others in the neighbourhood. The example of Arpinum shows that whether an Italian city or town was Italian and Roman had little to do with blood or even tribal allegiance, and a lot to do with happenstance, and the vagaries of war and politics. A good rule of thumb in south and central Italy was that the more strategic the location of

a settlement, the more likely it was to be Roman, because when the Romans conquered such a location in war they generally refused to give it back. And after a while the population of the occupied city started to think of themselves as Romans as well.

The main difference – and in many cases the only difference – between a Roman and an Italian was that one had the vote and the privileges that went with it and the other didn’t. The coming war would be as close to a civil war as it could get and would end by actually being one.

All going well, in March 90 BC the Italian assault would come as a bolt from the blue and Rome would be on the ropes before the state even realized it was in danger. And if a sudden Italian attack immediately dropped Rome into deep military trouble, then it would be politically easier for Italian diplomats to peel away Rome’s allies by the same judicious mixture of bribes and threats that Rome usually used to keep them in line in the first place. So the last thing the Italians wanted was to declare war late in the campaigning season. That would cost them the advantage of surprise without any benefit to compensate. If hostilities broke out right after the death of Drusus and late in the year, then the Italians would have at best a month in which to campaign before the harvest was safely behind Roman city walls and out of the reach of foragers.

Altogether then, it was best that the Romans be left in ignorance of the nasty surprise awaiting them in the spring of 90 BC. And fortunately, that autumn circumstances had provided a typically Roman spat to distract the senate and people from matters outside the city.

Such a speech was never going to go down well if delivered to a population moderately soused with wine, especially as that population had a deservedly bad conscience in any case. What result Caepio was expecting to get is unknown, but anyone without his familial pig-headedness could have expected what he got. The people of Asculum assumed that the game was up, and that Caepio knew about the intended rebellion. Since there was no point in dissembling any more, the townsfolk got right down to business and started the rebellion right there and then. Caepio was the first item on the agenda, and his subordinates were lynched alongside him. Then the people of Asculum

turned on the Romans living in the city and killed them and looted their property. There was no keeping the secret after that, especially after word of the uprising reached other towns in the locality, which promptly followed the example of Asculum. As Italy trembled on the brink of war, the Italians sent a diplomatic mission to Rome in one last-ditch effort to make the senate see reason.

This meant that in west-central Italy a solid bloc of land was held by the rebels from just south of the mouth of the river Po through southern Picentine land, the territory of the Vestini and then of the Marruncini, finishing almost at the ‘spur’ above the heel of the boot of Italy. This took a large bite out of the territory over which Rome held sway, and with the addition of Marsic lands, that bite extended right across the peninsula to within reach of the city of Rome itself. This initial wave of rebellion did much to ease the minds of those Italians considering rebellion, but afraid to share the fate of Fregellae, which had been brutally crushed for the want of allies. This time around, a second wave of rebels was not long in coming.

With the addition of the tribe of the Frentani, who occupied the coast north-west of the Samnites, almost the entire Adriatic seaboard of Italy apart from Roman Picenum had joined the Italian revolt.

In fact it is clear that in many cases, especially in Apulia, influential aristocrats managed to keep their particular communities loyal to Rome even as the rest of the countryside rose in rebellion. At this point of absolute and vital importance was the attitude of the Latins and the colonists. The ‘Latins’ were those people who possessed the Latin Right, the right to make commercial agreements, to marry or transfer citizenship to another Latin state if they moved there. This right gave Latins many of the privileges of Roman citizenship. Though Latins did not have the vote, they were protected by Roman law and were thus safe from the worst of the abuses that had been inflicted on the Italians. The colonies,

those fortified outposts scattered around the hostile lands of the south and west of Italy, were designed precisely to hold those lands under Roman control. However, the populations of these colonies had large numbers of peregrini – foreigners living within the city walls. And many of the ‘Romans’ in these colonies had never even seen Rome but were closely linked to neighbouring Italian cities through marriage, commerce and culture. So whether the Latins would stay loyal was already an open question, but it was a particularly moot question in the case of those colonies with a population of Latins, and these colonies tended to be much larger than purely Roman settlements.

They occupied some of the richest land in southern Italy and had been located at choke points in overland communications with the express purpose of being a crippling nuisance to any rebels. Whether the colonists were prepared to withstand the privations of siege from people with whom they shared so many bonds, and whether they would be prepared to kill and be killed in defence of a deeply flawed and unjust Roman state that had done little to merit such service was a question that would ultimately decide the future of Italy. The Venusians deliberated these questions and found Rome wanting. They threw in their lot with the rebels, and the whole peninsula held its breath while waiting to discover how many other colonies were going to join them. As it turned out, the defection of the Latins and the colonies started and stopped at Venusia. Had it not, Rome would not have survived. The military significance of the colonies goes without saying. The military significance of the other Latin tribes is less

remarked upon, but they were the weight that finally tipped the scales.

Whatever their differences at home, Italians and Romans abroad had co-operated enthusiastically in exploiting the lands they had jointly conquered. Indeed, this exploitation at times approached the point of pillage, and the resentful peoples being plundered cared little about the political disagreements of their hated occupiers. The idea that they might side with one against the other lost its attraction to foreigners when both sets of oppressors appeared equally unsavoury.

This left invaders from outside the empire. Fortunately candidates for this role were few, since in the decades leading up to their civil war Rome and the Italians had done an effective job of beating up any potential foreign threats. Gaul was too disorganized to mount an invasion, and there currently were no large tribal movements that might cause one. Though independent, Egypt was politically a mess and lacked the will and the means to intervene in Roman affairs. Parthia was at this time a remote country with little interest in Roman affairs. Indeed, the two empires had not yet even properly introduced themselves through a formal meeting of ambassadors, though this was about to happen.