Cataclysm 90 BC: The Forgotten War that Almost Destroyed Rome

by Philip Matyszak

This time around, the Romans faced an enemy as numerous as they were, who were every bit as much disciplined and ferocious fighters, and who knew the Roman military system intimately. While it was true that there was no Hannibal in the Italian ranks, all the Roman senate had to offer for leadership of their own armies were the same petty-minded and self-interested individuals who had brought about the disaster in the first place. This was proven by the fact that, with the city facing extinction, the immediate reaction of the political class was to use the crisis for infighting and to settle scores with personal enemies.

However the activities punishable by maiestas legislation were poorly specified, precisely because of the law’s catch-all nature. Basically maiestas was whatever a court and jury decided it was in the case of a particular individual. With a political system as cynically corrupt as that in Rome the potential for abuse of such laws was vast.

Naturally one of those commanders was the leader and instigator of the entire rebellion, Pompaedius Silo. The other consul, Papius Mutilus, represented the Samnites, who along with Silo’s Marsi made up the two most important rebel groups. Silo commanded the ‘northern’ group – that is, the least southerly group of rebels that operated close to Rome – and Mutilus took the southern group of tribes. This was a very rough and ready division, but it is probable that each group focussed on one siege, with a general from the ‘southern’ group taking command of the siege of Aesernia in the south, and one of Silo’s commanders doing the same for Alba.3 The division of command also reflected the linguistic division of the two groups. As their coinage shows, the northern group used Latin as their lingua franca while the southerners spoke Oscan, and they called Mutilus, their commander, embratur – a word that may well be the original of the Latin ‘imperator’ from which we today get ‘emperor’. The Romans meanwhile chose their generals with particular care. As consul for the coming year they elected one of the Julii Caesares, an ancient family newly come again into political prominence. Lucius Julius Caesar was to take command of the war

against the southern group of rebels and his colleague Rutilius Lupus would handle the Marsi and others close to Rome. This Rutilius was a relative of that Rutilius Rufus still in comfortable exile in Asia Minor and watching all the excitement from afar. Unsurprisingly the feuding but very competent Sulla and Marius were separated under the command of different consuls. Caesar didn’t get Marius, which is surprising as the pair were close family through Marius’ marriage to a Julian wife. However Rutilius Lupus was also a relative, and once he had got Marius in the north, Caesar perforce got Sulla in the south.

The troops that Italians and Romans commanded were very much alike. Both sides relied on heavy infantry to win their battles, and it is probable that both used the cohort formations that had become the standard unit of their armies since Marius had employed them so effectively against the Cimbri. Some of the Samnites may have adopted their traditional armour of stiffened linen, but generally most of those called to arms on either side would have donned the same coats of chain mail that they would have worn had they served together in Rome’s foreign wars that year. Each set of infantry relied on a heavy throwing spear (pilum) to be used just before engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a sword. A surviving fragment of the work of Roman

historian Cassius Dio tells us how similar the two sides were. The Marsi were able to spy on the Romans ‘by mingling with their forage parties and entering through their ramparts under the guise of allies. There they took note of what was seen and heard in the [Roman] camp and later reported this to their own side.’5 In other words, even when the two sides were at war, it was hard to tell them apart. As a general rule, the Italians had more skirmishers, since the hillmen from allied tribes were accustomed to this sort of fighting, and as a bonus many were also expert with the sling. On the other hand, the Romans had the better cavalry, both because they could recruit warriors skilled in this arm of combat from Cisalpine Gaul, and because most of northern Campania had stayed loyal and this region traditionally provided the Roman army with the bulk of its cavalry. Nevertheless, with both sides so equally matched in weapons, skill and numbers, the war would be decided by whichever side had the generals better able to outmanoeuvre their opponents, and which group had the politicians better able to maintain their own alliances and pick apart those of the other side. Given the wealth of military experience among the Roman generals, and the colossal ineptitude of their politicians (who were often the same people), one might expect victories in the field to be cancelled out by political setbacks. In fact the reverse was the case. In the year 90 BC, it was Rome’s generals who broug...

For the Marsi and their allies, the immediate priority was to break the ring of Roman colonies that dominated the strategic landscape. The existence of these colonies meant

that the Italians had to be constantly on the alert lest the Romans sally out from their walls and attack Marsic towns, farms and supply chains. But even more annoyingly, the colonies had been situated with malice aforethought across the major lines of communication in central Italy. This meant that Roman armies could zip about with relative ease, getting supplies and a safe haven each time they stopped at a colony. The Italians on the other hand had to laboriously get around each of these municipal roadblocks either by extensive detours or by struggling through difficult terrain. Militarily the Italians could not operate freely until the colonies had been taken out of the war so the colonies had to go for that reason alone, but there was also a political aspect, in that the colonies represented Roman domination of the people and the lands around. If the Italians were fighting to be rid of Roman domination then the colonies – the aspect of Rome which most impinged on their daily lives – would have to go too. For the southern rebels too the Roman colonies were a huge inconvenience. However, the tactic of the Samnite commander Papius Mutilus was somewhat different. While the Marsi concentrated on breaking the ring of colonies that surrounded them,

the southern group aimed at consolidating and extending the territory under their control by taking the countryside and smaller towns away from Rome. The example of Venusia had shown that opinion in the southern colonies was not unanimously pro-Roman. The further from Rome it was, the more likely it was that the population had ‘gone native’ as the Venusians had done. Therefore colonies in the south of Italy, cut off from Rome and with the Italians in control of the countryside, might decide to re-think their loyalties. Furthermore, not everyone in a colony had to join the rebel side. With a bit of luck and a lot of treachery, all it might take was a few dozen men prepared to open a critical gate at the right time. So Mutilus’ operations had the focus of beating the Romans in the field, but not simply because from the Italian point of view this was a good thing in itself. Victory also helped to sway the hearts and minds of waverers, and where sympathy for the rebels was not enough, Mutilus w...

same reasons as the Italians needed to take them out of the war. This meant making sure that the colonies were strong enough in materiel and morale to withstand assault. An important aspect of morale for colonies that might come under siege was the probability of relief, so for the Romans preventing the fall of those places already under siege was a priority. As well as defending their colonies, the Romans had to consolidate the areas they currently held. This involved keeping a close eye on those Etrurians and Umbrians who were sympathetic to the rebel cause, and taking direct action against those areas such as Asculum which were already in revolt. Above all, Rome had to keep a grip on Campania. This area was horribly exposed to the rebels, with the Marsi to the northeast, the Samnites to the east and rebel Pompeii right on the doorstep. Yet without Campania Rome had few resources in Italy with which to fight the war. As Cicero later remarked, ‘don’t forget the powerful armies...

down Hannibal a century previously. The trick was not so much to win victories as to avoid defeat. Rome had an empire and could draw on it for money and manpower and if necessary simply outlast the Italians. This technique had worked with Hannibal, and it would work on the Italians, since after all the Italians that Rome was now fighting were pretty much the same Italians who had allied with Hannibal in that previous conflict. However, in order to w...

Mutilus used terror as a tactical weapon. When he took a town, the leading Roman citizens were executed, and presumably any who sympathized too openly with them. Mutilus so viciously plundered the countryside that Appian says ‘the towns in the

vicinity were terrified and surrendered to him’.10 In quick order Stabiae and Herculaneum on the coast, the nearby Roman colony of Salernum and several other towns fell to the Italian leader, who forcibly recruited the available manpower into his army, thus gaining about two legions and a thousand cavalry. Next Mutilus headed for Acerrae, a town situated inland some thirteen miles from Naples. The consul Lucius Caesar now entered the fray. Thanks to the energetic recruiting of an up-and-coming officer in Cisalpine Gaul, Caesar had acquired reinforcements of ten thousand Gallic warriors. Recruitment elsewhere in the empire had added a formidable force of Numidian horse, cavalry generally reckoned the best light horse in the world. But Mutilus had also foreseen the arrival of the Numidians and had taken steps to neutralize them. It will be remembered that the Latin colony of Venusia in Apulia had defected early to the Italian side. In Venusia the Romans had been holding hostage one of the sons of Jugurtha, and this man had fallen into Mutilus’ hands along with the city. Now this scion of the Numidian royal line was displayed to his father’s former subjects. The Numidians were invited to desert Rome and fight for a member of their own royal family.

So many took that invitation that Caesar was forced to consider the rest of his Numidian cavalry untrustworthy and he t...

a substantial Mauretanian contingent had arrived along with the Numidians, and the Mauretanians and their king Bocchus were enthusiastically pro-Roman. So Lucius Caesar and his cavalry made their way out of one of the unguarded gates and swept down on the flanks and rear of the Italian attackers. The result was the first substantial Italian defeat of the war.

With communication to Brundisium cut off, access to the eastern empire had suddenly become much more difficult. Nor were things going well in the rest of eastern Italy. Pompeius Strabo had been given the job of bringing Asculum to heel. This was an obvious choice, for Strabo was a major landowner in the more romanized part of Picenum to the north. He knew both the terrain and the people, and he had plenty to lose, for while the rebels held Asculum they had a springboard to attack his own lands in Picenum. In fact Asculum was at a nexus of road communications. From Asculum not only Picenum but also Umbria and Cisalpine Gaul were highly accessible to the rebels. Apart from Asculum’s strategic value, there were other reasons for wanting the town captured as soon as possible, namely the political and propaganda prize that the Romans would gain if they captured the town and avenged the massacre of Roman citizens there when the revolt had first flared up.

A slow approach was in any case Marius’ preferred form of combat; to delay battle, keep close to the enemy, wait for a mistake and then force an action on favourable ground. In the meantime, skirmishing and minor clashes would harden the nerves of the men and accustom them to the enemy and their tactics. With

the Marian method, the foe seemed familiar and less terrifying when the crunch came, and success was more likely. Rutilius was more of a traditionalist, and the traditional approach of a Roman general was to march his men to the battlefront, point them at the enemy army and thereafter encourage them to victory through the ensuing carnage. Besides tradition, there was another reason for the bull-at-a-gate strategy. Alba Fucensis remained under siege. Like Aesernia the citadel town had not been expecting a war in 91 BC, and had no reason to have laid in supplies for one. If this strategic location was not relieved in the near future then it would probably fall to the Marsi. Therefore Rutilius did not intend to be subtle about breaking the siege.

However, whether the Marsi suffered a defeat or merely a minor setback, in either case Scato had to withdraw. We know from another of those informative fragments of Dio that the Romans were the better-supplied of the two armies, and the loss of the Marsic camp and the rations stored within could not have helped Scato’s logistical situation. He withdrew, leaving the field to Marius, who was now temporarily in command of both his own men, that is the former survivors of Perpenna’s defeat, and the present survivors of Rutilius’ defeat. Perhaps because he felt that morale among his men was unsustainably low, or perhaps because he had after all not won the crushing victory attributed to him by Orosius, Marius now withdrew to Rome, taking with him for a proper funeral the dead whom he had retrieved from the battlefield.

To add to Roman worries, the fact that the rebellion had grown stronger rather than being promptly quashed had been noted with interest in Etruria and Umbria. These areas had seen no fighting, but the struggle for hearts and minds was intense, and the Romans had a sinking feeling that they were losing this battle too.

The Italians were not a barbarian people easily outmanoeuvred and out-fought by superior Roman army and logistics. Nor could the Roman army rely on the contempt the legionaries felt for ‘Graeculi’ (little Greeks) or decadent ‘orientals’. In foreign wars this feeling, however misplaced, had translated to a real advantage of morale on the battlefield. But the legionaries knew the Samnites and Marsi from fighting alongside

them, and knew there was nothing contemptible about their opponents. In terms of fighting ability the rebels actually seemed to have the edge. This is because war was essentially one of the rebels attempting to capture or destroy the Roman colonies on their lands. Therefore the rebels were essentially operating in their home territory as they laid siege to the colonies. To lift a siege the Romans had to venture on to land the rebels knew intimately. This partly explains why the attempts to relieve besieged cities were uniformly unsuccessful, and why, with two equally matched sides the Italians had the more victories to show for the year.

The willingness to compromise, which Livius Drusus had found so sadly lacking in 91, was suddenly there for Caesar to work with. It may have been at the point of a sword, but the Roman senate

and people had indeed finally got that point. The senate’s members were well informed enough to know that strategically they were in a poor position, and politically aware enough to know that Etruria was trembling on the brink. The common people might have been more reluctant to share their prized citizenship, but here Marius had done the senate an inadvertent favour. By displaying the corpses of the war dead from the battle of Tolenus in Rome, he had forced the Roman people to confront the grim reality of what their obstinacy was costing the city. There was little senatorial or popular resistance to Caesar’s final act as consul, which was to pass the Lex Julia, a law that gave Roman citizenship to any Italian with the Latin Right, and made eligible for the citizenship any other Italians who were not currently killing Romans to get it. In short the Roman senate and people conceded the very point on which the rebellion was based.

The Lex Julia applied specifically to communities. Each Italian city had to convene a meeting and formally pass a decree announcing that it was now Roman. This showed careful forethought. A city could not become Roman willy-nilly by default. The people had to stand up and explicitly declare themselves. And every time a city declared itself Roman, it put more pressure on neighbouring cities to do the same. In short, the Romans leveraged the desire for the citizenship in most cities against a minority of Etrurians who wanted to be shot of Rome altogether. Thus the Lex Julia had the different factions in the cities of Etruria and Umbria in competition against each other.

Any Italian, so long as he was domiciled in Italy and was on the electoral roll of an allied city – and no matter what side that city was currently on – could make a personal application to become a Roman by applying personally to the Praetor in Rome within the next sixty days. Or to put it another way, those Italians who wanted the citizenship that most of them were in rebellion to get could now obtain it by downing spears and reporting to Rome before the start of the next campaigning season. This legislation is generally seen as being aimed at community leaders and opinion-formers in the various Italian cities. However, the cynic might note that once an average peasant soldier had reported to Rome and become a Roman, he was now eligible for recruitment into

a Roman legion. The Lex Plautia Papia was not just designed to split communities into Roman and rebel factions, it was also a handy recruiting tool.

Throughout the Italian peninsula the flames of rebellion were dying down. While a goodly number of die-hard rebels remained under arms, it was unclear what they were fighting for. If it was for the Roman citizenship, the best way to obtain this was to stop fighting. If it was to destroy Rome, this put the remaining rebels in direct opposition to those who had been fighting to become Roman. This left the idea that the different peoples were fighting for the independence of their tribe, yet this was somewhat nullified by the fact that the tribes had formed a confederation, and made Corfinium their

capital, subsuming individual tribal identity into a larger whole in any case. So without a clear reason to keep going, a good many Italian rebels stopped fighting.

Once the Romans stopped fighting there was little need for the Marsi to continue doing so, and the war in central Italy was allowed to die of benign neglect. By the end of the year the Marsi were a part of the Roman polity. Asculum on the other hand had nailed its colours to the rebel mast, and in the city’s case no negotiation was possible. Pompeius Strabo took the town, and executed all its

leading citizens, presumably on the basis that Vidacilius had already done the same with any pro-Romans among them.

Peoples such as the Veneto received the Latin Right, which meant that their leading men could shortly expect to become Roman citizens, and the remainder had the right to trade with Roman citizens under the protection of Roman law. Even the surviving rebels in southern Picenum eventually became Roman citizens.

The Vestini and Marruncini ‘surrendered’ – that is they agreed to stop fighting in the expectation that the senate’s offer of citizenship would be extended to them in due course – and the Paeligni so took exception to Scato’s efforts to make them keep fighting that they arrested him. Scato would have been turned over to the Romans had his slave not slain him first.8 As quickly as it had rebelled, south-eastern Italy returned to its Roman allegiance. Brundisium was relieved as Metellus Pius now advanced from central Italy and quickly brought Apulia under Roman control, forcing Pompaedius Silo to flee to his native Samnite people. These people would at least keep fighting, partly out of tribal loyalty to their leader and partly out of visceral anti-Roman sentiment.