Cataclysm 90 BC: The Forgotten War that Almost Destroyed Rome

by Philip Matyszak

Aesernia was far from the only town which the Romans lost in the opening months of the war.

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

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.

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. The camp was saved and some 6,000 Italians were killed.

Less encouragingly, Caesar took a hard look at the forces arrayed against him at Acerrae and decided that he lacked the strength to oppose them. He withdrew, leaving Acerrae to stand siege by Mutilus and his Italians.

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. As it turned out, in bringing back the bodies Marius did Rome a great service, for it brought the reality of war home to the people of the city. At the time however, Marius received no thanks for doing so. The sight of the fallen consul and the bodies of his officers made a demoralizing sight.

But in Rome the damage had been done – the corpses of Rutilius and his men could not be un-seen, and this was to prove of vital importance in turning the population against the war and toward the previously unpalatable measures required for peace.

During the weeks that followed, Marius was accused of being battle-shy even by his own exceptionally low standards. Given the tattered morale of the men he commanded, not only was it commendable of Marius to avoid putting their fragile morale to the test immediately, it was quite an achievement just to keep that army intact in the field.

Overall, the rebels had as much reason to feel pleased with themselves as the Romans had to be worried. In the field the Italians had shown that they were more than a match for Rome’s supposedly invincible armies. The Italians had made territorial gains in southern Campania while bloodying Roman noses when they attempted to poke them into Marsic territory or around Asculum. One way or another, a number of Roman and Latin settlements had fallen into Italian hands while the Italians had not lost a single settlement of any significance.

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.

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.

If Etruria went, then Rome’s already over-stretched armies would struggle to hold Campania in the south where already manpower shortages had led to ex-slaves being recruited to man the defences of Capua and the coastal cities. With Umbria too in revolt, Rome would be cut off from the reinforcements that the ever-able Quintus Sertorius was supplying from Cisalpine Gaul. Already the Gallic Saluvii on the other side of the Alps had become dangerously restive. Should the Italian tide gain momentum by the end of 89 BC ‘Roman Italy’ might consist of northern Picenum and Latium – and may have ceased to exist altogether by 88.

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.

This marked the turning point of the war. Up to this point Rome had been losing and was in actual danger of extinction. In effect Rome saved itself by giving what the enemy was demanding, though the Romans were not prepared to actually give the citizenship to the enemy – yet. The fact that the Lex Julia specifically excluded communities in revolt shows that the legislation was particularly aimed at keeping Etruria and Umbria on the Roman side. And this it did, though it was a close-run thing.

As it was, Etruria chose to become Roman and Umbria did the same.

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. It is hard to agree with the statement that they ‘surrendered’, since it was actually the Romans who had done so. After all, the senate had done exactly what the Italians had pressed Livius Drusus to make it do – give Roman citizenship to any Italian who asked for it.

What remained of the war in 89 BC was essentially a huge mopping-up operation.

With Asculum fallen and the north now either pro-Roman or making itself actually Roman as fast as humanly possible, Strabo was able to turn his attention to the demoralized remnants of the rebellion further south.

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.

By now Marius was out of the war. Either he had withdrawn under the pretext of ill-health because he felt his efforts to date had been underappreciated, or because he was genuinely ill. It was certainly true that his recent efforts had been uninspired, and it may be that when his command lapsed at the end of 90 BC the government in Rome simply did not renew it. In any case, Marius was out of a job. In retirement he had plenty of time to watch his rival and ex-subordinate Lucius Sulla cover himself in glory. Sulla was now praetor and operating in the hills near Pompeii. When his opponent Cluentius pitched his camp almost on top of Sulla’s own, an infuriated Sulla immediately launched an attack upon it. This attack possessed more impetuosity than planning, for in this case Sulla was living up to his publicly stated dictum that he did his best work on the spur of the moment.9 He very nearly came to grief, but eventually prevailed thanks to some last-minute reinforcement by troops who returned from foraging.

Mutilus was well aware that Sulla had him in his sights, and had prepared forces blocking Sulla’s way. Except Sulla did not go that way. Eschewing the main roads he took his army by a circuitous route and arrived to find the enemy still awaiting his arrival from another direction. Mutilus’ men quickly buckled from the surprise Roman attack and those who were not cut down on the spot fled in disorder.

An estimated 300,000 Romans and Italians had perished in the fighting, and with those on both sides in the process of becoming the same nation, there were questions of land ownership, inheritance and treaty rights to laboriously sort through and decide.

Anyone wanting to vote had to do so in Rome, in person. It was one thing if a citizen felt strongly enough about an issue that he had to travel to Rome to make his voice heard, but it was completely another issue if a citizen could not travel to Rome and vote there because he was already serving his country elsewhere as a soldier. It was always galling for the army to find that it had voted an incompetent to command it, but at least the voters in the army had done that to themselves. Now the Romans in the army found that people in Rome (who did not have to do the fighting) had voted them a general whom they did not want and had thrown out the general that they did. A gap had opened between the Roman voter and the Roman soldier, effectively disenfranchising the latter. This ‘secret disease’ had been made all the more virulent by the recent war, as the legions now contained soldiers who had never even voted (because the censors had not yet got around to putting them on the voter’s roll). The soldiers gathered for the Asian campaign expressed their opinion of the Roman voters and of Sulpicius’ legislation by lynching the officers sent by Marius to take over. With that mutiny it became clear that Marius did not have his army after all. But Sulla had one, and he was bringing it to Rome.

It is improbable that either Sulla or his men saw what they were doing as a power-grab or a coup. If anything, they felt that the coup had been already accomplished. Sulpicius had taken control of the city by violence and the army was needed to restore legitimate government.

Yet this was no longer true. The senate had indeed been subject to the dictates of Marius and Sulpicius, but on the news that Sulla was marching on the city with six legions, senate and people came together in the face of the impending threat. Even all of Sulla’s own officers apart from one quaestor were so horrified by Sulla’s intentions that they left the army and fled to Rome. There, the senate sent two praetors to inform Sulla that his march on Rome was forbidden.

The army had indeed broken the power of the senate and stripped it of its authority, and the coming decades would prove this again and again.

At this point Sulla had few friends outside his army; a fact that he blithely pretended to ignore.

Having made the two new consuls swear to keep the peace, Sulla took himself and his army off to Greece. As far as he was concerned going to campaign against Mithridates was the whole point of the exercise, yet he can hardly have been unaware of the far-reaching significance of his actions.

Basically, Rome had been conquered. True, it had been conquered by a duly elected consul with a properly levied army, but that was hardly the point.

Now that the Roman electorate was no longer representative of the Roman army, what Sulla’s coup had done (and despite everything, it was indeed a coup) was to assert the army’s primacy over the Roman voter in decision making. Once this primacy had been asserted, there was no going back, and to a very real extent, the Roman Republic after 88 BC was a sham. In reality, Rome was a military dictatorship that had just not realized it yet.

Marius had escaped to Africa. There had been a close shave at Minturnae, where Marius had been captured, but no one was prepared to kill Rome’s former hero. Not sure what else to do with him, the Minturnians put Marius on a ship and (after another near-death experience in Sicily), Marius had ended up skulking near Carthage when news reached him of developments in Italy. When he heard that Cinna had found an army and was marching on Rome, Marius hastened to join in. It is questionable to what extent he was still sane.

Rome was besieged, but capably defended by Octavius and Pompeius Strabo. We know few details of the actual siege, but it is clear the defenders of the city were greatly outnumbered.

For the second time in two years, Rome had fallen to a Roman army. Yet the two conquests were not the same. Sulla maintained to the end that he was a consul restoring order in the city after an outbreak of mob rule. Whatever his inclinations, apart from punishing those he considered guilty of inciting that mob rule, he had refrained from vengeance. Vengeance, on the other hand was what Marius was all about. Guilt or innocence had little to do with it. His intention was not to restore order, but to make sure that those whom he considered as having betrayed him now paid for it with their lives.

Worn out by the exertions and stress of the previous year, Marius died within the first month of his latest consulship. He had managed to demonstrate the point that he had indeed been totally unfit for the command of the Mithridatic War which had sparked off this latest crisis, but by then few of Sulla’s supporters were alive in Rome to tell Cinna ‘I told you so’. Exactly how many perished in this bout of bloodletting is unknown, for the historians of the time are more concerned with rhetorical expressions of outrage than with supplying an exact body-count. It is, however, very clear that the occupation of the city by the army of Marius and Cinna was an altogether grimmer business than the occupation by Sulla had been. Within months Rome had gone from a city ruled by law and constitution to a city under mob rule, followed by army occupation under Sulla, followed by siege and conquest by Marius and Cinna and a subsequent reign of terror. Not just the people of the city, but Romans across the empire must have asked themselves how this could have come about.

Thus, in diplomatic language Sulla was invited to lay down his arms and throw himself at the mercy of the senate. The two sides were far apart, but at least they were talking. Optimists must have hoped that a further round of bloodshed could be averted.

Sulla’s next reply went a long way towards meeting the senate’s implicit demand. All he claimed to want was to be restored to Rome, along with those who had fled to exile with him. The rest he would leave to the senate.

Nevertheless, the government was at odds with itself; there was unrest in the provinces, private armies springing up and a consul had been murdered by his own men. No matter that the root cause of most of this disruption was Sulla himself. That Rome was in a parlous state was all the justification that Sulla needed to take matters into his own hands. As he had done in 88 BC in his earlier march on Rome, now in the spring of 83 BC Sulla set out for Italy publicly announcing his intention of ‘restoring order’.

Sulla crossed to Campania where matters came to the crunch, for the consul Norbanus moved to block the progress of Sulla’s army with one of his own. Until now, Sulla had been an obstreperous ex-consul who had taken some legally dubious actions. Anyway, the killing of Octavius and the persecution of Sulla’s friends, not to mention the excesses of Marius before his death, all meant that the government could hardly claim the moral, legal or constitutional high ground. Ideally, it would be best if the events of the past decade could be, if not forgotten, at least left in disreputable obscurity.

So the next round of Rome’s civil wars formally resumed somewhere around Canusium, or possibly at the crossing of the River Volturnus where Norbanus took the chance of crushing the Sullan threat for once and for all. He quickly discovered that a well-generalled veteran army coming off a hard campaign can punch well above its weight.

Despite its superior numbers the government army was soundly defeated, and the remnants fled to Capua, which had recently been made a Roman colony in an effort by the government to secure the city’s loyalty.

Sulla and his experienced men immediately seized the moment and fell upon the government army without breaking stride for the usual pre-battle preliminaries. The fight was short and nasty, with 7,000 men killed on the government side for few casualties among their veteran opponents. Norbanus had suffered his second defeat of the war, and he now retreated into Capua itself, and all that prevented Sulla from advancing on Rome was the early arrival of what was to prove an unusually severe winter.

When Pompey finally joined Sulla, the latter ordered his army’s standards to be lowered. This was the customary salute of a Roman commander to a fellow general, even though no one had promoted Pompey to his command but Pompey himself.

Thus, by the time winter brought campaigning to an end in 83 BC Sulla now controlled Liguria, Sardinia and isolated areas of northern Italy, and also had Picenum, Apulia and most of Campania – with the exception of Capua where Norbanus remained stubbornly behind the walls rejecting every overture of peace. The reaction of the Italians to Sulla’s arrival would be crucial to success or failure in 82 BC, so Sulla spent much of the winter in diplomatic overtures to Rome’s newest citizens.

Pompey and Crassus were working together at this point (as they would later do when, together with Julius Caesar, they dominated Rome as the so called ‘first triumvirate’).

So the current civil war and the last remnants of the Italian war now combined into a final convulsion, which was to determine the fate of Rome.

By hitting Rome, Telesinus was offering his men a chance to get their retaliation in first. However, there was also a cool, rational aspect to his planning – with the Samnites in their present mood, there was no way that Sulla could hold station before Praeneste and let the enemy have their way with the city he claimed to represent. Tactically, he should remain where he was, keeping the enemy armies apart and maintaining the siege of Praeneste. Politically, Telesinus had forced his hand. Sulla was compelled to abandon his carefully dug earthworks and make a forced march to defend Rome.

Sulla’s commanders were concerned by the state of the troops after their rapid overnight march as they attempted to catch up with the Samnites. The officers pointed out that they were not up against the generally demoralized and disorganized soldiers of Carbo or Marius, but Samnites and Lucanians – highly motivated, experienced and warlike opponents. They urged Sulla to wait, at least overnight. But Sulla had faith in Fortuna, and only allowed his men a few hours to rest and take a meal. Then he organized his battle lines, and at four o’clock that November afternoon, with the sun already sinking, the final battle of the Italian and civil war was begun.

Sulla’s legionaries were arguably the best soldiers in the world at that time, but they had marched all night, and were outnumbered by an enemy almost as good as they were.

It was afterwards estimated that some 50,000 men lost their lives in that one battle.17 Some time before dawn Telesinus was mortally wounded, and a Roman surge captured the Samnite camp. It became clear that the Romans were going to emerge with a hard-won victory, and the Samnite force divided itself into those slain, those fled and those taken prisoner – the latter, by varying accounts between 6,000 and 8,000 in number.

Essentially this battle ended the wars, both civil and Italian. Sulla’s victory broke the Samnites and Lucanians – the last bastion of Italian resistance – and demoralized the army of Carrinas and Censorinus. On news of the defeat of their cause, both Marian generals attempted to emulate the example of Carbo and Norbanus and flee abroad, but they had left it too late. They were quickly captured and brought to Sulla.