Cataclysm 90 BC: The Forgotten War that Almost Destroyed Rome

by Philip Matyszak

Instead of the customary office of proconsul, he would revive the ancient office of dictator, unused for the past 120 years. Then as dictators were appointed to do, he would set Rome to rights. And no one would object, because anyone likely to object would be dead.

Sulla continued to talk calmly as the shouts coming from outside the senate house changed to screams as Sulla’s men methodically slaughtered every prisoner. As a signal of intent, nothing could be clearer. Constitutional government had not returned yet to Rome – instead the Romans had exchanged the haphazard Marian killings for the more cold-blooded, thorough and precise purge of Sulla.

Sulla had a long memory. He recalled the legislative and judicial antics of senators and equestrians leading up to the catastrophe of 91 BC. Those equestrians who had terrorized the senate with their dominance of the law courts now experienced the terror of a state with no law courts whatsoever. Anyone who had illegally put to death a supporter of Sulla now experienced the fear of death for himself at first hand. Furthermore, while Sulla seemed purely focused on the twin goals of purging the state and exacting personal revenge, the motives of others were not so pure.

Marius was dead, and his son with him. This left a nephew, Marius Gratidianus who had been among the most bloodthirsty Marians during their time of triumph. He suffered a grisly death, and his corpse was mutilated again thereafter. Lacking Marius himself to kill, Sulla tried to kill his memory. The ashes were disinterred and scattered into the river Anio, and monuments and statues commemorating Marius up and down the country were overthrown and defaced. Overall, it has been estimated that some 5,000 people perished in the proscriptions, though this number does not include those killed collectively as will be seen in the fate of Praeneste and Norba. Furthermore, the general chaos lent itself to extra-curricular killings as wartime grudges were settled and private land grabs took place.

Crassus, the hero of the Colline Gate, did much to besmirch his reputation at this time.

The city of Volterrae in Etruria took note also, and hung on stubbornly until 80 BC until resistance was crushed personally by Sulla in his final military command.

When asked the reason for his terrible anger, Sulla explained that he had learned from experience that no Roman would ever be safe so long as there were Samnites to deal with. So what were once towns have become villages, and some have vanished altogether.

Another who disobeyed Sulla was the young Julius Caesar. He stubbornly remained married to Cornelia, the daughter of the Marian leader Cinna, despite having had strict orders to divorce himself from her. Instead Caesar went on the run. He, like most of those on the wanted list, was quickly captured and only the fact that a number of Sulla’s allies were also Caesar’s relatives saved the young man from immediate execution. (The couple remained married for another decade until Cornelia’s untimely death.)

Sulla had taken his revenge, and in the process had systematically removed anyone who might stand in the path of his intended reforms.

With Italy cowed and most of the rest of the empire again under Roman control, it was now time set about repairing the damaged country and constitution. Here Sulla seemed determined that the disasters of the past decade would never be repeated.

Revoking that citizenship was perhaps the only thing that Sulla could do that would break the fierce loyalty his ex-soldiers felt for him, so Sulla did not even try. Pragmatically, he accepted that most of Italy south of the Alps was either Roman or would soon become so.

Sulla set about not only bringing the senate up to its proper number, but also proposed the addition of three hundred new senators. This was originally the brainchild of Livius Drusus who had intended to bring the equestrian class more into the ranks of government. At the time the senate had rejected that idea with the same vehemence that it had rejected the idea of citizenship for the Italians. Now the measure was accepted with hardly a murmur.

The odd thing is that Sulla, who used his legions to ride roughshod over the government in Rome, appears not to have drawn the lesson taught by his own actions.

Declarations of war against an ally and the illegal detention of prisoners were also covered, as was the crime of tampering with the loyalty of the army. Sulla did not want anyone repeating his own actions.

Towards the end of 81 BC Sulla began to disengage from autocracy. As a transition he resigned his dictatorship and immediately stood for election as consul for the following year. Sulla campaigned as might any other candidate, greeting potential voters in the forum and cheerfully arguing his case with anyone who called him to account.

Sulla was duly elected with Metellus Pius as his colleague. Then, once his year in office was complete, Sulla retired from public life.

The flaws in the Roman constitution, which had led to an overweening and self-interested senate, had been corrected by making that body more inclusive and more answerable to the public. The threat posed by Mithridates had been, if not quashed, at least forced into dormancy.

The future seemed bright – but it wasn’t.

Finally, after suffering a violent internal haemorrhage, Sulla died in 78 BC. His illness and death are an appropriate metaphor for the Republic he left behind. That Republic was to last another twenty-nine years, but as with Sulla in 80 BC, despite the outward appearance of health, insidious internal rot had already passed the point of no return.

Sulla’s reforms had put the state back on an even keel, but he had righted a ship that was already sinking.

There were two reasons for the failure of the Roman Republic even after Sulla’s attempts to mend its ills. One was psychological and the other was systemic.

The systemic problem with the republic was that it no longer represented its citizens. When every male Roman citizen was also a practising Roman voter, the needs of the people found a voice in the legislature. Likewise when almost every Roman soldier was also a practising Roman voter, the will of the people and the will of the army were pretty much the same thing. However, as the Roman state expanded, an increasing number of ‘Romans’ lived their lives without even seeing the city of which they were technically citizens. And since all voting by Romans had to be done personally in Rome, this meant that an ever-increasing number of citizens were effectively disenfranchised. This problem resulted in very literal class warfare.

Thus we see one aspect of the systemic problem in Italy – the disenfranchisement and subsequent alienation of the poor. The second aspect of this disenfranchisement was that though they had almost completely lost their representation in formal politics, this certainly did not mean that the poor lost their ability to influence events. If the dominiatio Sullae had taught anything, it was that the sword was mightier than the constitution, and the men wielding those swords were the very men who were no longer represented in the formal political process – the common people of Italy.

A government that had been blatantly used as the tool of a self-interested aristocracy in the years up to 91 BC was hardly going to inspire faith in the system.

In fact the absence of a compelling ideology on either side of the Marian/Sullan conflict was one of the distinguishing features of the war.

Sulla’s men had a clear idea of what they were fighting for – a general they believed in, and the chance of a decent post-campaign settlement for themselves. Those in the ranks of the army opposing Sulla lacked a compelling reason why they should be there.

Men deserted because they had nothing to fight for. The exception was the Samnites and

Lucanians. They saw clearly that they were fighting for their freedom, their homeland and their very lives. And so they fought, fought well and came very close to winning. If all Italy had been similarly motivated, Sulla would not have made it past Brundisium.

The basic fact was that outside the Roman senate and equestrian class there was precious little liberty going about. Writers on the early empire were wont to lament the ‘loss’ of Republican freedoms. Yet the senate and equestrians did not share that freedom with their fellow Romans, nor with the Italians and certainly not with the provincials. Almost without exception every part of Italy was better off under the rule of the Caesars than it was in the last century of the Republic.

Consequently the damage wrought by this war had both an apparent side and an insidious one. Firstly, it introduced the idea of resolving internal political questions by military force.

By the time that Sulla returned, the use of force to compel political submission was so established that Sulla fought almost a standard campaign of conquest not much different from that by which he had extracted Greece from the clutches of Mithridates.

As military force became a recognized means of gaining political power, constitutional conventions suffered accordingly.

What we see in the last generation of the Roman Republic – cynical abuse of governmental and religious institutions, a readiness to resort to violence and a grim determination to win at all costs – are features that were always present in the Roman character but magnified out of all proportion by the traumas of 91–81 BC.

That calamitous decade destroyed the faith of the people of Italy not just in the senate and Roman government (as there was little faith there to begin with), but in negotiation and the political process as a whole.

That disastrous time left the post-Sullan generation of aristocrats with a grimmer and more cynical outlook, and they were much readier to believe that change, or the prevention of change, could only be achieved by naked force – within or without the constitution. This is why in 49 BC the senate was prepared to violate the constitution and over-ride a tribunican veto in order to bring down Caesar, and why Caesar was prepared to ignore the constitution and march on Rome allegedly in defence of tribune’s rights. That sequence of events marked not just the final collapse of the Roman Republic, but proof that the Republic had been unsalvageable for decades. The Republic did not collapse because Caesar crossed the Rubicon. It collapsed because nobody believed in it any more.