The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

by Mike Duncan

Though he had long denied it, Marius was an old man in bad health. He had recently undergone an operation for varicose veins, and just a few weeks after taking office, he contracted pneumonia. Before anyone realized how serious his condition was, Gaius Marius died. Just seventeen days after inaugurating his seventh consulship, with maps of Greece spread out on his desk and plans for a final showdown with Sulla in the works, Gaius Marius died one of the all-time anticlimactic deaths in history.

Gaius Marius was a pivotal figure in Roman history. When he first embarked on his public career he was merely a novus homo Italian. But through steady persistence, he had climbed his way up the cursus honorum. As he climbed, he helped unlock the populare forces that challenged senatorial supremacy. He was connected to publicani merchants, a friend of the Italians, and patron to legions of poor veteran soldiers. He had fought and won wars against Jugurtha and the Cimbri, and at the peak of his power was hailed as the Third Founder of Rome. His spectacular career set an example for ambitious men of future generations, though this example was not uniformly positive. At the end of his life Marius came to embody the dark side of relentless ambition: “It can therefore be said that as much as he saved the state as a soldier, so much he damaged it as a citizen, first by his tricks, later by his revolutionary actions.”

But the most important pillar was the Italians, to whom Cinna owed his power. The army that captured Rome was mostly Italian, and led by a man who promised them full political equality. In a very real sense, Cinna’s regime represented the triumph of the Italians in the Social War.

Despite the losses at Chaeronea, Mithridates’s Black Sea empire still had manpower left to draw on. Sulla was forced back on campaign when Archelaus sailed back over to Greece at the head of another army 120,000 strong. The two armies met at Orchomenus, and this time Sulla’s troops wavered in the early stages of the fight. But Sulla confronted a cohort in retreat and yelled, “For me, O Romans, an honorable death here; but you, when men ask you where you betrayed your commander, remember to tell them, at Orchomenus.” Shamed into action, the men turned and fought. The Pontic army was once again smashed. Even Mithridates did not have the resources to come back with a third army of 120,000 men. The Battle of Orchomenus marked the end of the war in Greece.

With Fimbria’s army on the rampage and almost all his troops now lost in Greece, Mithridates was forced to flee Pergamum for Pitane, and even then Fimbria nearly captured him. At that moment, the long-lost Lucullus finally came sailing into the Aegean at the head of a fleet. Lucullus could have easily blockaded the harbor at Pitane and prevented Mithridates from escaping by sea, but ever the loyal legate, Lucullus was not about to let any enemy of Sulla get credit for capturing Mithridates. So Lucullus kept sailing and Mithridates got away.

After completing his service in the legions under the command of Pompey Strabo, young Marcus Tullius Cicero settled in Rome to study rhetoric and oratory during the years of Cinna’s government.

Though there is a great deal of ambiguity in the sources, it is almost certain Cinna fulfilled his promise to disperse the Italians among the thirty-one rural tribes. Though it would not be until after the Civil War that the Italians were fully counted, the years of the Cinnan regime mark the permanent entrance of the Italians onto the citizen rolls.

Pretending that he had not been outlawed, Sulla sent back to Rome a huge official accounting of his campaign, diplomacy, and ledgers. This put the Senate in an awkward position. They sent an embassy to meet with Sulla and sound out his intentions. While they waited, Cinna and Carbo won another controlled election for the consulship of 84 and mobilized the Italians for war.59 Sulla’s response to the senatorial envoys was furious but exact. Sulla denounced the foul treatment he had received from his enemies. He recounted his victories. Listed his credentials. He had just won back Asia! And his thanks? To be declared an outlawed. To have his property seized and burned. His wife and children forced in exile. But with a magnanimous heart Sulla offered simple terms: the Senate and People of Rome must restore his dignity and his property. That was all. He did also say that when he returned he might not spare his enemies—but if the Senate cared to spare them, he would respect their decree.

When Cinna arrived, he called for a general meeting to address the troops. But when he entered the throng of assembled soldiers, one man refused to give way and was struck by one of Cinna’s guards. The man fought back, so Cinna ordered him arrested. This order only inflamed the rest of the men. They pelted Cinna with furious insults and then pelted him with stones. Dodging this sudden onslaught, Cinna tried to extract himself from the mob, but he was grabbed by an angry centurion. The apprehended consul allegedly offered the man a ring to let him go, but the centurion growled, “I am not come to seal a surety, but to punish a lawless and wicked tyrant.” Without further debate the centurion pulled out his sword and cut Cinna down where he stood. Having only just appeared from historical thin air three years earlier, Cinna vanished as abruptly as he arrived.64

While on the public stage, Cinna was the dominant leader of a tense coalition that ruled Rome for three years. And while Cinna obviously had a dismissive attitude toward republican norms, so did everyone else. Despite repeated attacks from men like Cicero who called him a “monster of cruelty,” Cinna was no more a lawless and wicked tyrant than any of the other men who played the deadly new game of violent politics. Cinna was certainly not an unimaginative dictator who used brutality only to secure petty whims and pleasures. The regime Cinna led tried to address the economic devastation of Italy, begin the process of fully integrating the Italians, and lay the groundwork for a return to peace.

Cinna’s vacant chair was never filled.2 Now sole consul, Carbo spent all of 84 BC raising an army. Despite the mutiny in Ancona, it was not hard to raise soldiers. Under Cinna’s guidance the Senate already passed a decree recognizing both citizenship and voting equality for the Italians. Recruiters made the obvious case that when Sulla came back all these advances would be canceled. Even if they cared little for the dynamics of high Roman politics, every Italian could agree that civitas and suffragium were worth fighting for. As long as Sulla remained hostile to the idea of Italian equality, he could expect endless waves of resistance upon his return to the peninsula.

also on board with the growing anti-Sullan coalition were the plebs urbana of Rome. The plebs urbana had been staunchly opposed to Italian citizenship and were thus unhappy additions to the Cinnan fold. But they did not have much of a choice. If Sulla returned to Rome, he was not likely to be as benevolent as he was after the first march. The murder of his friends and destruction of his property guaranteed that there would be a vicious punitive response. Tales of the sack of Athens had already filtered back to Italy. Fearing the same treatment, the plebs urbana lined up behind Carbo as he orchestrated a pan-Italian defense.

A wild card in all of this was Gnaeus Pompeius, the twenty-one-year-old son of the late Pompey Strabo. The man known to history as Pompey the Great was still too young to hold a magistracy, but had become the head of the Pompeius household when his father died over the winter of 87–86. This assumption of authority gave Pompey control over the impressive client network his father had built up in northern Italy. Far more popular than his father, Pompey consolidated personal control over the family network thanks to his ambitious charisma. Cicero says Pompey was “a man who was born to excel in every thing, would have acquired a more distinguished reputation for his eloquence, if he had not been diverted from the pursuit of it by the more dazzling charms of military fame.” Though he had barely emerged into adulthood, Pompey already commanded attention—and securing his loyalty would be a key objective of both sides in the coming civil war.6

Carbo’s path from consul of Rome to proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul blazed a trail that would be followed by both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.

Sulla finally crossed the Adriatic and landed in Italy in the spring of 83. Arriving in the port of Brundisium, he got his first omen that things might work out. In his talks with the Senate, Sulla hinted that when he returned, he would accept both Italian civitas and suffragium without further argument. When he arrived in Brundisium, he followed through and declared the Italians had nothing to fear. He was as committed to their new place in the Republic as his enemies. The inhabitants of Brundisium were thrilled by this news, and any rising opposition to his arrival evaporated.

Sulla’s arrival in Brundisium also marks the end of the long Social War between Romans and Italians. The question of Italian citizenship had been the third rail of Roman politics for fifty years.

But where Pius was a political weight almost as great as Sulla, Sulla also accepted the allegiance of two young men on the rise. Like Metellus Pius, neither were strictly partisans of Sulla, but circumstances conspired to convince both to join. In time, both of these young men would become central figures in the final collapse of the Republic: Pompey the Great and Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Still in his early twenties, Pompey was a man operating well above his station. He had never held a magistracy and currently held no official position in the army—but his family’s extensive client network made him a powerful force in Italy.

During the years of Sulla’s absence, the Cinnans attempted to secure an alliance with young Pompey, but much to their horror, Pompey raised a personal army and led them to rendezvous not with Asiaticus and Norbanus, but with Sulla. Pompey was brash and cocky, but, eager to cement Pompey’s loyalty, Sulla indulged the boy like he was already a great man, going so far as to stand when Pompey entered a room. The defection of Pompey to the Sullans was a blow to Carbo and the other old Cinnans: not only were t...

Fighting as tenaciously as they had against the armies of Mithridates, Sulla’s legions broke Norbanus’s army and sent it back to the safety of Capua. Sulla later said it was after the Battle of Tifata that he knew he was going to win the war—his men would follow him anywhere.

Ostensibly the talks were supposed to settle the political dispute and avoid open war. But Sulla’s negotiators entered talks “not because they hoped or desired to come to an agreement, but because they expected to create dissensions in Asiaticus’s army, which was in a state of dejection.” While he stalled in the negotiating tent, Sulla sent his men to mingle with the soldiers in Asiaticus’s camp to spread the word that Sulla was great, his promises would be kept, that this was really only about settling business with a few personal enemies. Sulla was the enemy of neither Rome nor Italy. Sulla’s troops also recalled that Norbanus’s army had just been trounced. Not without cause, Asiaticus’s men fell under the seductive influence of Sulla’s veterans.

When Sulla’s army marched on Asiaticus’s position, Asiaticus’s men dutifully suited up to meet them. But as the two sides lined up on the plains, Sulla gave the signal and Asiaticus’s troops crossed over to the welcome embrace of their new commander. Unable to do anything about this mass defection, Asiaticus was found in his command tent and taken prisoner.

Sertorius decided that Italy was likely lost—and if the cause was to survive, a prudent withdrawal was in order. Having been elected praetor for the year and given Spain as his province, Sertorius abandoned Italy and made his way overland toward Spain to raise new armies. After Sulla won the Civil War and liquidated all his enemies in Italy, Sertorius’s Spanish legions would be the only force left in the world opposing him. Sertorius would emerge as principal leader of the opposition to the coming Sullan regime.

With Norbanus and Asiaticus having proven themselves unequal to the task of defeating Sulla, Carbo returned to Rome for the consular elections for 82. The Assembly returned Carbo to his third consulship and for a colleague elected Marius’s son, Gaius Marius the Younger. Still in his late twenties, Marius the Younger had never served a magistracy and was not eligible to stand for the consulship. But Carbo engineered the young man’s election because, as a matter of family honor and personal predilection, Marius the Younger was a relentless—even cruel—enemy of Sulla. Besides, he was not being elected for any special military leadership or political skill. Even by Carbo’s own admission, Marius was elected because the name Marius still meant something.

As Plutarch says, “Sulla had used his good fortune moderately, at first, and like a statesman, and had led men to expect in him a leader who was attached to the aristocracy, and at the same time helpful to the common people.” But the next time Sulla came to Rome—when the war was finished and there was no one left to challenge him—it would be quite a different story: “His conduct fixed a stigma upon offices of great power, which were thought to work a change in men’s previous characters, and render them capricious, vain, and cruel.”

Carbo’s legions in the north still numbered as many as forty thousand men, but with a string of failures mounting, one of Carbo’s lieutenants opened secret communications with Sulla. The lieutenant secured a promise of leniency if he could “accomplish anything important.” To accomplish this “anything important,” the lieutenant invited a group of Carbo’s officers to dinner—including the ex-consul Norbanus. Suspecting treachery, Norbanus himself stayed away, but the others accepted the invitation. When they arrived they were all arrested and executed. The traitorous lieutenant then fled to Sulla’s camp while Norbanus himself despaired of victory and boarded a ship that sailed for the Greek city of Rhodes.

After discovering the enemy had decamped for Rome the night before, he spent the morning racing to catch up. At about noon, the first of his men arrived at Rome, and once they were all assembled, the battle trumpets sounded. Despite all his success over the past eighteen months, Sulla spent the rest of the day convinced that all was lost. He personally commanded the left wing of his army, which buckled under the weight of the Samnites. In the confusion of battle, Sulla believed Fortuna had finally abandoned him. Scattered messengers even raced back to Praeneste to tell the men there to break off the siege and reinforce Sulla’s battered legions. But what Sulla did not know was that on the other side of the battle, Crassus had smashed the enemy and captured their camps. It was not until hours later that Sulla realized he had actually won the battle—and only then after Crassus sent Sulla a request for more food to feed his victorious troops. When all the dust cleared, the Battle of the Colline Gate was in fact not just a victory, but an utter route: fifty thousand enemies killed and eight thousand taken prisoner.

But the next day, the people of Rome awoke to a frightening revision. Overnight Sulla posted in the Forum a new list with 220 additional names. Men who had breathed a sigh of relief the day before now faced death. The following morning another new list went up. It now contained more than five hundred names. Now everyone lived in fear that at any moment they would be proscribed. A man who had been spared from the original lists arrived in the Forum one day to discover his name was now posted.

men already on the list might use friends influential with Sulla to get their names off the list, the most famous case of this sort being nineteen-year-old Gaius Julius Caesar—the Gaius Julius Caesar. In addition to the crime of being Marius’s nephew, Caesar had also married Cinna’s daughter. Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce his wife, but Caesar refused. So Caesar’s name went on the proscription list and he was forced into hiding. But the young man had friends deep in Sulla’s inner circle, and after a few weeks they secured him a pardon. Sulla did not grant the pardon without reservation, however, and said, “Have your way and take him; only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.”

To bridge the constitutional gap now that both sitting consuls were dead, the Senate revived the ancient office of interrex. The Republic had occasionally used an interrex to oversee consular elections if the consuls were dead or so indisposed that they could not return to Rome. Since this was obviously the case, the interrex convened the Assembly and presented a bill to make Sulla dictator legibus faciendis et reipublicae constitienae: “Dictator for the making of laws and settling of the constitution.” The Assembly passed the bill unanimously.

But there was a large and unprecedented omission from the law naming him dictator: an expiration date. Old Roman dictators never served terms longer than six months, a limit literally written into the law that created their dictatorship. But Sulla conveniently left that part out. After hinting to the Senate that six months might not be enough to restore the Republic, Sulla implied his dictatorship was to be held in perpetuity. With no legal obligation to ever set his vast array of powers aside, Lucius Cornelius Sulla was now Dictator for Life.

SULLA HAD ALREADY revealed much of what he planned for the Republic after his first march on Rome. Before leaving to take command of the Mithridatic War, he carried laws to expand the power of the Senate, including moving all voting to the less democratic Centuriate Assembly, expanding the rolls of the Senate, and requiring the Senate’s consent before a bill could be presented to the Assembly. After Cinna took over Rome these reforms were canceled, but now they returned as a part of Sulla’s final constitutional settlement. To his original kernel of reforms, the dictator Sulla introduced a package of new laws to place the Senate back at the center of the Republic.

With the tribunate so often used to lob antisenatorial bombs, Sulla severely curtailed their power. Originally designed to protect the individual rights of plebeians, the office had morphed into a dangerous instrument of demagogues and tyrants. So in addition to requiring a tribune to seek permission from the Senate before introducing a bill, Sulla also abolished the all-purpose, all-powerful veto. A tribune could now only levy a veto in matters pertaining to individual requests for clemency. But more important than these procedural restrictions, Sulla decreed that men elected tribune were barred from all other magistracies. This prohibition ensured that ambitious young leaders would never seek the office again.

The tribunes contained, Sulla then formalized the rest of the republican list of magistracies. Until now, rules of progression up the cursus honorum from quaestor to consul had always been vague and unspoken. Sulla formalized the path. He also expanded the ranks of offices, doubling the number of quaestors to twenty and adding two more praetors. Rome was long overdue to add more official administrative posts to match their expanded empire. Sulla also decreed that two years had to elapse in between offices no matter what, and ten years had to pass before a man could run for the same office. There would not be repeat consulships in Sulla’s republic.

Sulla did not want repeated governorships either. With eight praetors and two consuls now serving annually, there would be no need to keep men in provinces for more than a year or two. But this was not about improving provincial administration. Provincial assignments gave men access to wealth, connections, and power. Keeping a high rate of turnover in the provinces did nothing to help Roman provincials, but it helped maintain the balance of power back in the Senate. It went without saying that all provincial assignments would be also controlled by the Senate. The Assembly would have nothing to do with it.

To match the expanded cursus honorum, Sulla also doubled the rolls of the Senate from thr...

With an expanded Senate now filling up, Sulla could also restore control of the courts. The fight that had been ongoing back to the days of the Gracchi would now be settled once and for all. The jury pool for permanent courts would be the Senate. The decree enlarging the Senate was partly meant to give the Senate sufficient manpower to dispense justice in the array of permanent courts Sulla now established.26

Tons of Italian land already lay vacant thanks to the upheavals of the past few years, and Sulla also doled out heavy punishment to regions that had opposed him. Etruria, Umbria, and Samnium—deep wells of anti-Sullan resistance—were targeted for mass seizure of property and redistribution to Sulla’s own veterans.

Sulla’s run of reforms was designed to roll the Republic back to its roots as a senatorial aristocracy. Almost all authority now emanated from the Senate. The tribunes were stripped of their power, the autonomy of the Assembly curtailed. Equestrians and publicani returned to a state of political and economic subservience.

DESPITE HIS DICTATORIAL power being held in perpetuity, Sulla never intended to stay in the Dictatorship indefinitely. He considered himself a unique and special lawgiver, but he was at heart a republican, not a king.

Sulla began the process of shedding power about a year after he assumed office. In mid-81, he announced that he would be a candidate for consul alongside Metellus Pius.

When the Assembly returned Sulla as consul for 79, he declined to serve. He accepted an almost honorary proconsulship in Cisalpine Gaul but never visited the province. Instead, he moved down to a country villa in Campania. There he lived at the center of a country court that signaled a freewheeling embrace of his old carefree ways. He hosted his old friends in the theater community, intellectuals from across the Mediterranean, and the political elite from across the known world. Sulla never stopped paying close attention to Roman politics—and Roman politics never stopped paying attention to Sulla—but the Sullan era was truly over.

Sulla’s final plan to control events was a masterful success, as later historians relied heavily on the memoir as a primary source. Our own understanding of Sulla some two thousand years later is still very often his version of events.

But while conducting a piece of public business in 78, Sulla was suddenly stricken. A local magistrate had been caught embezzling money from the city treasury, and while Sulla yelled at the thief, something ruptured inside his body and he spurted blood out of his mouth. Almost certainly caused by liver failure or a huge ulcer, Sulla collapsed in a heap of blood and bile and was carried back home, where he spent “a night of wretchedness.” By morning, Lucius Cornelius Sulla was dead.

When word of the dictator’s death reached Rome, a debate erupted over how to respond. Some believed that it was already time to mark his career infamous and deny funeral rights. Sulla had murdered his fellow citizens and made himself tyrant. But Pompey stepped forward and retorted that he believed that a great man like Sulla deserved an elaborate public funeral, and he couldn’t believe it was even a question. The elaborate funeral was duly staged. But the debate over Sulla’s legacy was only beginning. In later years, what one thought of Sulla spoke volumes about one’s character.

THE SULLAN CONSTITUTION did not survive. In the first years of the new regime, the senior Sullan leaders who took over Rome—Metellus Pius, Pompey, and Crassus chief among them—scrupulously followed Sulla’s constitution. But as the memory of Sulla faded and new political rivalries emerged, these leaders abandoned the Sullan decrees whenever expedient. In the end, it turned out Sulla’s “final” settlement was just another milestone on the Republic’s road to ruin.

One of the reasons Sulla’s constitution fared so poorly was that those who supported it did so mildly, and those who hated it did so passionately.

No one was more to blame for the failure of the Sullan constitution than Sulla himself. The facts of Sulla’s career spoke louder than his constitutional musings. As a young man he had flouted traditional rules of loyalty and deference to spread his own fame. When insulted, he marched legions on Rome. While abroad, he ran his own military campaigns and conducted his own diplomacy. When challenged back in Rome, he launched a civil war, declared himself dictator, killed his enemies, and then retired to get drunk in splendid luxury. The biography of Sulla drowned out the constitution of Sulla, and the men who followed him paid attention to what could be done rather than what should be done.

In the final analysis, Sulla’s attempt to restore the Republic was doomed because he misdiagnosed the problem. In Sulla’s estimation the political upheavals that wracked Rome from the time of his birth in 138 until his death in 78 were the result of the Senate losing their dominant position. But what he did not realize is that the senatorial domination he had grown up with was a recent development. In fact, that domination was a leading cause of the problem, not a solution. Sulla thought he was resetting the constitutional balance to its natural state. Instead he was just winding back the clock on a ticking time bomb.

As would be predicted by Polybius’s constitutional theory, the restored domination of the senatorial oligarchy provoked populare demagogues, leading to an even more ferocious series of civil wars in the 40s and 30s. But Polybian theory did not hold for long. The fall of the senatorial oligarchy was precipitated by rhetorical populists, but their aim was never democracy, nor did democracy follow. Instead, weary of a generation of civil war, the Romans moved directly to the stable hand of an enlightened monarch. Unlike Sulla, however, when Augustus ascended to sole power he did not retire. So in the end, Sulla’s constitution did not lead to the permanent triumph of the aristocratic element, but...