W033 The civil wars of Marius, Cinna and Sulla

The struggle over the command against Mithridates brought Sulla's army into Rome in 88 BC. His subsequent departure for the East did not stabilize Italy: Cinna and Marius took power, and political killing intensified. Sulla returned in 83 BC with a veteran army and fought his way toward control.

The victory at the Colline Gate in 82 BC was a decisive military stage, followed by proscriptions, confiscation and a constitutional settlement under dictatorship. Italian communities and groups still resisting Roman incorporation were participants in the war, not merely scenery for competing Roman families.

Command, forces and military problem

Extended campaign study

The account below develops the operations and their interpretation. Reported numbers and reconstructed tactical details retain the uncertainties described in the dossier.

The March on Rome (88 BC)

The transformation of the citizen question into the first Roman civil war required only the collision of the new army with the old politics, and the collision came in the first year of the peace. At Rome the tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus — a Drusan reformer turned radical, carrying laws to distribute the new Italian citizens through all the tribes against furious senatorial resistance — struck his bargain with the one man whose name could counterweight a consul: the tribal-distribution laws would pass under the protection of Marian veterans, and the Mithridatic command would be transferred by plebiscite from Sulla to the sixty-nine-year-old Marius. It was the Numidian precedent of 107 replayed; but the army had changed since 107, and Sulla understood the change as no man yet had. When the tribunes' officers reached Nola to take over the legions, the soldiers — whose stake in the eastern war was the plunder of the richest kingdom in the world, and whose loyalty ran to the commander who would lead them to it — stoned them to death; and Sulla, putting the question to the army in assembly, marched six legions on Rome. Every senior officer but one — his quaestor, Lucius Licinius Lucullus — refused to accompany the march; the city, defenseless, was taken after hours of street-fighting against improvised barricades and roof-tiles, the first armed capture of Rome in its history by its own army; Sulpicius was betrayed by a slave and killed, his head displayed in the Forum on Sulla's order (the slave freed for the service, then flung from the Tarpeian rock for the treachery); and Marius, hunted through the coastal marshes of Latium, was taken at Minturnae — where the sequence that became one of antiquity's most retold tableaux unfolded: the Gallic or Cimbric trooper sent into the darkened room to kill him recoiling from the old man's eyes and the growl "Man, do you dare to kill Gaius Marius?"; the magistrates, ashamed, shipping him instead to Africa; the Roman governor's officer there forbidding him to land; and the answer sent back from the small boat off the shore of the province he had conquered — "Tell the praetor you have seen Gaius Marius a fugitive, sitting amid the ruins of Carthage." The tableau's polish is the tradition's, but its currency began at once, and its meaning was not lost on contemporaries: the Republic now did these things to its own.

Sulla, having passed laws to shackle the assemblies, took his legions east in 87 to the war the whole convulsion had been about — and the settlement collapsed behind him within months. The consul Cinna, reviving the Sulpician program, was driven from the city by his colleague Octavius in rioting that killed thousands, declared deposed, and did what deposed men with the new army's example before them now did: raised the Campanian legions, recalled Marius from Africa, and besieged Rome. The city fell in late 87 through famine and defection; and the five days that followed gave the language its first taste of what the word "Marian" would thereafter carry. The consul Octavius, refusing flight, was killed in his curule chair and his head — a consul's head, the first — nailed to the Rostra; the orator Marcus Antonius, grandfather of the triumvir and the greatest speaker of the age, was hunted to a safe-house and killed mid-persuasion, the soldiers' commander weeping as he carried the head away; Catulus of Vercellae, prosecuted toward certain death, suffocated himself with charcoal fumes; the slave-bodyguard Marius enrolled — the Bardyaei — killed on a nod or a refused greeting until Cinna and Sertorius, a Marian officer with a conscience the age had not yet worn out of him, surrounded and butchered the butchers in their sleep.

Marius entered upon the seventh consulship the prophecy of his youth had promised on the first of January 86, and died on the seventeenth day of it, aged seventy, of pleurisy and, the tradition insists, of drink and raving; the sequel belonged to Cinna, who ruled by continuous consulship — the dominatio Cinnae — for three years of ominous, administrative quiet, while in the East the outlaw proconsul (Sulla had been declared a public enemy, his laws annulled, his house razed) fought the Mithridatic war on his own credit, and in 84 Cinna, embarking troops to confront him, was stoned to death by his own mutinous soldiers on the Ancona shore. The Republic's constitutional history in these years reduces to a single sentence: every armed man had learned that the state was whoever held Rome, and Rome was whoever held an army.

Sulla's Return and the Colline Gate (83–82 BC)

Sulla landed at Brundisium in the spring of 83 with forty thousand veterans of the eastern war — the Mithridatic campaign itself, with its sieges and set-pieces, is treated in the following chapter, but its political product landed here: an army five years bound to its imperator by oath, plunder, and outlawry — and the last civil war of the cycle unfolded across eighteen months of Italy. The young men came to him: Marcus Licinius Crassus, whose father and brother had died in the Marian terror, out of Spain with a private force; and Gnaeus Pompeius, twenty-three years old, who raised three legions from his father Strabo's veterans in Picenum on his own authority and presented himself with them — saluted, to the scandal of every constitutionalist and the delight of the army, as imperator by Sulla, who understood exactly what he was buying and what precedent he was setting. The government's new-citizen levies fought better than the government: the consul Norbanus was beaten at Canusium; the army of his colleague Scipio Asiaticus was talked out from under him at Teanum, deserting entire during a parley-truce; but the campaign of 82 in the north between Pompey, Metellus Pius, and the younger Marius's partisans, and in the center between Sulla and the consul Carbo, was hard and bloody through the summer — the younger Marius, defeated at Sacriportus, penned in Praeneste with the treasury; the Marian government, before abandoning Rome, perpetrating its final atrocity in the murder of the pontifex maximus Scaevola in the temple of Vesta itself; Carbo losing heart and sailing for Africa, leaving his armies to dissolve. What remained was the unreconciled remnant of the Social War: the Samnite and Lucanian armies under Pontius Telesinus, seventy thousand strong, who having failed to relieve Praeneste turned on Rome itself with the declared program — the phrase was reported from Telesinus's harangue — of demolishing the wolf's den outright, since Italy would never be free while the wolf lived in it. Sulla's army, force-marching, reached the city hours ahead of the storm, and the battle was joined against the northern walls, before the Colline Gate, on the afternoon of the first of November 82: the last pitched battle of the Italic peoples against Rome, and Rome's nearest approach to extinction since the Gauls.

Sulla's own left, which he commanded, was broken and driven against the walls — the fugitives trampled at the gates, which the veterans of the garrison slammed against friend and enemy alike; Sulla, by his own memoirs' account, prayed aloud to his Apollo amid the wreck; and the battle was retrieved from the other wing, where Crassus shattered the Samnite right and rolled up the line in a night of killing that ran on into the following day. Telesinus was found dying on the field with the expression, witnesses said, of the victor he had nearly been; the Samnite prisoners, some thousands, were penned in the Villa Publica on the Campus Martius; and two days later, while Sulla addressed the Senate in the temple of Bellona nearby, the prisoners were slaughtered to a man on his order, the screams filling the pauses of the speech — the senators starting to their feet, and Sulla, not raising his voice, instructing them to attend to what he was saying: it was merely some criminals being corrected.

The sentence stood for the regime. Within days the first proscription lists went up in the Forum — the innovation that gave the language a word: names published, the named stripped of law, their killers rewarded from the estate, their sons and grandsons barred from office, informers enriched, the heads receipted and displayed. Forty senators and sixteen hundred equestrians stood on the first lists; the final toll ran far higher, swollen by the entrepreneurial murders the mechanism invited — men proscribed because they were rich, one victim famously reading his own name and observing that his Alban villa had killed him. Crassus built the foundations of the greatest fortune in Rome buying proscribed estates at auction; the young Julius Caesar, nephew by marriage of Marius and son-in-law of Cinna, refused Sulla's order to divorce, went into hiding in the Sabine hills, and was spared at last on the intercession of his connections — with the warning, which every ancient biographer records and no modern one can resist, that in that boy were many Mariuses. The constitutional settlement followed on the terror's foundation: Sulla revived, for the first time in a hundred and twenty years, the dictatorship — held without time limit, legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae, for the writing of laws and the ordering of the state — and legislated the senatorial republic back into a fortress: the tribunate stripped of legislative initiative and veto and made a career dead-end, the courts restored to senatorial juries, the cursus honorum fixed in law with minimum ages and mandatory intervals, the provincial commands bounded by treason law, the Senate doubled to six hundred with his partisans, three hundred thousand acres of Italy planted with a hundred thousand of his veterans — a standing army of the settlement, quartered on the confiscated lands of Samnium and Etruria, whose ruined prior owners would furnish every insurrection of the following generation. And then, in 79, the act that Caesar alone in the next generation professed himself unable to understand: Sulla resigned the dictatorship, dismissed his lictors, and walked the Forum as a private citizen, offering — the gesture was the message — to render account to any man who asked. None asked. He retired to Campania, to the memoirs, the hunting, and the actors of his raffish youth, and died within the year of a hemorrhagic disease the tradition rendered loathsome; the epitaph he composed for himself said that no friend had ever outdone him in kindness, nor any enemy in harm. The state gave him the grandest funeral in its history, the legions marching, the matrons contributing spice by the hundredweight — and the settlement he had built to last forever began to be dismantled, by his own lieutenants, within two years.

Outcome and critical assessment

Result and caution: Sulla secured power and rewrote political arrangements, but armed competition over the Republic survived him. Distinguish the fighting, the proscription process and later institutional changes. Lists of executions, motives and private speeches in retrospective accounts require separate evaluation; the victory does not validate the victor's legal claims.

Historical record: IR-V, chapter 4; Appian, Civil Wars 1; Plutarch, Sulla and Marius.