From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68 (12 page)

In Africa Metellus,
¹⁶
who had Marius on his staff, restored discipline in his army, distrusted an offer by Jugurtha to surrender, and advanced westwards to the river Muthul where he fought an indecisive engagement. Avoiding further pitched battles, he then tried to wear down Jugurtha’s strength by attacking various strong-points: Marius, for instance, was sent to seize Sicca, and though Metellus failed to capture Zama Regia, in the following year (108) when his command had been prolonged he recovered Vaga, where there had been a rising in Jugurtha’s favour.
¹⁷
After another engagement Jugurtha fled westwards and Metellus captured Thala. Jugurtha, however, raised fresh troops and persuaded his father-in-law Bocchus, the king of Mauretania, to join him in an advance eastwards to Cirta, but Metellus avoided battle, Thus after two years of campaigning Metellus had begun to develop what was probably the best strategy to defeat a mobile enemy in the
vast and often barren spaces of N. Africa, though lack of troops prevented its full realization. His methods, as elaborated by Marius later, have been compared with those used in the Boer War by Lord Kitchener, who wore down his opponents by planting block-houses ever further in enemy territory. But though Metellus’ success might go far to restore the somewhat tarnished military reputation of the Senate, it was true that Jugurtha, although driven farther westwards, was still at large. An attempt by Metellus to secure his betrayal by treachery had failed, and only his capture or death in battle could end the war: this, rather than the occupation of Numidia, was the primary objective.

Metellus, however, had trouble nearer to hand. Marius began to press for leave to return to Rome to stand for the consulship, only to be told by Metellus that he should wait until he could stand with Metellus’ own son who was then only about twenty years old. After this insult, or perhaps rather before it, as the anti-Marian tradition suggests, Marius began to stir up trouble in the army and to agitate through the Roman traders in Africa and through his friends in Rome, claiming that Metellus from incompetence or ambition was unnecessarily spinning out the war. At last Marius got his way and returned to Rome where by boastful demagogy he secured sufficient popular and Equestrian support to carry a
novus homo
into the consulship of 107; further, the People disregarded the Senate’s decision to prolong Metellus’ command and appointed Marius to succeed him in Africa. This intervention by the People in the Senate’s traditional right to allocate the provincial commands established a very dangerous example which was later followed to exalt Pompey and Caesar to extraordinary commands to the great detriment of the Republic. Further, Marius intended to make sure of victory in Africa by taking out more troops. To raise these he disregarded the rule that the army should be recruited only from men enrolled in the five
classes
, and appealed for volunteers from the
capite censi
or
proletarii
, men who lacked the necessary property qualification. This innovation also had far-reaching political effects and paved the way for the later military dictatorships. At the moment it merely provided Marius with an enthusiastic army.

With these troops Marius sailed to Africa, leaving behind in Italy his quaestor, L. Cornelius Sulla, to raise a large force of cavalry. After spending much of the summer (107) in training his troops and in skirmishes with the enemy, Marius adopted the strategy of attacking fortified cities. Apart from a spectacular march through the desert to seize Capsa which would have good propaganda value, at first he achieved little; since his command was prolonged, he turned during the winter and the first part of 106 to a systematic reduction of Jugurtha’s fortresses throughout Numidia in an area as large as peninsular Italy. At some point Sulla’s cavalry joined him and in the autumn
of 106 he launched a successful attack on a fortress near the river Muluccha, some 500 miles west of Cirta, where Jugurtha kept some of his treasure. This loss compelled Jugurtha to secure Bocchus’ support by a promise to cede western Numidia to him, and the two kings were forced to consider risking a pitched battle. Marius, however, had not the forces to hold so large an area and could not winter so far west. On his return march he beat off attacks by Jugurtha and Bocchus, and when he was near Cirta (which may temporarily have been lost to the Romans) he decisively defeated the two kings in a final battle in which he snatched victory from defeat either through the sudden arrival of Sulla at a critical moment (Sallust) or because of an unexpected storm (the Livian tradition). When Bocchus applied to Rome for terms, he was told by the Senate that he must ‘work his passage’. This later involved negotiations with Sulla who went to Bocchus’ camp, uncertain whether he was walking into a trap; by his superior diplomacy, however, he persuaded Bocchus to betray Jugurtha to him instead of himself becoming Jugurtha’s prisoner (105). Thus the war ended – only just in time in view of the menace on Rome’s northern frontier – and Jugurtha, after gracing Marius’ triumph at the beginning of 104, died in the State prison, the Tullianum.

Rome’s settlement of N. Africa gained her no territorial advantage: the province of Africa was not enlarged. Eastern Numidia was given to a half-brother of Jugurtha, named Gauda, and Bocchus was rewarded for his treachery towards Jugurtha by receiving western Numidia in addition to retaining the throne of Mauretania. With peace re-established the Senate was satisfied to leave the whole area west of the Roman province in the hands of native rulers. If any Romans benefited from the settlement it was the Equites who could now resume their trade in Africa in safety.

The war had shown that despite weaknesses in the Roman army, such as lack of cavalry and an initial failure to cope with guerrilla warfare, yet the Roman legions could still win through. But more important than the war itself were its political effects. By provoking suspicions of senatorial corruption, it had exacerbated the relations of the Senate with the People and Equites, already aggravated by the Gracchi. It had increased interference by the last two groups in foreign policy and had elevated a ‘popular’ general to potentially dangerous heights. Metellus might be given a triumph and the
cognomen
Numidicus, and Sulla might claim solid credit for the final capture of Jugurtha, but it was not the senatorial generals who were regarded as the architects of victory or chosen to face the new menace in the North. Seeds of rivalry were sown between Marius and Sulla, champions of Populares and Optimates, and the influence of the army in political life was foreshadowed.

Meantime a much more serious menace had been developing in the North. The Cimbri and Teutones, two Germanic tribes, had started a mass movement from their homes somewhere in the Jutland area, and advanced southwards, taking with them their wives and children in their wagons. Checked by the Scordisci near Belgrade, they turned westwards. To meet this potential threat to her northern frontier Rome sent Cn. Carbo in 113 to head them off, but though they were willing to respond, Carbo insisted on fighting and met with disaster at Noreia near Ljubjana (see p. 38). To Rome’s great good fortune the Germans decided to continue trekking westwards. On the way they were joined by the Tigurini and other Celtic tribes, and reached Gaul by 110 where they could threaten the new Roman province; to protect it the Romans sent out an army under M. Iunius Silanus, consul of 109. When the Senate rejected as too hazardous a proposal from the tribes that they should be allowed to settle on the frontiers, they defeated Silanus somewhere in the valley of the Rhone. The Cimbri, however, turned northwards, while the Tigurini continued to the west where Rome’s allies the Volcae around Tolosa (Toulouse) revolted. Though L. Cassius Longinus, consul in 107, drove them back, he was routed and killed in an ambush in the Garonne valley and the survivors had to march under the yoke. A consul of 106, Q. Servilius Caepio, however, managed to recover Tolosa, but was then faced by the return of the Cimbri. His command was prolonged and he received reinforcements under Cn. Mallius, consul of 105, who was a
novus homo
. As proconsul, Caepio was subordinate to Mallius, but he was reluctant to obey or co-operate, though finally he joined Mallius east of the Rhone. The result was Rome’s greatest defeat since Cannae, a hundred years before: at Arausio (modern Orange) the two commanders were thrust back against the river and defeated in detail, with a reported loss of 80,000 men. Italy was threatened with invasion, and Mallius’ colleague P. Rutilius Rufus decreed that no man under thirty-five should leave the country.

These events abroad naturally had repercussions at home, where Caepio, who was a good senatorial, had earlier celebrated a triumph for victories over the Lusitani in Spain, and had been elected consul for 106, the year in which Metellus Numidicus received a triumph for his services in Africa. Before he had gone off to Tolosa, Caepio had secured the passing of a
lex iudiciaria
which deprived the Equites of some control of all
quaestiones,
both standing and special: it is hardly likely that he was able to transfer them back to the Senate alone, but more probably all were now to be empanelled from both Equites and senators.
¹⁸
The law-courts in fact increasingly became the battle-ground for political disputes. C. Popillius Laenas, who had accepted unworthy terms
from the Tigurini when his commander Cassius had been killed in the Garonne valley, was prosecuted for
perduellio
by a tribune C. Coelius Caldus, who also introduced a bill to extend secret ballot to such cases. Caepio’s turn was soon to come: as a preliminary move after his defeat as proconsul at Arausio, the People deprived him of his command.

Meanwhile in view of the menace in the North, Marius, the People’s hero, was elected to a second consulship, for 104, in his absence. On his return from Africa he celebrated his triumph over Jugurtha on 1 January and was given the command in Gaul against the Cimbri and Teutones by the People, who again disregarded both the Senate’s traditional claim to make such appointments (cf. p. 42) and the interval of ten years that was prescribed by law between the holding of two consulships. Marius, who then went off to train and organize a new army, was in fact elected consul again each year until his sixth consulship in 100; the People thus flouted the
lex Annalis
and refused to give the Senate the option of prolonging his command by prorogation. This rising tide of popular feeling soon helped to modify Caepio’s judiciary law: a tribune, C. Servilius Glaucia (probably in 104) carried a measure to restore the extortion court (
quaestio de repetundis
) to the Equites.
¹⁹
The People and Equites were obviously beginning again to exert more pressure upon the Senate, and the unfortunate Caepio became the target for further attacks. Blamed for the disaster at Arausio, he lost his seat in the Senate when a tribune carried a bill expelling from the Senate all who had been deprived of their
imperium
by the People. Further, the treasure which Caepio had taken at Tolosa (p. 44) had mysteriously disappeared while being transported to Massilia in 106. A special commission of enquiry was appointed to investigate the loss, but Caepio may have succeeded in escaping serious penalty in this court.
²⁰
His final trial followed later (p. 46).

Meantime a tribune, Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, was hitting out in many directions. He was unsuccessful in two prosecutions, one against Silanus (
cos.
109) on a charge of misconduct on his campaign against the Cimbri, and the second against M. Aemilius Scaurus whom he accused of neglecting his sacral duties: he had a grudge against Scaurus for not having co-opted him as a Pontiff to succeed his father, the consul of 122. He then carried a law to transfer to the People the selection of priests, who were to be chosen by 17 of the 35 tribes; this was a very serious encroachment upon the privileges of the senatorial class. Further, Cn. Pompeius Strabo, a quaestor of 104 and the father of Pompey the Great, shocked public opinion by attempting to take part in the prosecution of his own commanding officer, a governor of Sardinia.
²¹

Rome found time for all these political bickerings because the German threat was still hanging fire, although other trouble flared up nearer home. An outbreak of slaves at Capua was crushed, but a more serious slave-rising
developed in Sicily. Thanks to the settlement by Rupilius after the First Servile War (pp. 11–12), conditions in Sicily may have improved somewhat, with a decrease of
latifundia
and an increase of smaller farms devoted to the production of corn, wine and oil, but the basic evil of slavery remained, and if the new uprising did not involve such large numbers as the earlier one, it at least spread more widely over the island. The immediate cause was that the Roman governor in 104, under pressure from the slave-owning landlords, failed to implement fully a decree passed by the Senate that provincial governors should seek out and release all citizens of allied states that were being kept as slaves, many of them having been reduced to slavery by the activities of the pirates. When a certain Salvius, who led a revolt in the south part of the island and styled himself King Tryphon, joined hands with a Cilician named Athenion in the west, the situation became grave for the Romans in view of the concurrent threat to their northern frontier. The commanders sent against the slaves achieved little in 103 and 102, but finally a lieutenant of Marius, Manius Aquilius (
cos.
101), brought the war to an end.

Another scandal of 104 was that the Senate used a rise in cornprices as an excuse to install M. Aemilius Scaurus in place of L. Appuleius Saturninus as the
quaestor Ostiensis
who looked after the corn that arrived at the port of Ostia. Saturninus not unnaturally was embittered and turned
popularis
. He was elected tribune for 103 and soon showed what he could do as a
popularis
, though since he was tribune again in 100 there is some doubt about dating his measures. Supported by his colleague C. Norbanus in 103, he launched an attack on Caepio and Mallius for their responsibility for the disaster at Arausio. He proposed a plebiscite to send Mallius to exile, and Norbanus prosecuted Caepio before the People. After disturbances, in which two opposing tribunes were driven off by force and the Princeps Senatus, Scaurus, was hit on the head with a stone, Caepio was convicted and imprisoned, but later was allowed to go into exile at Smyrna.
²²
Saturninus also secured by a
lex Appuleia de maiestate
the establishment of a court to try cases of treason, that is offences against the
maiestas
of the Roman People, a crime which now began to replace the earlier charge of
perduellio
.
²³
While no doubt the existence of the new court would tend to make generals more careful in the future, Saturninus’ immediate object will have been political: the court would prove a useful weapon against senatorial commanders, and since the jurors were Equites it would win him further support in Rome. He also proposed a corn-law, which possibly went no further than to revive the provisions of Gracchus’ law which had been modified by Octavius (p. 39).
²⁴
At any rate the Senate objected, and when Saturninus disregarded the veto of two colleagues, the son of Caepio
who was now quaestor forcibly broke up the Concilium; when this led to a prosecution for
maiestas minuta
, he was acquitted. The fate of the corn-bill remains uncertain. Saturninus also promoted Marius’ interests: in addition to helping him to win his fourth consulship, he carried, despite tribunician opposition, a measure to provide allotments of 100
iugera
in Africa for Marius’ veterans. Thus Saturninus, who might appear as a
popularis
in the Gracchan tradition,
²⁵
had secured the backing of Marius, People and Equites in his struggle against the Optimates.

Saturninus was clearly dangerous, but Metellus Numidicus, who was censor with his cousin Caprarius in 102, was unwise to try to omit the names of Saturninus and Glaucia from the list of senators. This provoked a riot in which Numidicus was forced to seek refuge on the Capitol; the more conciliatory counsels of Caprarius then prevailed. Saturninus’ friends, the Equites, were no doubt gratified when the Senate decided to set up a special command to cope with the menace of piracy in the eastern Mediterranean which interfered with their trading interests, but the praetor and famous orator, M. Antonius, who was sent out with proconsular
imperium
in 102 to secure bases on the coasts of Pamphylia and W. Cilicia, achieved little even though he held his command until 100. Saturninus meanwhile continued on the path of violence. In 101 he insulted an embassy from Mithridates, king of Pontus, and was in consequence prosecuted on a capital charge, but he secured acquittal by calling on the mob to break up proceedings. Then after the murder of a competitor he gained a second tribunate for 100, and his friend Glaucia was elected praetor. Marius, now victorious over the Germanic tribes, returned to Rome to hold a triumph and to stand for a sixth consulship for 100. This would be the testing year.