[101 B.C.]

"the property of our masters is now ours." He now rashly laid siege to the impregnable fortress of Lilybæum; but finding its capture impossible, he drew off, alleging that an impending danger had been revealed to him.

Meanwhile Salvius, who had assumed the name of Tryphon, fixed the seat of his sovereignty at the fortress of Triocala, which had fallen into his hands, and sent orders to Athenion to repair in person to that place. Athenion obeyed the orders of King Tryphon, and appeared at Triocala with three thousand men. The king now occupied himself with adding to the strength of his new capital. He chose a senate out of his followers. On public occasions he wore the toga prætexta of a Roman magistrate, and was attended by the due number of lictors.

The Romans seemed unable to make head against the insurgents, till, in 101 B.C., M'. Aquillius, the colleague of Marius in his fifth consulship, took the command. Meanwhile, Tryphon had died, and Athenion had become chief of the insurgents. Aquillius brought them to an engagement, in which he encountered the brave Athenion hand to hand. The consul was severely wounded, but the slave leader was killed. Aquillius remained as proconsul in Sicily for another year, in the course of which time he crushed the last embers of the war. After the fall of Athenion, the insurgents dwindled away to a band of one thousand desperate men commanded by one Satyrus, who at length surrendered to Aquillius, and were by him sent to Rome to serve as gladiators. The story of their end is very touching. Being brought out into the arena to fight with wild beasts, they slew one another at the foot of the altars which stood there; and Satyrus, being left alone, fell upon his own sword.

It is manifest, from the humanity and discipline observed by these unhappy men in their power, that their chiefs must have been originally men of station and education, reduced to slavery by the horrid practice of ancient warfare. The story of their death presents a picture not flattering to Roman civilisation.

Strict measures were adopted in Sicily to prevent a recurrence of these perils. It was made a standing order, confirmed by every successive prætor, that no slave should have a weapon in his possession. Nor was the ordinance suffered to remain a dead letter. Soon after, the prætor L. Domitius received a fine boar as a present. He inquired who had killed it. Finding that it was a slave employed as a shepherd, he summoned the man to his presence. The poor fellow came with alacrity, expecting a reward. The prætor asked him with what he had killed the animal; and finding that it was with a hunting-spear, he ordered the unfortunate wretch to be crucified. Such were the laws by which the masters of the world were obliged to maintain their power.b

ROMAN SEAL RINGS

Ew Barker

"WHEN Caius Gracchus fell," said Mirabeau, "he seized a handful of dust tinged with his blood and flung it toward the sky; from that dust was born Marius." This phrase of Mirabeau's, though a whit rhetorical, is historically true. The patricians were willing to cede nothing to the Gracchi, and they were decimated by Marius. The struggle changed its methods: one fought no more with laws as the only weapons, but yet more with proscriptions. Marius was the incarnated pleb; as ignorant, pitiless, formidable, he had something of Danton, except that Danton was no soldier.b

Marius had taken no part hitherto in the old contentions of classes at Rome. But his plebeian origin, the attitude of defiance he had assumed towards the nobles on the occasion of his first election to the consulship, the outrage he had done to establish usage in the enlistment of proletarians, above all, perhaps, the arrogance with which he had extorted so many successive consulships from the hands of the most illustrious competitors, all combined to mark him as the champion of the "movement party," whatever its immediate objects or popular cry might be.

Under the shadow of his anti-oligarchical aggressions, the people and their tribunes renewed the demands of the era of the Gracchi. The knights were irritated by the loss of their monopoly of the judicia, and a cry for a new agrarian distribution was always sure to interest a portion at least of the multitude. But envy and spite against unpopular individuals among the nobles were still more effective instruments to work with. Q. Servilius Cæpio, who had been defeated by the Cimbrians, was selected as an object of popular persecution. A few years before he had captured Tolosa in Gaul by an act of signal treachery, such, however, as the Romans seldom animadverted severely upon as long as they were successful. But Cæpio had forfeited their forbearance by his recent disaster, and the hoards of gold which he had rifled from the temples of the Gallic deities were supposed to have brought the vengeance of Heaven upon him, and the country whose armies were entrusted to him. The people, at the instigation of their demagogues, proposed to deprive him of his imperium, confiscate his property, and declare him incapable of serving the state in future. The senate defended its luckless proconsul, who had helped to restore to it a share in the judicia; but the tribune Vibius Norbanus drove the nobles from the comitium, together with two of his own colleagues who sided with them. In the tumult by which this act of violence was consummated Emilius Scaurus, the prince of the senate, was wounded on the head by a stone. Cæpio was deprived, cast into

[102-100 B.C.] prison and subsequently banished, unless indeed, according to another account, he was strangled in his dungeon. The retribution of his crime did not stop here. His noble family was further dishonoured by the licentious conduct of his two daughters, and the gold of Tolosa passed into a proverb, for the unlawful gain which precipitates its possessor into misery and disgrace.

In the year 102 the tribune Domitius, transferred to the people the election of the chief pontiff, which had formerly been invested in the appointment of the pontifical college. The head of the national religion was an important political personage. He held in his hands the threads of the state policy, which opened or shut the oracular books of the Sibyls, appointed sacrifices and ceremonials, interpreted the will of the gods from portents, and placed the seal of the divine approbation upon every public act, or withheld it from it. This engine of government had been long firmly grasped by the nobles; it could still be handled only by patricians; but the patricians had ceased to be identified in interest and feeling with the ruling oligarchy, and from the hands of patricians the traditions of the old republic were destined to receive their rudest shocks. The appointment of the chief pontiff by the people became eventually an important agent in the overthrow of the Roman constitution. In the year of the battle of Aquæ Sextiæ, Marcius Philippus proposed an agrarian law, which, however, was rejected. But at the same time another tribune, Servilius Glaucia, carried a resolution of the people for wresting the judicia once more from the senators, and conferring them again upon the knights exclusively. He increased the stringency of an existing law against extortion in the provinces; and to the holder of the Latin franchise, who should convict a senator of its violation, he assured the superior privileges of full Roman citizenship.

THE SIXTH CONSULATE OF MARIUS

When Marius returned to Rome (101) he was already for the fifth time consul. But he was not satisfied with this extraordinary series of honours, and was not the less anxious to obtain a further renewal of his long lease of office. The nobles, he felt, were his natural opponents. He hastened therefore to connect himself with the leaders of the people, to whom the chief of the aristocracy was personally hostile. Allying himself with the tribunes Servilius Glaucia and Appuleius Saturninus, he mingled his disbanded legionaries with the dissolute mob of the Forum, and by threats, promises, and largesses easily overpowered the votes of the honest citizens.1 ́ Marius was raised to a sixth consulship: yet he was neither popular in his manners nor eloquent in his address (100). On the contrary, in all civil matters, it is said, and amid the noise of popular assemblies, the conqueror of the Cimbrians was utterly devoid of courage and presence of mind. The undaunted spirit he showed in the field entirely failed him in the Forum, where he was disconcerted by the most ordinary praise or censure.

In his policy also Marius was unfixed and wavering; and instead of steadily courting the prejudices of the Roman rabble, he favoured and rewarded the Italians, of whom the Roman commons now entertained a deep jealousy. After his late victories he ventured to stretch the prerogative of

[1 Appians informs us that Saturninus had at his back the country people, who were the honest citizens, whereas the dissolute mob of the Forum supported the senate. This fact has been generally overlooked.]

[100 B.C.]

the consulship to confer the citizenship on a thousand soldiers of the state of Camerinum, who had served him well in the field. The act was illegal as well as unpopular, and Marius did not, perhaps, make it more palatable by the excuse he gave for it: "Amid the din of arms," he said, "I could not hear the voice of the laws."1

The tribunes, however, who wished to strengthen their position by a new alliance, bestowed their countenance upon the Italians also. They caused a measure to be enacted, by which Marius was allowed to create three Roman citizens in every colony which enjoyed the Latin franchise, thus enabling him to bestow the boon they chiefly coveted upon many of the soldiers who had distinguished themselves in his service. With the same view Saturninus carried another measure, by which the unfortunate inhabitants of the transAlpine provinces were deprived of their estates, and forced to make room for the victors of Aqua Sextiæ and Vercellæ. The nobles resented these concessions to the conquered Italians, and even the commons regarded them with uneasiness and distrust. They sought to interrupt the proceedings on the occurrence of rain or thunder. "Be still," cried Saturninus, "or it shall presently hail." His adherents armed themselves with stones. Tumults arose in the Forum; the senators and their partisans among the populace were driven away by the fury of the veterans, and Saturninus carried his rogation with open violence. Marius kept warily aloof, and affected great horror at the illegal disturbance. He excited the nobles underhand to protest against the execution of a law carried in a manner so irregular, which the tribunes insisted on their accepting under specified penalties. As soon, however, as they had committed themselves, Marius withdrew his countenance from them, and left them the choice of submitting with dishonour, or enduring the punishment of refusal. The senators, entrapped and cowed, took the oath required, till it came to the turn of Metellus; but the haughtiest of the nobles, though urged and entreated by his friends to yield to necessity, disdained to swerve from the principles he had avowed. Saturninus demanded that he should be outlawed, and fire and water forbidden him. His friends were numerous and strong enough to have defended him with arms, but he forbade them to draw their swords, and went proudly into banishment.

Saturninus obtained the renewal of his tribunate. He had carried matters with a high hand: on the occasion of his first election he had daringly murdered an opponent; he had thwarted the nobles, and even risked his popularity with the commons by proclaiming himself the patron of the Italians. It was now requisite, perhaps, to recover his ground with his supporters in the city; and for this purpose he imposed one of his freedmen upon the citizens, as a son of their favourite Tiberius Gracchus. This intrigue, indeed, seems to have had little success; Sempronia, the widow of Scipio Emilianus, and sister of the murdered tribunes, vehemently denounced it, and the people laughed at the imposture, if they did not resent it.

But force, after all, was more familiar to Saturninus than fraud. When C. Memmius, one of his adversaries, was about to be elected consul, he caused him to be poniarded in the Forum by the bandits who surrounded his own person.2 But he had now gone too far. To save himself he rushed into open revolt. He climbed the Capitol, with his companion Glaucia and

[1 As a representative of the rural class, Marius consistently favoured the Italians; he was not so ignorant nor so wavering as has generally been assumed. It was the rabble which opposed Italian interests.]

[2 His opponents, rightly or wrongly, accused him of this crime.]

[100 B.C.]

his band of ruffians and assassins, seized the citadel, in virtue perhaps of his official dignity, and defied the republic to arms. The nobles retorted upon him with the fatal cry, that he aspired to royalty; and the people, already perplexed at his leaning to the Italians, and shocked, perhaps, at the frantic violence of his proceedings, were not indisposed to listen to it. They acquiesced without a murmur in the decree of the senate, by which the state was declared in danger and Marius charged as consul to provide for its safety.

The city was placed in what in modern times is called a state of siege; that is, the consul, whose ordinary functions within the walls were purely judicial and administrative, received the power of the sword as fully as if he were in the camp. He proceeded to invest the fortress, which was considered impregnable to an attack, and could only be reduced by blockade. By cutting some leaden pipes, upon which, in the security of the times, the citadel of the republic had been allowed to become dependent for water, the insurgents were deprived of the first necessary of life. Saturninus offered to capitulate on the promise of personal safety. Marius guaranteed his life; and in order to preserve him from the fury of the populace, placed him, in the first instance, with his followers, in the Curia Hostilia, a large public building at the foot of the hill. But when the people scaled the walls, tore off the roof, and poured missiles upon the wretched captives, the consul made no effort to save them, and they all perished miserably—a deed of blood which was long remembered, and afforded at a later period the handle for a persecution of the nobles themselves.

No event, perhaps, in Roman history is so sudden, so unconnected, and accordingly so obscure in its origin and causes, as this revolt or conspiracy of Saturninus. The facility with which a favourite champion of the people is abandoned and slain by his own clients, seems to point to some unseen motive, with which history has forgotten to acquaint us. The Roman demagogues were well aware of the inveterate horror with which the people regarded the name of king; and none of them, it may be safely said, notwithstanding the oft-repeated calumnies of their opponents, ever ventured to aspire to it. If it be true then (as the historians represent) that Saturninus was hailed as king by his adherents, and accepted the invidious designation with joy, it is highly probable that his adherents were foreigners and Italians rather than citizens. We have already seen the use which leaders of all parties were making at this time of the claims of the Italians to emancipation from the state of conquered subjects in which they were still held. All in turn pressed these claims, when it suited their particular purpose, nor did most of them scruple to abandon them when their convenience required it. Sometimes the nobles, sometimes the commons, were cajoled into supporting them, as a counterpoise to the aggressions of their immediate opponents; but both the one class and the other were at heart bitterly opposed to them, and the hope of obtaining favour or justice from the republic seems to have gradually disappeared from the minds of the claimants themselves. They hated Rome, and with Rome they identified, perhaps, republican government itself. They could only hope for redress of their grievances from a revolution which should overthrow the supremacy of the senate house and the Forum. This was the menace from which even the licentious rabble of the city recoiled, and which determined Marius to allow the violation of his plighted faith, and the sacrifice of his friend and ally. Even if entirely devoid of patriotic

[1Ihned says: "Marius found himself placed in an awkward dilemma. He was no longer able to control his own party, and was being carried along by them against his will far beyond the point to which he had intended to go."]