The incident illustrates an attractive aspect of Cicero’s personality: his predisposition to admire. He was not a cynic and, although he was much concerned with his own glory and had a fair share of hatreds and dislikes, he was appreciative of the achievements of others and liked to praise them if he could.
It was another death soon after that caused the conflagration that set Italy alight. Drusus knew that he was at personal risk and seldom went out of doors, conducting business from a poorly lit portico at his house on the Palatine Hill. One evening as he was dismissing the gathering he suddenly screamed that he had been stabbed and fell with the words on his lips. A leather worker’s knife was found driven into his hip, but the assassin was never caught.
Drusus’s murder was the final blow to Italian aspirations. Communities across the peninsula rose in revolt. The struggle, called the War of the Allies, was bloody and bitter. Young, well-connected and ambitious Romans were expected to serve on military campaigns; although Cicero seldom showed any interest in soldiering, the war was too close to home for him to ignore. He temporarily abandoned his studies to serve in the army of Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo as a member of his general staff. He met the commander’s son for the first time, young Cnaeus Pompeius (whom we know as Pompey). Exact contemporaries, they were about sixteen or seventeen years old—and of course without an inkling of how closely their destinies were to be interlinked in future years.
Rome sustained some serious defeats and there was a distinct risk that the rebellion, which was centered on the Adriatic side of Italy, might spread. The neighboring Etruscans and the Umbrians seemed on the point of secession. So in 90 the Senate, facing disaster, gave way. They awarded Roman citizenship to all those Allies who stayed loyal and, it seems, also to those who surrendered. This was decisive, and, although fighting continued for some time at a terrible cost in human lives and suffering, Rome emerged the military victor—and the political loser.
Italy was now united and very gradually the old cultural divisions and languages of the peninsula gave way to an overall Latinity. In the short run, the shock to the Republic’s stability and to the self-confidence of its ruling class was great. And there was worse to come. The War of the Allies signaled a new bloodier spiral into social and political chaos. Soldiers in the Forum, elder statesmen massacred, half the Empire in revolt—nothing like it had been seen in the history of the Republic. It was nearly ten years before something approaching normality returned, in 82; during this period, according to a modern estimate, 200,000 lost their lives from a free population in Rome and Italy of about 4,500,000.
With typical, tricky mean-mindedness, the Senate corralled the new Italian citizens into a small number of the tribus, or voting groups, into which the General Assembly was divided, thus reducing their electoral impact. A radical Tribune, Publius Sulpicius Rufus, now intervened; he had been a friend of the dead Drusus and promoted a policy of fair play for the newly enfranchised Italians. In 88, he brought forward a proposal to distribute the new citizens across the complete range of the tribus. Uproar ensued among the optimates and Sulpicius, the latest in the line of civilian reformers, recruited 600 young equites as bodyguards; they were nicknamed the “anti-Senators.”
One of the Consuls in 87 was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, a descendant of an old but impoverished family who had arrived comparatively late on the political scene. Sulla had misspent his youth among a demimonde of actors and hustlers and first made a name for himself on the battlefield when he was thirty-one. His appearance was remarkable, for his face was disfigured by a birthmark which people said looked like a mulberry with oatmeal sprinkled on it. A conservative, he aimed to restore the Senate’s traditional authority. His Consulship was a reward for signal achievements in the War of the Allies. He was given a military command once his Consular year was over to deal with a serious crisis that had overtaken Rome’s territorial possessions in Asia Minor.
Mithridates, King of Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, had been scheming for years to free the entire region from Roman control. He was an able and ambitious man, of remarkable physical strength and mental stamina. Fearful of the plots endemic in an oriental court, he was reputed to consume small regular doses of poison to build up his resistance. The War of the Allies gave him a one-time opportunity to act while Rome’s back was turned, and he seized it. His army invaded the region and his fleet sailed into the Aegean. Democrats in Athens invited him to liberate Greece.
Mithridates’ advance was so swift and total that about 80,000 Roman and Italian businessmen and their families found themselves unexpectedly marooned in enemy territory. Mithridates’ solution to the problem of what to do with them was final. He sent secret instructions to local authorities in every town to kill all strangers who spoke Latin. In general the order was obeyed with enthusiasm, clear evidence of the unpopularity of Roman rule. In one town, the executioners planned their work with sadistic ingenuity: children were killed in front of their parents, then wives in front of their husbands and lastly the men. All Italian property was confiscated and handed over to the king.
The massacre was a terrible blow to the Republic’s authority and added greatly to its economic difficulties, because a regular flow of tax and trading revenues was abruptly cut off. Bankruptcies became common and indebtedness in every social class reached very high levels. Senators, much of whose wealth was locked up in land, found themselves with few liquid assets; the aftermath of the War of the Allies was no time to sell real estate to raise cash. Everyone agreed that it was crucial to retrieve Asia Minor. The future of the Empire was in the balance and, whatever Rome’s internal problems, dealing with the threat in the east came first.
At this point, Marius, the great general who had saved Rome from the Gauls, unexpectedly reappeared. He had served in the War of the Allies but had spent a number of years out of public view. Now nearly seventy, he was old and embittered by what he saw as the Republic’s ingratitude and was out for vengeance. The Tribune Sulpicius unwisely turned to him for support. In return, he arranged for Sulla’s eastern command to be taken from him and given to Marius. The Consuls tried to stop Sulpicius by suspending public business and in the riots that followed Sulla was forced to take refuge in Marius’s house.
This was an unbearable humiliation. Sulla decided to rejoin his army not far from the city, where it was waiting for him to lead them eastwards. But he had a score to settle and did not set off at once. Instead he turned his legions on Rome, which he captured after a few hours of street fighting. Sulpicius was hunted down and killed, but Marius, after a series of hair-raising adventures, made his escape to Africa where many of his old troops had been settled. Sulla quickly passed laws which invalidated Sulpicius’s legislation and would make it difficult for reformers to have their way during his absence. He then marched off to fight the King of Pontus, who would not wait.
Sulla’s entry into Rome was a watershed. He had broken one of the Republic’s greatest taboos by marching soldiers inside the city limits. Worse than that, the army had shown decisively that its loyalty was to its leader, not to the state. The rule of law had been overturned, and a legally elected Tribune, whose person was meant to be sacrosanct, had been put to death. Others would lose little time in exploiting these fatal precedents.