One man in particular regarded the command as his by right. Marius had long had his eye on a war with Mithridates. Ten years previously he had travelled to Asia and confronted the King face to face, telling him with the bluntness of a man spoiling for a fight either to be stronger than Rome or to obey her commands. On that occasion Mithridates had managed to swallow his pride and back down from war. All the same, it may have been no coincidence that when at last he did rise to the bait the man who provoked him into doing so was a close ally of Marius. Manius Aquillius, the commissioner who incited Rome’s puppet king to invade Pontus, had previously served as Marius’ military deputy and consular colleague, and Marius in turn had helped secure Aquillius’ acquittal on a charge of extortion. The events and sources are murky, but it is possible that there is an explanation here for Aquillius’ otherwise seemingly cavalier attitude towards Rome’s security in the East, at a time when, back in Italy, she was fighting for her life. He had been aiming to provide his patron with a glorious Asian war.14
But the plot – if such indeed it were – was to have fatal consequences: for Aquillius himself, for Marius, and for the Republic as a whole. To the contagion of faction-fighting that had infected Rome for decades, racking first her own streets and then the whole of Italy, a new and deadly strain was about to be added. An Eastern command was a prize so rich that no one, not even Marius, could take it for granted. There were others, hungry and ambitious, who wanted it too. Just how badly would soon become clear.
That autumn of 89 BC, looking to the future, the Roman people found themselves in the grip of a collective paranoia. A terrible war was drawing to a close, but despite the victory there was only a sense of foreboding. Once again, it seemed, the gods were speaking through strange signs of the Republic’s doom. Most ominous of all was a trumpet, heard ringing out from a clear, cloudless sky. So dismal was its note that all those who heard it were driven half mad with fear. The augurs nervously consulted their books. When they did so they found, to their horror, that the meaning of such a wonder left little room for doubt: a great convulsion in the order of things was approaching. One age would pass away, another would dawn, in a revolution fated to consume the world.
LUCK BE A LADY
The Rivals
During the nineties Marius had gone shopping for real estate on the coast along from Naples. So had most of Rome’s super-rich, of course, but Marius’ investment in an area notorious for its indolence and effeminacy had raised particular eyebrows. Location, location, location: the great general had chosen a spot just south of the Lucrine Lake, where his villa would be conveniently situated not only for Orata’s oyster-beds, but also for the sulphur baths of the nearby spa town of Baiae. The perfect retirement home, in other words – and, as such, a public-relations disaster. Shellfish and health resorts were not what the Romans cared to associate with their war heroes. The satirists had a field day. The man of steel, they jeered, had grown soft and obese.
But this mockery was misdirected. Marius’ weight problems were only common gossip in the first place because, far from lounging by the side of his pool, the old general had chosen to remain in the public eye. Rome was the only conceivable theatre for a man of his fame, and Marius had never had the slightest intention of retiring. Ironically, this could be read in the architecture of the notorious villa itself. Built on a natural promontory, it mimicked the layout as well as the situation of a legionary camp, and displayed an enthusiasm for entrenchment that had always been the hallmark of Marius’ generalship. In its blending of the military virtues with imposing splendour, it was in fact the perfect expression of how the great general liked to see himself.
One of his former officers, inspecting the villa, could only exclaim in rueful approbation that, compared to his old commander, everyone else was blind. In the summer of 89 BC that officer had good reason to appreciate the qualities that made for an exemplary encampment. Down the coast from Marius’ villa, smoke billowed out over the orchards and vineyards of Campania as Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in command of a vast army of thirteen legions, blockaded the rebel-held cities of the plain, forcing their surrender one by one. No more apprenticeships for Sulla. Instead, a career marked by the struggle to emerge from Marius’ shadow had finally brought him a reputation as perhaps the ablest officer in the war. Yet even though the rivalry between the two men, veteran general and ambitious protégé, had long since grown poisonous, Sulla never made the mistake of underestimating his old commander. Where others saw marks of flabby degeneracy in Marius’ villa, Sulla found inspiration.
It was not only that its siting served as an object lesson in the science of entrenchment. On a coastline thronged with the resorts of the ruling classes the magnificence of Marius’ estate stood out. Traditional Roman morality may have frowned upon conspicuous consumption, but it also fostered competition as the essence of life. It was his clients’ scrabbling after status symbols that had enabled Orata to make such a killing. No Roman could afford to lose face, not even when it came to having a swimming pool installed. To the nobility, a villa was less important as a holiday home than as a public display of its owner’s splendour and high birth.
And yet Marius was a provincial. His breeding lacked pedigree, his manners polish. He had won his prestige on raw ability alone. If his villa loomed above those of the aristocracy, then it served as all the more vivid a symbol of the status that an outsider could hope to win in the Roman Republic. And Marius’ status was indisputable. Not only had he won election to just about every magistracy going – often several times over – but he had even married a bona fide Julian, patrician and still proud of it, despite her family’s decline. So it was that a nobody from Arpinum could claim that he slept with a descendant of the goddess of love. Naturally, none of this did anything to boost the great man’s popularity with the establishment. Even so, Marius’ example was one that Sulla, though himself a patrician, would have been eager – and indeed anxious – to absorb.
For the younger man’s career too had been a struggle against the circumstances of his upbringing. Despite his noble birth, his father had died leaving him virtually penniless, and throughout his youth Sulla’s means had been humiliatingly disproportionate to his pretensions. He had gradually sunk into a world of seedy lodgings and even seedier companions – comics, prostitutes and drag-queens – to whom, however, he would display a touching loyalty all his life, to the immense scandal of his peers. Sulla had relished the demi-monde even as he struggled to escape from it; nor was he ever to lose his taste for slumming. Hard drinking and wisecracking, he combined the aptitudes of a bar-fly with the natural talents of a gigolo, being as physically striking as he was charming, with piercing blue eyes and hair so golden that it was almost red. Ultimately, indeed, it had been sex appeal that had redeemed him from the ranks of the déclassé, for one of Rome’s best-paid courtesans had grown so obsessed with him that in her will she had left him everything she owned. At around the same time Sulla’s stepmother had also died, having similarly appointed him her sole heir. Only at thirty, an age when most nobles had already spent years climbing the slippery pole of advancement, had Sulla at last found himself with the funds to launch his political career.