Everyone knew that to traverse this would be a gesture of awesome and terrible significance. Rome was numinous with the presence of gods, but there were few spaces more holy than the pomerium, the ancient boundary that marked the furrow ploughed by Romulus, and had not been altered since the time of the kings. To cross it was absolutely forbidden to any citizen in arms: within the pomerium was the realm of Jupiter, the city’s guardian, and the guarantor of her peace. He was a god it was perilous to anger, so when Sulla told Marius’ envoys that he would accept their terms they may even have believed him. But Sulla had been dissembling: no sooner had Marius’ envoys set off back for Rome than he ordered his legions to follow, advancing in separate divisions to seize three of the city gates. Mighty though Jupiter was, Sulla continued to rely upon the blessings of Venus, the goddess of fortune, and a divinity – he trusted – just as great.
As the legionaries passed over the pomerium and began pushing through the narrow streets, their fellow citizens greeted them with a hail of tiles flung down from the rooftops. Such was the ferocity of this assault that for a moment the soldiers quailed, until Sulla ordered that fire-arrows be shot at the roofs. As flames began to crackle and spread down the line of the city’s highways Sulla himself rode along the greatest of them all, the via Sacra, into the very heart of Rome. Marius and Sulpicius, after a futile attempt to raise the city’s slaves, had already fled. Everywhere, mail-clad guards took up their new posts. Swords and armour were worn outside the Senate House. The unthinkable had happened. A general had made himself the master of Rome.
It was a moment pregnant with menace. Later generations, with the benefit of hindsight, would see in it the great turning point of which the augurs had warned: the passing of an old age, the dawning of a new. Certainly, with the march on Rome of a Roman army, a watershed had been reached. Something like innocence had gone. Competition for honours had always been the lifeblood of the Republic, but now something deadly had been introduced into it, nor could its presence there, a lurking toxin, easily be forgotten. Defeat in elections, or in a lawsuit, or in a debate in the Senate – these had previously been the worst that a citizen might have had to dread. But Sulla, in his pursuit of Marius, was pushing rivalry and personal hatred to new extremes. From that moment on, the memory of it would haunt every ambitious citizen – both as a temptation and as a fear.
And naturally, having taken his fateful step, Sulla was desperate to force his advantage home. Summoning the Senate, he demanded that his opponents be branded enemies of the state. The Senate, with one nervous eye on Sulla’s guards, hurriedly obeyed. Sentences of outlawry were duly pronounced on Marius, Sulpicius and ten others, including Marius’ young son. Sulpicius, having been betrayed by a slave, was hunted down and murdered, but the other condemned men all escaped. Marius himself, after a series of hair-raising adventures that saw him hiding in reed beds and outfacing contract killers, eventually reached the relative safety of Africa. To that extent, Sulla’s gamble had failed: the snake had been scotched, not killed. Marius had survived to fight another day. But Sulla, although he was disappointed, was not unduly alarmed. The condemnation of his great rival had been something more than just a deeply satisfying act of personal vengeance. He had also intended it to give another message: by identifying his own cause with that of the Republic, he hoped to recast his march on Rome as an action in its defence. Backed by five legions he may have been, but to Sulla legitimacy remained more important than any naked use of power. During the outlawry debate, when a venerable senator had told him to his face that a great man such as Marius should never be made a public enemy, Sulla had accepted the old man’s right to dissent without demur. Whenever he could, he would behave with a similar regard towards the sensibilities of his compatriots. Far from playing the military despot, he preferred to pose as the defender of the constitution.
Nor was this mere hypocrisy. If Sulla was a revolutionary, then it was very much in the cause of the status quo. Hostile towards any hint of innovation, he had all of Sulpicius’ legislation declared invalid. To replace it, he brought in laws of his own, aimed at bolstering the traditional supremacy of the Senate. Despite distaste for its soi-disant champion, the Senate can hardly have been averse to such measures. Yet Sulla remained caught in a dilemma. Eager to leave Italy for the Mithridatic war, but afraid of what might happen in his absence, he knew that it was vital for him to leave supporters in positions of power. Interfere too blatantly in the annual elections, however, and his claim to embody the rule of law would become laughable. As it was, he suffered the humiliation of seeing his allies failing to gain either of the consulships. True, one of the successful candidates, Gnaeus Octavius, was a natural conservative, like himself, but the second, Cornelius Cinna, had gone so far as to threaten him with prosecution. In the circumstances Sulla accepted defeat with as good a grace as he could muster. Before he would agree to the new consuls taking up their office, however, he required them to swear a public oath on the sacred hill of the Capitol that they would never overturn his legislation. Octavius and Cinna, evidently unwilling to push their luck, agreed. As he took the oath Cinna picked up a stone and hurled it, publicly praying that if he failed to keep his word to Sulla he might similarly be hurled out of Rome.
And with that Sulla had to be satisfied. Before he crossed from Italy to Greece, however, he took one final measure. Wishing to reward a faithful ally at the same time as ensuring his own security, he arranged for the command of Strabo’s legions to be transferred to Pompeius Rufus, his colleague in the consulship of 88 BC. In fact, far from ensuring his friend’s safety, such a measure served only to demonstrate how blind Sulla had been to the implications of his troops’ willingness to march with him on Rome. Just as Marius’ legate had done, Rufus arrived at his new army’s camp armed with a bill and nothing more. Strabo welcomed the man come to take his place with a menacing politeness. He presented Rufus to the troops, then absented himself from the camp – on business, he claimed. The next day Rufus celebrated his new command by performing a sacrifice. A gang of soldiers clustered round him where he stood by the altar, and as he raised the sacrificial knife they seized him and struck him down, ‘as though he were the sacrificial offering himself’.4 Strabo, claiming to be outraged, hurried back to the camp but took no action against his murderous troops. Inevitably, the rumours that had dogged Sulla in similar circumstances now attached themselves to Strabo. There were few who doubted that he had ordered the murder of his replacement himself.
A consul butchered by his own soldiers: Rufus’ fate might seem to confirm the doom-laden judgement of a later generation, that after Sulla’s coup ‘there was nothing left which could shame warlords into holding back on military violence – not the law, not the institutions of the Republic, nor even the love of Rome’.5 In fact, it illustrated the opposite. Far from following up Rufus’ murder by launching a coup of his own, Strabo held back from committing himself to any course of action at all. Aware that with Sulla gone from Italy he now held the balance of power, he spent the year 87 veering from faction to faction, offering his support to the highest bidder, all the while making ever more extravagant demands. Such avarice and trimming served only to compound his already massive unpopularity. Then, towards the end of the year, nemesis struck. Following his spectacular death, when the tent in which he lay dying of plague was struck by lightning, crowds mobbed his funeral procession and dragged the corpse from its bier through the mud. Without the intervention of a tribune, it would have been torn to shreds. In a society where prestige was the principal measure of a man’s worth Strabo’s posthumous fate was a grisly warning to anyone tempted to gamble with the interests of the state. Yet not even Strabo, grasping as he was and armed with opportunity, had thought to aim for military dictatorship. Sulla’s coup had been an outrage but not, it seemed, a fatal one. The laws, the institutions of the Republic and the love of Rome still held good.