his assassins. He was slain by one Censorinus, despatched for that purpose; his head was cut off and suspended to the Rostra. Among many other distinguished men sacrificed by Marius to his vengeance was M. Antonius, the famous orator. Q. Catulus, the partaker of Marius' triumph over the Cimbri, who besought his life on his knees, was compelled to commit suicide. But the perpetrator of these horrors was soon to feel himself the stroke of fate. He had caused himself to be named consul for the seventh time, with Cinna as his colleague, for the year B. C. 86; but he had not enjoyed his dignity more than eighteen days, when he expired, after a short illness, of a pleurisy, in the seventy-first year of his age.1 During the next three or four years Sulla continued to be engaged in Greece and Asia, and the Marian faction. was predominant at Rome. Order reigned in the capital, or rather all opposition was for a while suppressed; but it was the silence of terror, to be broken at the first opportunity. The anxiety occasioned by numerous portents betrayed the inquietude of the public mind. But the only person who appears to have suffered at this period was Sulla. While he was gaining victories for the republic, his house was demolished, his villas burnt, his wife compelled to fly with her children. Sulla, however, let his adversaries have their way till he had brought the war with Mithridates to a successful conclusion, B. c. 84; and at the beginning of the following year he returned to Italy. He had previously written to the senate, recounting his services, upbraiding them for their ingratitude, and threatening a speedy vengeance. When he landed at Brundusium, he had only between 30,000 and 40,000 men; but they were veteran troops, inured to service and flushed with victory. The Marian party had five times that number, and might reckon on the support of the 1 For this period in general, see Appian, B. C. i.; Plut. in Marius and Sylla; Vell. Pat. ii. 11-23; Liv. discontented Italians. But they had lost their leader, Cinna; they had no general of any eminence; their troops were scattered in various places, and a great part of them was ready to desert to the standards of a commander like Sulla. Cn. Pompeius, in particular, who now makes his first appearance in history at the early age of twenty-two, privately raised three legions in Picenum, where he had large estates, to support the cause of Sulla. Several other distinguished and influential men also offered their services. It was in the year B. c. 83, while parties remained in this state, and nothing decisive had yet been done, that the Capitoline temple was destroyed by fire. Its destruction, according to Tacitus, was the act of an incendiary ;1 but whether it was done by the Marian faction or that of Sulla, or what was the motive of the perpetrator, is unknown. It had now existed in its original state four centuries and a quarter. The consuls for the year B. c. 82 were Papirius Carbo and C. Marius, son of the conqueror of the Cimbri, but himself a mere nominis umbra.' On marching against Sulla he is said to have carried off from various temples, and especially from the ruins of that of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, 13,000 pounds weight of gold.2 Defeated with his allies, the Samnites, on the plain of Pimpinara, he shut himself up in Præneste, and Sulla, leaving one of his officers to blockade him there, marched straight upon Rome. If the younger Marius possessed not the talents of his father, he at least equalled him in cruelty. He employed the interval before Sulla could reach Rome to despatch orders for the murder of Sulla's principal adherents. It was on this occasion that the learned and virtuous Pontifex Maximus, Q. Mucius Scævola, was murdered. Four years before, upon the death of the elder 1 'Privata fraude.'-Hist. iii. 72. 2 Plin. H. N. xxxiii. 5; Val. Max. vi. 6, 4. Marius, Scævola had already been insulted by the mock ceremony of an immolation to the manes of that butcher. The ancient usage of a human sacrifice at funerals had now been superseded by those gladiatorial combats in which the victims fell by one another's hands; but Fimbria, the brutal tribune, revived at least the image of the primitive custom by inflicting on the Pontifex a wound, so that his blood should bedew the funeral pile of Marius. Now, by one of those ferocious jokes which find their parallel only amidst the butcheries of the French revolution, Scævola was, in gladiatorial terms, accused of having received the blow on the former occasion in a cowardly manner (quod parcius corpore telum recepisset'). The Pontifex took refuge at the eternal fires which burnt on the altar of Vesta, but the solemnity of that holy place failed to inspire his assassins with awe, and the blood of the murdered priest besprinkled the statue of the goddess." Like the leaders of the Reign of Terror in France, most of these butchers suffered themselves violent and horrible deaths. The younger Marius perished soon after by suicide, while attempting to escape through a common sewer from Præneste. Meanwhile Rome had narrowly escaped destruction. Pontius Telesinus and L. Lamponius Gutta, at the head of the Samnites and Lucanians, after an abortive attempt to relieve Præneste, had marched upon the capital with the avowed purpose of razing it to the ground, and had encamped on the spot occupied by the Gauls after the battle 1 Val. Max. ix. 11, 2; cf. Cic. Pro Roscio Am. 12. 2 Cic. De Orat. iii. 3; Lucan, ii. 126; Florus, iii. 21, 21. Velleius Paterculus (ii. 26), however, says that Scævola was killed, along with other victims, in the Curia Hostilia. The sprinkled statue, however, must be a rhetorical exaggeration of Cicero's; for, according to Ovid, Vesta had no statue : Esse diu stultus Vestæ simulacra putavi, Ovid here, like Horace, calls the of the Allia. Fortunately Sulla arrived just in time to avert such a catastrophe. Before his arrival, Claudius, at the head of a band of young patricians, had made a desperate and forlorn assault upon an army of 50,000 Italians, which, of course, only resulted in their own destruction. Rome was filled with dismay, expecting every moment the entrance of the victorious bands. But towards midday Sulla's van, consisting of a body of cavalry, was descried, and soon after Sulla himself arrived with the bulk of his army. He ranged his troops before the Porta Collina, in the hollow between the Quirinal and Pincian, near the present Villa Ludovisi, and though the day was far advanced he resolved to charge the enemy immediately. A Temple of Venus Erycina, which stood just outside the Colline Gate, may have inspired him with confidence. He was an assiduous devotee of that goddess, and he is said to have seen her the night before in a dream, fighting for him in the first ranks. But on this occasion Mars at least was unpropitious, and in spite of the exertions and personal valour of Sulla, he was defeated. His troops fled in disorder towards the Porta Collina, bearing down and trampling on a great many citizens who had come out to see the battle; and the enemy were only prevented from entering the gate with the fugitives by the letting down of a sort of portcullis, which crushed a number of men. On the other hand, Crassus, with the right wing of the army, was victorious; and he succeeded in driving back the confederates to Antemnæ, near the confluence of the Tiber and the Anio. Sulla joined Crassus here on the following morning, when Antemnæ was taken, and the confederates, who had suffered great loss, were in full retreat. A body of three thousand of them laid down their arms on condition of pardon. But when Sulla entered Rome he caused them to be shut up, with about the same number of prisoners, in the Villa Publica. On the third day after the battle he convoked the senate in the Temple of Bellona, which stood near that building. He had ordered his troops to cut down all the prisoners; and while he was addressing the senate, the hearts of the Conscript Fathers were chilled with terror at the shrieks and dying groans of 6,000 men. Sulla, after rebuking their emotion, calmly continued his discourse: Trouble not yourselves,' he exclaimed, with what is passing without; it is only some rascals that I have ordered to be punished!' A fitting prelude to the horrors that were to follow. In cold, calculating cruelty, Sulla must be allowed the pre-eminence among the men of that period. He drew up his list of proscriptions with much method, subjecting it to several revisions; it is said to have contained between 4,000 and 5,000 names,1 and was posted up in the Forum like the edicts of the prætors. We may fancy with what interest the names were perused. The inquisitive reader might, perchance, light upon his own! The conjuncture seems to have been used, like the Reign of Terror in France, to get rid of private enemies or those whose death was desirable. It seemed a general license to slay. The heads of the victims were hung in grim array around the tribune; among them was that of Marius, the youthful air of which excited the jocularity of Sulla. But the space sufficed not. The superabundant heads were displayed around the Lacus Servilius, a fountain on the other side of the Forum, just opposite to the tribune, and at the top of the Vicus Jugarius, a street now pretty nearly represented by the Via della Consolazione. Cicero, in his speech for Roscius, makes a jocose allusion to the subject, comparing the Servilian lake to that of Trasimene.3 Sulla, calmly seated at the tribunal 1 Val. Max. ix. 2, 1. 26 "Quisquis voluit, occidit.'-Florus, iii. 21, 25. 3Multos occisos non ad Trasime num lacum sed ad Servilium vidimus.'-Pro Rosc. Am. 32. Cf. Senec. Prov. 3; Festus, p. 290 (Müll.). |