CHAP. XXXI. DEATH OF M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. 245 generations. It combined in the person of Livia, the wife of Augustus, with those of Tiberius and Caius, to render the empire of the Cæsars a popular institution. ers. From the moment, indeed, that Drusus avowed himself the champion of the Italians the hostility of the privileged classes at home was aroused against him. Even in his own house he was feared and denounced as a public enemy. Among his family was a nephew, M. Porcius Cato, afterwards illustrious, then but a child of four years. A chief of the Marsians, at his uncle's table, amused himself by asking the child to support the Italian cause. The little Cato sturdily refused. He was offered playthings and sweetmeats, but still refused. At last the Marsian, piqued at his obstinacy, held him by the leg from the window, and again demanded his assent with the direst threats. But caresses and menaces proved equally fruitless, and the Italian sighed to think what resistance he must expect from the men of Rome if a mere child could display a courage so inflexible. The career of Drusus, however, was a short and sad one. The indisposition of both senators and knights to his measures became more strong and vehement. He was compelled to throw himself more unreservedly into the hands of the foreignTo the last he struggled to confine them within legitimate limits, and came forward himself to denounce a plot formed by them for the assassination of the consuls. But they passed at last beyond his control. Pompædius Silo, the chief of the Marsians, marched with ten thousand men along by-roads, and threatened to make a rush at the city. The Senate consented to parley with him, and held out hopes of concession. For the moment blows were averted; but in the Senate-house the discussion was still animated, and the decision dubious. Some of the Italians themselves wavered; some of their champions in the city were gained over. When the day for voting arrived the consul Marcius Philippus attempted to break up the meeting. One of the tribunes' officers seized and throttled him. The city was thrown into a state of the fiercest excitement. Tribunes were arrayed against tribunes, nobles against nobles, Romans against Romans, Italians against Italians. The streets were traversed by armed bands on either side. Civil war seemed imminent. At this crisis Drusus, attended by a number of his adherents, was returning to his house. B.O. 91. Passing through a dark corridor, he felt himself suddenly struck, and fell to the ground, exclaiming, "When will Rome again find so good a citizen?" The assassin escaped in the crowd. U.C. 623. The murder was generally imputed to the Senatorial faction, and specially to the consul Philippus. The magistrates refused inquiry, and exerted themselves all the more to abrogate such of their victim's measures as had already passed into law, while his adherents were too stupefied to resist. They put up their creatures to impeach some of the noblest Optimates, who were themselves partisans of the movement. A Bestia, a Cotta, a Mummius, a Pompeius, and a Memmius were condemned. Among the accused was the illustrious Emilius Scaurus. He deigned only to reply, "Varius the Iberian charges Scaurus, prince of the Senate, with exciting the Italians to revolt. Scaurus denies it. Romans! which of them do you believe?" The people absolved him with acclamations. sources. The Italians had already concerted an alliance, and flew to arms. The death of their champion Drusus, and the prostration of their adherents within the city, reduced them to their own national reThe Marsians were summoned to take the lead, and their chief, Pompædius Silo, was the soul of the confederacy. The Pelignians, the Picentines, the Vestines, the Marrucines, the Samnites, the Lucanians, and the Apulians, together with the Marsians, gave mutual hostages and resolved on a simultaneous rising. They proposed to constitute a great federal republic, with consuls, prætors, and a Senate of five hundred nobles, and chose for their capital the stronghold of Corfinium, in the country of the Pelignians, giving it the name of Italica. This alliance was confined, indeed, for the most part to the Sabellian tribes. The Etrurians, the Latins, and the Umbrians held aloof from it, and together with Campania, which had become thoroughly Romanized, adhered to the fortunes of Rome. The Bruttians no longer existed as a nation; and the cities of Magna Græcia had ceased to have any political importance. The Gauls beyond the Rubicon, who had aided Hannibal against the Romans, long since exhausted or satisfied, made no effort now to recover their independence. What was the relative strength of the combatants thus arrayed against each other? Three centuries earlier, at the date of the Gaulish invasion, the nations of Sabellia, together with the Apulians, could arm, it is said, 200,000 men; while the Etrurians, Latins, and Umbrians boasted 120,000 warriors. Supposing the same proportions to remain, the allies who still remained to the republic may have alone balanced three fifths of the whole force opposed to her. But the census of Rome numbered at this time at least 400,000 warriors, and she could draw largely from her provinces beyond the peninsula. Her forces, therefore, trebled or quadrupled those of her adversaries. She held, moreover, the chief places of strength throughout their territories, connected by the great military roads. From these resources, however, ample deduction must be made. Powerful garrisons were to be maintained at every point of her vast empire. In Greece and Asia, in Spain and Africa, Rome was still encamped. The disposition of her allies was doubtful and precarious; her own citizens were capricious; CHAP. XXXI. THE MARSIC OR SOCIAL WAR. 247 jealousies and suspicions were rife among her own chiefs and leaders. The Social or Marsic War commenced in the year B.C. 90, and lasted through three campaigns. The republic was taken by surprise, while the Italians had long prepared themselves to U.C. 664. become the assailants. Operations were carried on at B.C. 90. the same time throughout all the central regions of the peninsula. The historians enumerate the opposing commanders on both sides, and give a long list of their engagements, in which they almost uniformly claim a victory for the Romans. Among the captains of the republic we meet with various names which become illustrious at a later date. Marius himself was a veteran in arms, but he seems not to have been intrusted with extensive command, and he was perhaps too closely connected with the enemy to take active measures against them. But around him were ranged an L. Cæsar, a Rutilius, a Pompeius Strabo, and a greater than these, L. Cornelius Sulla, who gained, indeed, the chief laurels of the war. A Cæpio, with the curse of the Tolosa gold weighing on his house, was defeated and slain. The young Cn. Pompeius bore arms in these operations; and Cicero, the chief of Roman orators, earned under the auspices of Strabo his first and only stipend. On the side of the Italians the most distinguished leaders were Pompædius, Judacilius, and Motulus, who seem to have maintained the Italian cause with constancy, and eventually with more success than our accounts would lead us to expect. Even in the midst of their reputed victories the Romans empowered the consul Cæsar to offer to their allies all the advantages which they refused to their adversaries. The lex Julia conferred the franchise on the Etrurians and the Umbrians. Two years later they made up their minds to extend this boon by the lex Plautia Papiria even to the confedcrated Italians. Every Italian who chose to come to Rome and claim the franchise within sixty days was received into the bosom of the commonwealth. Ten tribes were added to the thirty-five already existing. The offer, after all, was not very generally accepted. The Roman religion required that every legal measure should be sanctioned by certain ceremonies, and these could only be performed within the sacred precincts of the city. It was admitted on all hands that the suffrage could only be given at Rome. Accordingly the franchise offered little attraction to distant citizens, who were required to forego their local citizenship for a privilege they had little opportunity of exercising. After all the blood which had been shed in the struggle, the Italians found themselves content for the most part to retain their old position. The roll of the Roman citizens, which in the census of 640 numbered 394,336, in that of 668 (B.c. 86), the next of which we have account, had not increased beyond 463,000, and sixteen years later was only 450,000. But the precedent now set for the first time on so large a scale bore ample fruit in the course of later Roman history. The full franchise was conceded in special instances to various states in Spain, Gaul, and Africa; while the Latin, which conferred, as we have seen, a certain eligibility for the Roman, was even more widely diffused. Pompeius Strabo extended it to the entire nation of the Transpadane Gauls. On the whole, the liberal concessions of this period evince in a marked manner the prudence of the Roman government at one of the most critical moments of its career. The strong national prejudice against which they were carried was now finally overthrown, and the Roman writers uniformly agree in applauding the policy which dictated them, and ascribing thereto the preservation of the state at this time, and the unabated vigor of its subsequent progress. CHAPTER XXXII. Rise of L. Cornelius Sulla.-Mithridates, king of Pontus, defies the republic and causes a massacre of Roman citizens in Asia Minor.-Quarrel between Marius and Sulla.-Marius compelled to flee from the city.-His wanderings and adventures.-Sulla takes the command in Asia.-Cinna creates disturbance, and is expelled from the city.-Marius and Cinna unite and occupy Rome, and make a bloody proscription of the Senatorial party.-Murder of Octavius, Crassus, Antonius, and Merula.-Marius attains his seventh consulship, and dies, possibly by his own hand.-Reputed sacrifice of Q. Mucius Scævola at his funeral. (B.C. 88-86.) THE names of the great leaders of parties have been for some time coming more and more into prominence in our annals, and the history of Rome will now for many years chiefly chronicle the personal rivalry of her warriors and statesmen. In the year which closed the contest of the republic with her Italian allies Sulla was forty-nine years old, Marius about seventy. From campaign to campaign Sulla had dogged the steps of the elder captain, and was always ready to step in and seize the opportunities which the other cast carelessly in his way. Not that Marius was indifferent to the progress of his junior. He felt chagrin at the contrast in their birth and origin, for L. Sulla, though needy in point of fortune, was a scion of the illustrious house of the Cornelii, and knew the advantage of such a connection. Sulla, moreover, was trained in Grecian accomplishments, which Marius vainly pretended to despise CHAP. XXXII. RIVALRY OF MARIUS AND SULLA. 249 Sulla spoke and wrote Greek; his autobiography became probably the text-book of the Greek historians of Rome, from whom we chiefly derive our accounts of him. Yet his nature was essentially rough and plebeian. With the affectation of letters he combined, like many other noble Romans, addiction to gross debauchery and mean associates. His eyes, we are told, were of a piercing blue, and their sinister expression was heightened by the coarseness of his complexion, disfigured by pimples and blotches, compared by the raillery of the Greeks to a mulberry sprinkled with meal. His manners were haughty and morose, though not devoid of a certain sensibility, for he was easily moved, it is said, even to tears, by a tale of sorrow. No single act of kindliness and generosity is recorded of him. The nobles, who accepted him as their champion, had no personal liking for him. Yet the aggrandizement of his party was a species of fanaticism with him. He despised the isolated ascendency of a Marius, and aspired to rule in Rome at the head of a dominant oligarchy. 1. C. 88. Marius had quitted the camp at the most critical moment of the war, and during his retirement Sulla brought the contest to a close, having obtained the consulship in 666. The arrange- U.c. 666. ments for peace were hastened by the threats of a war with Mithridates, king of Pontus. Sulla was still consul when it became necessary to choose a general to command in the East. For this command Sulla had now the highest claim; but Marius was jealous, and mortified at having imprudently given way to him. He hurried back to Rome, showed himself among the young soldiers at exercise in the Campus, and tried to prove himself still apt for arms by running, wrestling, and swimming in rivalry with them. But the nobles no longer regarded him; they had found another champion on whom they could rely. They mocked the clumsy feats of the veteran candidate, and persuaded the people to reject and dismiss him to his retreat in Campania. The business in hand demanded, indeed, a man of the maturest powers, as well as the highest abilities. Pontus, on the eastern shores of the Euxine Sea, the region from which Mithridates took his title, constituted but a small part of his dominions. His patrimonial kingdom he inherited from a line of princes of high Persian extraction, and he was himself the sixth of his name. To the north he had extended his sway over the Cimmerian Bosporus as far as the Borysthenes, while to the south he had received from his father the sovereign ty of Phrygia, which the republic had sold for a sum of money. This country, indeed, the Romans had recently wrested from him; but he had indemnified himself by placing an infant child of his own on the throne of Cappadocia. The armies of Mithridates were recruited from the hardy mountaineers of the Caucasus and the |