703. Roman Civil War: Marching on the Senate (Part 3): summary and key takeaways

When the assembly in Rome stripped Lucius Cornelius Sulla of his command against Mithridates and awarded it to his aging rival Gaius Marius, Sulla refused to submit to constitutional procedure. He retreated to his camp at Nola, where six battle-tested legions were preparing to depart for Greece and the promise of immense eastern plunder. Sulla recognized that his soldiers feared losing their spoils if Marius took charge and recruited new men. Playing on their greed and his own wounded aristocratic pride, he urged the troops to follow him against the capital. In Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland's view, this appeal transformed a constitutional dispute into an existential crisis for the Roman Republic.

Almost all of Sulla's senior officers deserted him in horror, refusing to participate in an armed assault on their own homeland. Only a single quaestor remained loyal to Sulla as he ordered the army to march toward Rome. The city was defenseless, as the Senate had never conceived of a Roman commander turning his weapons against the heart of the state. When envoys from Rome met Sulla on the Appian Way and questioned why he marched against his native city, he replied that he came to deliver her from tyrants. This shocking justification ignored centuries of Roman legal precedent that forbade armed troops from crossing the sacred city boundary.

Sulla's legions breached the Pomerium, crossing the sacred perimeter where Roman commanders were strictly forbidden to lead armed men. Fierce street fighting erupted as citizens climbed atop flat roofs and hurled roof tiles down onto the advancing soldiers. Sulla met this resistance with brutal resolve, ordering archers to shoot fire arrows onto civilian rooftops and setting entire streets ablaze. The legions pressed through the smoke and the flames until Sulla reached the Senate House, posting armed guards at its doors. With physical control of Rome secured, Sulla compelled the frightened senators to declare Marius, the tribune Sulpicius, and ten of their associates public enemies. Sulpicius was hunted down and betrayed by his own slave, while the elderly Marius narrowly slipped out of the city into desperate flight.

Having seized power through armed insurrection, Sulla discovered that holding Rome required at least the pretense of constitutional legitimacy. He could not openly rule as a naked autocrat without provoking massive domestic resistance from both the aristocracy and the populace. Sulla permitted the consular elections for the upcoming year of eighty-seven BC to go forward, hoping that reliable allies would secure the executive offices. To his fury, the Roman voters rejected his favored candidates and chose Lucius Cornelius Cinna and Gnaeus Octavius instead. While Octavius was an uncompromising conservative, Cinna was an outspoken opponent of Sulla who had already threatened him with legal prosecution.

To protect his position before departing for the East, Sulla forced both incoming consuls to ascend the Capitoline Hill and swear solemn oaths not to overturn his legislation. Cinna performed a flamboyant ritual by picking up a stone and hurling it to the ground, praying that he might be cast out of Rome if he broke faith. Sulla remained deeply skeptical of Cinna's sincerity, but he lacked the time to linger in Italy. Across the Aegean, King Mithridates the Sixth of Pontus was overrunning Roman territory and slaughtering Roman citizens with impunity. Mithridates had ordered the coordinated extermination of around eighty thousand Romans and Italians across Asia Minor in a single day, shocking the Mediterranean world.

The rebellion against Roman hegemony also ignited the Greek mainland, where the city of Athens staged a revolution against its pro-Roman oligarchs. An Athenian philosopher named Aristion seized control of the city and allied directly with Mithridates, inviting an army from Pontus across the Aegean Sea. Sulla realized that he could not delay his eastern expedition without surrendering the entire Greek world to the king of Pontus. Before departing, Sulla attempted to leave a loyal force behind in Italy by ordering Pompeius Rufus to relieve the unscrupulous general Pompeius Strabo of his command. Instead, Strabo encouraged his own soldiers to murder Pompeius Rufus during a religious sacrifice, leaving Sulla with no choice but to sail for Greece and abandon Italy to its fate.

While Sulla sailed east, the sixty-nine-year-old Gaius Marius endured an astonishing sequence of escapes across Italy and the Mediterranean. Declared an outlaw with a bounty on his head, Marius fled from Rome hiding beneath a cart loaded with beans. He reached the port of Ostia and boarded a ship bound for North Africa, where he retained loyal veterans from his historic victories against Jugurtha. A violent storm wrecked his vessel along the Italian coastline, forcing the elderly general to hike through swamps while evading search parties. In one famous episode, Marius buried himself up to his neck in the mud of a coastal marsh, waiting in terror while pursuers combed the reeds around him.

Local authorities eventually discovered Marius shivering and caked in filth, dragging him to a holding cell in the nearby town of Minturnae. Unwilling to execute the savior of Rome themselves, the town magistrates dispatched a captured Cimbric slave to decapitate the sleeping general in the dark. As the assassin entered the gloomy cell, Marius fixed him with piercing eyes and bellowed in a terrible voice, demanding whether he dared to murder Gaius Marius. Terrified by the old conqueror's supernatural aura, the Cimbric warrior dropped his sword and bolted into the street crying that he could not kill the man. Shaken by this omen, the townspeople decided to spare Marius, placing him on a boat that carried him across the sea to the ruins of ancient Carthage.

When the Roman governor of Africa warned Marius to leave the province or face execution as a public enemy, the exile delivered a haunting reply. He instructed the messenger to inform the governor that he had witnessed Gaius Marius, a ruined fugitive, sitting among the ruins of Carthage. Tom Holland notes that this iconic scene captured the dramatic reversal of Roman fortune, pairing the fallen general with the devastated capital of Rome's greatest historical rival. Marius bided his time in Africa, convinced by childhood prophecies that he was destined to achieve a record-breaking seventh consulship. Back in Rome, political order was rapidly disintegrating once again, providing the opening Marius desperately awaited.

Back in Rome, the tenuous truce between the newly installed consuls shattered almost immediately after Sulla's departure. Lucius Cornelius Cinna sought to enroll newly enfranchised Italian citizens across all voting tribes, provoking furious resistance from his conservative colleague Gnaeus Octavius. Street violence exploded in the Forum, and Octavius used armed force to drive Cinna out of the city. The Senate promptly stripped Cinna of his consulship and proclaimed him a public enemy, repeating the exact legal overreach that Sulla had pioneered. Cinna fled to the army stationed at Nola, winning over the legions by presenting himself as the legitimate consul wrongfully deposed by senatorial oligarchs.

Hearing that civil conflict had erupted again, Marius returned from North Africa accompanied by his son and a small band of hardened loyalists. Landing in Etruria, Marius used his legendary reputation to recruit an army of desperate runaways, agricultural slaves, and impoverished veterans. Cinna and Marius joined forces, advancing on Rome from multiple directions to cut off the capital's grain supplies. The Senate desperately appealed to Pompeius Strabo, who brought his legions to the Colline Gate but played both sides while awaiting the highest bidder. Strabo's scheming ended abruptly when plague swept his encampment, and a sudden bolt of lightning incinerated him in his tent. Strabo's sudden demise left his nineteen-year-old son, Pompey, in command of the family's extensive private client base.

With Strabo dead, Rome was starved into submission, and the Senate threw open the gates to Cinna and Marius. Gnaeus Octavius refused to flee and was murdered in his curule chair, his severed head displayed on the Rostra in the Forum. Marius launched an unhinged bloodbath against his political enemies, sending slave death squads through the streets to butcher senators and aristocrats without trial. Cinna eventually found the violence so repulsive that he surrounded Marius's marauding slaves and massacred them all to restore basic order. In eighty-six BC, Marius secured his coveted seventh consulship, fulfilling the ancient prophecy, but he died of disease and delirium just seventeen days into his term.

Far across the Mediterranean, Sulla ignored the catastrophic news from Italy and concentrated entirely on crushing the Pontic invasion of Greece. He marched his legions through Boeotia and laid siege to Athens, determined to punish the city for its alliance with Mithridates. Inside the walls, the philosopher Aristion conducted a bizarre defense, standing on the ramparts to shout obscene verses and insults about Sulla's blotchy complexion. Sulla showed no romantic sentimentality for classical Greek heritage, ordering his engineers to fell the sacred trees of the Academy and the Lyceum to build siege towers. After months of grueling starvation, Roman troops breached the Athenian defenses in March of eighty-six BC, unleashing a terrifying sack upon the ancient cultural capital.

Sulla permitted his soldiers to slaughter citizens and plunder homes, though he ultimately spared Athens from total destruction out of respect for its illustrious ancestors. Aristion retreated to the Acropolis for a desperate final stand before being captured and forced to drink poison. Leaving Athens ruined and stripped of its democratic institutions, Sulla marched north into Boeotia to confront the massive armies Mithridates had ferried into Greece. Despite facing overwhelming numerical odds, Sulla outmaneuvered and obliterated the Pontic forces in two brilliant pitched battles at Chaeronea and Orchomenus. These crushing defeats broke Mithridates' military power in Europe, forcing the king to seek an audience with Sulla along the shores of the Hellespont.

At the meeting in Dardanus, Sulla agreed to remarkably lenient peace terms because he desperately needed to return to Italy and confront Cinna's hostile regime. Mithridates agreed to surrender his territorial conquests in Asia Minor, hand over seventy warships, and pay an indemnity, but he was permitted to retain his ancestral kingdom of Pontus. Sulla extracted massive financial penalties from the Greek cities of Asia Minor, demanding five years of back taxes that plunged the province into crippling debt. He also looted invaluable cultural treasures, including the library containing original works of Aristotle and the columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. With the eastern war concluded, Sulla prepared to transport his victorious legions back across the Adriatic Sea, setting the stage for an inevitable civil war against the rulers of Rome.