The Historians' History of the World 05

“When Caius Gracchus fell,” said Mirabeau, “he seized a handful of dust tinged with his blood and flung it toward the sky; from that dust was born Marius.” This phrase of Mirabeau’s, though a whit rhetorical, is historically true. The patricians were willing to cede nothing to the Gracchi, and they were decimated by Marius. The struggle changed its methods: one fought no more with laws as the only weapons, but yet more with proscriptions. Marius was the incarnated pleb; as ignorant, pitiless, formidable, he had something of Danton, except that Danton was no soldier.b

Marius had taken no part hitherto in the old contentions of classes at Rome. But his plebeian origin, the attitude of defiance he had assumed towards the nobles on the occasion of his first election to the consulship, the outrage he had done to establish usage in the enlistment of proletarians, above all, perhaps, the arrogance with which he had extorted so many successive consulships from the hands of the most illustrious competitors, all combined to mark him as the champion of the “movement party,” whatever its immediate objects or popular cry might be.

Under the shadow of his anti-oligarchical aggressions, the people and their tribunes renewed the demands of the era of the Gracchi. The knights were irritated by the loss of their monopoly of the judicia, and a cry for a new agrarian distribution was always sure to interest a portion at least of the multitude. But envy and spite against unpopular individuals among the nobles were still more effective instruments to work with. Q. Servilius Cæpio, who had been defeated by the Cimbrians, was selected as an object of popular persecution. A few years before he had captured Tolosa in Gaul by an act of signal treachery, such, however, as the Romans seldom animadverted severely upon as long as they were successful. But Cæpio had forfeited their forbearance by his recent disaster, and the hoards of gold which he had rifled from the temples of the Gallic deities were supposed to have brought the vengeance of Heaven upon him, and the country whose armies were entrusted to him. The people, at the instigation of their demagogues, proposed to deprive him of his imperium, confiscate his property, and declare him incapable of serving the state in future. The senate defended its luckless proconsul, who had helped to restore to it a share in the judicia; but the tribune Vibius Norbanus drove the nobles from the comitium, together with two of his own colleagues who sided with them. In the tumult by which this act of violence was consummated Æmilius Scaurus, the prince of the senate, was wounded on the head by a stone. Cæpio was deprived, cast into prison and subsequently banished, unless indeed, according to another account, he was strangled in his dungeon. The retribution of his crime did not stop here. His noble family was further dishonoured by the licentious conduct of his two daughters, and the gold of Tolosa passed into a proverb, for the unlawful gain which precipitates its possessor into misery and disgrace.

[102-100 B.C.]

In the year 102 the tribune Domitius, transferred to the people the election of the chief pontiff, which had formerly been invested in the appointment of the pontifical college. The head of the national religion was an important political personage. He held in his hands the threads of the state policy, which opened or shut the oracular books of the Sibyls, appointed sacrifices and ceremonials, interpreted the will of the gods from portents, and placed the seal of the divine approbation upon every public act, or withheld it from it. This engine of government had been long firmly grasped by the nobles; it could still be handled only by patricians; but the patricians had ceased to be identified in interest and feeling with the ruling oligarchy, and from the hands of patricians the traditions of the old republic were destined to receive their rudest shocks. The appointment of the chief pontiff by the people became eventually an important agent in the overthrow of the Roman constitution. In the year of the battle of Aquæ Sextiæ, Marcius Philippus proposed an agrarian law, which, however, was rejected. But at the same time another tribune, Servilius Glaucia, carried a resolution of the people for wresting the judicia once more from the senators, and conferring them again upon the knights exclusively. He increased the stringency of an existing law against extortion in the provinces; and to the holder of the Latin franchise, who should convict a senator of its violation, he assured the superior privileges of full Roman citizenship.

THE SIXTH CONSULATE OF MARIUS

[100 B.C.]