The Historians' History of the World 05

With the commencement of the second year of war (89), the Romans were enabled to assume the offensive in every quarter. Cn. Pompeius and Porcius Cato, the consuls of the year, assailed the confederates in the north; the one in Picenum, the other on the banks of the lake Fucinus. Sulla and Cæsar turned their legions against Mutilus in Campania, while the cities of Apulia and Lucania were attacked and recovered by officers of inferior note. Porcius himself was slain in battle with the Marsians, but his death was speedily avenged by his colleague. Judacilius, who commanded in Asculum, unable to repel his besiegers, constructed a pyre in the principal temple of the place, and laid his couch on the summit. He then caused a repast to be served, took poison, and applied the torch. The Romans entered the undefended walls, massacred the inhabitants, and reduced the city to ashes.

Asculum was the bulwark of the Italian confederacy in the north, and its fall opened the heart of their territories to the Romans. Another great defeat, with the loss of Vettius Scato, crushed the spirit of the Marsians, the Pelignians, and the Marrucinians, who hastened to lay down their arms. Pompeius, the victorious general, obtained a triumph, and among the captives who were led in chains before his chariot was a child, carried at his mother’s breast, who lived to become a consul at Rome and to gain the honour of a triumph himself. This was a native of Asculum, by name Ventidius, whose strange reverse of fortune deserved to become the theme of public admiration. The laurelled car was followed by the Roman legionaries, and among them we may suppose was a youth, who gained in after times a far nobler reputation, Cicero, the chief of Roman orators, who earned under the auspices of Pompeius his first and only stipend.

In the south, the death of the late consul Cæsar had thrown upon Sulla the conduct of the war. The cities of Campania fell successively before his prowess and good fortune. Stabiæ was overthrown, Herculaneum and Pompeii capitulated. His progress was checked for a moment by a mutiny in a division of his forces, in which his lieutenant, Postumius, lost his life. Sulla recalled the men to obedience, and required them to expiate the slaughter of a citizen by torrents of hostile blood. Assured of their ardour and devotion to his ascendant genius, he led them against the Samnite general, Cluentius, and gained a sanguinary victory under the walls of Nola. Leaving this impregnable fortress behind him, he next entered the territory of the Hirpinians, and sacked their capital, Æculanum. Meanwhile a Roman officer, named Cosconius, penetrated into Lucania, and defeated Egnatius by treachery. The shattered remnant of the confederate armies, reduced to thirty thousand men, were enclosed in the defiles of the Apennines. Pompædius, the last survivor of the gallant band of Italian generals, sought to envelop the Romans, as his last resource, in the flames of a servile insurrection. He summoned the slaves to rise throughout Italy, and put arms into their hands; at the same time he continued to press Mithridates for succours, and his emissaries solicited the subjects of the republics in Greece, Asia, and Africa. The final struggle of the expiring confederacy was not uncheered by a gleam of sunshine. Pompædius gained a victory, and entered Bovianum with the imitation of a Roman triumph. But his success was transient, and his laurels quickly faded. He was slain in the third year of the war in an encounter with the prætor Metellus, near Teanum in Apulia (88).