The Historians' History of the World 05

As soon as Sulla had withdrawn to Asia, Cinna made no further concealment of his designs. Avowing himself the restorer of the late order of things, he demanded the recall of the exiles of his party, and the restoration of the laws of Sulpicius, that is to say, the full and final emancipation of Italy. In the actual temper of the public mind, such demands could not fail to produce a sedition in the Forum. Such, in fact, was the result. A disturbance ensued, and blood was shed. But Cinna had miscalculated his strength. The new citizens, upon whose efforts he relied, were few in number. The senate, his colleague Octavius, and even a majority of the tribunes of the plebs, together with the mass of the original citizens, united themselves against him. They flew to arms, and drove his partisans out of the city. Cinna, we may suppose, counted in this abortive attempt upon the support of Pompeius Strabo, while that general, reserved and perhaps undecided, contented himself with observing it from a distance, and leaving the two factions to weaken and exhaust each other.

The victorious party proceeded to deprive Cinna of the consulship, and elected L. Merula, a flamen of Jupiter, a man respectable for his birth and reputed integrity, in his room. Cinna, proscribed and outlawed, betook himself to the new citizens of Campania, and declaimed to them on the persecution to which he was exposed for his devotion to their interests. The Campanians discovered more zeal for the defence of their newly acquired rights than they had evinced in the struggle to obtain them. Cinna succeeded in collecting an armed following. Many exiles of his party flocked to his standard, and among them was Q. Sertorius, an officer of distinction. Nor did he scruple to unite himself with the Samnites and Lucanians, the avowed enemies of the republic. Clothed in black, with disordered hair and beard, he ventured to enter the camp of the Roman general commanding in Campania, and moved the soldiers to compassion at the sight of a consul kneeling to them in supplication. They insisted on placing themselves under his orders. At the head of a Roman army he demanded the restitution of his rights, and vowed the destruction of his opponents.

Wandering from coast to coast, and threading the ambuscades of a thousand enemies, Marius was not unapprised of the events that were passing. He found means of communicating with his friends, and when he suddenly threw himself on the coast of Etruria, he was joined by several adherents with a band of five hundred fugitive slaves. Etruria was crowded, as we have seen, with a population of serfs, whose native masters kept them in a state of degradation and misery. Unconscious of the political questions in agitation, these men flocked to the adventurer’s banner as the symbol of vengeance and plunder. While Marius advanced upon the city from the west, Cinna was slowly approaching in the opposite direction.

At the same time Sertorius and Carbo threatened her from other quarters, and Rome found herself encircled by four armies of her own rebellious citizens, backed by the resources of the Samnite insurrection. To resist these accumulating dangers, the senate hastily recalled Metellus, bidding him make peace with the Samnites on any terms. But the conditions they exacted in the insolence of this triumph—admission to the franchise, compensation for their losses, the surrender without return or reciprocity of their fugitive slaves—were intolerable to the pride of the Roman general. Metellus ventured to disobey his orders, and broke off the negotiation. He left a small detachment under his lieutenant Plautius to check the advance of the enemy, while he hastened in person to Rome. Plautius was speedily overpowered, and the rebel Romans were reinforced by the whole strength of the Samnite confederacy, which devoted Rome itself to destruction. There can be no peace, they exclaimed, for Italy until the forest shall be extirpated in which the Roman wolves have made themselves a den. The senate was reduced to extremity. Envoys were despatched to the quarters of Pompeius Strabo in Picenum; his command was acknowledged, his services were invoked, his return to the defence of the city earnestly entreated. At this moment Strabo might feel himself the arbiter of his country’s destinies; but he still vacillated as to his course, and continued apparently to treat with both parties, until the advancing successes of the Marians diminished the value of his adhesion.