Part 4

Marius was continued in office, and was a fourth time consul. He had completed his military reforms, and the army was now a professional service with regular pay. Trained corps of engineers were attached to each legion. The campaigns of the Romans were henceforth to be conducted with spade and pickaxe as well as with sword and javelin, and the soldiers learned the use of tools as well as of arms. The Teutons were destroyed on the twentieth of July, 102 B.C. In the year following the same fate overtook their comrades. The victories of Marius mark a new epoch in Roman history. The legions were no longer the levy of the citizens in arms, who were themselves the state for which they fought. The legionaries were citizens still. They had votes and they used them; but they were professional soldiers with the modes of thought which belong to soldiers, and besides the power of the hustings was now the power of the sword.

The danger from the Germans was no sooner gone than political anarchy broke loose again. Marius, the man of the people, was the savior of his country. He was made a consul a fifth time, and then a sixth. An indifferent politician, however, he stood aloof in the fierce faction contest between the aristocrats and the popular party. At last he had almost withdrawn from public life, as he had no heart for the quarrel, and did not care to exert his power. For eight years both he and his rival Sylla kept aloof from politics and were almost unheard of.

When Sylla came to the front, it was as leader of the aristocratic power in the state. Sulpicius Rufus, once a champion of the senate and the most brilliant orator in Rome, went over to the people, and as tribune demanded the deposition of Sylla. The latter replied by leading his legionaries to Rome. Sulpicius was killed; Marius, the savior of his country, had to fly for his life, pursued by assassins, with a price set upon his head.

While Sylla was absent in the East prosecuting that magnificent campaign against Mithridates, King of Pontus, which stamped him the first soldier of his time, the popular party again raised its head. Old Marius, who had been hunted through marsh and forest, and had been hiding with difficulty in Africa, came back at the news that Italy had risen again. Marius and Cinna joined their forces, appeared together at the gates of the capital, and Rome capitulated. There was a bloody score to be wiped out. Marius bears the chief blame for the scenes which followed. A price had been set on his head, his house had been destroyed, his property had been confiscated, he, himself, had been chased like a wild beast, and he had not deserved such treatment. He had saved Italy, when but for him it would have been wasted by the swords of the Germans.

His power had afterward been absolute, but he had not abused it for party purposes. The senate had no reason to complain of him. His crime in their eyes had been his eminence. They had now shown themselves as cruel as they were worthless; and if public justice was disposed to make an end of them, he saw no cause to interfere. From retaliatory political vengeance the transition was easy to plunder and wholesale murder; and for many days the wretched city was made a prey to robbers and cut-throats.

So ended the year 87, the darkest and bloodiest which the guilty city had yet experienced. Marius and Cinna were chosen consuls for the ensuing year and a witch’s prophecy was fulfilled that Marius should hold a seventh consulate. But the glory had departed from him. His sun was already setting, redly, among crimson clouds. He lived but a fortnight after his inauguration, and died in his bed at the age of seventy-one. “The mother of the Gracchi,” said Mirabeau, “cast the dust of her murdered sons into the air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius.”

MITHRIDATES, KING OF PONTUS.[10]

BY THEODOR MOMMSEN.

[Surnamed “the Great,” born about 132 B.C., died in 63. This powerful Eastern monarch, who greatly extended his frontiers beyond his original kingdom, was one of the most formidable barriers to Roman power in Asia. He organized a league and severely taxed the military resources of the republic. Sulla spent four years in compelling him to submit to an honorable peace. In the second Mithridatic war he was successively defeated by Lucullus and Pompey. He finally committed suicide by the hands of one of his mercenaries. References: Mommsen’s “History of Rome,” Arnold’s “History of Rome.”]

Partly through the constant growth of oppression naturally incident to every tyrannic government, partly through the indirect operation of the Roman revolution--in the seizure, for instance, of the property of the soil in the province of Asia by Caius Gracchus, in the Roman tenths and customs, and in the human hunts which the collectors of revenue added to their other avocations there--the Roman rule, barely tolerable from the first, pressed so heavily on Asia, that neither the king’s crown nor the peasant’s hut there was any longer safe from confiscation, that every stalk of corn seemed to grow for Roman tribute, and every child of free parents seemed born for the Roman slave-driver.

It is true that the Asiatic bore even this torture with his inexhaustible passive endurance; but it was not patience or reflection that made him bear it peacefully. It was rather the peculiarly Oriental want of power to take the initiative; and in these peaceful lands, among these effeminate nations, strange and terrible things might happen if once there should appear among them a man who knew how to give the signal for revolt.

There reigned at that time in the kingdom of Pontus Mithridates VI, surnamed Eupator, who traced back his lineage on the father’s side, in the sixteenth generation to King Darius, son of Hystaspes, in the eighth to Mithridates I, the founder of the Pontic Empire, and was on the mother’s side descended from the Alexandridæ and the Seleucidæ. After the early death of his father, Mithridates Euergetes, who fell by the hand of an assassin at Synope, he had received the title of king when a boy of eleven years old; but the diadem had only brought to him trouble and danger. It is said that in order to escape from the daggers of his legal protectors, he became of his own accord a wanderer; and during seven years, changing his resting-place night after night, a fugitive in his own kingdom, led the life of a lonely hunter.

Thus the boy grew into a mighty man. Although our accounts regarding him are in substance traceable to written records of contemporaries, yet the legendary tradition, which is generated with the rapidity of lightning in the East, early adorned the mighty king with many of the traits of its Samson and Rustem. These traits, however, belong to his character just as the crown of clouds belong to the highest mountain peaks; the outline of the figure appears in both cases only more colored and fantastic, not disturbed or essentially altered.

The armor which fitted the gigantic frame of King Mithridates excited the wonder of the Asiatics, and still more that of the Italians. As a runner he overtook the swiftest deer; as a rider he broke in the wildest steed, and was able by changing horses to accomplish one hundred and twenty miles in a day; as a charioteer he drove with sixteen in hand, and gained in competition many a prize--it was dangerous, no doubt, in such sport to carry off victory from the king.

In hunting on horseback he hit the game at full gallop, and never missed his aim. He challenged competition at the table also; he arranged banqueting matches and carried off in person the prizes proposed for the most substantial eater and the hardest drinker. His intellectual wants he satisfied by the wildest superstition--the interpretation of dreams and of the Greek mysteries occupied not a few of the king’s hours--and by a rude adoption of the Hellenic civilization. He was fond of Greek art and music--that is to say, he collected precious articles, rich furniture, old Persian and Greek articles of luxury--his cabinet of rings was famous--he had constantly Greek historians, philosophers, and poets in his train; and proposed prizes at his court festivals, not only for the greatest eaters and drinkers, but also for the merriest jester and the best singer.

Such was the man; the sultan corresponded. In the East, where the relation between the ruler and the ruled bears the relation of natural rather than of moral law, the subject resembles the dog alike in fidelity and in falsehood, the ruler is cruel and distrustful. In both respects Mithridates has hardly been surpassed. By his orders there died or pined in perpetual captivity, for real or alleged treason, his mother, his brother, his sister espoused to him, three of his sons, and as many of his daughters. Still more revolting, perhaps, is the fact that among his secret papers were found sentences of death, drawn up beforehand, against his most confidential servants.

In like manner it was a genuine trait of the sultan that he afterward, for the mere purpose of depriving his enemy of trophies of victory, caused his whole harem to be killed, and distinguished his favorite concubine, a beautiful Ephesian, by allowing her to choose the mode of death. He prosecuted the experimental studies of poisons and antidotes as an important branch of the business of government, and tried to inure his body to particular poisons. He had early learned to look for treason and assassination at the hands of everybody, especially his nearest relations, and he had early learned to practice them against everybody, and most of all against those nearest him; of which the necessary consequence--attested by history--was that all his undertakings finally miscarried through the perfidy of those whom he trusted.

At the same time we meet with isolated traits of high-minded justice. When he punished traitors, he ordinarily spared those who were involved in the crime solely through their personal relations with the leading culprits; but such fits of equity are to be met with in every barbarous tyrant. What really distinguishes Mithridates amid the multitude of similar sultans is his boundless activity. He disappeared one fine morning from his palace, and remained unheard of for months, so that he was given over as lost; when he returned, he had wandered _incognito_ through all anterior Asia, and reconnoitered everywhere the country and the people.

In like manner he was not only generally fluent in speech, but he administered justice to each of the twenty-two nations over which he ruled in its own language, without needing an interpreter--a trait significant of the versatile East. His whole activity as a ruler bears the same character. So far as we know, his energies, like those of every other sultan, were spent in collecting treasures, in assembling armies--which were usually, in his earlier years at least, led against the enemy not by the king in person, but by some Greek _condottiere_--in efforts to add new satrapies to the old.

Of higher elements--desire to advance civilization, earnest leadership of the national opposition, special gifts of genius--there are found, in our traditional accounts at least, no distinct traces in Mithridates, and we have no reason to place him on a level even with the great rulers of the Osmans, such as Mohammed II and Suleiman. Notwithstanding his Hellenic culture, which sat on him not much better than his Roman armor on his Cappadocians, he was throughout an Oriental of the ordinary stamp, coarse, full of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel, perfidious, and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, so powerful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about him and his unshaken courage in resistance frequently look like talent, sometimes even like genius.

Granting even that during the death-struggle of the republic it was easier to offer resistance than in the times of Scipio or Trajan, and that it was only in the complication of the Asiatic events with the internal commotions of Italy that rendered it possible for Mithridates to resist the Romans twice as long as Jugurtha did, it nevertheless remains true that before the Parthian war he was the only enemy who gave serious trouble to the Romans in the East, and that he defended himself as the lion of the desert defends himself against the hunter.

But whatever judgment we may form as to the individual character of the king, his historical position remains in a high degree significant. The Mithridatic wars formed at once the last movement of the political opposition offered by Hellas to Rome and the beginning of a revolt against the Roman supremacy resting on very different and far deeper grounds of antagonism--the national reaction of the Asiatics against the Occidentals, a new passage in the huge duel between the West and the East which has been transmitted from the struggle of Marathon to the present generation, and will, perhaps, reckon its future by thousands of years as it has reckoned its past.

LUCIUS SYLLA.

BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla or Sylla (Felix) dictator of Rome, born 138 B.C., died in 78. Leader of the aristocratic party in the state, he destroyed the party of popular reform, became dictator, and proscribed thousands of the best citizens of the republic, who were hunted down like wild beasts. In the Social and the Samnite war, as in the first war against Mithridates, he displayed the genius of a great soldier, surpassing even that of his able rival Marius. He reorganized the Roman Constitution, concentrated all power in the hands of the senatorial oligarchy, and paved the way for Julius Cæsar to overthrow the liberties of the republic, though the latter belonged to the opposite party. References: Froude’s “Life of Cæsar,” Plutarch’s “Lives,” Mommsen’s “History of Rome.”]

Lucius Sylla, a patrician of the purest blood, had inherited a moderate fortune, and had spent it like other young men of rank, lounging in theatres and amusing himself with dinner-parties. He was a poet, an artist, and a wit, but each and everything with the languor of an amateur. His favorite associates were actresses, and he had neither obtained nor aspired to any higher reputation than that of a cultivated man of fashion.

His distinguished birth was not apparent in his person. He had red hair, hard blue eyes, and a complexion white and purple, with the colors so ill-mixed, that his face was compared to a mulberry sprinkled with flour. Ambition, he appeared to have none, and when he exerted himself to be appointed quæstor[11] to Marius on the African expedition, Marius was disinclined to take him as having no recommendation beyond qualifications which the consul of the plebeians disdained and disliked. Marius, however, soon discovered his mistake. Beneath his constitutional indolence Sylla was by nature a soldier, a statesman, a diplomatist. He had been too contemptuous of the common objects of politicians to concern himself with the intrigues of the forum, but he had only to exert himself to rise with easy ascendancy to the command of every situation in which he might be placed.

The war of factions which exiled Marius, placed Sylla at the head of the expedition against the King of Pontus. He defeated Mithridates, he drove him back out of Greece and pursued him into Asia. He left him still in possession of his hereditary kingdom; but he left him bound, so far as treaties could bind so ambitious a spirit, to remain thenceforward on his own frontiers. He recovered Greece, the islands, and the Roman provinces in Asia Minor. He extorted an indemnity of five millions, and executed many of the wretches who had been active in the murders. He raised a fleet in Egypt with which he drove the pirates out of the archipelago back into their own waters. He restored the shattered prestige of Roman authority, and he won for himself a reputation which his later cruelties could stain but not efface. During his Eastern campaign, a period of more than four years, the popular party had recovered ascendancy at Rome.

The time was come when Sylla was to demand a reckoning for what had been done in his absence. No Roman general had deserved better of his country; his task was finished. He had measured the difficulty of the task which lay before him, but he had an army behind him accustomed to victory, and recruited by thousands of exiles who had fled from the rule of the democracy. He intended to re-enter Rome with the glories of his conquests about him, for revenge, and a counter-revolution. Sylla had lingered at Athens, collecting paintings and statues and manuscripts--the rarest treasures on which he could lay his hands--to decorate his Roman palace. On receiving the consul’s answer he sailed for Brindisi in the spring of 83 with forty thousand legionaries and a large fleet.

The war lasted for more than a year. At length the contest ended in a desperate fight under the walls of Rome itself on the first of November, B.C., 82. The popular army was at last cut to pieces, a few thousand prisoners taken, but they were murdered afterward in cold blood. Young Marius killed himself. Sertorius fled to Spain, and Sylla and the aristocracy were masters of Rome and Italy. Sylla was under no illusions. He understood the problem which he had in hand. He knew that the aristocracy were detested by nine tenths of the people; he knew that they deserved to be detested, but they were at least gentlemen by birth and breeding.

The democrats, on the other hand, were insolent upstarts who, instead of being grateful for being allowed to live and work and pay taxes and serve in the army, had dared to claim a share in the government, had turned against their masters, and had set their feet upon their necks. They were ignorant, and without leaders could be controlled easily. The guilt and danger lay with the men of wealth and intellect, the country gentlemen, the minority of knights and patricians like Cinna,[12] who had taken the popular side and deserted their own order. There was no hope for an end of agitation till every one of these men had been rooted out.

Appointed dictator, at his own direction, by the senate, he at once outlawed every magistrate, every public servant, civil or municipal, who had held office under the rule of Cinna. It mattered little to Sylla who were included if none escaped who were really dangerous to him; and an order was issued for a slaughter of the entire number, the confiscation of their property, and the division of it between the informers and Sylla’s friends and soldiers. It was one of those deliberate acts, carried out with method and order, which are possible only in countries in an advanced stage of civilization, and which show how thin is the film spread over human ferocity by what is called progress and culture. Four thousand seven hundred persons fell in the proscription of Sylla, all men of education and fortune. Common report or private information was at once indictment and evidence, and accusation was in itself condemnation.

The political reform enforced by the dictator gave the senate complete restrictive control over legislation and administration. All constitutional progress which had been made in the interests of the people was utterly swept away. The senate was made omnipotent and irresponsible. Sylla’s career was drawing to its close, and the end was not the least remarkable feature of it. He resigned the dictatorship and became a private citizen again, amusing the leisure of his age, as he had abused the leisure of his youth, with theatres and actresses and dinner-parties.

He too, like so many of the great Romans, was indifferent to life; of power for the sake of power he was entirely careless; and if his retirement had been more dangerous to him than it really was, he probably would not have postponed it. He was a person of singular character, and not without many qualities which were really admirable. He was free from any touch of charlatanry. He was true, simple, and unaffected, and even without ambition in the mean and personal sense. His fault, which he would have denied to be a fault, was that he had a patrician disdain of mobs and suffrages and the cant of popular liberty.

The type repeats itself era after era. Sylla was but Graham of Claverhouse in a Roman dress and with an ampler stage. His courage in laying down his authority has often been commented on, but the risk which he incurred was insignificant. Of assassination he was in no greater danger than when dictator, while the temptation to assassinate him was less. His influence was practically undiminished, and as long as he lived he remained, and could not but remain, the first person in the republic. He lived a year after his retirement and died 78 B.C., being occupied at the time in writing his memoirs, which have been unfortunately lost. He was buried gorgeously in the Campus Martius, among the old kings of Rome.

POMPEY.

BY THOMAS KERCHEVER ARNOLD.

[Known as Cneius Pompeius Magnus (or the Great), born 106 B.C., assassinated in Egypt by one of his own officers in 48. Best known as the most formidable rival of Julius Cæsar; his career was eminently fortunate till he sunk before the ascendancy of a greater man. He achieved brilliant victories for Rome, and was honored with three triumphs. Pompey was identified in the factional wars of Italy, with the party led by Sulla. He finally became triumvir in the division of power with Cæsar and Crassus. In the civil war which ensued Pompey was defeated by Cæsar at the battle of Pharsalia in Thessaly. After this defeat he fled to Egypt, where, as he was leaving the boat for the shore, he was stabbed in the back.]

The tears shed for Pompey were not only those of domestic infliction; his fate called forth a more general and honorable mourning. No man had ever gained at so early an age the affections of his countrymen; none had enjoyed them so largely, or preserved them so long with so little interruption; and at the distance of eighteen centuries the feeling of his contemporaries may be sanctioned by the sober judgment of history.

He entered upon life as a distinguished member of an oppressed party, which was just arriving at its hour of triumph and retaliation; he saw his associates plunged into rapine and massacre, but he preserved himself pure from the contagion of their crimes; and when the death of Sylla left him almost at the head of the aristocratical party, he served them ably and faithfully with his sword, while he endeavored to mitigate the evils of their ascendancy by restoring to the commons of Rome, on the earliest opportunity, the most important of those privileges and liberties which they had lost under the tyranny of their late master.

He received the due reward of his honest patriotism in the unusual honors and trusts that were conferred on him; but his greatness could not corrupt his virtue; and the boundless powers with which he was repeatedly invested he wielded with the highest ability and uprightness to the accomplishment of his task, and then, without any undue attempts to prolong their duration, he honestly resigned them. At a period of general cruelty and extortion toward the enemies and subjects of the commonwealth, the character of Pompey in his foreign commands was marked by its humanity and spotless integrity.