The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (highly recommended books TXT) 📖

in those waters; they landed at Eryx and at what was formerly Carthage, but the Roman magistrates both in Sicily and in Africa sent them away. So they escaped to Numidia, whose desert sand-dunes gave them a place of refuge for the winter. But the king Hiempsal II, whom they hoped to gain and who had seemed for a while willing to unite with them, had only done so to lull them into security, and now attempted to seize their persons. With great difficulty the fugitives escaped from his cavalry, and found a temporary refuge in the little island of Cercina (Kerkena) on the coast of Tunis. We know not whether Sulla thanked his fortunate star that he had been spared the odium of putting to death the victor of the Cimbrians; at any rate it does not appear that the magistrates of Minturnae were punished.

Legislation of Sulla

With a view to remove existing evils and to prevent future revolutions, Sulla suggested a series of new legislative enactments. For the hard-pressed debtors nothing seems to have been done, except that the rules as to the maximum of interest were enforced;(24) directions moreover were given for the sending out of a number of colonies. The senate which had been greatly thinned by the battles and prosecutions of the Social war was filled up by the admission of 300 new senators, who were naturally selected in the interest of the Optimates. Lastly, material changes were adopted in respect to the mode of election and the initiative of legislation. The old Servian arrangement for voting in the centuriate comitia, under which the first class, with an estate of 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds) or upwards, alone possessed almost half of the votes, again took the place of the arrangements introduced in 513 to mitigate the preponderance of the first class.(25) Practically there was thus introduced for the election of consuls, praetors, and censors, a census which really excluded the non-wealthy from exercising the suffrage. The legislative initiative in the case of the tribunes of the people was restricted by the rule, that every proposal had henceforth to be submitted by them in the first instance to the senate and could only come before the people in the event of the senate approving it.

These enactments which were called forth by the Sulpician attempt at revolution from the man who then came forward as the shield and sword of the constitutional party—the consul Sulla—bear an altogether peculiar character. Sulla ventured, without consulting the burgesses or jurymen, to pronounce sentence of death on twelve of the most distinguished men, including magistrates actually in office and the most famous general of his time, and publicly to defend these proscriptions; a violation of the venerable and sacred laws of appeal, which met with severe censure even from very conservative men, such as Quintus Scaevola. He ventured to overthrow an arrangement as to the elections which had subsisted for a century and a half, and to re-establish the electoral census which had been long obsolete and proscribed. He ventured practically to withdraw the right of legislation from its two primitive factors, the magistrates and the comitia, and to transfer it to a board which had at no time possessed formally any other privilege in this respect than that of being asked for its advice.(26) Hardly had any democrat ever exercised justice in forms so tyrannical, or disturbed and remodelled the foundations of the constitution with so reckless an audacity, as this conservative reformer. But if we look at the substance instead of the form, we reach very different results. Revolutions have nowhere ended, and least of all in Rome, without demanding a certain number of victims, who under forms more or less borrowed from justice atone for the fault of being vanquished as though it were a crime. Any one who recalls the succession of prosecutions carried on by the victorious party after the fall of the Gracchi and Saturninus(27) will be inclined to yield to the victor of the Esquiline market the praise of candour and comparative moderation, in so far as, first he without ceremony accepted as war what was really such and proscribed the men who were defeated as enemies beyond the pale of the law, and, secondly, he limited as far as possible the number of victims and allowed at least no offensive outbreak of fury against inferior persons. A similar moderation appears in the political arrangements. The innovation as respects legislation—the most important and apparently the most comprehensive—in fact only brought the letter of the constitution into harmony with its spirit. The Roman legislation, under which any consul, praetor, or tribune could propose to the burgesses any measure at pleasure and bring it to the vote without debate, had from the first been, irrational and had become daily more so with the growing nullity of the comitia; it was only tolerated, because in practice the senate had claimed for itself the right of previous deliberation and regularly crushed any proposal, if put to the vote without such previous deliberation, by means of the political or religious veto.(28) The revolution hadswept away thesebarriers; andin consequence that absurd system now began fully to develop its results, and to put it in the power of any petulant knave to overthrow the state in due form of law. What was under such circumstances more natural, more necessary, more truly conservative, than now to recognize formally and expressly the legislation of the senate to which effect had been hitherto given by a circuitous process? Something similar may be said of the renewal of the electoral census. The earlier constitution was throughout based on it; even the reform of 513 had merely restricted the privileges of the men of wealth. But since that year there had occurred an immense financial revolution, which might well justify a raising of the electoral census. The new timocracy thus changed the letter of the constitution only to remain faithful to its spirit, while it at the same time in the mildest possible form attempted at least to check the disgraceful purchase of votes with all the evils therewith connected. Lastly, the regulations in favour of debtors and the resumption of the schemes of colonization gave express proof that Sulla, although not disposed to approve the impetuous proposals of Sulpicius, was yet, like Sulpicius and Drusus and all the more far-seeing aristocrats in general, favourable to material reforms in themselves; as to which we may not overlook the circumstance, that he proposed these measures after the victory and entirely of his own free will. If we combine with such considerations the fact, that Sulla allowed the principal foundations of the Gracchan constitution to stand and disturbed neither the equestrian courts nor the largesses of grain, we shall find warrant for the opinion that the Sullan arrangement of 666 substantially adhered to the status quo subsisting since the fall of Gaius Gracchus; he merely, on the one hand, altered as the times required the traditional rules that primarily threatened danger to the existing government, and, on the other hand, sought to remedy according to his power the existing social evils, so far as either could be done without touching ills that lay deeper. Emphatic contempt for constitutional formalism in connection with a vivid appreciation of the intrinsic value of existing arrangements, clear perceptions, and praiseworthy intentions mark this legislation throughout. But it bears also a certain frivolous and superficial character; it needed in particular a great amount of good nature to believe that the fixing a maximum of interest would remedy the confused relations of credit, and that the right of previous deliberation on the part of the senate would prove more capable of resisting future demagogism than the right of veto and religion had previously been.

New Complications
Cinna
Strabo
Sulla Embarks for Asia

In reality new clouds very soon began to overcast the clear sky of the conservatives. The relations of Asia assumed daily a more threatening character. The state had already suffered the utmost injury through the delay which the Sulpician revolution had occasioned in the departure of the army for Asia; the embarkation could on no account be longer postponed. Meanwhile Sulla hoped to leave behind him guarantees against a new assault on the oligarchy in Italy, partly in the consuls who would be elected under the new electoral arrangement, partly and especially in the armies employed in suppressing the remains of the Italian insurrection. In the consular comitia, however, the choice did not fall on the candidates set up by Sulla, but Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who belonged to the most determined opposition, was associated with Gnaeus Octavius, a man certainly of strictly Optimate views. It may be presumed that it was chiefly the capitalist party, which by this choice retaliated on the author of the law as to interest. Sulla accepted the unpleasant election with the declaration that he was glad to see the burgesses making use of their constitutional liberty of choice, and contented himself with exacting from both consuls an oath that they would faithfully observe the existing constitution. Of the armies, the one on which the matter chiefly depended was that of the north, as the greater part of the Campanian army was destined to depart for Asia. Sulla got the command of the former entrusted by decree of the people to his devoted colleague Quintus Rufus, and procured the recall of the former general Gnaeus Strabo in such a manner as to spare as far as possible his feelings—the more so, because the latter belonged to the equestrian party and his passive attitude during the Sulpician troubles had occasioned no small anxiety to the aristocracy. Rufus arrived at the army and took the chief command in Strabo's stead; but a few days afterwards he was killed by the soldiers, and Strabo returned to the command which he had hardly abdicated. He was regarded as the instigator of the murder; it is certain that he was a man from whom such a deed might be expected, that he reaped the fruits of the crime, and that he punished the well-known originators of it only with words. The removal of Rufus and the commandership of Strabo formed a new and serious danger for Sulla; yet he did nothing to deprive the latter of his command. Soon afterwards, when his consulship expired, he found himself on the one hand urged by his successor Cinna to depart at length for Asia where his presence was certainly urgently needed, and on the other hand cited by one of the new tribunes before the bar of the people; it was clear to the dullest eye, that a new attack on him and his party was in preparation, and that his opponents wished his removal. Sulla had no alternative save either to push the matter to a breach with Cinna and perhaps with Strabo and once more to march on Rome, or to leave Italian affairs to take their course and to remove to another continent. Sulla decided—whether more from patriotism or more from indifference, will never be ascertained—for the latter alternative; handed over the corps left behind in Samnium to the trustworthy and experienced soldier, Quintus Metellus Pius, who was invested in Sulla's stead with the proconsular commandership-in-chief over Lower Italy; gave the conduct of the siege of Nola to the propraetor Appius Claudius; and in the beginning of 667 embarked with his legions for the Hellenic East.

CHAPTER VIII

The East and King Mithradates

State of the East

The state of breathless excitement, in which the revolution kept the Roman government by perpetually renewing the alarm of fire and the cry to quench it, made them lose sight of provincial matters generally; and that most of all in the case of the Asiatic lands, whose remote and unwarlike nations did not thrust themselves so directly on the attention of the government as Africa, Spain, and its Transalpine neighbours. After the annexation of the kingdom of Attalus, which took place contemporaneously with the outbreak of the revolution, for a whole generation there is hardly any evidence of Rome taking a serious part in Oriental affairs—with the exception of the establishment of the province of Cilicia in 652,(1) to which the Romans were driven by the boundless audacity of the Cilician pirates, and which was in reality nothing more than the institution of a permanent station for a small division of the Roman army and fleet in the eastern waters. It was not till the downfall of Marius in 654 had in some measure consolidated the government of the restoration, that the Roman authorities began anew to bestow some attention on the events in the east

Cyrene Romans

In many respects matters still stood as they had done thirty years ago. The kingdom of Egypt with its two