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PREVIEW： Epochs #161 ｜ Marius & Sulla - Part IV


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Summary

Part four of the story of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. This time, I'm looking at the return of Sullullus from the east, and his return to the city of Rome, and the chaos that ensues when he meets his old enemies.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to this episode of Epochs, where I shall be doing part four of my story all about Marius and Sulla and the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.
00:00:09.900 So last time I left off with Marius having concluded his war with Mithridates, and in the story Mithridates is not done with.
00:00:20.000 There are actually three Mithridatic wars. That was only the first of the three.
00:00:24.640 So in the broader story of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, Mithridates will still be on the scene.
00:00:31.020 So the lion, Cornelius Sulla, is on the way back to Rome to deal with his political enemies.
00:00:37.380 Remember Marius himself, the old Marius had died of natural causes.
00:00:41.400 Quite a while ago now, Sulla was out in the East for something in the order of five years, and it's been a good couple of years since Marius has died, two, three years since Marius has died.
00:00:50.860 So there's a whole new faction of people. Incidentally, it's still called the Marian faction, and his son, also Gaius Marius, Gaius the Younger, is one of the leaders, and he is young.
00:01:01.580 He's only about 26 in 83 BC, which is the year that Sulla actually returns.
00:01:07.660 But the real leaders are Sina, another guy called Carbo, and another sometime console called Scipio, not one of the more famous, revered Scipios.
00:01:17.240 But there's Sina, Carbo, Scipio, Marius the Younger, and a few others.
00:01:23.140 And the lion is returning from the East. Carbo called him something between a lion and a fox.
00:01:28.660 And it's the half of Sulla that is the fox that you need to worry about.
00:01:33.600 He's both brave and strong and noble and fierce, but also very, very cunning and nimble.
00:01:39.840 And it's the more cunning and nimble thing about him, which is truly terrifying.
00:01:43.440 Now, everyone knows that Sulla is on his way back, and they know this for a year or more.
00:01:49.120 And apparently, this throws Rome into all sorts of psychological turmoil.
00:01:54.800 Dan Carlin talked about, as some sort of analogy, that imagine if, in a modern world, we knew an asteroid was coming,
00:02:01.720 and was certainly going to impact the Earth, a big one.
00:02:05.600 And we knew it was coming. There was nothing we could do to avoid it.
00:02:08.620 But it wasn't going to happen for, like, a year or two.
00:02:11.000 What would that really do to society and politics?
00:02:14.740 Probably, on all sorts of levels, society and politics might break down, or cease to function correctly, at least, at the very least.
00:02:23.900 Well, that's really what happened in Rome.
00:02:25.900 The Popularist faction, i.e. the Marian faction, sort of politically throw caution to the wind,
00:02:31.880 and don't even really start trying to play the game properly.
00:02:36.060 Sinner and Carbo and Scipio just sort of openly take consulships for themselves year after year,
00:02:45.440 not even really pretending to play the game correctly.
00:02:49.020 And also, most of the Optimate faction, the old establishment landed class senatorial faction,
00:02:56.180 have, most of them have either been killed or fled already.
00:02:59.900 So anyone that would have been there, legit opposition in Rome, aren't even there.
00:03:04.800 So politics is sort of completely broken in Rome in this point.
00:03:09.000 Well, I say completely.
00:03:10.420 On the surface, it still carries on.
00:03:12.520 That's a remarkable thing about Rome, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire,
00:03:17.300 even into the years of the late Roman Empire and the Empire in the East in Constantinople.
00:03:23.000 For hundreds and hundreds of years, even towards the end of the Byzantine Empire,
00:03:28.100 there was still a Roman Senate, which still would go through the motions of electing consuls and
00:03:35.940 praetors and giving out governorships and military commands.
00:03:43.100 And even though by the age of Augustus and Tiberius, it was largely,
00:03:47.600 certainly by the age of Caligula or someone like that,
00:03:50.100 it was all really a sham, a bit of a show.
00:03:53.740 All power lay with either the Triumvir or the Emperors.
00:03:58.120 But they would still, the Senate would still go through all the motions of pretending it still mattered.
00:04:04.260 And people still ran for office and all that sort of thing.
00:04:07.560 Anyway, this starts sort of here, where the real authority and power had shifted away from the Senate
00:04:14.620 and lay in the hands of sort of senior faction leaders.
00:04:18.400 But they carried on as though everything was OK, as though everything was still normal.
00:04:22.160 So I say politics was broken and ruined.
00:04:25.680 And in the truest sense, it was.
00:04:27.960 But on the surface, everything carried on.
00:04:30.320 It's a remarkable thing about the Roman Senate.
00:04:32.660 As I say, for hundreds of hundreds of years, they continue to do that.
00:04:35.880 Quite remarkable, this sort of degree of self-deception that can go on.
00:04:40.140 And also, I mean, Sinner didn't act completely like a tyrant or a dictator.
00:04:45.880 He did.
00:04:46.380 He had subverted the rules in all sorts of ways.
00:04:50.460 As I say, keeping, giving himself, warding himself consulships and giving them the other consulships
00:04:56.240 and senior roles in the state to his friends and things.
00:05:00.000 But also, at the same time, sort of allowed the few remaining dissenting voices to sort of speak openly.
00:05:07.540 And there was a faction within Rome, within the assemblies and the Senate,
00:05:11.860 that were neither Marian nor Sullen, sort of very deliberately so,
00:05:15.640 trying to keep their powder dry, so to speak.
00:05:17.700 And he allowed them to function and still speak more or less openly.
00:05:21.340 So he was far from a Caligula or a Nero or a Caracalla,
00:05:26.740 someone that would sort of butcher whole swathes of the Senate if they looked at him sideways.
00:05:32.140 He wasn't like that at all.
00:05:33.520 And as I said last time, a big chunk of the Senate and the senatorial class
00:05:39.040 and equites, the knightly class of Rome, who were pro-Sullen or anti-Marian,
00:05:46.060 they'd all fled.
00:05:46.900 So a bit of an exodus from Rome, really, fled to the east to the safety of Sulla's camp.
00:05:53.480 If they thought they were actually going to be killed or at least have all their property
00:05:57.980 or money confiscated by the Marians, they would flee to the east.
00:06:02.320 And so many of them had that Sulla was able to say that he's almost got a Senate in exile all of his own.
00:06:09.080 And the Marian camp, the Populares, had done a real number on them.
00:06:13.000 You know, hundreds or a few thousand people had been executed.
00:06:15.320 Lots and lots of property had been expropriated, stolen.
00:06:21.100 And the people that fled to Sulla, much like the aristocratic class of France during the revolution,
00:06:28.040 the French Revolution, or aristocratic Russians during the Bolshevik Revolution,
00:06:32.940 where all these people have fled to Sulla, they'd been telling tales,
00:06:36.120 perfectly within their rights to do, of course,
00:06:38.180 but they'd been telling Sulla that this person or that person had done something completely illegal
00:06:44.320 and wrong and immoral and stolen from you and murdered your friends and all sorts of things
00:06:49.720 and burnt your houses down.
00:06:52.160 And this is what Sinner has been doing or saying.
00:06:54.460 And this is what Carbo has been doing or saying.
00:06:57.760 This is how Marius the Younger has been conducting himself.
00:07:00.880 And so Sulla's been building up this picture of everyone he wants to get if and when he gets back to Rome.
00:07:08.580 He's going to have his vengeance in this life.
00:07:12.220 But people in Rome, many people in Rome, don't really know or they've got no idea
00:07:16.940 about to what extent or how extreme Sulla's vengeance will play out.
00:07:22.360 A lot of them are hoping, you know, I personally did nothing really wrong or, you know,
00:07:28.440 I only barely was pro-Marion and only then just to save my own life from property.
00:07:33.800 I've never really been against Sulla.
00:07:35.560 Hopefully I won't be on the chopping block, so to speak.
00:07:39.320 When the lion returns, hopefully I'm not on the dinner menu.
00:07:42.100 And so there is sort of a type of low burn but very, very real panic in Rome.
00:07:47.540 What is Sulla going to do?
00:07:49.920 How bad is it going to be when he returns?
00:07:51.840 And there's all sorts of deputations and letters sent to Sulla.
00:07:56.820 Appian gives us a fair amount of detail on those, saying, you know,
00:08:00.460 you're going to be cool with me once you get back to Rome, right?
00:08:03.920 You're not going to kill these of my friends, are you? Et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:09.120 One of the many correspondences Sulla has with them, he says basically,
00:08:14.000 no, anyone that wronged us, anyone that was sort of fully in the Marian faction
00:08:16.980 is going to get their comeuppance.
00:08:20.460 They're going to be executed when I get back.
00:08:23.160 Let there be no mistake about it.
00:08:24.960 I mean, just to give you an idea of Sulla's character, certainly at this point in his life,
00:08:29.940 because in the earlier episodes, I said about how he could be very nice and affable,
00:08:35.540 certainly at table, when he didn't have his military hat on or his political hat on,
00:08:44.360 when he was in party mode.
00:08:46.960 He could be very nice and funny and things.
00:08:49.020 But when the Red Miss descended, when he was sort of, you know, in serious mode,
00:08:56.400 he was someone not to be trifled with.
00:08:59.500 And just to give a flavour, there's one sort of small anecdote in Plutarch.
00:09:02.880 When he's on his way home from the east, at one point he's in and around the region of Athens
00:09:08.660 on the coast of Greece, and he's near to a small town called Halle.
00:09:13.340 And a few years before, when he'd been besieging Athens, he'd sacked Halle.
00:09:19.400 And he thought he'd killed or ordered all the menfolk of this little place called Halle killed.
00:09:25.560 And on his way home, a few years later, some fishermen, random fishermen,
00:09:30.140 while he's sitting on the shoreline at one point, bring him some fish as an offering,
00:09:34.700 some fresh fish as just a gift, as an offering.
00:09:38.000 And he's pleasant enough and says, you know, thank you.
00:09:42.300 And where are you guys from?
00:09:44.320 And they say they're from Halle.
00:09:46.240 And apparently he just sort of goes deadpan, like he gets those dead eyes about him.
00:09:50.520 And just suddenly it's very, very serious moment.
00:09:54.120 And apparently he says, what?
00:09:56.140 Is there a man of Halle still in existence?
00:09:59.060 And apparently all the men there, they're just like their mouths go dry
00:10:02.820 and they sort of, they're petrified, glued to the spot and don't know what to say.
00:10:07.320 Their mouths just falling open and they're too frightened to move or say anything.
00:10:12.300 And then suddenly Sula's expression, because Sula was the type of person that might just order them executed on the spot.
00:10:20.140 But then apparently suddenly his expression just breaks and he sort of smiles and says,
00:10:25.040 oh, well, you did bring me nice fish.
00:10:26.360 So it's OK.
00:10:27.540 Off with you.
00:10:28.480 You know, be gone.
00:10:29.080 Get out of my sight.
00:10:29.680 It's fine.
00:10:31.000 So, yeah, a dangerous, unpredictable person, Sula.
00:10:37.240 Worrisome.
00:10:38.260 You know, people have known that that's what he's like for quite a while.
00:10:41.300 He's not an unknown quantity.
00:10:43.000 You know, he's already marched on Rome once.
00:10:45.220 People know sort of what Sula is like.
00:10:47.220 He hasn't shown his true, true colours yet in quite how bloodthirsty and murderous he could be.
00:10:53.320 But nonetheless, people know that he's as serious as cancer.
00:10:58.200 He's not an unknown entity to them.
00:10:59.840 So in Rome, it's like there's a sort of a sword of Damocles hanging over their head.
00:11:05.680 And there's a faction in the Senate who were never explicitly pro-Marian who say to Sina,
00:11:12.840 they say, look, try and try and placate him if you can.
00:11:16.680 You're not going to be able to beat him in the field.
00:11:19.720 You know, don't don't raise any troops even.
00:11:22.800 You know, if you have to flee, flee.
00:11:24.860 But, you know, don't don't plunge us all into a full blown civil war.
00:11:30.100 And at least in the first instance, Sina says, sure, sure, sure.
00:11:32.960 I won't I won't raise troops.
00:11:34.300 I wouldn't dream of that.
00:11:34.980 But then he just does.
00:11:36.140 Then he just goes and does, raises loads of Roman levies or local Italian levies.
00:11:41.200 And he raises lots of troops or an army, really, from the so-called Italian allies.
00:11:47.200 He says to them, you know, Sina is a very, very persuasive speaker, apparently, you know, an orator.
00:11:54.740 And he says to he says, you know, Sulla is an optimate, right?
00:11:59.140 You know, if he comes back to Rome and installs himself as just a dictator or an autocrat in any sort of way, your dream of having citizenship, full Roman citizenship, that's not going to happen.
00:12:11.780 That's one of the things Sulla and his party have always been against.
00:12:16.540 You really have to fight with me, for me.
00:12:20.040 We're the popularis.
00:12:21.220 We're the ones that for generations have been championing your calls.
00:12:25.080 When you rose up in the civil wars, we're the ones that were on your side, that backed you up, remember?
00:12:31.100 Everything we've done for you.
00:12:32.960 And now Sulla's going to return and probably do away with all that.
00:12:36.480 You've got to come fight for us, for me.
00:12:39.260 And a lot of them say yes.
00:12:40.980 So Sina and Karbo are able to raise pretty large armies or very large armies, certainly armies that are enough on paper to match Sulla or at least give him a run for his money.
00:12:52.760 One of the things to say, though, and I've said it multiple times on Epochs, is that when it comes to armies, land armies, infantry and things, you want quality over quantity.
00:13:04.760 And Sulla's army is veteran and absolutely 100% fiercely loyal to the mighty Sulla.
00:13:12.400 Sulla's veteran armies are going to be way, way, way better at the job of fighting battles when it all boils down to it.
00:13:22.380 than anything Sina and Karbo can raise or Marius the Younger.
00:13:28.140 Marius the Younger just simply isn't going to be able to command the sort of gravitas that Sulla can.
00:13:34.980 His levies will be no match for the hardened vets of Sulla.
00:13:40.900 And so where before I've said that if Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were something like the fuse to a bomb and Marius, the career of Marius or the Marian military reforms, if they were something like a powder keg.
00:13:59.220 Well, Sulla is the explosion.
00:14:02.800 Sulla returning to Rome for the second time now is that explosion.
00:14:07.380 So Sina, in the first instance, doesn't really want to allow Sulla to actually land in Italy.
00:14:14.980 His calculation is, and probably correctly, that once Sulla lands in Italy,
00:14:19.500 he's going to garner sort of overwhelming support and just the tactical side of any fighting will be in his favour because he's the superior tactician.
00:14:31.480 Just strategically speaking, it's probably better for us, the Populares, the Marian party,
00:14:36.060 if we can, to take the war out to Sulla and have some battles in Asia Minor, in Greece, in Thrace, the Balkans, if we can.
00:14:48.420 It's going to be better for everyone, really.
00:14:50.480 It's just going to be better for the Republic.
00:14:52.480 If there's going to be battles between legionaries, if we can do it not on Italian soil, that's going to be best.
00:14:58.960 So that's what Sina thinks.
00:15:00.660 So Sina takes his army and he starts ferrying it across the Adriatic.
00:15:06.060 And some of it gets across, but then there's a big storm in the middle of this crossing.
00:15:10.840 And the other half of his men, or the other big contingent of his men, which haven't crossed yet,
00:15:15.440 who are stopped from crossing by a storm, they sort of seem to lose their nerve or decide they don't necessarily want to do this anymore.
00:15:22.600 You know, something approaching a mutiny, saying, well, you know, we're not going to cross the sea right now because there's a storm.
00:15:31.060 And being shipwrecked in the ancient world was almost certainly a death sentence.
00:15:34.880 Most people couldn't swim.
00:15:36.780 So we're not crossing right now.
00:15:38.740 That's off the cards because of a storm.
00:15:40.920 And we're rethinking the whole idea of crossing over to Dalmatia or crossing over to Greece at all.
00:15:47.760 Because, you know, they just sort of lose their nerve a bit and sort of starting to look like they're beginning to mutiny.
00:15:53.960 Now, Sinner decides to deal with this by sort of dressing them down, by trying to browbeat them and humiliate them into getting going, getting back on side.
00:16:06.300 And it backfires.
00:16:07.820 It doesn't work.
00:16:08.780 Now, there's a couple of different ways you can try and persuade people, isn't there?
00:16:13.620 You can try and sort of coerce them in a nice, good, positive way.
00:16:19.100 You know, you can try and bribe them.
00:16:20.420 You can try and sort of appeal to their sense of honour or you can try and flatter them.
00:16:24.740 You can just try and use reason.
00:16:27.180 There's all sorts of, you know, fairly positive, good, nice ways to try and get someone to try and bend somebody to your will.
00:16:34.460 And then there's just the more harsh, negative, even violent or mean ways, right?
00:16:40.600 You can just sort of try and bully them into doing what you want or try to threaten them in various ways.
00:16:48.100 Anyway, Sinner tries that.
00:16:50.900 You know, there's examples in other parts of history where Alexander or Caesar, they both show sort of disappointment a couple of times when their men don't follow them or don't do what they want.
00:17:02.380 But both Alexander and Caesar did that.
00:17:04.440 They're just sort of disappointed that their men wouldn't want to follow them in this next adventure.
00:17:10.620 And the men tumble and they say, no, no, we love you more than ever, if anything.
00:17:14.440 Don't be like that.
00:17:15.980 Don't do that.
00:17:17.060 Well, Sinner just did not command that sort of love and authority over his men.
00:17:23.120 And he certainly couldn't just bully them into anything.
00:17:27.620 That's what he tries to do.
00:17:28.600 He sort of berates them.
00:17:29.360 He calls a meeting of sort of the general officers or a lot of the men, in fact.
00:17:33.820 It sounds like a big meeting.
00:17:36.040 And he sort of chastises them, rebukes them, you know, calling them names and things.
00:17:42.440 And at one point, his lictors, his personal, his small number of personal bodyguard, he's trying to move through the crowd.
00:17:49.980 And one random legionary standing in the way.
00:17:54.360 And one of Sinner's lictors goes to push him out of the way, or does push him out of the way.
00:17:59.660 And apparently the crowd sort of turns nasty when they see that.
00:18:03.140 They start shouting at Sinner.
00:18:05.160 They're sort of not taking their dressing down.
00:18:09.040 They won't be told off by Sinner.
00:18:11.720 And some start even throwing stones.
00:18:14.840 And Sinner doubles down, starts really berating them.
00:18:20.460 And one of Sinner's men, one of his lictors, draws a sword, we're told.
00:18:25.160 And then he gets stabbed.
00:18:26.520 And then suddenly it's just a bloodbath and Sinner's murdered by his own men.
00:18:31.200 So that's how Sinner died.
00:18:32.760 Just a mutiny among his own men.
00:18:34.520 Because he didn't handle them right.
00:18:36.860 Because he didn't read the room properly.
00:18:38.940 He thought he could berate or bully them into doing anything he wanted.
00:18:43.300 And they just wouldn't.
00:18:44.840 So now Sinner's dead.
00:18:46.640 And Sinner was, fairly clearly, the preeminent leader of the Marian faction.
00:18:54.500 So now he's dead.
00:18:56.700 It's really Carbo, Scipio, Marius the Younger, and another consul called Narbinus.
00:19:04.040 There's still a fair few leaders of this Popularist faction, the Marian faction.
00:19:08.500 It's a bit like a many-headed hydra.
00:19:11.580 Because it's a big movement.
00:19:13.960 It's not just a small number of senators.
00:19:15.980 And if you kill them all, it's done with.
00:19:18.060 No, it's a big social movement.
00:19:20.420 You know, hopefully I've made that clear over the last few episodes.
00:19:23.000 That it's this idea about how unfair the urban plebs of Rome have been treated for hundreds of years.
00:19:31.300 How the Italian citizenry have been treated unfairly by the senatorial establishment for hundreds of years.
00:19:39.800 So the fact that Sinner is dead doesn't mean anything's over.
00:19:44.340 Nothing's over.
00:19:45.660 The talks will be passed to the next ones, Marius the Younger and Carbo mainly.
00:19:50.280 But Sulla will still have armies to fight.
00:19:53.360 Will still have a faction.
00:19:54.660 Will still have a social movement to defeat.
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00:20:01.540 Good night.
00:20:13.960 What is the election?
00:20:14.740 Good night.
00:20:20.240 Good night.
00:20:22.020 Good night.
00:20:23.760 Good night.