6. Marius and Sulla

The crushing of the Gracchan movement removed the possibility of the Roman masses overthrowing the Senate and reconstructing Roman society themselves. But the old ruling class remained incapable of ruling as it had done in the past.

As we have seen, the simmering hostility between the senatorial and equestrian classes came to a head in 123 BC, when Gaius Gracchus passed the Lex Judicaria, which prescribed that the jurors (judices) should be chosen from the equites, and not the Senate. From this time on the gulf between the Senate and the equites widened every year. Hitherto the jurors had been chosen from the ranks of the nobles, who therefore had control of the courts, and made unscrupulous use of their power.

This was especially the case in the courts which were established to try governors for extortion in the provinces. The voracious publicani, Roman tax-farmers who plundered the provinces, were mainly drawn from the equites. Usually the governors connived with them in this thievery, in exchange for bribes. But occasionally, a governor would clash with them either out of honesty or self-interest, and they could be threatened with prosecution, fines or exile. The question of who controlled the courts therefore affected the fundamental interests of an important section of the equestrian class.

In a situation where the contending classes have fought themselves to a standstill, and where neither side is able to win a decisive victory, the state apparatus, in the form of the army, begins to raise itself above society and acquire a certain degree of independence. In the Roman Republic this process was assisted by the fact that the army had an increasingly mercenary character, reflecting the destruction of the free peasantry that had been the backbone of the old citizens’ militia.

After the crushing of the Gracchan movement, the class struggle resolved itself into mere party strife in which ambitious politicians and generals representing one or another clique of the possessing classes struggled to get control of the state. There now appeared a whole series of rival generals, each manoeuvring for power. The constant wars against the Cimbri, the Teutones and other tribes conferred increasing power and prestige to these generals, who supported first one party, then another.

The first of these generals with political ambitions was Gaius Marius, the son of a poor day-labourer who got rich as the result of lucky speculation and married into the ancient patrician gens of the Julii. His military victories over the Africans, Germans, Cimbri and Teutones further increased his prestige. “Marius stood aloof from parties not much less than from society”, Mommsen informs us.^[1] This adventurer had one foot in each class and intrigued and manoeuvred between all of them. But his main base was the army, which he reorganised to suit his own purposes.

Prior to this, the army was open only to citizens with property. The different branches of the army (cavalry, heavy infantry, etc.) were likewise determined by the amount of property one possessed. But the changes in the class composition of Roman society rendered these distinctions irrelevant.

Marius first obtained the consulship in 107 BC, and his reforms of that year were a big step towards transforming the army from a citizens’ militia into a professional standing army, separate and apart from society, with its own identity and interests. The soldiers’ first loyalty was not to the Senate and the people of Rome but to their own commander – the man who would guarantee them their pay, plunder and glory. It was also a step towards a dilution of the rank of Roman citizen, since the army was open to Latins and other non-Romans, and Marius even gave Roman citizenship away on the battlefield, which he had no constitutional right to do.

From now on, the army was open to the non-propertied classes and what part of the army one served in was determined not by property but only by duration of service. A section of the urban proletariat was drafted into the army, far from Rome and the popular assemblies. In this way the Roman class struggle was effectively exported abroad and directed at Rome’s enemies.

All distinctions of armour were abolished, all wore the same uniform and all recruits were uniformly trained. The result was a general improvement in the fighting qualities and discipline of the troops, who had a new sense of identity – a new esprit de corps. The Roman army became a formidable and disciplined fighting force. But the reforms had another, more sinister import. Mommsen observes:

The republican constitution was essentially based on the view that the citizen was also a soldier, and that the soldier was above all a citizen; it was at an end, so soon as a soldier-class was formed. To this issue the new system of drill, with its routine borrowed from the professional gladiator, necessarily led; the military service became gradually a profession. Far more rapid was the effect of the admission – though but limited – of the proletariat to participate in military service; especially in connection with the primitive maxims, which conceded to the general an arbitrary right of rewarding his soldiers compatible only with the very solid republican institutions, and gave to the able and successful soldier a sort of title to demand from the general a share in the movable spoil and then from the state a portion of the soil that had been won.^[2]

The little detail that the training of the soldiers was copied from that of gladiators is significant of a profound change in the nature of the army. Gladiatorial combat, which played such a significant role in the national psychology of Rome in the later Republic and Empire, was probably invented by the Etruscans as a religious ritual involving human sacrifice. But it is possible that the Romans copied this bloody practice from the Samnites. Indeed, they used the words ‘gladiator’ and ‘Samnites’ synonymously. The gladiator was more often than not a slave, and although some of them acquired the status of pop stars (as long as they stayed alive), the profession in general was looked down upon as unworthy of free men.

The Roman soldier was now a professional killer, just like the gladiator, part of a well-oiled machine, held together by military discipline and a common interest in conquest and plunder: “His only home was the camp, his only science war, his only hope the general”, writes Mommsen.^[3] The Roman legion was now completely severed from civil society, and, although it carried on its banners the proud title SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus – the Senate and the People of Rome), in practice ambitious Roman generals could, and did, use it as a weapon against both the Senate and the Roman people.

Thus, the basis for Caesarism had been laid:

They had now the standing army, the soldier-class, the body-guard; as in the civil constitution, so also in the military, all the pillars of the future monarchy were already in existence: the monarch alone was wanting.^[4]

The very existence of a standing professional army is a threat to democracy. A standing army that is cut off from society is always a potential instrument for a coup d’état. This was demonstrated by the experience of the Roman Republic. That is why many centuries later the Paris Commune inscribed in its programme the demand for the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the armed people – a citizens’ militia. And this demand is at the very heart of the programme of workers’ democracy as explained by Lenin in State and Revolution and included in the Bolshevik Party Programme of 1919. The history of the Roman Republic is a salutary warning in this respect.

Caesarism

The Republic was being torn apart by class struggle. A series of demagogues arose, always willing to rouse the city poor in Rome to riots and disorders. Such men were the street orator Gaius Servilius Glaucia, known as the Roman Hyperbous, and his more able colleague, Lucius Appuleius Saturnius, whom even his enemies recognised as a fiery public speaker. Marius flirted with the populares, who were not averse to a deal with the victorious general who had the power of the legions at his back.

Here we have one of the elements of what we now call Bonapartism, and its ancient equivalent, Caesarism: a tendency to balance between the classes, to lean on the lumpenproletariat to strike blows against the ruling class, while manoeuvring to seize power, using the army. The populist leaders struck a deal with Marius to carve up public offices between them.

It is said that Marius himself was not above soliciting votes or even buying them. He certainly used the services of discharged soldiers to help his campaign with a little physical force. By a combination of bribery and assassination, Marius succeeded in getting himself elected consul, while Glaucia was made praetor and Saturninus a tribune of the plebs.

Marius obtained the loyalty of his men by promising them land. This could only be done through conquests. Partly it consisted of confiscated Carthaginian lands. Other land was taken from the Gallic territory in northern Italy. But soon all the legally available land was divided up. This fact was an important impulse to future Roman expansion, as was the resources to bribe the population of the capital with free grain. Together with the constant need to replenish the stock of cheap slaves, it became a self-enforcing process, propelling Rome to new wars of conquest.

In Rome itself the struggle between the conservative and populist factions continued. The latter demanded subsidies for the poor that would have bankrupted the treasury. The aristocracy resisted, but the Senate was under the pressure of the masses, who regularly rioted in the streets. Saturninus demanded that the Senate act, “or else thunder will be followed by hail”. But behind the scenes the aristocratic party was preparing a counterstroke. Arms were distributed to the sons of the rich, and they began to attack supporters of the popular party.

As on previous occasions, the populists were superior in numbers, but they were not properly armed or trained. They were therefore unprepared for such an onslaught. They broke open the doors of the prisons and even appealed to the slaves to fight for their freedom. But it was too late. As we have seen so many times in history, small, well-organised armed groups with good captains can defeat an unarmed and disorganised mass without too much difficulty. And in the moment of truth, they found that they could not rely on ‘friendly’ generals to save them.

Marius, who had leaned upon the populists to gain power for himself, now abandoned them and sided with the aristocracy to put down the masses. A fierce battle was fought in the great marketplace. The supporters of the popular party were defeated and took refuge in the Capitol, where fighting was seen for the first time in history. But they were forced to capitulate when the water supply was cut off.

Probably Marius would have preferred to spare the lives of his former allies, who could be useful to him in future intrigues, but matters were no longer in his hands. Without waiting for orders, the reactionary ‘gilded youth’ of Rome climbed the rooftops of the courtyard where the supporters of the popular party were effectively imprisoned and, tearing the tiles from the roofs, stoned their helpless victims to death.

The victory of the reactionaries was complete and devastating. Overnight, the popular party was utterly crushed, its leaders butchered. There followed yet another reign of terror, in which the ruling class took revenge for its humiliation at the hands of the masses: trials, executions, bans and proscriptions decimated the populists. In the past, the equites had supported the Gracchi, but now, terrified of the threat from the masses, they rallied to the banner of reaction that always unites the propertied classes against the poor and dispossessed.

The state rises above society

In the end the conflict had solved nothing. Roman society was now split into two bitterly antagonistic camps of rich and poor. On the one hand, the equestrian merchants and moneylenders formed a single reactionary bloc with the aristocratic slaveowners; on the other side stood the mass of dispossessed Roman citizens, the proletarians. But the peculiarity of the situation was this: that neither side could win a final and decisive victory over the other. Under such circumstances, the state – armed bodies of men – tends to rise above society and acquire a large degree of independence.

Engels explained the role of the state thus:

The state is therefore by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the moral idea”, “the image and reality of reason”, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become involved itself in an insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.^[5]

Unable to rule as it had in the past, the Roman ruling class had to rely increasingly on rule by the sword to keep the masses in check. The murders of Saturninus and Glaucia were followed by a long night of reaction in which the rights of the proletariat were abolished or restricted, laws were changed and progressive reforms liquidated.

However, the class struggle was not abolished, only driven underground. The discontent of the masses festered. Some resorted to individual terrorism. Cicero alleges that they succeeded in assassinating the hated Quintus Metellus by poisoning him. Others took refuge with foreign enemies of Rome, such as King Mithridates of Pontus, who was preparing war against Rome.

Reaction was firmly in control, but contradictions were breaking out in the camp of the victors. Having utilised the services of the equites to crush the proletariat, the aristocratic party in the Senate now proceeded to turn on its erstwhile allies. The confidence of the aristocrats had grown, their old overweening pride reasserted itself. Freed of the fear of the masses, they asserted their right to rule the roost without consideration for their junior partners, whom they saw as upstart nouveaux riches.

The class lines did not completely comply with the lines of party affiliation. There were certainly those in the Senate who supported the equites. Men like Lucius Marcius Philippus defended the rights of the equestrian class. The conflict between the senatorial and equestrian orders boiled down to who would plunder the provinces.

Some of the senatorial class were prepared to share the plunder with the equites. Others were greedier or else blinded by the class hatred of the old Roman aristocracy for the new class of moneyed upstarts, such as Marcus Aemilius Scaurus (c. 159 – c. 89 BC), one of the most prominent leaders of the optimates, and Marcus Livius Drusus (155-108 BC), who opposed the reforms of Gaius Gracchus.

While squabbling among themselves, the ruling class always kept a wary eye on the masses, whom they attempted to keep happy with free handouts of grain (plundered from the unfortunate provinces) and promises of land (likewise taken from the provinces). Slowly the provinces were being crushed by the burdens imposed by the capital.

The class of small peasants was already extinct in Umbria and Etruria, although it maintained a precarious foothold in areas like the Abruzzi valley. Italy was being bled by Rome and denied of its rights. This provoked a revolt of the Italians against Rome.

The Italians revolt

The intolerable burdens imposed by a parasitical capital city eventually drove the provinces to revolt. The political upheavals in Rome gave the Italians some hope of redress, but this led nowhere. The provincials first allied themselves to the populares, then to the optimates, but to no avail. No matter which party ruled at Rome, the provinces were always the losers.

Nowhere is the parasitic nature of Roman society more clearly illustrated than in this systematic plundering of the productive provinces by the unproductive centre. The cities of Italy were theoretically independent allies of Rome, but in practice Rome dominated them, demanding tribute and soldiers.

By the second century BC, between one half and two-thirds of the soldiers in Roman armies were from their Italian allies. Rome also controlled the allies’ foreign policy and their relations between one another. In compensation, the allies received a slice of the booty and lands taken in the course of Rome’s conquest in the Mediterranean. But as time went on, the burden of the impositions grew.

As we have seen, the Romans’ policy of land distribution was carried out unjustly and at the expense of the Italians. This led to huge and increasing inequality of land ownership and wealth. Appian writes that this led to the “Italian race […] declining little by little into pauperism and paucity of numbers without any hope of remedy”.^[6] For nearly two centuries they had shared dangers and victories with the Romans; they now eagerly demanded all their privileges.

In 91 BC, the tribune Marcus Livius Drusus, the son of the aristocratic leader of the same name, courageously took up the banner of reform. Like the Gracchi, he was noble, wealthy, and popular, and he hoped to settle the question peacefully and fairly. But his attempt to reform the courts alienated the equites, his agrarian and corn laws earned him the hostility of the big landowners, and his attempt to admit the Italians to the rights of Roman citizenship aroused the jealousy of the Roman city rabble.

In an exact repeat of what had happened with the Gracchi, his laws were passed, but the Senate pronounced them null and void. He was denounced in that body as a traitor, and was struck down by an assassin in the same year. The death of Drusus drove the Italians to despair.

Eight states entered into a defensive alliance and what had begun as a movement for equality and Roman citizenship began to evolve into a war for separation. The rebels formed a federal republic to which they gave the name Italia, with Corfinium, in the Pelignian Apennines, as its capital. All Italians were to be citizens of Corfinium, and here was to be the place of assembly and the Senate House.

This Italian rebellion is known as the Social War (from socii, meaning ‘allies’). The lead was given by the Samnite tribes, followed by other Latin tribes from the Liris and the Abruzzi down to Calabria and Apulia. Soon all of central and southern Italy was in arms against Rome. Only the Etruscans and Umbrians stuck with Rome. Here the landed and moneyed aristocracy ruled, and the class of independent small peasants had disappeared.

This war was at first disastrous to Rome. The Italians overran Campania, defeated the Romans several times, and entered into negotiations with the Northern Italians, whose loyalty to Rome began to waver. In the face of this challenge to its power, Rome took decisive action. The consuls, Lucius Julius Caesar and Publius Rutilius Lupus, both took the field. Each had five lieutenants, among whom were Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

The Social War was the last expression of the vigour of the class of small peasants that had once been the backbone of the Roman republic. The revolt was partly national in character – the Italians were a separate people (or rather, peoples) who spoke languages different to Latin. But there were also elements of class warfare – particularly on the issue of debt.

The free Italian peasantry, undermined by slave labour and the rise of the big latifundia, were being crushed under the weight of debt. They demanded the liquidation of all outstanding debts.

The war dragged on for five bloody years. But in the end the Italians suffered defeat. Their revolt had served to unite all the classes in Rome against them. The radical demands on debt pushed the equites into the arms of the aristocratic party, and their differences were forgotten in the fight against the common enemy. The city rabble was implacably opposed to sharing their privileges with the Italians and enthusiastically supported the war.

As usual, the Roman ruling class used a combination of cunning and brutality to get what it wanted. It decided to make concessions. Towards the close of the year 90 BC, the consul Caesar introduced the Julian Law, by which Roman citizenship was extended to all those Italians who had not yet revolted. This law was supplemented in the following year by the Lex Plautia Papiria, which allowed every citizen of an Italian town the franchise, if he handed in his name to the praetor at Rome within sixty days.

Yet another law, the Calpurnian Law, permitted Roman magistrates in the field to grant Roman citizenship to all who wished it. These laws had the desired effect. They succeeded in dividing and disorganizing the rebellion. The Samnites and Lucanians held out till the bitter end, but were finally crushed by Marius.

The end of the Social War did not bring peace to Rome. Far from being satisfied with the concessions, the new Italian citizens were embittered and resentful. Ultimately, they had fought for freedom from oppression. What they gained was oppression of the same kind as the rest of the plebeian masses.

In Rome, the Senate was torn apart by violent personal rivalries. All classes were affected by the prevailing austerity. The huge expense of the war had drained the treasury, and many were plunged into bankruptcy.

The Social War had tilted the balance of forces sharply toward reaction. The Senate, whose ranks had been depleted by the long period of wars and revolutions, was filled up by the admission of 300 new senators – all of them naturally loyal to the ruling aristocratic clique.

The voting system was reorganised so as to give a crushing preponderance to the propertied classes: those with estates greater than 100,000 sesterces in value possessed almost half the votes. In practice this meant that the poorer classes were excluded from the franchise.

The war also led to the rise of powerful generals like Sulla and Marius. The Roman army was now an army of mercenaries. The soldiers were loyal only to their general and indifferent to politics or the interests of the Republic.

In 88 BC the reactionary Sulla led six legions into Rome itself, in defiance of all laws and traditions of the Republic. His men murdered two tribunes who annoyed them. Very soon Sulla, the representative of the aristocratic party, was master of Rome. This was a fatal precedent. For the first time the army decided the outcome of the political struggle, as Mommsen remarks:

The first military intervention in civil feuds had fully demonstrated, not only that the political struggles had reached the point at which nothing save open and direct force proves decisive, but also that the power of the bludgeon was of no avail against the power of the sword. It was the conservative party which first drew the sword, and which accordingly in due time experienced the truth of the ominous words of the Gospel as to those who first have recourse to it.^[7]

Once more the triumphant reactionaries abolished progressive legislation. The Sulpician Laws, intended to enhance the voting power of the new enfranchised citizens, were pronounced null and void and their author, Publius Sulpicius, was condemned to death. His head was sent to Sulla as a present.

Nothing was done for the debtors, except to enforce the already existing rules for the maximum rate of interest. The people’s tribunes were forbidden even to appear before the people unless the Senate gave permission. To the social and political crisis was added an economic slump. Rome was now in the grip of a deep commercial and monetary crisis.

Mithridates

In the spring of 88 BC, King Mithridates of Pontus in the East invaded the wealthy province of Asia, which disrupted trade and drained the coffers of the Republic. So unpopular were the Romans with the oppressed provinces that as soon as Mithridates’ troops entered Greece, most of the smaller Greek states – the Achaeans, Laconians and Boeotians – joined them.

As we have seen, the economic system depended upon a steady supply of slaves, and that depended on successful foreign wars, in which entire cities were sold into slavery to guarantee a continuous supply of cheap slaves for the mines of Spain or the latifundia of Italy. But when the Romans met with serious resistance, as in the wars of Mithridates, the flow of slaves dried up, and the disruption of trade immediately provoked a crisis. This was, in fact, the most serious financial crisis that Rome had ever experienced.

The equites were discontented with the rule of the oligarchy that had not been able to prevent these ruinous wars and the economic crisis that accompanied them. They had, of course, supported the aristocrats when the latter suppressed the masses.

But now they began to move into opposition again. There were clashes between the two sides at election time, in which swords were drawn and blood ran in the Forum. On one occasion it is said that 10,000 people were killed.^[8]

Mithridates understood that the best way to strike at Rome was to disrupt its trade. His fleet commanded the eastern Mediterranean, and he controlled most of Greece and Asia. Delos, the centre of Roman trade in the eastern Mediterranean, was occupied and nearly 20,000 men, mainly Italians, were put to the sword.

Mithridates skilfully combined military methods with revolutionary measures such as the cancellation of debts and even the liberation of the slaves. This made him a formidable enemy. After a hard struggle, the Roman armies eventually defeated those of Mithridates. But even here the corrupt spirit of degeneration was manifest.

War had ceased to be a patriotic duty for free citizens and had become a simple business affair, an opportunity to plunder and rob. The troops serving in northern Greece under the Roman general Flaccus mutinied against their commander, accusing him of embezzling the soldiers’ spoils. The accusation must have had some basis because Flaccus was deposed by the army and executed. Needless to say, after the Roman victory, the slaves were brought back to their previous position and the debts cancelled by Mithridates were reintroduced.

The Marian terror

The struggle between the parties in Rome acquired an increasingly ferocious character. Lucius Cornelius Cinna, who had distinguished himself as an officer in the Social War, would become the most visible head of the populares. When he set about trying to resurrect the democratic reforms of Sulpicius, the Senate deprived Cinna of his consular office. Others were pronounced outlaws and fled to Africa. But these measures did not calm things down; quite the opposite.

The spirit of the soldiers at this time was inclined to be revolutionary and democratic except when individual generals succeeded in purchasing their loyalties. Therefore, when Cinna appealed to the soldiers stationed in Italy against the unconstitutional proscription against him, he got an immediate response.

The army of Campania recognised him as consul and marched on the capital. He invited the exiles back. More importantly, as he marched on Rome Cinna freed the slaves, whom he armed and included in his rebel army. He ordered his soldiers to break open the ergastula, the buildings where the landowners shut up their field-labourers for the night.

Cinna issued a proclamation offering freedom to any slave who should desert to him. As a result, many slaves left the city to join the rebels. In desperation, someone suggested that the Senate should offer freedom to any slave who joined the army, but this was too much for the Senate to swallow.

Many others flocked to his standard, and his army soon grew to 6,000, along with forty ships. He was joined by Marius, who was made commander of the rebels in Etruria. Rome was besieged. The armies of the Senate just melted away. Defeat now stared it in the face.

The Senate was forced to capitulate ignominiously, only asking that there should be no bloodshed. This was a vain hope, given the extremely inflamed and embittered mood of the populace. No sooner did the rebels enter the city than they launched a bloody reign of terror, in which Marius played the leading role.

The noted general, now over seventy years of age, was driven by the thirst for revenge against all those who had engineered his downfall. As Mommsen put it, Marius repaid every sarcasm with a stroke of the dagger.

The victors decided not to waste time prosecuting individual senators but to deal with their enemies by a far simpler method: they decided to kill all the members of the ruling party and confiscate their property. The city gates were closed to stop them from escaping.

For five days and nights the slaughter went on uninterruptedly. Even after this, the executions continued throughout Italy. A large number of Rome’s wealthiest citizens were put to death in what became known as the Marian terror.

In theory, the republican laws and constitution remained. But what use are laws and constitutions when all the important questions are settled by armed force? After Marius died in 86 BC, Cinna, the head of the popular party, ruled for four years as consul and regularly nominated himself and his colleagues without consulting the people, although he continued to lean on them for support. In effect, he made himself dictator of Rome.

Cinna naturally abolished the reactionary laws introduced by Sulla. He gave the freedmen (freed slaves) the vote in order to turn them into a fixed clientele. He introduced measures to ease the position of debtors. A new law on debt reduced the level of every private claim to one-fourth of its nominal amount and cancelled three-quarters in favour of the debtors.

To please the Roman proletariat, he removed the restrictions on the free distribution of grain. In this way the Roman people accepted the loss of their political power in exchange for material benefits. The era of ‘bread and circuses’ was born.

The real basis of Cinna’s regime was the army. The equites, who might have backed him, were alienated by his measures on behalf of debtors, which hit them in the most sensitive part of their anatomy – the purse.

The smashing of the aristocratic party produced a situation of relative stability for about three years, until a new wave of agitation upset the status quo. Those members of the oligarchy who had survived the Marian terror fled to territory controlled by Mithridates. Sulla, the chief of the reactionary party, established something like a government in exile.

In the spring of 83 BC, Sulla landed in Brundisium at the head of his legions. As Sulla advanced northwards, he successfully bought the support of other generals, formerly associated with the populists. His soldiers mixed with theirs, fraternised, joked, got drunk together. Naturally, Sulla’s troops, generously supplied with gold from their master’s coffers, bought the drinks.

This was not a struggle for political ideas but simply for loot. The general who promised more loot got the army’s backing. On this occasion, Sulla promised more. The armies of Rome once again melted away like snow in springtime. Bribed by Sulla’s gold, they passed over en masse to his side.

The Marian army was routed and forced to retreat, but not before putting to death all those prisoners who had so far escaped execution. Sulla finally entered Rome, where he made himself dictator and immediately instituted a White terror.

A regime of blood and iron was imposed. The Latin tribe of the Samnites, who had obtained a de facto independence under the popular government, was ruthlessly crushed and their cities given up to pillage. The Samnite nation, said Sulla, should be forever extirpated from the face of the earth.

Sulla’s dictatorship

Sulla’s government was supposed to represent the Roman aristocracy, but in fact its members were chosen mainly from defectors from the populares and wavering elements – the equivalent of the men who in the French Revolution were called ‘the Marsh’.

He understood that the social base of the aristocracy was too narrow to guarantee stability to his regime, which, like that which it had overthrown, rested mainly on the army. Among the deserters from the popular party were Lucius Flaccus, Lucius Philippus, Quintus Ofella, and last but not least, Gnaeus Pompeus – later known as Pompey the Great.

Like his father, Strabo, the young Pompey was not originally a supporter of the oligarchy and had identified himself with the populists, even serving in Cinna’s army. But in this age of cynical military adventurers, principles and ideas could change with every change of the wind. Men like Pompey were not the exception but the rule.

The fact that Sulla’s dictatorship rested on the army is shown by his nomenclature: he did not call himself Consul but Proconsul – an office of a purely military character. He wrote to the Senate, explaining to them that in his modest opinion, they should hand all power to one man, who, again in his modest opinion, should be himself.

Since he had a large army at his back, the senators were in no position to argue. Here for the first time, the state – in the form of the army – lifted itself above society and dominated it without any restraint.

The title ‘dictator’ originally signified a magistrate appointed by the Senate during an emergency. It had fallen into disuse at the time of the wars with Hannibal. Now Sulla revived it, assuming supreme control of the state.

But the original idea was for a short-term period – not more than six months – after which the dictator would step down. What happened under Sulla was quite different. His dictatorship had no limits of any kind. It was rule by the sword, pure and simple.

In order to protect the oligarchy against the proletariat, Sulla established his personal dictatorship over the oligarchy. Although Sulla spoke in the name of the Senate, and in fact represented the interests of the senatorial class (the oligarchy), he expropriated them politically, concentrating all power into his own hands.

Thus, the ruling class lost power over its own state. As Mommsen correctly comments: “the protector of the oligarchic constitution had himself to come forward as a tyrant, in order to avert the ever-impending tyrannis. There was not a little of defeat in this last victory of the oligarchy.”^[9]

Following the now familiar pattern, Sulla launched a campaign of proscriptions, arrests and executions of his enemies. Every day saw new political murders. The death toll amounted to at least 4,700 names, mostly members of the Marian party. On Sulla’s instructions, their heads were piled up for public display at the Servilian Basin near the Forum.

But these bloody reprisals were not confined to those members of the Marian party directly implicated in the previous terror. The victims included equites who had sat in judgement on senators or had made money speculating on confiscated lands. There were about 1,600 such people on the proscribed lists.

Sulla’s terror dragged on for months and spread all over Italy. Spies and informers were everywhere. People were denounced out of spite, personal hatred or plain greed. Some were murdered even before their name was placed on the proscribed list to justify murder ex post facto.

Naturally, Sulla and his family and friends did not neglect the opportunity to enrich themselves by getting their hands on the confiscated property of their enemies. One of his freedmen is said to have purchased property worth 6 million sesterces for just 2,000, while one of his subalterns is said to have accumulated an estate worth 10 million sesterces through speculation.

Sulla’s terror was different in kind to anything that went before. The Marian terror was mainly the product of the desire for personal revenge. It was relatively haphazard in comparison to the systematic campaign of Sulla with its cold, calculating cruelty. Sulla’s confiscations amounted to the staggering value of 350 million sesterces. Many of the wealthiest men in the republic were ruined by this. Mommsen writes:

It was altogether a fearful visitation. There was no longer any process or any pardon; mute terror lay like a weight of lead on the land, and free speech was silenced in the market-place alike of the capital and of the country-town. The oligarchical reign of terror bore doubtless a different stamp from that of the revolution; while Marius had glutted his personal vengeance in the blood of his enemies, Sulla seemed to account terrorism in the abstract, if we may so speak, a thing necessary to the introduction of the new despotism, and to prosecute and make others prosecute the work of massacre almost with indifference. But the reign of terror presented an appearance all the more horrible, when it proceeded from the conservative side and was in some measure devoid of passion; the commonwealth seemed all the more irretrievably lost, when the frenzy and the crime on both sides were quite equally balanced.^[10]

When a ruling class is weakened and exhausted by long years of internecine struggle, we see how power can pass into the hands of a ‘strongman’ who rules in the name of the existing social order, but who in fact usurps power and reinforces it by creating a new state in his own image. Such a man was Sulla. His rise, however, also marked the beginning of a process of utter degeneration of Roman society in all spheres of life.

In the good old days of the Republic the army was not allowed to set foot in Rome, and as a consequence there was no army garrison in the capital. The revolutionary events of the previous period, however, persuaded the ruling clique of the need to take special measures. Sulla therefore took steps to strengthen the state as an organ of repression. For the first time he set up a real standing army, made up of specially selected professionals taken from the ranks of freed slaves and numbering around 10,000.

Nowadays the state is surrounded by a mystique that has been built up over centuries. It is presented as a power standing above society (which it is) and above all class interests (which it is not). It is the Holy of Holies, and not to be questioned. But in Sulla’s time the nature and role of the state was plain for all to see.

The force set up by Sulla was intended as a kind of bodyguard for the oligarchy, but this was not defence, as in the past, against a foreign enemy, but to defend the ruling class against its own citizens.

Here we already have the outline of the future Praetorian Guard. Here is the embryo of the Gestapo, the KGB, and all future special organs of state repression, where an armed force is created to defend the state against the people it is supposed to be defending.

Having concentrated power into his hands, Sulla ruthlessly crushed both the popular party and the equites. Ever since the time of Gaius Gracchus, the government had provided the proletariat with the distribution of free corn. Sulla abolished this. Gaius Gracchus had encouraged the growth of the equestrian class by developing the system of tax farming, whereby private individuals were able to fleece the wealthy provinces of Asia for their own benefit.

Sulla struck a heavy blow against these publicani by abolishing the system of middlemen and establishing fixed taxes for Asia, to be paid directly to the treasury at Rome. Gracchus gave the equites a privileged place in the legal system. Sulla abolished the equestrian courts and re-established the senatorial courts. In short, the equestrian order established by Gaius Gracchus was abolished by Sulla.

It is impossible to run society by repression alone, and the army is too narrow a base to achieve a stable regime. Therefore, Sulla needed a policy that would give him a social base. Following a line of action that was in theory acceptable to both conservatives and populists, he tried unsuccessfully to put the clock back by encouraging the creation of small farms through the colonisation of territories in Italy.

He ordered the breaking up of some big latifundia, to be settled by soldiers in his own army. Similar utopian schemes were advanced 2,000 years later by the Italian fascists – with just as little success. In the time of Sulla the big latifundia dominated agriculture just as the big monopolies dominate our own world. The day of the free small peasant was over, and all attempts to revive it were necessarily doomed to impotence.

Which class now held power? In theory all power now passed to the Senate. But in practice, this was only a show. Real power was concentrated in the hands of Sulla and the army. In a move ostensibly designed to strengthen it, Sulla introduced 300 new members into the Senate. These new appointees were grateful to Sulla for their promotion and loyal to him.

However, while preserving the outward forms of the old republican democracy, Sulla robbed them of any real content. Mommsen explains:

The burgess-body remained formally sovereign; but so far as its general assemblies were concerned, while it seemed to the regent necessary carefully to preserve their names, he was still more careful to prevent any real activity on their part. Sulla dealt even with the franchise itself in the most contemptuous manner; he made no difficulty either in conceding it to the new burgess-communities, or in bestowing it on Spaniards and Celts en masse…^[11]

Sulla did everything to consolidate his grip on power. But he had overlooked one small detail. The Roman army on which he relied had been entirely transformed. The soldiers no longer had any loyalty to the state, but only to their commanders. And this loyalty lasted only as long as the latter guaranteed the soldiers an acceptable amount of loot. In the course of the civil war, no fewer than six generals had been murdered by their own troops. The army now had a sense of its own power, and was not prepared to submit to anybody.

When Sulla attempted to assert his authority over the army, he immediately met with resistance from his own staff. Naturally, his main opponents were the people in whom he had placed the greatest trust: Gnaeus Pompeus, whom he had entrusted with the conquest of Sicily and Africa and intended to make his son-in-law, and Quintus Ofella.

When Sulla, through the Senate, ordered Pompey to dismiss his army, the latter refused. The arrogant upstart Pompey told Sulla to his face that “more worshipped the rising than the setting sun”.^[12] Nevertheless, Sulla decided to attempt a compromise with Pompey. Ofella was not so lucky. It is typical of the cynicism of men like Sulla that while he had abolished the death penalty for political offences, he had Ofella cut down by his paid assassins in the marketplace anyway.

Plunder of the provinces

Under Sulla’s dictatorship, the populares and the equites were deprived of all rights. But the ruling oligarchy was itself displaced from state power, which passed to the hands of Sulla and his clique. Sulla was a king in all but name. The fact that Sulla gave provincials the vote was an empty gesture, because the vote itself was meaningless. He gave the provinces an empty title and in exchange robbed them of very real wealth. But though Sulla kicked and humiliated them, he could not do without the very equites he had displaced from political power.

After decades of revolution and civil war, Rome’s treasury was depleted. Sulla needed the moneylenders to raise more cash, but then a large part of the wealth flowed from the state’s coffers straight back into the moneylenders’ pockets. The war tax that Sulla imposed on Asia swelled to six times its original amount as a result of usurious interest rates. The usurers made huge fortunes and the provinces were stripped bare. People in the affected communities had to sell their public buildings, their jewels and their works of art; parents had to sell their children in order to satisfy the greed of these insatiable leeches.

The provinces were being crushed under an intolerable burden of taxation. Sicily and Sardinia had to hand over one-tenth of their production of grapes and wheat. There was also a land tax, import duties, and a hundred other impositions. The province of Judea had to pay a Temple tax.

Even more onerous was the quartering of troops and other such obligations, such as the free lodging of magistrates, clerks, lectors, heralds, physicians, priests and a host of other official functionaries. To these taxes and obligations must be added periodic forced sales and requisitions. All this provided enterprising Roman magistrates with a huge source of personal enrichment.

These things were the normal state of affairs for most of the provinces. But if the provincials dared to rebel against their tormentors, their plight would be far worse. Sulla compelled the cities of Asia who had joined Mithridates against Rome to pay to every common Roman soldier quartered in them the equivalent of forty times his daily wage (16 denarii), seventy times if he was a centurion. In addition to free food and lodging, the cities had to provide the soldiers with free clothing. To make matters worse, the soldiers were given the right to invite as many guests as they liked.

This does not exhaust the list of impositions. To it must be added the numerous local taxes for the maintenance of public buildings and the payment of all local services. Last, but not least, the system of tax farming greatly increased the burden of taxation, as greedy Roman middlemen took their slice of the wealth produced by the provinces. Even without the tax farmers, the Roman governors and magistrates plundered the provincials shamelessly. And new laws introducing new taxes were a regular occurrence.

It was necessary to look around for some new source of plunder. And the ancient civilisations of the East were the most tempting target for Roman avarice. Despite all her wealth, Rome’s annual income was only two-thirds of that of the pharaoh of Egypt. The Ptolemies exploited the fabulous wealth of the Nile Valley and in addition benefited from Egypt’s favoured position as an international commercial centre. Its turn would come soon.

The other source of wealth was slavery. Although the landowners had been politically expropriated by Sulla, they still retained their stranglehold on the key elements of the economic life of Rome and increased their wealth all the time. In Sulla’s time, a modest fortune for a Roman senator would be 3 million sesterces, while 2 million was considered to be a decent equestrian fortune.

The landowners and money men were naturally the driving force behind the Republic’s foreign policy. It was their pressure that led to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth, because they wanted to rid themselves of these trading rivals. Similarly, the slave trade was increased to unheard-of levels to meet the demands of the Roman landowners:

All lands and all nations were laid under contribution for slaves, but the places where they were chiefly captured were Syria and the interior of Asia Minor.^[13]

This was the heyday of slavery. Italy was now overrun by a mass of slaves. It is of course impossible to state the total number of slaves in Roman Italy with certainty, but historians consider a range of up to 2 million, out of a total population of 6 million at the end of the Republic, to be plausible. This would have meant that one in three inhabitants of Italy were slaves, giving a similar proportion of slave to free inhabitants as the southern slave states of the antebellum USA.^[14]

Degeneration

The rule of Sulla was a golden age for the Roman upper classes. This was a period in which the rich became even more fabulously rich. This was shown by the lavish gladiatorial games that now became fashionable. Sulla himself, when he was praetor, exhibited a hundred lions at the games.

This was an age, like our own, characterised by a sharp and deepening contrast between rich and poor. Most people lived in stinking, narrow streets, where poor Romans inhabited overcrowded slums in rat-infested apartment blocks called insulae (literally, islands). The dwellings of the poor often only contained one or two rooms. There was no running water and conditions were squalid and unsanitary.

Some of these insulae were seven or more storeys in height. To reach an apartment, a poor tenant had to climb as many as 200 stairs. Most buildings were made of wood and were so badly built that they all too frequently collapsed or caught fire. That made them real death traps.

The contrast with the luxurious lifestyle of the rich could hardly be greater. The Roman nobility lounged in idleness in their splendid villas around the Bay of Naples tended to by armies of slaves. The inside of their houses was even more impressive than the outside, being hung with expensive curtains and tapestries. The great usurer, Crassus, had a townhouse famous for its old trees, which was valued at 6 million sesterces. By comparison the value of an ordinary dwelling in Rome was about 600.

Extravagant prices were paid for qualified domestic slaves – 100,000 sesterces for a good cook, for instance, or 200,000 for an educated Greek slave of the first rank. As in every other form of class society the ignorant rich masters could purchase the services of poets and philosophers.

Instead of the old woollen dresses, wealthy women wore silk that scarcely concealed their figures. Conservatives complained that the latest styles were only an excuse for people to walk around naked. Fortunes were made and lost at the gaming tables. Morals were looser than ever before. Divorce, previously almost unheard of in Rome, became commonplace.

So scandalous was the ostentation of the rich that Sulla passed the so-called sumptuary laws, which sought in vain to place some limit on the extravagances of the wealthy. The rulers of Rome were afraid of the reaction that such conduct might provoke among the less favoured population of Rome.

But the nobles felt themselves above the law. Their ostentation was a defiant reaction to the period when they had to suffer the indignities and persecutions of the rule of the populares. They were now the masters of the house! They would flaunt their wealth for all to see! No laws would stop them!

We see this phenomenon repeated many times in history – in France during the Thermidorian reaction, for example, or in seventeenth-century England after the Restoration of Charles II following the death of Oliver Cromwell.

To this moral decay we must add the decay of religion and the spread of mystical and irrational tendencies. The old Romans were not at all inclined to mysticism. The Roman religion was a religion of farmers with a rather provincial and prosaic outlook on life.

We see this healthy and thoroughly un-mystical outlook in all kinds of details. In the struggle against Carthage, the Romans had to learn how to fight on ships for the first time. They were not natural sailors. On one occasion, when they were about to go into battle with the Carthaginian navy, the priest announced that the auguries were unfavourable because the sacred chickens would not eat the grain he had offered them. The Roman captain’s answer was: “If they will not eat, then let them drink!” So saying he threw the unfortunate birds into the sea and attacked the enemy – although, sad to say, not very successfully.

It is in the period of Sulla when for the first time we see the spread of mysticism in Roman society. Sulla himself had no ideology and little religion, but he was superstitious and believed in Fate. Of Sulla’s beliefs, Mommsen writes:

… it was that faith in the absurd, which necessarily makes its appearance in every man who has thoroughly ceased to believe in a connected order of things – the superstition of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw on each and every occasion the right number.^[15]

Both Caesar and Napoleon had a similar cast of mind to that of Sulla, and they constantly harped on about Destiny. There is always an element of the gambler in such military adventurers, and all gamblers are superstitious. It often appears that the outcome of a battle is decided by a lucky accident, like the lucky throw at dice.

But this is also a product of a specific period in history. As Hegel pointed out, necessity expresses itself through accident. The Men of Destiny throughout history have only been men who expressed an idea that had already become necessary by the working out of processes that take place behind the backs of men, and invisible to them.

Their ‘luck’ turns out to be no luck at all, but an optical illusion. The circumstances that determine whether they win or lose are prepared in advance. This does not cancel out the role of the individual in history. What it means is that the scope for individual action is severely limited by objective reality, which favours one outcome over all others. When history plays games with the destiny of men and women, it always plays with a loaded dice.

This rise of mysticism and irrationality in the later Roman Republic is also no accident. In a period when the productive forces are developing and society is going forward, people will believe in the existing gods, will accept unquestioningly the existing morality and obey the existing laws. But when a given social order is breaking down, when the productive forces stagnate and decline, then a different psychology can be observed.

There are symptoms of universal malaise, doubt and scepticism. The temples stand empty. Nobody believes in the old gods any more. Instead, we see the spread of mysticism, unbelief and superstition. Mommsen writes:

Men had become perplexed not merely as to the old faith, but as to their very selves; the fearful crises of a fifty years’ revolution, the instinctive feeling that a civil war was still far from being at an end, increased the anxious suspense, the gloomy perplexity of the multitude. Restlessly the wandering imagination climbed every height and fathomed every abyss, where it fancied that it might discover new prospects or new light amidst the fatalities impending, might gain fresh hopes in the desperate struggle against destiny, or perhaps might find merely fresh alarms. A portentous mysticism found in the general distraction – political, economic, moral, religious – the soil which was adapted for it, and grew with alarming rapidity; it was as if gigantic trees had grown by night out of the earth, none knew whence or whither, and this very marvellous rapidity of growth worked new wonders and seized like an epidemic on all minds not thoroughly fortified.^[16]

This extract shows very clearly the depth of degeneration that had corroded the very spirit of the Roman Republic. The conclusion is clear.

The Republic now existed in name only. Unable to live, it was unwilling to die. It was only a matter of time until an appropriate executioner would be found to put it out of its misery. Exactly the same can be said of the capitalist system in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Reading Mommsen’s comments on this period, we seem to be reading a description of our own troubled times.

Endnotes

[1] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, p. 240.

[2] Ibid., p. 246.

[3] Ibid., pp. 246-7.

[4] Ibid., p. 247.

[5] Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 155-6, emphasis added.

[6] Appian, Roman History, Vol. 3, The Civil Wars, Book 1, p. 19.

[7] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, p. 321.

[8] Ibid., p. 382.

[9] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, pp. 421-2.

[10] Ibid., p. 427, emphasis added.

[11] Ibid., pp. 435-6.

[12] Plutarch, Lives, Vol. 3, ‘Pompey’, p. 365.

[13] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, p. 491.

[14] See Madden, ‘Slavery in the Roman Empire Numbers and Origins’, Classics Ireland, Vol. 3, pp. 109-128.

[15] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, pp. 459-60.

[16] Ibid., p. 525.