AFTER THE SHOCKING death of Strabo, the Senate despaired at its chances of surviving the siege. To keep the war going, Octavius slipped out of the city and joined with his strongest supporters, Metellus Pius and Marcus Crassus Dives. * Operating in the Alban Hills near Rome, Octavius tried to raise levies from the Latin communities that had stayed loyal through the Social War. But he could not raise troops fast enough, and with Cinna’s army preparing to march on Rome again, the Senate ordered Metellus Pius to go negotiate a peace. Cinna’s first demand was that Pius treat him as consul. He said, “I left Rome as consul, and I will not return there as a private man.” After a few rounds of negotiations, the Senate agreed to Cinna’s terms. The recently elevated priest-consul Merula formally resigned. In exchange, Cinna said he would not purposefully kill anyone when he reentered the city. But no one could miss Marius standing behind Cinna glowering ominously. As soon as these negotiations were complete, Metellus Pius prudently withdrew himself to Africa.27
Settlement in hand, the Senate ordered the gates of Rome opened. The restored consul Cinna entered the city at the head of an army. But for the moment, Marius did not follow. The old man refused to enter until his status as an enemy of the state was formally repealed. So as soon as he entered the city, Cinna arranged for the Assembly to lift the ban on the twelve Marian exiles and restore their civil dignity. He then induced the Assembly to turn the tables on the man who had engineered the expulsion of the Marians. Under Cinna’s close watch the Assembly declared Sulla an enemy of the state.28
With his dignity restored, Marius entered Rome. For a few hours everything was calm. Then the killing began. Though Cinna had pledged not to go on a punitive murder spree, Marius had made no such promise, and the soldiers were eager to be let off the leash. Whether they were Italian veterans of the Social War or foreign mercenaries, the chance to sack Rome was an opportunity they did not want to miss. So for five days, the people of Rome cowered under a bloody terror in which “neither reverence for the gods, nor the indignation of men, nor the fear of odium for their acts existed any longer among them… They killed remorselessly and severed the necks of men already dead, and they paraded these horrors before the public eye, either to inspire fear and terror, or for a godless spectacle.” But the killings were not indiscriminate. The marauding troops concentrated on the wealthier quarters of the city and ignored the lower-class plebs. This discriminating eye helped form a perverse bond between the soldiers and the poor Romans; indeed, after dreading contact for so long it might have surprised both sides to learn they had a common enemy in the rich nobles on the Palatine Hill.29
No man had a bigger target on his back than Cinna’s colleague Octavius, who was furious the Senate had surrendered. Though he commanded no troops, Octavius refused to hide. But while Cinna had promised not to
With the Cinnans running amok, the great optimate orator Marcus Antonius found himself targeted by Carbo, the son of the man Antonius had driven to suicide twenty-five years earlier. After tracking Antonius to an inn, a tribune loyal to Carbo sent some soldiers upstairs. But Antonius was “a speaker of much charm,” who had lost none of his persuasive talents. He “tried to soften [them] with a long discourse, appealing to their pity by recalling many and various subjects, until the tribune, who was at a loss to know what had happened, rushed into the house.” Furious to find Antonius nearly talking his way out of danger, the tribune “killed him while he was still declaiming.” Antonius’s head was posted in the Forum.31
But not all the killings were carried out in the street. The unfortunate priest-consul Merula was offered the dignity of a formal trial, but he elected to commit suicide rather than accept a sentence of death. He “opened his veins and, as his blood drenched the altars, he implored the gods to whom, as priest of Jupiter, he had formerly prayed for safety of the state, to visit their wrath upon Cinna and his party.” Marius’s old colleague Catulus—the man who always tried to take credit for the Battle of the Raudian Plain—was also offered the courtesy of a show trial. Aware that he was in mortal danger, he approached Marius and begged for his life. Marius merely replied, “You must die.” Catulus returned home and suffocated himself.32
