Over the course of these bloody five days we know of fourteen named victims, including a shocking six former consuls. Lucius Caesar and his brother Gaius perished, as did Crassus Dives, who committed suicide along with his eldest son as they were on the verge of capture. One poor soul named Ancharius died because he greeted Marius in the street and Marius did not acknowledge him. The Spiked Boots chopped him down right there on the spot. Watching as heads mounted on the rostra, the people of Rome were mortified that “what their ancestors had graced with the ships’ beaks of the enemy was now being disgraced by the heads of citizens.”33
At this point, Marius himself is often portrayed as crazed with bloodlust, a man “whose anger increased day by day.” Painted as an old man driven mad with senile vengeance, he “thirsted for blood, kept on killing all whom he held in any suspicion whatsoever.” But if we stand back from the bloody chaos, Marius appears no better and no worse than any of the others; he settled personal vendettas and let his men run wild, but so did they all. That said, it does appear Marius was willing to carry on the terror longer than his colleagues, and he certainly did nothing to rein in his infamously brutal Spiked Boots. It was left to Cinna and Sertorius to finally restore order with one last brutal slaughter. In the middle of the night, they surrounded the Spiked Boots and massacred every last one of them. The slaughter of the Spiked Boots marks the end of the five-day terror.34
With the killing concluded, anyone who wished to depart Rome was now free to do so. This led to an exodus of families who may have survived the terror but still wanted no part of Cinna’s Rome. Sulla’s wife Metella and her children were among the refugees and they headed straight for Athens to bring Sulla the news that Marius had captured Rome, their friends were dead, and Sulla was an enemy of the state.35
MUCH TO SULLA’S great consternation, the siege of Athens was still ongoing over the winter of 87–86. The city should have fallen by now, but Lucullus had still not returned from his quest to gather a navy. It was while Sulla sat unhappily outside of Athens that his wife and children showed up. He was shocked to see them, and even more shocked by the news they bore: Rome had fallen to his enemies, all his property had been razed to the ground, and the Assembly had declared him an enemy of the state. Worst of all, Marius would almost certainly be voted commander of the war against Mithridates.36
Now cut off from cash and supplies from Italy, Sulla started pumping the local Greeks for money to fund his war not just against Mithridates, but also what looked like a looming civil war with Marius. Sulla’s brilliant expedient was to target well-endowed shrines like the Oracle at Delphi. The stiff tribute he imposed on these religious treasuries caused great moral agonizing, even for Sulla’s own agents, who were “loath to touch the sacred objects, and shed many tears… over the necessity of it.” But that didn’t stop them from taking the money and running.37
After a winter of bad news, Sulla vented his frustrations on Athens in March 86. As the winter drew to a close the city fathers came out to beg for mercy, but were so long-winded in their defense of Athens, the shining beacon of light and reason, that Sulla snapped, “I was not sent to Athens by the Romans to learn its history, but to subdue its rebels.” Out of patience Sulla ordered a daring gambit to capture the city. One night, a few cohorts of Roman soldiers used tall ladders to climb into Athens at an ill-attended corner of the wall. These advance cohorts successfully threw open the gates and let their comrades in. What followed was like a scene from the terror in Rome, only worse. Sulla did not restrain his men, giving them rein to rob, kill, and rape at their pleasure. A witness later said that “the blood that was shed in the market-place covered all the Cerameicus inside the Dipylon gate; nay, many say that it flowed through the gate and deluged the suburb.” Only after the desperate pleading from both Greek and Roman friends did Sulla allow himself to be persuaded to end the sack.38
After capturing Athens, Sulla turned his full attention to its port of Piraeus. The legions overwhelmed the defenses and forced Archelaus’s fleet to retreat out to sea. Sulla then ordered the famous docks of Piraeus burned and its walls destroyed. Consolidating his victory, Sulla made plans to conquer the rest of Greece before turning to face the armies of Marius.39
