The Storm Before the Storm полностью

BACK IN ROME, Cinna spent the last few days of 87 arranging his own reelection to the consulship. To preserve the veneer of constitutional government, Cinna allowed elections to proceed but likely used his own powers as consul to disallow any other candidates. As had been arranged in advance, the only other man allowed to run was Gaius Marius. In January 86 Marius finally entered the seventh consulship he claimed was his destiny.⁴⁰

The division of labor in the Cinna-Marius regime is clear. Marius would assume command of the war against Mithridates. He would raise an army, march to Greece, and depose Sulla. Cinna meanwhile would remain in Rome and see to the political and economic settlement of Italy. If all went well, Sulla could be pushed aside, Marius would win the war, and then return to a friendly regime that would divide up the spoils and make them the permanent masters of Rome.⁴¹

Unfortunately, it didn’t go like that. Though he had long denied it, Marius was an old man in bad health. He had recently undergone an operation for varicose veins, and just a few weeks after taking office, he contracted pneumonia. Before anyone realized how serious his condition was, Gaius Marius died. Just seventeen days after inaugurating his seventh consulship, with maps of Greece spread out on his desk and plans for a final showdown with Sulla in the works, Gaius Marius died one of the all-time anticlimactic deaths in history.⁴²

Gaius Marius was a pivotal figure in Roman history. When he first embarked on his public career he was merely a novus homo Italian. But through steady persistence, he had climbed his way up the cursus honorum. As he climbed, he helped unlock the populare forces that challenged senatorial supremacy. He was connected to publicani merchants, a friend of the Italians, and patron to legions of poor veteran soldiers. He had fought and won wars against Jugurtha and the Cimbri, and at the peak of his power was hailed as the Third Founder of Rome. His spectacular career set an example for ambitious men of future generations, though this example was not uniformly positive. At the end of his life Marius came to embody the dark side of relentless ambition: “It can therefore be said that as much as he saved the state as a soldier, so much he damaged it as a citizen, first by his tricks, later by his revolutionary actions.” Above all Marius was a man whose ambitions could never be satisfied, for though he was the “first man to be elected consul for the seventh time, and was possessed of a house and wealth which would have sufficed for many kingdoms at once, he lamented his fortune, in that he was dying before he had satisfied and completed his desires.”⁴³

CINNA NOW RULED alone. The presence of Marius in his coalition had always been uncomfortable, and the death of the old man was a welcome relief. Cinna was now able to claim the Marian standard without having to worry about Marius himself. The Marian partisans were an important pillar of Cinna’s coalition, which now included publicani merchants and moderate senators looking to keep the peace. But the most important pillar was the Italians, to whom Cinna owed his power. The army that captured Rome was mostly Italian, and led by a man who promised them full political equality. In a very real sense, Cinna’s regime represented the triumph of the Italians in the Social War.

While he consolidated his domestic regime, Cinna also reassessed his foreign policy. Marius’s death meant he needed new leadership for the war in the east. So Cinna took what would have been a single unified army under Marius and divided it between two men: Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus and Lucius Valerius Flaccus. Cinna induced the Senate to assign Asiaticus to the province of Macedonia, and induced the Assembly to elect Flaccus consul and assign him to the province of Asia.⁴⁴

But Cinna was not as concerned about the war in the east as he was about the situation in Italy. The Italian economy was in shambles and things had only gotten worse since the murder of Asellio three years earlier. There were still no taxes from the east to augment the money supply, and estates across Italy were still ruined. So before he left for the east, Flaccus carried a measure through the Assembly that canceled three-fourths of all outstanding debts. The act was necessary medicine. Until Asia was retaken and money circulated in Italy again, there was nothing else to be done. But the law did have key points that kept the creditors from total ruin: First, the act guaranteed the publicani bankers would at least get something when it appeared possible they would get nothing. Second, most of them were themselves debtors; their own pressing burdens were canceled along with everyone else’s.⁴⁵