The Storm Before the Storm полностью

But by that point, the rumors of emancipation had taken on a life of their own. Every slave in Sicily now believed their ticket to freedom was in the mail. When the tribunal shut down after liberating just a few hundred men, slaves on estates across the island boiled with rage. Down on the southwest coast, an armed revolt broke out and a few hundred slaves occupied the heights of Mount Caprianus. Within a week, the rebel force was up to two thousand. A hastily raised Sicilian militia was sent to subdue to the slaves, but this militia dropped their weapons and ran at the first whiff of battle. Word of this victory spread and in no time the slave army had grown to more than twenty thousand.¹¹

After this initial uprising, the Second Servile War followed the same course as the First Servile War. In fact, its course is so similar that some scholars believe ancient historians simply copied and pasted details of the second revolt to fill out the lost details of the story. So once again a Syrian slave prophet gathered the rebels and recast himself as a king—though this time his name was King Tryphon rather than King Antiochus. Then—as before—a second revolt broke out on the other side of the island, this one led by a Cilician named Athenion. There was once again hope among the local Sicilians that the two slave armies would destroy each other, and once again deflation when King Tryphon and Athenion joined forces. But though all of these details are suspiciously similar, the Second Servile War was not an invention—it was a very real uprising that consumed Sicily for the next three years.¹²

MEANWHILE BACK IN Rome, the populares who had kept the Senate under siege and carried Marius to two consulships continued to feel their oats. In fact, the reelection of Marius was not the only unprecedented result of the election of 105. Joining Marius in the consulship was another novus homo named Gaius Flavius Fimbria. Never in Roman history had two novus homo served as colleagues in the consulship.¹³

The populare also filled the lower rungs of the magistracies. Though the evidence is thin, 105 was almost certainly the year Gaius Memmius—agitating tribune in 111 and principal prosecutor during the Mamilian Commission in 109—was elected praetor. Enemies of the optimates like Lucius Cassius Longinus ^* and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus were elected tribunes and would soon use their positions to prosecute grudges both personal and political. 105 was also the year another ambitious novus homo took his first step up the cursus honorum. More radical and with fewer scruples than the Gracchi, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus was elected quaestor and would shortly be at the center of a political movement that almost toppled the old senatorial order completely.¹⁴

So while Marius was off preparing a defense against the Cimbri, this cohort of populares launched an offensive against the Senate. The now much-despised Caepio was obviously a prime target. The Assembly had already stripped Caepio of his consulship in the aftermath of Arausio, and now the tribune Longinus passed a law that expelled from the Senate any man who had had his imperium revoked by the Assembly. Booted from the Senate, Caepio then had to answer for the missing Tolosa gold. But much to the populares’ frustration, the ensuing trial proceeded with plenty of senators on the jury. Caepio was found not guilty of stealing the treasure. His acquittal only fueled populare wrath.¹⁵

The tribune Ahenobarbus then settled a personal grudge against Scaurus, who he believed blocked his chance at a priesthood. After tying up Scaurus in court with frivolous lawsuits, Ahenobarbus carried a law opening the college of pontiffs to popular election. Until now, the vacancies in a priesthood had been filled by the senior pontiffs, allowing the optimate nobility to keep the priesthoods as their own special preserve. Now priests would be elected by popular vote. The case of Ahenobarbus also demonstrates how difficult it is to separate the personal from the political in the Late Republic. Likely driven by a personal grudge, Ahenobarbus rammed through a bill that further strengthened the power of the Assembly and weakened the nobility.¹⁶

Also during this year of populare ascendency, another young tribune named Lucius Marcius Philippus introduced a bill aimed at wholesale land redistribution. We don’t know the details of Philippus’s bill, but we know that in the midst of the debate over this legislation, Philippus made his famous observation that “there were not in the state two thousand people who owned any property.” The anti-populare Cicero goes on to note that Philippus’s speech “deserves unqualified condemnation, for it favored an equal distribution of property; and what more ruinous policy than that could be conceived?” The legislation did not pass, but the fact that it was even introduced is proof that gains made during the Gracchan era had been reversed by the turn of the century.¹⁷