By now, Marius had himself internalized the conviction that he must remain consul until he defeated the Cimbri, but since they kept not showing up, it seemed like the emergency atmosphere that had propelled him to consecutive consulships was fading. At risk of losing the coming consular election, Marius returned to Rome and forged an alliance with the unscrupulous young politician Saturninus to help maintain his iron grip on the consulship.
LUCIUS APPULEIUS SATURNINUS had been elected quaestor along with the other populare nobiles in the election of 105. Assigned to Ostia to monitor the grain supply, Saturninus took over just as the Second Servile War shut down the supply line from Sicily. Due to the crisis, the Senate took the extraordinary step of stripping Saturninus of his responsibilities. The princeps senatus Scaurus assumed his post for the duration of the year. Though the historian Diodorus attributes Saturninus’s humiliating censure to “laziness and his debased character,” it is just as likely that even the most active and virtuous quaestor would have been unable to cope with such a dire situation.24
Spurred by the insult, Saturninus returned to Rome and ran for tribune. Cicero, who held Saturninus in disdain, said that “of all the factious declaimers since the time of the Gracchi, he was generally esteemed the ablest: and yet he caught the attention of the public, more by his appearance, his gesture, and his dress, than by any real fluency of expression, or even a tolerable share of good sense.” But his performance was good enough—Saturninus won a tribunate for 103.25
Though a man like Marius used populare rhetoric to fuel his political rise, he also burned to be accepted by the nobility, to be recognized as their equal. Saturninus, on the other hand, was a bomb-thrower. Like many popular revolutions in history, the men who unlock the door are not always the same men who come bursting through. The men who had run populare programs the year before, like Ahenobarbus, Longinus, and Philippus, were all from ancient noble families who, like Marius, saw populare rhetoric as a path to power. Saturninus, on the other hand, really did seem to want to just burn the whole thing down.
Now a tribune, Saturninus joined with fellow populare Gaius Norbanus to bring the despised Caepio back to trial. Two of their optimate-aligned colleagues tried to veto the trial, but with respect for mos maiorum running dangerously low, Norbanus instigated a riot that physically drove the rival tribunes out of the Assembly. Caepio was duly prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile. Violence once again proved to be the last word in Roman politics.26
But Saturninus did not stop with Caepio. The tribune turned his attention to the unfortunate Mallius. Until now Mallius had been a martyr of the populare, the novus homo who had been betrayed by an arrogant noble. But Saturninus was now wielding a more indiscriminate weapon and Mallius too was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to exile.27
After securing these convictions, Saturninus then passed a law establishing a new permanent court that would deal with cases of
Having established a means of destroying his enemies, Saturninus looked to consolidate his own base of popular support. He identified the veterans of the Numidian war as the perfect foundation. Many of the men who had served in Numidia were now back living in the vicinity of Rome and were a political force waiting to be organized. Saturninus began working the veterans, letting it be known that he planned to introduce a bill to award allotments of land in North Africa to every man who had fought Jugurtha. Unlike the Gracchan allotments, Saturninus’s allotments were meant to be a retirement bonus. The land would be a veteran’s to dispose of as he saw fit: he could keep it or sell it. The new land-for-veterans scheme was a novelty when Saturninus pitched it, but it set a precedent for the future that a legionary could expect land when he was discharged from service.29
