With the Senate not realizing yet the scope of the crisis they were falling into, they rejected the ultimatum out of hand. So the Italian armies gathered under their local generals and launched a simultaneous uprising in late 91. Since all the Italian generals were intimately familiar with both Roman politics and war, they knew exactly what to hit first. Going all the way back to the tribal wars of the early Republic, the Romans planted Latin colonies in the backyards of defeated enemies. These communities remained outposts of Roman military authority. The first thing the Italians did was attack these Latin colonies, then seize control of the roads to cut off Rome’s ability to communicate outside their own sphere in Latium. It was a simple and effective strategy that caught the Romans with their togas down.36
THE POPULATION OF Rome was dumbfounded as each scrap of news from outside Rome revealed yet another city or tribe in revolt. The Senate scrambled to organize a response to the crisis. They ordered provisional governors to stay at their posts until further notice, and then assigned every consul and praetor for the year 90 to the province of Italy. It was a concentration of sovereign magistrates on the peninsula not seen since the Second Punic War.37
But before they could wage a war, the Roman leadership had to spend valuable time establishing which of them was to blame for the insurrection. A tribune named Quintus Varius Hybridia proposed a commission to purge those who had supported Italian citizenship and thus “incited the Italians” with false promises and selfish demagoguery.38 Tribunes loyal to the men who might be targeted by the commission tried to veto the bill, but as was now painfully routine, a violent mob menaced the tribunes into fleeing the Assembly. The bill passed, and it was time to go head-hunting.39
Staffed by an all-Equestrian jury and led by ex-consul Philippus, the Varian Commission attacked its enemies with reckless abandon. At least a half-dozen prominent senators were prosecuted, including Scaurus and Antonius. The old optimates avoided conviction because they were, after all, some of the most powerful men in Rome. But their less august friends did not fare so well. Among those exiled was Gaius Aurelius Cotta, one of the young men at Crassus’s house that fateful night in September 91. His exile is probably the reason he lived through the civil wars.40
But though Scaurus was not convicted by the Varian Commission, the princeps senatus had come to the end of the line. Now past his seventieth birthday, the old master of the Senate had lived long enough to see the Metellan faction he had led for nearly thirty years disintegrate around him. Metellus Numidicus was dead as were most of his brothers and cousins. Of the next generation, only Numidicus’s son Metellus Pius showed promise. With Crassus unexpectedly dead, and their shared protégés all targeted and exiled, the faction splintered. Other families sensed the weakness of the Metelli and closed in for the kill. As the historian Velleius Paterculus notes: “Thus it is clear that, as in the case of cities and empires, so the fortunes of families flourish, wane, and pass away.” While Scaurus lived, the Metellans remained a dominant power in Rome, but the old man followed his friend Crassus and died in early 89.41
WHILE THESE POLITICAL prosecutions unfolded, the campaign season arrived in the spring of 90, and the Romans were ready to start a counteroffensive in multiple theaters. Consul Lucius Julius Caesar* was assigned to the Samnites in the south, while Publius Rutilius Lupus operated in the north against the Marsi. Meanwhile, proconsul Sextus Caesar was dispatched across the Apennines to Asculum. Spread out beneath the senior magistrates were an array of legates and praetors who operated with an unusual amount of independence. Among them were the men who would define the next violent phase of Roman politics: Metellus Pius, Pompey Strabo, Cinna, Quintus Sertorius, even old Marius came out of retirement. But no one used his service in the Social War to better political advantage than Lucius Cornelius Sulla.42
Sulla had stayed on the sidelines during the explosive political battles of 104–100 that climaxed with Saturninus’s insurrection. When things started getting back to normal in 99, Sulla made a bid for praetor but was rebuffed by the voters, the story being that the voters were not happy Sulla was trying to skip out on being aedile. He was still old friends with King Bocchus of Mauretania and the people wanted Sulla to throw some fancy African-themed games. But wanting to get on with his career, Sulla promised to throw the desired games if he was elected praetor. Running again the next year, he was elected. The games were magnificent.43
