The abandoned Marius sat for a time and contemplated his sorry state. Then he picked himself up and moved inland, tromping through swampland, still aiming for Minturnae. With night falling, he ran into a peasant and begged shelter for the night. The peasant complied, but then a cavalry patrol rode up and banged on the door. While the frightened peasant confessed everything, Marius tore off his clothes and dove into a nearby swamp. He hid in the murky water with “his eyes and nostrils alone showing above the water.” But the patrol found him anyway. Gaius Marius, six-time consul and Third Founder of Rome, was dragged out of the swamp “naked and covered with mud.” Then he was led into Minturnae by a rope around his neck.51
Though it had only been five days since Sulla had captured Rome, word had already spread that the fugitive Marius was to be killed on sight. But the leaders of Minturnae anguished over the dilemma of what to do with him. After placing Marius under house arrest they brought out a slave and ordered him to go kill Marius. According to the story, this slave was either Gallic or Cimbric and thus likely made a slave by Marius himself. Overawed rather than filled with vengeance, the slave refused. He said, “I cannot kill Gaius Marius,” and ran out of the room.52
Unable to kill Marius, the leaders of Minturnae decided to put him on a boat: “Let him go where he will as an exile, to suffer elsewhere his allotted fate. And let us pray that the gods may not visit us with their displeasure for casting Marius out of our city in poverty and rags.” From the mainland, he sailed to the island of Aenaria, on the north end of the Bay of Naples, where he reunited with the men he had been separated from. Finally able to point themselves toward Africa, they sailed around Sicily, eventually putting in at Eryx on the northeast coast for supplies. But the quaestor in Eryx had been alerted to Marius’s general route and pounced as soon as the Marians put ashore. After a bloody battle on the docks that left sixteen dead, Marius and his remaining men cut loose their ship and put back out to sea.53
Finally, Marius landed on the island of Cercina off the coast of Africa. One of his veteran colonies had been established on the island after the Numidian war and he was welcomed into the homes of the inhabitants. The governor of Africa, meanwhile, had been told Marius was likely heading toward him and now faced the great dilemma of the fugitive Marius. The governor’s duty was clear—he must arrest Marius and kill him. But the province was full of Marius’s veterans. If the governor killed Marius, he was likely signing his own death warrant.54
After a few days, Marius crossed to the mainland and was greeted by an official bearing a decree from the governor: “The governor forbids you, Marius, to set foot in Africa; and if you disobey, he declares that he will uphold the decrees of the senate and treat you as an enemy of Rome.” Dejected, Marius sat brooding. When the official finally asked for Marius’s reply, the old general said, “Tell him, then, that you have seen Gaius Marius a fugitive, seated amid the ruins of Carthage.” Not far from where Scipio Aemilianus had once wept tears of dread foreboding, old Marius now sat and “as he gazed upon Carthage, and Carthage as she beheld Marius, might well have offered consolation the one to the other.” He did not fight the decree and returned to Cercina.55
MEANWHILE, FAR OFF to the east, Mithridates had completed the envelopment of Anatolia. Because he needed the entire region to be united in opposition to Rome, the Pontic king ordered a blood pact. As spring gave way to summer in 88, Mithridates sent out a letter to every Asian city now under his dominion. As a sign of mutual solidarity the local magistrates were to wait thirteen days after receipt of the letter and then apprehend and murder every Italian in their jurisdiction—including women and children.56
Under the circumstances, there was little anyone could do but comply. No one was going to risk the wrath of Mithridates just to save a few Italians they didn’t really like anyway. So on the thirteenth day after receiving the letter, every city across Asia arrested and systematically executed all resident Italians. Informers were offered a share of confiscated Italian property, leading neighbor to betray neighbor. Each city soon had a pile of bodies. In total, the dead numbered as many as eighty thousand people. Mithridates himself undertook the central sacrifice of this gruesome pact. Bringing out the captured Manius Aquillius, Mithridates ordered molten gold poured down his throat. There was no going back now. The massacre of the Italians was an act of calculated genocide to bind the eastern cities against Rome. Each was now individually complicit in the murder of Romans. It was now either fight and win with Mithridates, or face the vengeance of Rome alone.57
