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But though there were no formal parties, it is true that there were now two broadly opposing worldviews floating in the political ether waiting to be tapped as needed. As the crisis over the Lex Agraria revealed, it was no longer a specific issue that mattered so much as the urgent necessity to triumph over rivals. Reflecting on the recurrent civil wars of the Late Republic, Sallust said, “It is this spirit which has commonly ruined great nations, when one party desires to triumph over another by any and every means and to avenge itself on the vanquished with excessive cruelty.” Accepting defeat was no longer an option.⁶³

In fact, memories of that excessive cruelty doled out to the Gracchans lived on the minds of those who had been witness to the methods of the noble optimates. Though it was the Gracchi who Cicero later accused of “throwing daggers in the Forum,” it was the optimates who had murdered thousands in the name of public order. Most insulting was the Senate’s order to Opimius to rebuild and refurbish the Temple of Concord, which had been damaged during the fighting in 121. The temple was dedicated to the unity of the Roman people, but for many in Rome, calling a bloody purge the foundation of unity was an insult. After the restoration was complete an anonymous vandal inscribed at the base of the temple: “A work of mad discord produces a temple of concord.”⁶⁴

CHAPTER 4 A CITY FOR SALE

We are silent when we see that all the money of all the nations has come into the hands of a few men; which we seem to tolerate and to permit with the more equanimity, because none of these robbers conceals what he is doing.

CICERO¹

GAIUS MARIUS WAS BORN IN 157 BC IN ARPINUM, AN ITALIAN city that had only recently been enfranchised by the Senate. Though later denigrated as “a man of rustic birth, rough and uncouth, and austere in his life,” Marius was in fact the son of a respected Equestrian family, raised in comfort and privilege. But though he was the well-educated son of a prosperous family, Roman politics in the second century seemed designed to make a mockery of his ambitions. Marius was a novus homo Italian without sufficient ancestry or connections to dream of anything more than a respectable career in local government. But Marius wanted more than that. So upon completing his education he took the only path to political prominence available to a relative outsider: service in the legions. Marius had “no sooner reached the age for military life than he had given himself the training of active service, not of Grecian eloquence.”²

A family connection to the Scipione allowed twenty-three-year-old Marius to join the personal legion Scipio Aemilianus raised for the final expedition to Numantia in 134. Contrary to long-standing myth, Marius did not begin his career as a common legionary: his Equestrian status qualified him to be an officer. During his service in Spain, Marius’s superiors commended his bravery, diligence, and honesty. Marius proved time and again that he was a man to be counted on. According to an oft-told story from the end of the siege of Numantia, Aemilianus’s friends asked him one night where the Roman people would find a man to replace him. Aemilianus tapped young Marius on the shoulder and said, “Here, perhaps.”³

After Numantia fell, Marius likely joined the scramble for a piece of commercial spoils, which in Spain meant mining. If he did acquire a share of the mining rights, it would explain how he had enough money to fund an expensive political career in Rome. But even as he benefited from these business connections, Marius was acutely aware of the resistant social pressures to a public career. He had “neither wealth nor eloquence, with which the magnates of the time used to influence the people,” but “the very intensity of his assurance, his indefatigable labors, and his plain and simple way of living, won him a certain popularity among his fellow citizens.”⁴

DESPITE HIS SOCIAL background, Marius did have one thing going for him. He was a hereditary client of the Caecilii Metelli, a noble family just emerging as the dominant faction in Rome. A plebeian family ennobled for five generations, the Metelli rose to prominence thanks to one great man: Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus. A contemporary of Scipio Aemilianus, Macedonicus earned his triumphant cognomen by crushing the last remnants of Macedon in 147.^* This victory heralded a long and impressive career that took Macedonicus across the empire from Spain to Greece. But as he rose, Macedonicus avoided throwing his family’s lot in with either the Scipione circle or the Claudians, instead remaining aloof to both.⁵