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The real strength of the Metelli, though, lay in manpower. Macedonicus and his brother Lucius had, between them, six sons and three daughters. This brood of Metelli went forth into high Roman politics in the 120s and took it over for a generation. Wherever a war was being fought, a Metelli was sure to be there. From 123 to 106 the Metelli cousins held six consulships. Their name dominates the rolls of triumphal honor that recorded successful campaigns in Macedonia, Thrace, Sicily, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. This herd of cousins filled all ranks of the cursus honorum through the 120s and 110s. By the time the eldest attained their consulships, the youngest filled the ranks of quaestors, aediles, and praetors. This domination of the magistracies gave the family direct control over the levers of power.⁶

But the Metelli were not just successful because there were so many of them; they also cultivated talent. In fact, the real mastermind behind the Metellan faction was not one of the cousins at all, but rather a shrewd young operator named Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. Scaurus hailed from a noble family, but recent generations had seen their political and economic fortunes collapse. Scaurus’s father didn’t even bother with a public career and instead spent his life as a coal merchant to rebuild the material fortunes of the family. Coming from such humble origins, Scaurus was later slandered as the novus homo son of a publicani, but he was neither. Scaurus was not a great orator like Gaius Gracchus, but he had a knack for persuasion in intimate conversations, relying more upon “his judgment in affairs of consequence, than upon his ability in speaking.” He talked his way into the Metelli just as the family was rising in status and he married one of Macedonicus’s daughters. From the moment Scaurus entered the family, he began to take the reins. Cicero would later say of Scaurus that “nothing happens without his word.” Sallust recalls that Scaurus “was greedy for power, fame, and riches, but clever in concealing his faults.”⁷

While Scaurus was a consummate backroom operator, the Metellans also needed men to command attention in the Assembly. Among the most promising was the vibrant young orator Lucius Licinius Crassus. The quintessential optimate, Crassus came from an illustrious family and had a keen intellect and a born talent for oratory. He had burst on the scene in 119 as the prosecutor of the turncoat land commissioner Carbo. He was now considered the greatest orator in Rome, a mantle he inherited from the dead Gaius Gracchus. But Crassus was more of a scholar than the Gracchi—a student of the law, philosophy, and literature. The only thing missing from his sterling resume was an interest in battlefield glory. While a man like Gaius Marius was stamped by service in the legions, Crassus was stamped by the Forum. He later said, “I entered the Forum quite a youth, and was never absent from it longer than during my quaestorship.” No one better knew the Forum, or was better known in the Forum, than Lucius Crassus the Orator.⁸

The Metellans also recruited Crassus’s great friend and political ally Marcus Antonius. Four years older than Crassus, Antonius acknowledged Crassus’s superior ability: he said that while men listened to him and dreamed of equaling his own skill, when Crassus spoke, “no one is so conceited as to have the presumption to think that he shall ever speak like him.” Though loyal to his friends, Antonius was also a subtle player who understood the power of circumspection. He once said that he never wrote his speeches down so that if later “he had said anything which was not desirable, he might be able to deny that he had said it.” He carried this basic inscrutability throughout his entire life, and where Crassus was the master of the great public occasion, Antonius shined in judicial proceedings. With the skill of the best Greek sophists, Antonius could argue any side of a debate and win. He was a formidable force in the courts and often deployed in defense of Metellan interests.⁹

Aside from these rising young nobles, the Metelli also cultivated allies within the Equestrian class, the merchants and bankers who provided funding for the wars of foreign conquest that maintained domestic supremacy. With Metellans taking part in nearly every censorship between 131 and 102, they controlled the state publicani contracts for an entire generation. There is no evidence that the Metelli were abnormally corrupt, but in that era it was taken for granted that one would help his friends and stymie his enemies. These connections made the Metelli the most powerful single faction in Roman politics.