Marius and the army that followed a man

When a Roman soldier owned a farm, discharge sent him home; when he owned nothing, discharge left him with whatever his commander could obtain for him, and that single change turned armies into political constituencies.

The previous lesson left the Republic with the Gracchan land programme half executed, the Senate willing to kill, and the recruiting problem unsolved. This lesson is about the man who solved the recruiting problem and, in doing so, created the instrument that would destroy the Republic. It is also the lesson where the sources most need handling with care, because the main narrative of Marius's rise was written sixty years later by a moralist with a case to make.

The war that discredited the Senate

Jugurtha, a prince of Numidia in North Africa, murdered his way to sole power over a kingdom allied to Rome and then fought off Roman intervention for seven years, from 112 to 105 BC. What made the war politically explosive was not its difficulty but its handling. Roman commanders made agreements with Jugurtha and had them repudiated. Bribery was alleged at every stage, and a special court was set up to investigate it. Jugurtha visited Rome in person under safe conduct and, on the story Sallust tells, left saying the city was for sale and would perish as soon as it found a buyer.

Sallust wrote his account in the 40s BC, after the Republic was effectively over, to argue that the nobility's greed had destroyed it. He is a first-class writer with a thesis, and the thesis shapes the selection of everything in his book. What survives independent of him is that the war went badly for years, that a court was created to try senators for corruption in it, and that the Roman people responded by taking the command away from the aristocracy and giving it to an outsider. The last of those is a fact of legislation and needs no source's goodwill.

That outsider was Gaius Marius, an equestrian from Arpinum with no consular ancestors, who had risen as a client of the Metelli, served with distinction, and then stood against his own patron's family. Elected consul for 107 BC, he had the African command transferred to him by a vote of the people, over the Senate's assignment. The precedent was Scipio's in 210 BC, and it was becoming a habit.

Enrolling men with nothing

For the new army Marius did something Sallust records in a sentence: he enrolled soldiers from the capite censi, the head count, the men below the property qualification, contrary to custom.

Be careful with what that means. The threshold had been falling for a century, from 11,000 asses to Polybius's 4,000 to about 1,500, and poor men had served before, in emergencies. There was no law abolishing the qualification, and no ancient writer says there was. What Marius did was to take volunteers without property as a matter of course, for a foreign war, when there was no emergency compelling it. Recent scholarship has been steadily reducing the "Marian reform" from a revolution to an acceleration, and the correction is right about the mechanism and can be pushed too far, because the consequences that follow do not depend on how sudden the change was.

Here are those consequences. A propertied conscript serves, wins, and goes back to a farm that is still his. A propertyless volunteer serves for years, and at discharge has his savings, his share of booty, and no land. If he is to have land, somebody must obtain a law giving it to him, and the only person with an interest in doing that is his general. So the soldier's retirement became a political favour, delivered by a patron, and the patron's ability to deliver depended on his standing in Rome.

Example. Work out the size of the problem. Suppose one legion of about 5,000 men is discharged and each veteran is to receive ten iugera, a modest plot. How much land is that, and what follows?

Fifty thousand iugera, which is about 12,600 hectares, for a single legion. An army of four legions needs something over 50,000 hectares, all of it in Italy, all of it currently belonging to somebody, and all of it obtainable only by a law passed in an assembly against the resistance of the occupiers. There is no standing fund, no reserve of land set aside, and no procedure. Every discharge is therefore a separate political campaign, and a general who cannot win it has failed the men who won his battles. That is the structural fact that makes armies into followings, and it does not require anybody to be disloyal or ambitious: it is what the absence of a pension system produces.

Now you. Why did the Senate not simply create a standing procedure for settling veterans and remove the problem?

Six consulships

Marius finished the African war in 105, or rather his quaestor Sulla did, by persuading Jugurtha's father-in-law to hand him over, an episode both men spent the next twenty years arguing about.

He then had to deal with something worse. Two migrating northern peoples, the Cimbri and the Teutones, had been destroying Roman armies since 113, and in 105 BC at Arausio, on the Rhone, they destroyed two of them at once, with losses reported at 80,000 soldiers and 40,000 camp followers, a figure of Cannae's order and this time inflicted on armies that were not surrounded but badly commanded.

Rome elected Marius consul for 104 and then for every year to 100, six consulships in all and five of them consecutive, in flat contradiction of the rule requiring a ten-year interval. He rebuilt the army, waited two years, and destroyed the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae in 102 and the Cimbri at Vercellae in 101.

The legion remade

The military changes credited to Marius belong here with a caution: our sources for them are late and fond of attributing systems to individuals. The legion was reorganised around the cohort of about 480 men rather than the older manipular lines, which gave a commander ten manoeuvre units instead of thirty and worked better with troops of uniform equipment. The eagle became the legion's single standard, an object soldiers would die to recover. The men carried their own kit to reduce the baggage train, which earned them the nickname of Marius's mules. Whether Marius invented these or ratified changes already under way, the direction is clear: a standing professional force with its own identity, in which the legion, not the property class, was what a soldier belonged to.

Example. Marius held six consulships, five of them in consecutive years, against a rule requiring a ten-year gap. What does that tell you about the constitution at this date?

That its rules were now negotiable under pressure, and that the pressure came from the people who voted rather than from a strongman. Marius did not seize these consulships; he was elected to them, repeatedly, by an electorate frightened of the Cimbri and unimpressed by the aristocracy's record. The rule was not repealed, and no court struck the elections down, because there was no court. So the constraint this course described at the start as fundamental, annuality with intervals, turned out to be a convention that a sufficiently frightened assembly would set aside for a sufficiently successful general. Once set aside for Marius it could be set aside for Pompey, and the argument in 52 BC over Caesar's candidacy is conducted with these precedents on the table.

Now you. Sallust says Marius enrolled the head count "contrary to custom". Modern historians argue that the property qualification had been eroding for a century and that Marius changed less than the sources imply. Does the correction matter for the argument of this lesson?

The first test, and the first betrayal

The consequences arrived immediately. To settle his African and Gallic veterans, Marius worked with the tribune Saturninus, who carried land bills in 103 and 100 BC by methods that had become standard: assembly votes, violence in the streets, and an oath imposed on senators to obey the law.

In 100 BC Saturninus went further, had a rival candidate killed, and lost control. The Senate passed its final decree, and Marius, consul for the sixth time, took arms against his own tribune, besieged him on the Capitol, accepted his surrender and stood by while he was lynched.

That episode is worth more attention than it usually gets, because it shows the position of a man like Marius exactly. He needed a popular tribune to obtain his veterans' land; he needed senatorial acceptance to have a political future; and when the two requirements collided he chose the Senate and destroyed his own instrument. He then retired into an unhappy semi-retirement, having got his soldiers their land and lost the alliance that produced it. The lesson his successors drew was not that the popular route was wrong but that it had to be pursued with a bigger army and fewer scruples.

Example. In 100 BC Marius put down Saturninus. In 88 BC Sulla marched on Rome. What changed in twelve years?

The willingness to use the army itself against the city. Marius in 100 was a serving consul acting under the Senate's decree with hastily armed citizens, which is a use of force within the political system as the Gracchan crisis had left it. Sulla in 88 brought legions from a foreign command against Rome to overturn a vote of the assembly, which is not a move inside the system but a demonstration that the system's decisions could be reversed by force from outside it. Between the two lies the Social War, which put whole armies of Roman soldiers under commanders who had learned that the state's decisions were negotiable. The precedent Marius set was that rules bend; the precedent Sulla set was that they can be broken by anyone with legions who is prepared to accept the consequences.

Now you. Why did the propertyless soldier's dependence on his general not simply make the general dependent on the state, which paid and discharged the army?

Where this leaves the Republic

By 100 BC Rome had a professional army recruited from men with nothing, generals who had to be politicians to look after them, a Senate that would use force to defend its position, and a set of constitutional rules that had proved bendable in an emergency.

One large group had watched all of this from the outside: the Italian allies, who supplied half the army, received none of the land, and had no vote in any of the assemblies where these fights were decided. In 91 BC a Roman tribune proposed to enfranchise them, and was murdered. What Italy did next, and what it let loose inside Rome, is the next lesson.