In 91 BC most of Italy revolted against Rome to obtain Roman citizenship, and three years later a Roman consul used the armies that war had created to capture his own capital.
The previous lesson left a professional army whose soldiers depended on their generals, and a governing class that had learned to bend its own rules. This lesson puts those two facts together with the one group that had been left out of every settlement since 338 BC. The Italian allies had supplied half of Rome's armies for two centuries and held no vote in the assemblies that sent them to war, and when they finally demanded a remedy the Republic discovered how thin the distance was between an army and a coup.
The allies revolt
The immediate cause was a murder. Marcus Livius Drusus, tribune in 91 BC, proposed a package that included citizenship for the Italians, and was stabbed in his own house one evening, his killer never found. With the constitutional route closed, the allies took the other one.
What they built is the most revealing thing about the war. The rebels formed a state of their own called Italia, with its capital at Corfinium, renamed Italica. It had a senate of five hundred, two consuls, twelve praetors and its own coinage, some of it showing an Italian bull goring the Roman wolf, with legends in Oscan rather than Latin.
Example. The Italian rebels copied Roman institutions almost exactly. What does that tell you about what they wanted?
That the war was about admission, not separation. A movement seeking independence from Rome does not organise itself as a duplicate of Rome, with a senate, paired consuls and a praetorian college; it revives whatever it had before. The rebels built a second Rome because two centuries of alliance had made them politically Roman in everything but the vote, and their leaders were exactly the local aristocrats whom the settlement of 338 BC had bound to Roman interests. The Oscan legends cut the other way and are the qualification worth keeping: local identity was real, and the alternative state was a serious construction rather than a bargaining posture. The best reading is that they wanted in, and were prepared to build something else if refused.
Now you. Rome conceded the citizenship in 90 and 89 BC, and enrolled the new citizens in a limited number of tribes, on some accounts eight or ten out of thirty-five. Why, and what does it echo?
Answer
Because the tribe was the voting unit, so confining hundreds of thousands of new citizens to ten tribes caps their weight at 10 of 35 votes, about 28.6 per cent, however many of them there are. It is the same device used on the freedmen and the urban poor in the fourth and third centuries BC, described in the lesson on elections, applied at a vastly larger scale: concede the status and contain the arithmetic. The manoeuvre also failed, slowly. The distribution of the new citizens across all thirty-five tribes was fought over for a decade and completed under the censors of 70 to 69 BC, whose census records about 910,000 citizens against 394,336 in 115, a rise of more than half a million people.
Winning by conceding
The fighting was severe. Appian reports that some 300,000 men died in Italy, and though ancient totals of that kind are unreliable, the war put Roman legions against soldiers trained in exactly the same way, since the rebels were the men who had fought Rome's wars. Roman commanders included both Marius and Sulla.
Rome's decisive move was legislative. The lex Julia of 90 BC offered citizenship to allies who had not revolted, and to those who laid down their arms; the lex Plautia Papiria of 89 extended it further. Communities took the offer and left the war, and the revolt collapsed piecemeal during 89 and 88.
The result is one of the strangest outcomes in Roman history: the rebels lost the war and obtained the thing they had gone to war for. Italy south of the Po became Roman, which is the reason "Italy" thereafter means a country of citizens rather than a peninsula of subject allies, and it is the foundation of everything the empire later did with citizenship. It also meant that the men who fought each other in the civil wars of the next sixty years were, on both sides, Romans.
The march
In 88 BC Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, overran the Roman province of Asia and organised the massacre of the Romans and Italians living there, a figure our sources put at 80,000 in a single coordinated day. The command against him was the richest opportunity in a generation, and it was assigned to the consul Sulla.
The tribune Sulpicius then carried a law transferring it to Marius, by a vote of the assembly. The move was not new: commands had been transferred by popular vote to Scipio in 210 and to Marius himself in 107. What was new was the response. Sulla left Rome, went to his six legions at Nola, told them what had happened, and marched on the city.
The detail that matters most is that every one of his senior officers except one refused to go with him. Roman soldiers followed and Roman senators did not, which tells you both that the act was understood as monstrous and that the professional army of the previous lesson would do it anyway, because the men who marched expected their futures to come from Sulla rather than from the state.
Rome was taken. Sulpicius was hunted down and killed, Marius escaped to Africa, and Sulla left for the east. In his absence his enemies took the city back, killed his supporters, and held it for five years, during which Marius returned, held a seventh consulship and died in it. When Sulla came back in 83, a second civil war ran for over a year and ended at the Colline Gate outside Rome in November 82.
The proscriptions
Sulla's victory was followed by an innovation in political killing. He posted lists of names in the Forum. A proscribed man could be killed by anyone, his killer was paid, his property was confiscated and sold, and his sons and grandsons were barred from office.
The numbers vary by source, which is itself informative. Appian gives 40 senators and 1,600 equestrians on the first list; Plutarch describes 80 names, then 220, then 220 more; later writers give totals of 4,700 and 9,000. The lowest figures describe hundreds of the wealthiest men in Italy and the highest describe thousands.
What the confiscations did was as important as the killings. Property changed hands at auction on a scale that created fortunes, and Crassus, who reappears in the next lesson as the richest man in Rome, built much of his wealth this way. The proscription was not only terror but a transfer of assets to Sulla's supporters, which bound them to the survival of his settlement.
Example. Sulla had himself appointed dictator to write laws and reconstitute the Republic, an office nobody had held for 120 years and this time with no fixed term. How should that be classified?
As a monarchy operating through a republican form, and as an accurate reading of what the constitution allowed. The dictatorship was a real Roman office, the appointment went through a law, and the whole apparatus of magistrates and assemblies continued to function. What was missing was the six-month limit that had made the old office safe, and the emergency that had justified it: Sulla's commission was to rebuild the state, which has no natural end date. The Romans of 82 BC therefore watched a constitutional office being used to hold unlimited power for as long as its holder wanted, and this is the template Caesar takes up in 49, with one difference that decides everything. Sulla resigned.
Now you. The proscription totals in our sources range from a few hundred to nine thousand. What should be done with that range?
Answer
Report it and use the structure rather than the number. All the sources are hostile, all wrote long after, and none had access to the lists, which were not preserved; the higher figures come from writers with the strongest rhetorical interest. What they agree on is the mechanism, which is checkable against its consequences: published lists, rewards for killers, confiscation and sale of estates, and disabilities on descendants that were still being argued about twenty years later, since Caesar removed them. A range this wide means the death toll is unknown, and the system that produced it is well attested, which is the ordinary situation for ancient atrocity numbers.
A constitution built to stop the next Sulla
Then, having taken power by an act without precedent, Sulla used it to legislate against every method he had used.
The Senate was doubled to about 600 by enrolling equestrians, and the number of quaestors raised to twenty, so that entry to the Senate became automatic and the censors' discretion over its membership largely disappeared. Praetors were raised to eight, and the ten senior magistrates each year went out to govern provinces afterwards, which regularised the promagistracy. The minimum ages and intervals of the cursus honorum were re-enacted and enforced. The permanent courts were reorganised and their juries returned to senators.
Above all, the tribunate was destroyed as an instrument. A tribune could not put a bill to the assembly without the Senate's prior approval, his veto was restricted, and any man who held the office was barred from holding any other, which removed it from the career path of anyone with prospects. And a law of treason made it an offence for a governor to leave his province or make war without authority, which describes precisely what Sulla had done in 88.
He resigned the dictatorship in 79 BC and died the next year. The settlement began to come apart at once: the ban on ex-tribunes holding further office was lifted in 75, and in 70 BC the consuls Pompey and Crassus restored the tribunate's powers in full, eleven years after Sulla's laws had taken them away.
Example. Why did the Sullan constitution fail so quickly?
Because it diagnosed the tribunate as the disease. Every measure in it assumes that the danger to the Republic is a popular politician using the assembly against the Senate, which is a fair description of 133 and 123 and no description at all of 88. Sulla did not take Rome with a tribune's bill; he took it with six legions whose men expected land from him, and nothing in his settlement touched the recruitment, the pay, the discharge or the length of commands that produced such legions. He also left behind the demonstration that a commander who was willing to march could have anything he wanted, which no law can undo. Within a decade Pompey was extracting a consulship at 36, having held no office at all, by standing outside the city with an army he declined to disband.
Now you. Sulla's treason law made it an offence for a governor to leave his province or start a war without authority. Was it useless?
Answer
Not useless, but pointed at the wrong end of the problem. As a rule it was clear and it named the offence correctly, and Roman politicians took it seriously enough that the legal argument of 49 BC turns on exactly this ground, with Caesar's opponents insisting he lay down his command and Caesar arguing his position was protected. What the law could not supply was an enforcer. Prosecuting a governor requires him to come home without his army, which he does only if he expects to be safe, and the man who is not safe now has both a motive to keep his legions and a precedent for using them. A criminal statute against armed rebellion is only as strong as the state's monopoly of arms, and Rome had lost that monopoly to its own commanders.
Where this leaves the Republic
By 70 BC Italy was a country of Roman citizens, the Sullan restrictions on the tribunate were gone, and the two men who removed them were a general with no legal claim to his consulship and the richest man in Rome.
The empire had also gone on growing while Rome fought itself, and the problems it now presented, a war against Mithridates that had run on and off for twenty years, piracy that interrupted the grain supply of the city, a rebellion in Spain, could not be handled by an annual magistrate with a legion or two. What the Republic did about that, and what the men who received those commands became, is the next lesson.