703. Roman Civil War: Marching on the Senate (Part 3)

The King is the Lord. From Focus Features and the acclaimed director of Jason Bourne. The King says work harder, you work harder. Starring Andrew Garfield. No, sit up! We've given you! Sit up! In a land of kings, one man will defy an empire. There will be no peace until we are free. And ignite a revolution. 10,000 rebels converge on London. Based on the true story behind the legend of Robin Hood. We rule ourselves now. The Uprising. Rated R. Under $17.99 without parent. Only in theaters September 10th. Discovered at Dolby Cinema. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Tom, you can always tell, can't you, when somebody is really passionate about something. And actually we have a brilliant example in our own podcast team. Because a couple of years ago we hired a new producer called Elia Akude. And it was the best decision we ever made. And if you want a similar passion in your team, then you need Zip Recruiter. And you can try it free at Zip Recruiter. Zip Recruiter.com slash history. Zip Recruiter's newest feature and powerful matching technology shows the most interested, qualified people first. So find candidates who really want those jobs in your company on Zip Recruiter. Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at Zip Recruiter.com slash history. That's Zip Recruiter.com slash history. Get your match on Zip Recruiter. This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria. For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity, and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation. Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives, and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search GatesFoundation.org slash mosquito to learn more. So it happened that Marius was selected to command the war against Mithridates in place of Sulla. When Sulla was brought the news of this, his instinct was to rely on the fact that he was a Christian. His instinct was to rely on the fact that he was a Christian. staff officers to inform seller of this plebiscite but more than that to take command of his army on behalf of marius so marius's staff officer rides from rome down to nola and he arrives in sulla's camp and sulla has with him six legions of which five are earmarked to go with him on the expedition against mithridates so this is about 30 000 battle-hardened men in total and listeners at this point may be wondering well if sulla has six legions with him how many legions does marius have with him in rome and the answer is marius has absolutely no legions whatsoever so you would think this is pretty basic maths how can as hardened an operator as marius has always been throughout his life how could he possibly have been so stupid as to drive his greatest rival into this corner where there are six legions kind of at his back this seems to i i would guess completely mad to to people today listening but it's not i mean i'm gonna hazard a guess at the answer to this which is that marching in rome has never been done before and you say sulla has the legions but the legions you know sulla's borrowed the legions from the from rome they're not his personal legions we're not in the the first century or second century ad the absolute convention surely is that sulla just says fine i don't like it but i you know i'll have to go along with it and off he goes back to rome you know you don't want to earn the opprobrium of your fellow elitists in rome who would you know it's unthinkable basically that you wouldn't obey the order isn't it i think for marius it is literally unthinkable he hadn't even crossed his mind because as you say it is it is goes against every custom tradition and law of the roman republic the notion that an army of rome might choose to behave like the private militia of its own commander it's just unthinkable imagine uh when harry truman sacked douglas macarthur in the war in the the korean war imagine if doug general macarthur had caught his troops and said fine we're marching on washington i mean it's it's that level of unthinkability right yeah i think so or you know montgomery marching on london in 1944 or something like that i mean it would be an insane thought and that's why it doesn't occur to marius that it's remotely possible but of course it does occur to sulla and what is striking is that he doesn't seem to have hesitated at all i mean there's no kind of standing on the backs of a rubicon thinking oh should i shouldn't i he just goes for it and i think this reflects a number of factors so firstly sullen knows that his men think he's absolutely brilliant sulla all his life has used his charm when he chooses to do something that he doesn't want to do and he doesn't want to do anything that he chooses to as as a weapon and i don't think it's any different with the rank and file legionaries they are ready to follow him basically wherever he leads sulla is charming but he is also a very very dangerous man to offend and although he's a very good looking man people have noted throughout his career that when he gets angry mysterious white spots start to appear across his face and when these white spots start to appear it's probably not a good sign so i think that's a you very ominous and a clear marker that sulla is not a person that you want to put into a strop on top of that as we've said sulla has a deep personal rivalry with marius he really detests him he is furious at the frustration of his ambitions and of a deal that he thought was absolutely done and so he therefore has an utter belief in the justice of his own cause and this because sulla above all is very superstitious he believes that he is what the romans called felix lucky a favorite of the goddess venus and so he trusts on fortune on venus on everything that is right and proper that they will back him that they will give him the good luck that sulla regards as essentially as his kind of divine right can i ask a question so in later years it was quite common for generals to think that he was a good luck that he was a good luck that he was a good that their armies belonged to them so pompey the great caesar crassus you know antony octavian these commanders who end up fighting for supreme power in rome and you know taking the city being kicked out of the city retaking all of this and that's a result obviously of the structural circumstances you know this isn't their own willfulness this is just what people do at this point sulla is the first person that does this now is this as it were great man history sulla could have decided differently this is about his own individual you know genius or whatever genius is the wrong word but you know what i mean or is it that by this point roman politics has degenerated there's a it's already begun to corrode the partisanship the polarization or whatever which makes it possible for him to make this decision so in other words is he genuinely thinking completely outside the box or if he hadn't done it somebody else would have done it pretty soon afterwards i think there are all kinds of circumstances but there are two obvious ones and the first is that as we're talking about this we're talking about the rome's supplies of manpower have grown larger and as campaigns require armies to be away and in the field for longer so the opportunities for individual commanders to establish a personal link with their men and identify their own interests with those of their men starts to grow so i guess that what sulla decides to do is something that a general at some point in roman history was almost bound to do and on top of that political life in rome has been quite brutal over the previous decades so that we talked to in the first episode two tribunes were murdered sulla himself was you know menaced by heavies when he went back to rome as consul and so there is a kind of a coarsening i think of the the traditional respect that the romans had for their kind of constitutional norms but having said that i mean those constitutional norms remain very very strong and when sulla leads his legions on rome the news of his advance is greeted with utter shock and consternation people cannot believe what has happened and i think the fact that it hadn't crossed marius's mind it's the kind of the best indicator of how still at this point it was basically seen as something inconceivable except for someone as bold and ruthless as as sulla so as he leads the legions towards rome everyone in rome is going what the hell's going on what's happening and they send envoys out to to beg sulla to go to rome and they send envoys out to to beg sulla to go to rome and they send envoys out to to beg not to cross this kind of dare i say sacral boundary which encloses rome called the pomerium and to cross that for a citizen in arms is an utter taboo no one ever does it but sulla dares to do it he brushes all the appeals aside his soldiers cross the pomerium into the sacred space that is rome itself and they start pushing through the narrow streets and as they do so their fellow citizens who are appalled by what is happening in rome and they start pushing through the narrow streets and as they do so their fellow citizens who are appalled by what is happening clamber up the stories of their various houses up onto the tops of the insulae the blocks of flat and start hurling tiles down at their fellow citizens these legionaries as they are advancing through the streets and for a moment the legionaries quail i guess they maybe they're stunned to be greeted by such violence and maybe there's a kind of a wave of of shame and anxiety but sulla does not allow them time to think he orders um archers to dip their arrows in fire and then to fire these arrows at the roofs where the people are throwing um tiles down and flames begin to crackle and spread down the line of the city's highways these highways that the legionaries are marching down and as they go sulla follows them and he is riding down the greatest of all the highways the broadest road in rome it's called the via sacra the sacral way and he advances into the very heart of rome where the senate house stands and he orders his legionaries to stand guard on the senate house the city is his the unthinkable has happened a general in arms has made himself the master of rome and just emphasize i mean this is such an incredibly fateful step and having taken it sulla moves very very fast to take advantage of what he's done he can't afford not to well he still takes the political and legal side of things seriously doesn't he because he wants basically political and legal sanction for what he's done retrospectively yes completely and and this is always the case in coups isn't it that a coup will work if the person who conducts the coup can present himself as being on the side of legitimacy because that then transforms the former defenders of legitimacy into rebels i mean you see it throughout the course of history and so it is um now in 88 bc in rome so the key for sulla is to have marius and salpicius this um this tribune who had presented the bill to the people to have him stripped of his command he wants them declared public enemies because then sulla can frame everything that he's doing as a defense of of the republic and so sulla is there in his armor in the senate house telling them this is what you've got to do everyone in the senate is well aware that he has his soldiers outside and so unsurprisingly they do indeed proclaim marius salpicius marius's son and nine other of his leading henchmen outlaws and the death squads then start fanning out and the death squads then start fanning out and the death squads then start fanning out and the death squads then start fanning out and the death squads salpicius is betrayed by a salpicius is betrayed by a salpicius is betrayed by a slave um he is hunted down and murdered but slave um he is hunted down and murdered but slave um he is hunted down and murdered but the other eleven outlaws do manage to get away marius briefly tries to um to resist with his own attempted armed force it obviously not going to work so he slips away and he vanishes and he is not caught and clearly for sulla this isn't it's probably an annoyance rather than a catastrophe i mean he's now the master of of rome but he would really like to have dispatched marius and the fact that marius is still out there somewhere well that is a factor that will continue to be a feature of the of the story as it develops so for the time being he's master of rome and we've already talked about how his priority is to establish his own legitimacy to present himself as the guardian of the constitution to present marius as the person who's a threat to it and we talked in the previous episode about how sulla you know golden haired swashbuckling ruthless sort of sexy he is the candidate the personification of the traditional conservative elite isn't he well except that he has just he has of course but it's not an unheard of for reactionaries or conservatives i mean i think of i don't know spain in 1936 general franco people to launch coups in defense of what they claim is the old order and that's what he's doing now and it's incredibly roman incredibly roman to be if you're going to be a revolutionary to be a revolutionary in the cause of the status quo which is exactly what what sulla is and on the other side of that equation are the people that marius has been appealing to now maria it's interesting why the why don't more of the people of rome take to the streets i mean his constituency are the popular is are the kind of ordinary people so presumably this isn't a city under occupation most people in rome are on marius side probably the mass of the population if asked would would be pro marius but the key players in roman politics as ever are the elites the people in the senate and most of them i mean they disapprove of how sulla has done it but they do approve of what sulla has done the senatorial conservatives really dislike the the kind of the populists if you like and so they do approve of the measures that sulla is taking essentially to kick marius out of the city resentment of him has been you know long term he's very very unpopular with the with the senatorial elites however that said i mean sulla is in a bit of a bind because on the one hand the whole reason he's done this is so that he can take his legions eastwards and go and fight mithridates and win a glorious war there and so to do that he knows that he needs supporters in positions of power and particularly he needs consuls in the following year 87 when he's going to be going off to the east he needs supporters in in position equally and so if he imposes his own followers on the electorate then that would make his claim to embody the rule of law completely ludicrous he would be very nakedly a tyrant and i think that really would provoke widespread popular opposition to him so what sulla does eventually is to settle for a compromise so the election the consular elections are held and sulla's allies are defeated as the two consuls that will be following him in 87 people who who are hostile to what he's done and one of these two men um a guy called lucius cornelius sinner he had gone so far as to threaten sulla with prosecution so that's quite something for sulla to swallow but he does however he gets the two consuls including sinner to come up with him on onto the capitol which is the sacred hill the hill of jupiter the great temple of jupiter is on it and he's going to be the one who's going to be on it and he orders them to swear a public oath that they will not um reverse his legislation they will not stab him in the back and sinner and the other consul does so and sinner then spontaneously picks up a stone and throws it and he says if i break my word may i similarly be hurled out of rome you know very flamboyant now does sulla trust this i mean sulla is a almost certainly not but the problem is that if he is to leave for the war against mithridates in 87 he can't afford to hang around and you know make sure that everybody in rome is absolutely trustworthy and the whole while that sulla has been busy in the year of his consulship in in 88 in the wake of his march on rome trying to sort things out in italy to make sure that it's going to be safe for him to leave italy for the war against mithridates the situation in the east has been getting darker and darker so the war in the east or the situation in the east this guy mithridates is the greatest threat to rome in in a long time i mean we had the white walkers in the previous episodes but this guy is a king he's very rich isn't he and he has he has ancient prophecies on his side so we love an ancient prophecy and he's got loads of ancient prophecies on his side loads there are all kinds of omens that have been current in the east for for many decades um telling of how a great king is going to appear in the world um and he will come out of the east and he will be an instrument of divine retribution against the overweening roman superpower and essentially these prophecies have been bred of the kind of feeling of impotence and helplessness that most people in the eastern mediterranean have felt before the spectacle of roman supremacy and so mithridates who was actually dead to attack rome the first king to do so in over a century you know he's very successful in invoking these prophecies and applying them to himself but more than that he has a tremendous eye for propaganda and a kind of striking image so people may remember that the whole war against mithridates had actually been provoked by a roman ally of marius a guy called manius aquilius who had kind of incited a neighboring king to invade pontus's kingdom and it had all gone absolutely tits up and aquilius had ended up fleeing the mainland asia and kind of going out to an island just off the um just off the the shore of of asia and at a crucial point he goes down with a stomach bug and so when mithridates um agents arrive where he is in his sickbed he is helpless to escape and so he is captured and this offers such scope for a man as skillful at propaganda as mithridates so he has aquilius chained to a seven foot barbarian and dragged back from the the coastline of asia all the way to pergamum the capital of asia when they reach pergamum aquilius is tied backwards onto an ass and paraded through the streets and so everybody is able to vent their hatred of the romans on him and then finally a very very famous scene mithridates has gold melted down and then aquilius's nostrils are held his down aquilius's throat and it's such a memorable gesture that people will claim that it's done to other roman generals who fall prisoner of uh rebellious people in the east for many decades to come crassus isn't this something supposedly happened to crassus the story is told of crassus as well but i think this is the the originator of the story and mithridates you know he proclaims to the people of asia why he has imposed this punishment on aquilius he says that it is an of how the romans have only one abiding motive greed deep-seated for empire and riches and you know he's not wrong the romans have been absolute bloodsuckers when it comes to the the poor cities of asia as a result of this the other greek cities in asia they've been simmering with a similar kind of resentment towards overweening roman power this upstart this parvenu from italy that is trying to impose itself onto um onto the greek world they pile in behind mithridates don't they they're all they're very up for this they do because mithridates sends secret instructions to the leading figures in all the various cities of asia that they are to prepare a massacre of every roman and italian in asia most of whom belong to the business class that have been leeching onto um onto the hapless greeks and the greeks in asia could not be happier to join in and when the massacre hits the romans and the italians it hits them as a bolt from the blue so they are completely without warning as it seems to them they're rounded up and they are slaughtered perhaps by hired assassins or perhaps by um vengeful mobs um some of them are hacked to pieces as they cling to sacred statues or to altars um others are shot as they attempt to swim out into the sea and once they're dead their bodies are then left to rot unburied outside the city walls of all the various cities that have participated in this massacre and of course the casualty figures are very inflated so it's said that 80 000 men women and children were were killed but there's no question that these figures are believed back in italy and the impact on the romans is kind of analogous perhaps to the impact that 9-11 had on americans it comes as a similar shock uh the idea that the commanding heights not just of their power but of their economy could be hit in this way and so much bloodshed be inflicted as a complete surprise but the difference with 9-11 is that um osama bin laden did that do not then launch An invasion of Canada or something. But this is what Mithridates does, isn't it? Because you've already mentioned that he's eyeing up Greece. And he's now going to absolutely double down. He thinks Rome is vulnerable. And although Greece is not, I mean, Greece is not part of the Roman Empire, as it were, but it's part of the Roman sphere of influence at this point, presumably economically as well as diplomatically. Yeah, it's completely under the shadow of Roman power. Remember that the city of Corinth had been annihilated as evidence for the Greeks of what would happen if any Greek city chose to oppose the Romans. And so cities in Greece now are governed by pro-Roman oligarchs. And they do Rome's bidding. And in return, Rome rewards this class of collaborators. And the classic example of this is the most famous of all the Greek cities, and that is Athens. So Athens, by this point, it used to be an imperial power itself. That empire has long, long gone. Its democracy, to the degree that it still exists, is a complete sham. Its independence, you know, it's nominal. It's nothing more really than a fig leaf. But if you are a millionaire, you know, with responsibility for running Athens, times are pretty good. The Romans, you know, smile on you. They give you favorable treaties. They allow you to enjoy. They allow you to enjoy special trading relations with other parts of Rome's empire. And the plutocrats, basically, you know, they are happy to sell the rest of the Athenian people down the river in return for the power and wealth that backing Rome gives them. But obviously, the richer they get, the more the resentments of the mass of the people, the demos, as they are called, just fester and fester. And so, unsurprisingly, when news of what has happened in Asia reaches Athens, everyone's completely gripped by this incredible spectacle. The collapse of Roman rule, the conquests of Mithridates, the massacre of so many Romans and Italians. And the business elite are obviously appalled. But the mass of people in Athens are, you know, they're thrilled. And this old longing for freedom, which has been repressed for so many years, but in Athens is still felt as something. Living as part of the, you know, the historical patrimony of the Athenian people. It rouses the demos, the Athenian people, to dream that freedom might, after all, be theirs. And so a revolution breaks out and it's led by a naturalized Athenian called Aristion. And inevitably, this being Athens, he is a philosopher. But just because he's a philosopher doesn't mean that he can't preside over a pogrom. And so he leads the mass of the people against the plutocrats, those who don't flee. Are massacred. And then he sends envoys to Mithridates on the other side of the Aegean, saying, could we have an alliance? And Mithridates says, yeah, absolutely. This is brilliant. And he promptly sends an expeditionary force across the Aegean to Athens so that this alliance between Athens and the king of Pontus can be expressed in military terms. And of course, those military terms are targeted against Rome. And it seems with Athens now allied to Mithridates. What is to stop other Greek cities from doing the same? And back in Italy, where Sulla has been watching the situation develop, not necessarily to Rome's advantage, he realizes that speed is an absolute premium now. You know, he has to get across the Adriatic, get into Greece, see off Mithridates' armies, because otherwise the whole of Greece and maybe Macedon as well, which is currently a Roman province, it might all just slip away. He's got Marius on the loose. No one knows where Marius is or what he's going to get up to. He has one of the new consuls, Cinna. Cinna did that business with the stone. I'm not going to cause any trouble. I mean, one of the characteristics of very cynical, ruthless people is they assume that everybody else is as cynical and ruthless as they are. So Sulla can't trust Cinna. One thing we haven't really talked about, actually, you know, Sulla was involved in this war against the Italian, the rest of Italy, the social war. That's still going on, isn't it? And actually, nobody really has decided. I mean, there's still a massive political argument about how to end that particular war. I mean, almost everybody thinks that the Italians should be given the vote and they should, you know, they should be incorporated fully into the Roman Republic. But exactly how is still a moot point. So Sulla is taking a big risk by leaving all this behind, unresolved, to go over to Greece and presumably to Asia. But I guess. Does he think he has no choice that this is existential for Rome? I think it's probably less Rome than him. He, you know, he has marched on Rome. He has dared very greatly in the course of ensuring that he can lead this war against Mithridates. So he has to go. But you're right that in every sense, if he crosses the Adriatic and leaves Italy behind, there is no guarantee that he will remain legally a general of the Roman Republic. It's very likely. It's very likely that his enemies will secure power. And if they do, then they will name him an enemy of the state. So it's it is a huge gamble. And I think that for that reason, before he leaves, he makes one attempt to provide some military security for himself in Italy while he is away. So in the dying days of his consulship, he'd been consul with this guy, Pompeius Rufus, who had been beaten up by Marius's thugs before Sulla's march on Rome and stripped of his consulship. And Sulla, when he marches on Rome, he has this colleague, this friend of his, this associate, Pompeius Rufus, reinstalled as a consul. And because Pompeius Rufus can absolutely be relied upon, what Sulla really wants is for him to have a great army of legions so that he will be a heavyweight to his other enemies in Roman Italy. So he thinks there is this guy Strabo in Piscinum, which is the area on the kind of the central Italy on the. The Adriatic coast and Strabo, people may remember Strabo means squint Strabo has. It's a nickname. He's a very sinister figure, but very effective. And he has been laying siege to the city of Asculum where the social war had originally broken out. I've done a very good job. He storms it. He's basically crushed the revolution, the rebellion, the social war in central Italy. But Sulla's wheeze is to say, well, if the war is over, then Strabo doesn't need his legion. So as consul, I will force through a bill saying that Strabo should hand over his legions to Pompeius Rufus. And then my ally will have the legions. And of course, this is exactly basically what Marius has done. Yeah, it does not occur to Sulla that actually Pompeius Rufus, when he arrives, that Strabo might say, no, I'm going to keep the legions myself. Just as Sulla had done, you know, in his turn. I think this is what's so interesting. You were saying, you know, it doesn't. How unthinkable is it? For people to do what Sulla has done. I think it's so unthinkable that even Sulla thinks that no one else will do it. That's the measure of how kind of fateful a step his march on Rome was. So as you say, what is to stop Strabo doing to Pompeius Rufus what Sulla had done to Marius's ambassadors? Well, Pompeius Rufus turns up and Strabo greets him with a kind of very menacing politeness. And then he says, I'm afraid I can't hang around here. I'm called away on urgent business. I'll be away for the next couple of days. But, you know, do as you will. Do take over my legions. So the next day, Pompeius Rufus gathers all the soldiers around him and he celebrates his command in the traditional manner by performing a sacrifice. And as he is conducting the sacrifice, a gang of Strabo's soldiers start to push in on him. And as he raises the sacrificial knife to kill the victim that's being sacrificed, these soldiers seize him and they strike him down. And a Roman. Scholar later described it. He perished as though he were the sacrificial offering himself. The Strabo comes back and he says, I'm shocked, shocked to discover what's happened. But he takes no action against the mutineers and the legions remain securely under his command. And so Sulla does not have that body of legions backing him that he had hoped for. Question about Strabo. Is Strabo at this point loyal to Marius? Is he operating in his own? He's his own man. He's his own man. So isn't that a sign of how generally. Structurally, Roman politics and Roman kind of military politics is kind of breaking down that because you describe Strabo as a warlord. I mean, this is not just a general as part of an institution. This is an independent military power broker, kingmaker, you know, in different circumstances, I guess. Yeah. And I think that's exactly what Strabo is doing is waiting to see who's going to win, but keeping his legions close to him. And so this is a really malign situation in Italy. But it is one that. Sulla says, well, what the hell I'm off. He gets in his ships. He loads his men up. They cross the Adriatic. He lands on the far side and he is going to war in the east. Well, we'll find out what happens in the east. And indeed, what on earth has happened to our protagonist, Gaius Marius, after the break. Hello, this is Tom Holland from Goalhangers. The rest is history. And I'm James Holland from Goalhangers. We have ways of making you talk. We're here to introduce Pressure, an unmissable World War Two drama from the producers of Darkest Hour. Now hitting the big screen. It tells the gripping, yet I think widely unknown story. story of a meteorologist called james stagg who played an absolutely crucial role in the launching of d-day well yes because may had been a beautiful month for the beginning of june was gorgeous weather too and then suddenly it turned and huge storms were approaching fast approaching from across the atlantic threatening to completely wreck the whole d-day invasion yeah it's amazing film it stars andrew scott as stagg brendan fraser as eisenhower and damian lewis as montgomery pressure is an absolute must see pressure is exclusively in cinemas from september the 9th this episode is brought to you by atio the aicrm gary here from goal hangers the rest is football football moves quickly now teams have more data than ever but the real skill is knowing what actually matters you there but with so much noise it's easy to drop the ball that's why atio is useful it's an aicrm designed for how teams actually operate today fast and in sync by connecting your tools you get a complete picture of your business so while others are scrambling for answers you just ask atio what you want to know and you get to the right answer faster when everything's moving quickly that sort of clarity matters ask more from your crm ask atio try atio for free at a t t i o dot com slash goal hanger this episode is supported by anthropic the team behind claude now history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked yeah there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century and the hard question in particular was what is out there beyond the atlantic ocean to the west and as you will know the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer christopher columbus and he realizes or rather everybody else realizes that there is a vast continent out there and it is of course the americas so you know anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why anthropic is founded on one hard question above all how can we ensure that the ai revolution really goes well for ordinary people and that's why we're here today and we're going to talk about the answer to that question people so they asked over a hundred thousand people and what came back wasn't just fear there was hope as well people wanted to know will cancer ever be cured can kids have a better future it turns out that there is hope in hard questions ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking so welcome back to the rest is history the year is 87 bc it's um all the way all looking very febrile in the east but also in rome and just before the break we were wondering what had happened to the protagonist of this entire series gaius marius well tom what has happened to maria so he fled rome what has become of him since he's in a real bind because he's been declared a public enemy um sulla has leaned on the sell it to have that um bill passed uh and so he is now an outlaw and on top of that as you were saying he's been declared a public enemy very old he's very fat and he has one of the most recognizable faces in the whole of rome so basically you know what is a 69 year old overweight six times consul to do there's only one thing he can really do and that is to go undercover and so this is what marius does and he takes refuge on one of the many estates he has um outside rome and he's hidden in a cartload of beans and hidden by beans he is then taken by a loyal carter down to ostia which is the port of rome and from there he takes ship to africa and africa is the obvious place he would go because that is where he had won his first great military victories he has lots of allies and supporters there but complete disaster there's a storm uh and marius and his companions get they get driven ashore and from there they escape squads who've come to arrest them by the skin of their teeth they hitch lifts with passing merchants who then decide that they don't want to have anything to do with him and dump him on the shore there's one particularly hairy incident where um marius ends up hiding naked in a marsh kind of burying himself in mud so i always kind of think of it you know it's like marlon brando um in the mud colonel kurtz colonel kurtz yeah what is it you're a you're an errand boy yeah exactly it's that moment but unfortunately he is discovered and he's hauled out from the mud all covered in the in the gunk of the swamp and he gets locked up in a cell and the local kind of town council think well we now we've taken him we better get rid of him but they're all very nervous so they think well let's get a paid assassin to do it and they fix on a kimbrian so one of those barbarians who'd been defeated ironically by marius like a dane yeah so lots and lots of had been taken as slaves and this is presumably a slave and they give this kimbrian a sword and say go in and finish off marius so he goes into the cell it's very dark and all the kimbrian can see is the kind of i like to imagine red glare of his eyes kind of staring at him from the shadows and then he hears marius's voice man do you dare to kill gaius marius and the kimbrian does not dare he's absolutely terrified oh my words martin sheen runs away yeah he runs out of the cell and he's like oh wailing i cannot kill gaius marius he is you know this this guy is just too terrifying and the local authorities they decide that you know they can't kill him either marius is the you know he's the great savior of rome he's such an impressive man they don't want to just dispatch him so what they do is they give him back his clothes and they put him on a boat and they say just you know get out of here we don't have anything else to do with you and so this enables marius to cross from italy to africa and he makes him a slave and he's like oh my god i can't do this i can't do this i can't do this i can't do this i can't do this i can't do this i can't do this i can't do this i can't do this land by where carthage had stood so these um ivy clad ruins um absolutely deserted and the governor of africa sends him a message saying if you stay here then i will uphold the decrees of the senate and treat you as a public enemy so i'm giving you a chance to get out and marius groans and then he gives a very famous answer it's very celebrated in uh in in later roman history tell the governor that you have seen gaius marius a fugitive sitting among the ruins of carthage i mean you're doing it with an american accent but i just think this is made for russell crowe especially russell crowe now no it's marlon brando when he's a little bit heavier you know he's a he's somebody people associate with rome i mean this is absolutely made for him yeah who do you have a seller a young jude law is basically ideal for celebrity he's too old now i think jude law jude law would be good although tom holland for octavian by the way i think he'd be a brilliant octavian i think you're right about that but yeah okay well let's say gary guys marius from this point on we'll give him an australian accent so is it all over for marius he's stuck in carthage he's got no arms he's got no backing he's being disrespected by the local governor it's not all over for him actually because remember that um that prophecy which had decreed that he would end up holding seven consulships fate will not be denied and you are right dominic because back in italy circumstances are becoming more favorable for marius so by this point sulla has left for the war with mithridates and the two new consuls have embarked on their magistracies so one of these two consuls we've already mentioned this is sinner and we've said he hates sulla and he has solemnly and publicly sworn an oath on the capital not to reverse sully's legislation but we've been asking all along can he be trusted sinner is a very very slippery customer his colleague a guy called nice octavius he's not a fan of sulla either but he is the kind of man who probably can be trusted to keep an oath because he is old school he's a classic conservative he's the kind of person who once he's sworn an oath to the gods is liable to keep it clearly sinner and octavius are very different caliber of men and it doesn't take long for them to fall out and they fall out over this kind of perennial bugbear of roman politics by this point which is the question of how far the italians should be given for in france for roman citizenship and under normal circumstances these kind of disagreements would have been contained within the senate house but as we've been saying the climate in rome has becoming ever more violent politics is being militarized and so arguments that begin in the senate have a tendency now to escalate and it doesn't take long for the disagreements between sinner and octavius to get very badly out of control and it ends up with sinner being expelled by octavius officially stripped of his consulship by the senate and once again proclaimed a public enemy so essentially now what has happened in rome is that every time there's a disagreement between the consuls it ends with one of the consuls being decreed an outlaw and this is not does not make for a healthy politics it does not at all and how much is that a break with established roman politics massively so actually this is a really good for for democracies that may have modeled them themselves on Roman or obsessed with not following the example of Rome. This is really good example. in the dangers of excessive polarization and you know everything becoming you know political disagreements being litigated in the courts and and painting your opponents as the enemies of the republic isn't it i mean this is what happens yes because if you use very violent rhetoric that violent rhetoric can become real and once it becomes real then essentially you've let a very dangerous genie out of a bottle and that this is essentially what has happened so there's basically no space left for pluralism i mean insofar as there was a limited amount of pluralism differences of opinion reasonable differences opinion the idea that every citizen has a has freedom of speech is really important in the republic and it's it's it's upheld people can basically say what they like that you know this is why even those who are not in the senate are so ready to scrawl graffiti insulting their enemies across the city it's taken for granted that this is the right of people living in a free state but if you are going to end up killed or declared a public enemy every time you have a disagreement with one of your peers then it becomes incredibly dangerous octavius has taken this step so sinner now does exactly the same and he does a sulla he goes to nola where this you know siege is is still dragging on and he works his magic on the legionaries who were camped out beside the city that one legion that had been left behind to prosecute the siege and then he gets that legion on side and then he goes on a tour of various cities around italy recruiting more men and then he goes on a tour of various cities around raising cash and he then takes a fateful step he sends a messenger to piscinum on the east coast of italy where strabo is camped out with all his legions and so strabo then duly crosses the apennines from piscinum and he makes camp outside rome beside the colleen gate which is the gate in the north of the walls of rome and he's obviously a very menacing presence this very sinister operator with all these legions camped outside one of the main gates of your city and what makes it all the more ominous is that actually he hasn't come out on sinner's side he hasn't come out on octavius's side he's clearly waiting to see which of these two consuls is going to need him the most and then demand his price one man however has by this point swung fully behind sinner and that is marius so marius has you know he gets the news that sinner is on the way to piscinum and he's on the way to piscinum and he's on the way to piscinum on the loose he crosses from africa with his son and with assorted henchmen and he then uses the magic of his name to recruit a private army himself lots of escaped slaves lots of old soldiers people like that rallying to you know the old man the magic of his name and so sinner is nervous of marius basically by this point everyone is nervous of marius because he is he's completely wired i mean he's he's he's really ready to kill anybody who annoys him by this point he's very very colonel kurtz i think by right do you think marius has well he's 69 he probably doesn't have that much longer to live or something has flipped in his head or what is it i think this is kind of a slight king lear thing that he's so stupefied by you know the the collapse of all his fortunes that something's gone inside his head he is much more murderous much more headstrong than he had ever been before but sinner thinks well it's better to have marius on your side than against you so they team up and they advance on rome and they put the city under siege and at one point they actually managed to break in through the walls but at this point strabo clearly thinks i don't really want marius inside rome so he he comes to um octavius's help uh and the men of sinner and marius are throat flung back out and so the the stasis between these three blocks of men octavius in rome strabo in his camp outside the colleen gate marius and sinner with their men it it's very kind of uneasy tension there and then suddenly it becomes clear that all along the gods have had marius's back because at this point a grotesque series of disasters intervene on marius's behalf so strabo's camp is abruptly swept by plague and he catches it himself and retires to bed the tent is then struck by lightning and strabo is incinerated he's but by the lightning by the lightning so he's got plague then he gets hit by lightning i mean it's a really bad day at the office what are the chances of that happening that just seems mad very low and then his funeral procession is held and he's so unpopular that the crowd sees his ashes um and it's only the intervention of a tribune that prevents them from being um desecrated and he leaves behind this very dark reputation that the art trimmer but he also leaves behind a young son only 19 years old pompeius and pompey as he's better known and this is someone of whom we will be hearing more later in this series pompey the great ascent of the story he has so exciting but at this point he's only 19 years old he hasn't really made a name for himself yet but he will be making a name for himself very soon i'm so pumped he's back in the story all right so let's pull the camera back a bit strabo is dead sinner and marius have the absolutely the upper hand and presumably now they can just waltz into rome yeah there's no one to stop them and do they behave with decorum elegance and grace they absolutely do not um octavius the consul refuses to flee instead he sits in his chair of office and this is where he's surprised by maris's men who chop him up into little pieces marius by this stage has gone completely psychotic his bitterness and rage you know this is all that he is he's an absolute monster and he is out to get everyone whom he for his recent misadventures and some are murdered by his gangs of slaves others are targeted for prosecution and meanwhile dominic you've been poo-pooing this prophecy the whole way through the series but you again have to eat your words because at this point marius is elected to his seventh consulship the record-breaking consulship so that proves it well i'm like way rooney having to row down the hudson which he did if you recall because he made a full a foolish prophecy during the world cup that norway wouldn't reach the quarterfinals i mean it would be great to see you rowing down a river well that wayne rooney comparison that's dogged me for so long i'm happy to lean into it once again do you know what who maris reminds me of at this point so it's colonel kurtz melded with daenerys targaryen yes yes he's he's a fat 69 year old daenerys right he's probably too heavy for a dragon he's gone mad he's he's like coarsened by resentment and victimhood and he's killing everybody yeah all his men are out slaughtering everybody maris himself goes on a massive bender he abandons himself completely to violent drinking bouts and when he's not drunk and he's asleep he's suffering terrible nightmares and two weeks after he has been elected to his seventh consulship he dies and this grim terrible old man at last is gone well he dies of what booze apoplexy booze over excitement basically he's you know he's run his course but he's died as he wanted his consul he's drunk he's killing people yeah he's the master of rome he's had his seventh consulship i mean who wouldn't want to be guys marius at that point brilliant loving it so he leaves behind him um as the heir to his cause a son uh he is only 22 at this point he's very good looking um he's a bit of a playboy and he is utterly committed to continuing the blood feud with maris's enemies and especially with sulla so the marians are still on the scene but the death of marius effectively means that sinner is now unchallenged as the leader of this new regime that has taken power in rome and the years that follow the death of marius will be commemorated by the romans as what they called kinanum tempus the age of sinner and he will maintain himself in the consulship for the next year next three years so a succession of continuous consulships um and you know there's no nonsense about keeping his oath to sulla quite the contrary everything he does has as its goal that the destruction of his his great enemy and with sulla absent in the east sinner knows that he he has a breathing space at least but they do you know he and his regime know what is threatening they know that if sulla is successful in his war you know should he defeat mithridate should he survive to return to rome with all his legions then there will be the showdown to end all showdowns and so unsurprisingly during these years sinner's priority is to prepare for the return of sulla okay so that's what's been going on in rome but all this time sulla has been away in the east prosecuting his war to try to restore rome and hegemonia and the eastern mediterranean he started in macedon didn't he uh macedon which is of course a roman province at this point so how did it go well the reason he's gone to macedon is he wants to um secure it against the threat of that expeditionary force that mithridates had sent to athens after the athenians and mithridates had signed their treaty and the arrival of sulla and his army in macedon is alarming for mithridates men because they know that they're going to be the caliber of the Romans. And so rather than confront them, they they retreat southwards back to athens and they hold themselves up in the port of athens which is separate from the main body of the city so the main body of the city of athens is protected by walls and so also is the port of athens piraeus that is also surrounded by walls and it's in the port that um mithridates force embed themselves because obviously from there they can be supplied by mithridates you know they they have access to the sea meanwhile what of athens itself well people may remember the guy in charge in athens is this philosopher aristion who has by this point inevitably installed himself as its tyrant and the situation facing the athenians now is i mean it is a nightmare so aristion i mean he may be great at giving academic lectures but the question is is the athens athens or is it athens piraeus is the athens athens or is it athens piraeus and mithridates invasion force presumably they are now heading for a bit of a showdown are they because there's two big armies in greece and that there's only room for one of them well there's one absolutely colossal army and then the sulla's army which is hugely outnumbered however the romans have never lost a major pitched battle in greece and sulla is you know he's a man who backs himself we know this by now and so he marches out very coolly he meets mithridates invasion force it's been divided into two sulla annihilates both of them and that's the end of mithridates invasion force and it's done very quickly and brutally that was quick that essentially is the end of the war sulla has done what he set out to do he's taken athens back and he's what he has destroyed mithridates offensive capability and he opens negotiations with the uh the general of this invasion force who survived the the defeat and then the following autumn amazingly he meets with mithridates in person on the shores of the hellespont so up by gallipoli and this is very unusual behavior from a roman because the romans do not usually negotiate with the kind of person who might have been responsible for wiping out tens of thousands of their compatriots which is what mithridates had done but actually both men have good reason to um to reach terms so for mithridates i mean he knows the game is up he's lost all his troops he'll be lucky to survive and if he can reach terms with sulla then that's tremendous for him that effectively in the situation that he's in is a result equally sulla doesn't have time to finish mithridates off he really urgently needs to get back to italy because as we've been hearing things have not been developing in italy necessarily to sulla's advantage because by this point he has been declared a public enemy by sinner and his regime and he's been condemned to death his prime minister his property has been razed and his family and his supporters have been forced to flee so when mithridates says to sulla look this is what i'll do i will withdraw from all the roman territory that i had conquered so effectively the province of asia i will give it back to you you can have all the cities i will withdraw to the limits of the kingdom of pontus and i will accept roman weapons inspectors coming in to make sure that i'm behaving myself that i'm not kind of redeveloping my offensive capabilities hands blicks. Yes, hands us blicks us. And Sulla says, okay, and he gives the killer of all these romans and italians a peck on the cheek and the treaty is signed and this is a massive result for mithridates because no one ever has emerged so unscathed from a war with the republic i mean this is a really good result for him i mean the people for whom it's a disaster are the um the greek cities of asia because these are all the guys who personally slaughtered all the roman and italian businessmen and now they've come back under roman rule so they have a terrible time of it because not only do they have to pay five years back tax but they're also obliged to pay the full costs of the war and the costs of the roman garrisons that sulla slaps on them so they go back to being leeched white of their cash which is what had been happening before mithridates invasion on the other hand though if you're if you're living in asia it's a sign that you can fight the romans and get away with it i don't think that is the lesson they draw okay i think the lesson they draw is don't mess with the romans and they will not mess with the romans ever again you know they have they have learned their lesson as too has athens because after he's sorted out asia sulla returns across the aegean to athens and there he inflicts further humiliations on the city i mean a little bit i mean always dangerous to compare people from history to nazis but there is a slight element of goring turning up and having the pick of an art gallery to what sulla does next um so there is this great unfinished temple to zeus um which has been been taken centuries and centuries to to complete and so sulla pulls down all the various columns of this temple and has them ready to be transported to rome he also loots the city's libraries of all their holdings um so henceforward if philosophers like aristion want to study the original manuscripts of aristotle they'll have to go to rome and i think that this is a very pointed insult from sulla at the academic community in athens um and he also rounds up a large number of greek athletes so that they can feature in the triumph that he is planning and the olympics are actually left so denuded of star quality that in the next olympics they can only stage the sprint every all the other so quickly anyway boring yeah so probably the worst olympics ever but of course you know is sulla counting his chickens before they've hatched by planning a triumph um he has been declared a public enemy so in constitutional terms his command is illegal and not only that but sinner who is by far the ablest of his enemies back in italy he is planning an expedition from italy across the adriatic to greece to confront sulla before sulla can cross the adriatic and come to italy so that massive showdown that both sides have been anticipating for much of this episode rome's first full-blown civil war that is now imminent it is going to happen wow so we are building towards the great showdown and in the next episode our climactic episode of this series we will find out what happens to sulla will he make himself master of rome will he celebrate his triumph and what then and of course this is the key step you might argue uh looking back towards the establishment of a new kind of rome an imperial rome a generation or two later so there's only one way to find out what happens and that's to listen to the next episode there's no there's literally no other way that you will find out the story there are no other historical accounts of this there will just be the rest is history's account now if you're a member of the rest is history club you can listen to that final episode right now if you're not a member of the rest is history club you can listen to that final episode right now if you're not a member of the club if you've identified what the winning side is and you want to be on it you don't want to be prescribed and have your property seized then i would suggest you go to the rest is history.com sign up you will get the final episode you get a host of unbelievable additional benefits but also you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're on the right side of history the winning side you are not a member of marius's party so i encourage you to do that i also encourage you to sign up for the rest is history club you can listen to that free newsletter it's completely free and it has all kinds of fascinating articles about this story and other stories feedback from listeners and all kinds of things like that so it's absolutely brilliant um tom i actually can't wait to find out what happens to seller so i'm going off now i'm going off now to listen to that final episode bye-bye very wise bye-bye you or ulcerative colitis symptoms every choice matters trimphia offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start trimphia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks if your doctor decides that you can self-inject trimphia proper training is required trimphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active crohn's disease and adults with moderate to severely active crohn's to severely active ulcerative colitis serious allergic reactions increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur before treatment get checked for infections and tuberculosis tell your doctor if you have an infection flu-like symptoms or need a vaccine explore what's possible ask your doctor about trimphia today call 1-800-526-7736 to learn