704. Roman Civil War: Master of the Republic (Part 4)

On the 6th of July, 83 BC, the largest and holiest building in Rome was struck by lightning. The ancient temple of Jupiter loomed on the summit of the Capitoline Hill, here beneath the ceiling sheathed in gold, amid trophies of statues and shields, the Guardian of Rome had his shrine. But now Jupiter had decided to destroy his temple with a thunderbolt. What was the cause of the God's anger? As the crowds gathered to watch the disaster, the flames billowed sparks and smoke across the forum. This was the heart of Rome stretching all the way from the capital, Hill of the Gods, to the Palatine, Hill of Power. The forum, along with the circus maximus, was one of two open spaces within the city walls where Rome's citizens could mix freely. Here was the Cometium, where citizens gathered to hear auditors address them from the rostra, the curved speakers platform made from the prowess of long ago captured ships. Immediately adjacent to it was the Curia, where the Senate met, and a little to itself the Temple of Castor and Pollocks, where the assemblies would be summoned to debate and vote on laws. Along this axis of buildings and open spaces lay the great theatre of the Republic's political life, Rome's most potent expression of her citizens' liberties and values. All the more potent as then that is the fire on the capital raged, it died the forum below it, angry red, red the colour of Mars, the God of War, and bloodshed. So if you think that was a very melodramatic reading charged with the sort of port-wine-soaked tones of one of London's greatest clubmen, you would be right. That was from Rubicon by our very own Tom Holland, describing an ominous moment in the descent of the Roman Republic into its first civil war. The gods are angry, but Tom, with whom? Well, I mean that is the question, isn't it? Because we left you last time with the Republic in the shadow of two great patricians, strong men. And the first of these is Sulla, a man who is at once completely charming and utterly sinister. He's very cultured, he's unbelievably brutal, he is a conservative, but he is also a revolutionary because he is the first man ever to lead a Roman army on Rome. So Sulla had led his army on Rome in 88 BC and in the intervening years, so between his march on Rome and the burning of the Temple of Jupiter on the capital, he has achieved remarkable things. So he has taken the war to Mithridates, who was this bold and ruthless and vindictive king who had conquered the Roman province of Asia and invaded Greece. And in only three years Sulla had reversed all of Mithridates conquests. He had brought Greece and the province of Asia, once again, to acknowledge the might of Rome. And Mithridates had retreated to within his own borders and he was obliged to accept Roman weapons inspectors to make sure that he wasn't rebuilding his offensive capabilities. And so you would think that back in Rome, the news of Sulla's triumphs would be greeted with praise and with thanksgiving and with all kinds of celebrations, but not a bit of it because back in Rome, the city is ruled by Sulla's enemies. And they have responded to Sulla's great feats by declaring him a public enemy and raising his house and running his family and friends out of the city. And Sulla is not happy about this. You know, this is not a man that you offend recklessly and in 84 he had written a letter to the Senate and Aryan the Greek historian describes what he said. He said he would be back very soon to take his vengeance on behalf of all those who had been wronged and on behalf of Rome itself upon the guilty men. So we're very, very ominous threat or chilling warning. So Sulla has lots of enemies, but there's one in particular isn't that particularly formidable, but also the particular object of his hatred and for completely understandable reasons. Now we talked about him last time. This is a man called Sinner who is very able, very ruthless, very opportunistic who is, you know, just as dedicated to the pursuit of victory and total defeat of his opponent as Sulla is and remind us about Sinner. So Sinner, he'd been elected as consul hadn't he just before Sulla went off to fight his war. And Sulla has said, you've got to swear an oath that you're going to attack me. Sinner said fine. And then Sulla went, he stabbed Sulla in the back. And basically for the past three years while Sulla has been away fighting with her deities, Sinner has been the dominant figure in Roman politics. And he had upheld his power in a completely unconstitutional manner by holding consulship after consulship after consulship in succession. And by 84 BC when Sulla sent that threatening letter, Sinner was on to his fourth consecutive consulship. And this is basically the closest to being ruled by a permanent autocrat that the Roman Republic has yet experienced. So again, they can ominous portent perhaps of the way that that things are going. However, as Sinner prepares for Sulla's return, I mean, he's not alone because he's dependent for his position of authority on the support of a quite sizable faction. And these are the marians, the followers of Gaius Marius, who for decades had been Rome's most successful and celebrated general until Sulla had replaced him. And Marius and Sulla had ended up as very, very bitter rivals. Now Marius himself by this point is dead. He'd had this kind of massive bender and essentially kind of collapsed over indulgence very elderly by this point kind of in 70, I think. But he has. So in the mafia sense, he has left his family, his familiar. He has a lot of supporters, a lot of people who have always backed Marius and have grown very rich off backing him. And just because Marius himself has gone, doesn't mean that his familiar is now dead. And the guy who is inherited the leadership of this familiar is the son of Marius, who by 84 is 26 years old. But by virtue of being the head of this kind of marian clan is already a very serious player in Roman politics, even though he hasn't as yet held any magistracies. At all. And we mentioned him. We described him last time. He's very good looking. He's a playboy. And he's eager to show himself his father's son. You know, he wants to prove himself a chip off the old block, I guess. And just on the marian faction. So in the previous episodes, we talked about how Marius had been a provincial outsider, how he'd appeal to the masses, the popular is all of this kind of thing. Is that is that class element? Sort of as a way of regional element, I suppose, is that still an element of the civil war between sinner and his people and seller and his people? Or is this generated into a gun and wars the roses struggle between the elites on one level on one level because Marius was an out of towner. And he'd always favoured in franchisement of the Italians who've been in this great war. We might come to that in a minute. And so he has he is backed by the Italians, basically, and they view seller as their great enemy. But in general, the fact that a powerful Roman aristocrat or player appeals over the head of the Senate to the people doesn't mean that, you know, they're socialist or that they themselves are necessarily identifying themselves with the masses of the plebeians in the Roman slums. Any more than the fact that that, I don't know, Donald Trump is very popular with people who don't have high incomes, mean that Donald Trump himself is, you know, from the masses. Essentially, the Romans, it's less about policy. It's more about vibe. It's about whether you are seen to be on the side of the people, whether you, whether you like them, I guess, whether you enjoy their pleasures and, and, and if you don't, then you are part of the kind of the aristocratic faction. But basically everybody is aristocratic in the upper echelons of Roman society. Okay. And it's important to keep all that in mind. So this is, I think ultimately, it's not a civil war about principle. It's a civil war about power. And this is why someone like Sinner, someone like Marius Jr., they are never going to arrive at an accommodation with seller. They are complete diehards. And it's not over points of principle. It's over issues of personal ambition and rivalry. Yeah, but they don't underestimate seller, do they? They, I mean, they know by now what an absolutely implacable and formidable opponent he is. I mean, here's an outlaw. His property has been confiscated. and the property of his supporters. He doesn't have a voice in Rome. And yet on the other hand, you know, he's an extremely practiced and accomplished commander. He has his legions, whose loyalty to him I'm assuming because they fought in the east. Yeah, yeah, must be absolutely unwavering at this point. Yeah, Kassala's provided them with enormous amounts of loot, of course. I mean, they they they all absolutely love him. So how a sinner and the Marianne's going to what I mean, what do they have to compete with that? Well, sinner has has legions as a as a console. Marius has supporters by virtue of his name. And then, of course, there are the Italians, the people who had been at war with the Romans a decade before. And now have largely been pacified. And lots of them are being enfranchised. So essentially, the way that the Romans had solved that war had stopped the Italians from breaking away, there was a kind of two-pronged strategy. So one of them was to give actually what the Italians had always been fighting for, which was access to full Roman citizenship. And from the beginning of the war, the Senate had been saying to Italian communities that didn't revolt or laid their arms down, look, you can have the citizenship. But also, this had been combined with very brutal military suppression of those who were still up in arms. And Sulla's role in these twin strategies had not made him popular with the Italians. So when it came to the enfranchisement of the Italians, Sulla was always dragging his feet. He was felt by the Italians not to be keen on this process. He wasn't he was clearly not an enthusiast for it. He was agreeing to it reluctantly. And as a field commander in the war, he had been by far the most lethal and brutal of all the generals, and therefore the most successful as well. And he particularly targeted a people called the Samnites. Oh yeah, we talked about them. The guys who are prone to shaving their private parts in public. But they're also, you know, they're very effective fighters. And for this reason, Sulla had particularly targeted them. And the Samnites had borne the brunt of Sulla's reprisals. And Samnium, which is the stretch of the Aponines, which rise to the east of the Bay of Naples south of Rome, this remains largely unpassified. And so here should the Marians wish to employ them. I think there is a third ready resource of men who are willing to oppose Sulla. So you have Sulla's armies, you have the Marians, and potentially you have the Samnites as well. Right. So what is Sulla's plan? What's his strategy? You know, he could wait for Sulla to land in Italy and deal with him then or he could take the offensive and go after him in Greece. I have to say people going after Roman adversaries in Greece doesn't tend to, doesn't tend to end well. Anyway, let's see what happens to Sulla. Well, you're right. Basically every Roman general who crosses the Greece to fight civil war, it all goes wrong. And Sulla's attempt to do this is the first in a long line. So what does he do? He and his fellow consul, they raise their armies, they go down with the Marians, they go to a port called Encona, which is in Piscinum, this region on the east coast of Central Italy, and an initial contingent crosses the Adriatic. All is looking well. And then there's a second fleet crosses with loaded down with men. And this is hit by a storm and the ships are forced back into harbor. And when the storm dies down and Sulla says, okay, we're ready to go. Can you board ships and will, you know, we'll continue with the crossing. They say they're not going to go. And there's a mass process of desertion. And the mutiny starts to spread throughout the camp. Sulla is furious at this. You know, he's being directly insulted. He's being disobeyed. He is a consul of the Roman people. And so he summons his men to an assembly to remind them of their duty. The men gather in a great assembly. Sulla starts to march through them to take the rostrum. But as he's pushing his way through the mass of soldiers and his lictus, his bodyguards, each consul has 12 of these lictus armed with rods. They're kind of beating away through. One of the rods catches a soldier painfully and the soldier hits the licta in the face. And there is an absolutely massive pile on. The soldiers start to throw stones at Sulla and his bodyguard. They then draw their swords and they stab Sulla to death. So Sulla never even makes it across the Greece. He is dead in this port town of Ancona. Sulla, what an end for him. Oh my god. No one saw that coming. Yeah. Well, it's a massive stroke of luck for Sulla. Well, he was phalix, wasn't he? He was blessed with the fortune by Venus, I think. Yes. And so he's laughing. He's absolutely laughing once again. He absolutely is. I think for two reasons. And the first is that Sulla himself, despite the fact that he's got himself murdered by his own troops, I mean, he is an effective figure, the most effective of Sulla's opponents. And so his loss is a real blow to the cause of those who want to oppose Sulla because really the only heavyweight who's left is Marius Jr. But we've said he's only 26 and a 26-year-old could never become a consul. That would be impossible. So essentially, the Marians are left with a massive leadership vacuum. The second reason why this is great news for Sulla is that the contrast between the evident devotion that is felt by Sulla's troops for their general and the death of sinner in a mutiny is a terrible look for the Marians. And I think that it helps to persuade a number of key waivers, people who've been sitting on the fence wondering which way to jump. Actually, that they should probably throw their lot in with Sulla. Right. That he has the look of a winner, even though ostensibly he's out numbered. And among the ranks of those who at this point start to join with Sulla. There are two of them in particular who will become very famous and both of them at this point are very young. And the first of these is the head of a family celebrated or you might say notorious for its wealth. And this is a man called Marcus Lassinius Crassus. Crassus. Great to have him on the show. So his father, Crassus' father, a very reputable family. He'd had a dazzling political career, but he'd also had a very unsenatorial interest in the import export business. Senators were not supposed to busy themselves with trade, but Crassus' dad had. And as a result, he'd become obscenely rich and he'd run himself the nickname Deves or the rich money bags. Right. And Crassus' dad had been an opponent of Marius and so he had been killed in the pogrom of 87 when Marius returned and was psychotic and killing all his enemies. And Crassus' elder brother as well. And so that had left the young Crassus who at this point was still only in his early 20s as the heir to the family name and crucially to its fabulous wealth. But Crassus too, of course, he's been targeted by the Marians too and so he flees Italy and he takes ship for Spain where his father had been a governor and so he has lots of backers and supporters. And Plutarch who loves a good story says that Crassus to begin with holds himself up on a cave on a beach. And his dependence bring him both food and new bell slave girls to satisfy his various appetites. And so he hangs out in this cave, I mean, whether that's true or not, who knows. But definitely the point comes where Crassus feels that it's safe to re-emerge and he sets the recruiting a legion from among all his father's various clients in Spain. And then when he's got the legion at his back and the news reaches him that sinner has been lynched by his own men, he sets sail for Italy. And when he lands, he uses his wealth, he uses his connections, he's a very able man as well, very persuasive. And he recruits an even larger force, so swelling the number of men at his back. And later in life, Crassus would make a celebrated comment, a very notorious comment to the effect that no man could truly be reckoned rich who lacked the funds to maintain his own army. And I think only someone who had gone through the civil war would ever have thought to say this. So Crassus has quite a substantial military force now at his back, completely illegal. I mean, it's illegal for citizens to raise their own private armies, but you know, these are troubled times and Crassus has gone ahead and done it. And so he's looking around and wondering, well, which anti-marie and should I throw my lot in with? And he realizes that Salar is really the only show in town. And so he crosses the Adriatic, and he joins with Salar in Greece, and Salar thinks this is tremendous, and they become great pals. Salar is very, very welcoming to him. Yeah. So that's number one. Who's the second man? The second man, he is even younger than Crassus, and he is even more glamorous. He's actually a lot more glamorous. Salar doesn't meet with him in Greece. He meets with him after he has crossed from Greece to Italy, and specifically to Brondizium in the heel of Italy, and from there, Salar is marching up the roads northwards towards Campania, where the Bay of Naples is. And as he's approaching campaigner. He's brought news that another prize at army has been raised on his behalf, and this private army has been raised in Piscinum on the eastern side of Italy, and it is crossing the Aponines to join him. And when Salar is brought this news, he's anxious that these reinforcements might be ambushed, that they might be surprised by the Merians. And so he orders his men to advance quickly, so that they can come to the rescue of this private army that is coming to join him. But as the Salar and his men are pushing their way up the road towards Campania, further messengers come, and they say, "Brilliant news, this army is absolutely fine, it's cross the Aponines, and what is more, it is wiped out, not one, not two, but three, hostile, Merian armies." And it is waiting for Salar, ahead of him on the road, it's drawn up in, you know, a splendid array, and standing at the head of this array of men, is its young commander, the man who has personally raised it from his estates in Piscinum, and he cuts a tremendous dash, this young man. He has golden hair, swept up in a quiff, and he is the spitting image of Alexander the Great. Wow, and Dominic, you know who this young man is. I do actually know who it is, his Nias Pompeus, isn't he? And he is the son of Pompeus Strabo, the bloke with the squint, who had the worst run of luck in history, and then he was in his tent, and it was tent was struck by lightning. So Strabo died, and I guess his affinity passed to his son, Nias Pompeus, or Pompey, and Pompey, as lots of listeners will know, he is the great rising star of Roman politics at this point, burning with ambition, ruthless in turn, but a showman, I mean, he wants to basically, he's basically cosplaying as Alexander the Great, isn't he? And he has this quiff, which you can see, and you can Google his statues or his busts, and you can see the quiff, and later on, he used to sort of wear his cloak like Alexander and all sorts of stuff like this. But at this point, Crassus plus Pompey is quite, I mean, that's quite a catch for Sulla. Yeah. Crassus, I think, is more obviously the kind of person that Sulla would wanted his back. Pompey is more aberrant because he is so madly young. He's only in his early 20s. And why has Pompey chosen to throw his lot in with Sulla? Bear in mind that Strabo, his father had been notorious as a trimmer, weighing up the odds. Pompey goes full in with Sulla. I think partly it's because Pompey had gone sniffing around Sinner's camp when Sinner was at Ancona and had seen him lynched. And so I think that that confirms Pompey in the view that Sulla is the guy to follow. But I think more than that, the reason that Pompey backs Sulla with such commitment is that he can see that Civil War has changed the rules of the political game because it has presented the younger generation of Roman aristocrats, no belays, with a really unparalleled opportunity to leapfrog their elders and their betters. Because normally there are kind of massive age restrictions. The young are not supposed to seize power. They're supposed to wait their turn. But for Pompey, he's not going to follow these rules. Crasseus isn't going to follow these rules. And someone else who isn't going to follow these rules is Amerian. In fact, the ultimate Marion, the young Marius, the son of Gias Marius, the seven times consul. Let's just have a look at him before we come to Pompey and Crasseus. So the young Marius, he's basically now the figurehead for the opposition to Sulla. And so the fact that he is young, and he doesn't have any official majestycy, is a huge problem for the Marion cause. Then when the temple of Jupiter burns down, so that was being described in the brilliant reading that you did to open this show, it obviously presents an opportunity for Sulla because the capital is where Sina had sworn his oath, which he'd then broken. And so the Sulla's propagandist can say, well, this demonstrator has destroyed the temple because he's angry with Sina and his followers. Yeah. But it does present an opportunity to Marius because inside the temple of Jupiter, this is where the Romans keep their gold. It's their central bank, if you like. It's where all the financial reserves are kept. So Marius, when he sees the temple up in flames, he rushes up to the top of the capital. And he doesn't bother rescuing the cult statue or any of the kind of great sacral objects that are stored there. He scoops up the treasure and he then uses it to pay for his own private legions. And then he uses it to bribe people to vote for him as consul. And so in the year 82, he's going to start a term as consul at the age of 26. And this is just unprecedented. And by the standards of Roman convention, completely obscene. And so even Sulla is shocked. And he understandably regards Marius Jr as his deadliest foe. And he kind of made this roofal comment that the older he became, so the younger his foes became. But of course, the same is true of his allies because Pompey is even younger than the young Marius. And just to emphasize, how shocking this is to mainstream Roman opinion, the Romans assume that the passions of young men are violent and dangerous. And this is why it's so important, the Romans think, that these passions are bitter and bridled, that they are kept under firm control. But we've said how Sulla he's a conservative, but he is also a revolutionary. And if he has a, you know, a sniff of an opportunity, he will take it. And so rather than slap Pompey down for having raised this private army at a very tender age, he thinks Pompey is great. And he gives Pompey free reign, not despite, but because Pompey has the savagery of youth. And Sulla wants to use this savagery to his own ends in the war. And the strategy proves brilliantly successful because by the autumn of 82, so that's a year and a half after Sulla had returned from Greece. The Marian cause is pretty much on the point of collapse. So Pompey, he's up in the North, Sulla sent him there to clean up all the northern cities, a true area and so on, what's now Tuscany. And Pompey does this to such effect that all the Marian forces there with, they take shape and withdraw and go to Sicily to try and carry on the fight there. Marius is defeated by Sulla himself in Campania. He withdraws to a town called Prineste, which is 25 miles east of Rome, holds himself up there. And this means that of all Sulla's enemies, the only army that remains in the field in Italy is the army of the Samnites. Oh yeah, nice armor, but they're very, they're very smooth people. Yes, exactly so. And they hate Sulla with vengeance. And in a sense, they are perhaps, I mean, even more than Young Marius, they are his bitterest and most implacable foes. Right. They want to relieve the Young Marius in Prineste up towards Rome. They evade Sulla and they start marching up towards Prineste and Sulla follows them and the two armies are kind of shadow boxing as they advance up the road towards Rome and then towards Prineste. But as the Samnites are drawing close to Prineste and they see that Sulla is on their flank, they suddenly think God, Rome is completely empty. There's no one guarding it. And the Samnites, of course, have been in a war against Rome. They hate Sulla, but they hate Rome as well. And they think we could go and capture Rome and put it to the torch. What an opportunity. And so they suddenly double back. They swing round. They march towards Rome. And Sulla is taken completely by surprise by this maneuver. I hadn't thought that they would do this and he pursues them at frantic, you know, exhausting speed. And he's chasing them desperately because he knows from his scouts that the Samnites are drawing ever closer to Rome. And as the sun starts to set, the Samnites are in front of the walls of Rome. And their commander gays us out at the cityscape and he tells them prepare to annihilate this monstrous den of evil doers. And he says, do you think that these walls who have prayed so terribly upon the freedoms of Italy will ever vanish until the forest that shelters them has been destroyed. And the Samnites great cheer, let's go and do it, let's wipe Rome out. And they advance on the Colline Gate, this gate on the north. And as they approach it, they can hear the screams of women in the city who think that, you know, they're about to be raped and slave killed. However, just as they are approaching the Colline Gate, Sulla's cavalry, which is an advance of the main body of Sulla's army, hits them in the back, hits them in their rear. And by late evening, Sulla has arrived with his exhausted army and against the advice of his left tenants, he thinks, I'm going to throw them into the battle. I'm not going to give them any chance to recapture their breath. And all evening, and long into the night, the battle rage ages, and it ebbs and flows, and crassus is with Sulla, and he's commanding the left wing, and he shatters the Sam Knight wing. But Sulla's wing, where he is, that's under enormous pressure. And it's on the verge of being broken, when Sulla offers up a prayer to Venus, you know, his great patron, you know, and he's not phalix for nothing. Venus hears his prayer, he rallies his men, they fight on, and by dawn as the sun is rising in the east over Rome, the victory is his. And this turns into a bloodbath, and victory not just in the battle, but effectively in the war against Italian allies and the war against the Merians, the victory at the Colline Gate ends both those wars. And it leaves Sulla as the master of Rome. Wow, so Sulla now wields power, unprecedented really, certainly for generations. He is the master of Rome. But what will he do with it? Will he govern benevolently and wisely, or will more blood flow? We will find out after the break. This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now history's biggest leaps, many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked. Yeah, there's a class of example of that time 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, great pioneering voyage of discovery, and he 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? Anthropic asked 100,000 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. 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The date is the 2nd November, 82 BC. So this is the day after Sulla's tremendous victory against the Samknights in the Battle of the Colline Gate. Outside the gate, there are piles of rotting bodies. Sulla's men have routed up 6,000 prisoners, and Sulla rather than allow them onto the sacred soil of Rome has led them to the campus marshes, the flat expanse beyond the city walls. Tom, this is where the Romans would assemble to go to war, isn't it, and where they would gather to vote for their magistrates. Give us some sense of the scene on the field of Mars as Sulla arrives with his prisoners. Yes, as you said, it's a kind of flat open plane, and so there aren't many public communities on the campus. But of the buildings that do stand there, the largest is this very grand formal building called the Villa Publica, so the public villa, and it consists of a square, two-storyed reception hall, and it's adorned with paintings and sculptures, and its ground floor is decorated with arches, and beyond these arches, their stretches are walled in closure. And this is where magistrates called the censors, who every five years would hold a censors, so that the Romans knew where they stood in relation to all their fellow citizens. This is where they were based, this is where the censors would be done. And it's also where foreign ambassadors would be greeted, and it's where generals who were granted triumphs would spend the night before they enter the Rome with their troops. So it's a kind of, I suppose it's a symbol really of the functioning of the Roman Republic, the entire Roman political system, right? And it is here in that walled enclosure of the Villa Publica that the 6,000 Sam Knight prisoners are penned up very, very tightly, there's really not very much space for them. Meanwhile, Sulla has entered Rome where he hasn't been for many years. Of course, he's been absent on campaign in Greece and Asia. And he summons a Senate to a meeting, not in the Senate House, but in the temple of a goddess called Belona, who is, as her name suggests, the goddess of war. The Sulla has chosen it with his, his kind of customary shrewdness and care. So it, it stands within listening distance of the Villa Publica. People in it will be able to hear what's going on in the Villa Publica, but it's also within sight of the capital where the charred remains of the great temple of Jupiter can be seen as well. And this is important for Sulla's purposes, because back in the spring of 83, when he and his army had landed at Brondizium from Greece, Belona, the goddess, had put one of Sulla's slaves into a prophetic trance. And speaking through the slave, the goddess had foretold the destruction of Jupiter's temple, which hadn't yet happened at that point, unless the Merians surrendered and submitted to Sulla's benign rule. Wow. And of course the Merians had not surrendered, and so the temple had duly burnt to the ground. And Sulla reminds the Senate of this, and he says to them, well, that's all the evidence you need. I, I have one. I have defeated the Merians. I stand before you as the self-evident favorite of the gods appointed by them to serve you and Rome as your savior. Now what does this mean in practice? Well, it soon becomes clear, because as Sulla is talking to the Senate, and he's described, he's moved on to describing his great victories over Mithridatees, Senators start to hear kind of muffled bangings and bumpings coming from the Philip publicer and then screams and then more screams, and then a lot of screams. And Sulla continues, seemingly oblivious to all the noise that is drifting across the campus. And then he pauses, and he says, I see that you, you've noticed that something is going on in the Philip publicer, please, please don't be distracted by it. And then to quote, this is what he's recorded as saying, some criminals are receiving their punishment. There is no need to worry. It is all being done on my orders. And of course, what is happening is that those 6,000 sound like prisoners are being systematically massacred. And when the killing is done, the corpses of the prisoners are dragged across the campus and tossed into the tibre. And for days afterwards, they clogged up the bridges and the banks. And the memory of it was something very terrible. And there was a poet years later who wrote that the corpse is stayed in the river until at last its currents cut a swath of blood through the azure open sea. So a very vivid, chilling image. Yeah. Eliminating the Sanites is one thing. But Sulla's bloodthirsty ambitions to not in there do they? Because all this time that he has been away, he has been brooding and he knows exactly what he wants to do. And he thinks there are too many people in Rome and a lot of them have got to go. Yeah. There are a lot of people in Rome whom he holds responsible for insulting him, condemning him as a public enemy, expelling his family and his friends from Italy. He has a lot of hatred stored up and Sulla is a tremendous hater. So what he does is to send death squads fanning out across Rome, even as the Sanite prisoners are being slaughtered in the Villa Publica. And their targets, of course, are supporters of the Merin regime and all its most prominent members. And the scale of the killing is much greater than the killing that Raymond's seen back in the days of the gracky. It's much greater than the scale of the killing that Marius had launched. It seems something utterly terrifying, even to Sulla's own supporters. And one of them dares to ask Sulla, you know, when are the killings going to end, you know, when are you going to reign these death squads in? And then he, you know, he's worried that Sulla might be offended and so he stammers and he says, well, you know, at least let us have a list of all those that you are planning to punish. And Sulla, who is, he needs a very sardonic man, says, fine. And so he draws up a list and he has it posted in the forum. And over the days and weeks that follow more lists, follow, and hundreds and perhaps thousands of names appear on these lists. So to clarify, these are, these are kill lists prepared by the Master of Rome against Rome's own people. Yes. And if your name appears on a prescription list, this is very bad news because all your properties are forfeit. Your sons and your grandsons are a bard from standing for office. And if anyone helps you, tries to protect you, tries to hide you, then they likewise are condemned to death. So there's nothing good about this at all. Not only are you put to death, but essentially there is an attempt by Sulla to ex-depay your dynasty as well. And in time, it's not only Mary and supporters who start to appear on these prescription lists. So unsurprisingly, anyone who has a name for wealth and isn't a particular friend of Sulla's, you know, you might have a swimming pool or a pleasure garden or a fancy villa on the Bay of Naples. This becomes reason for people to secrete names onto the prescription lists. And essentially, if you are rich, you are probably going to be visited by a bounty hunter. And the person who is very, very shameless at smuggling the names of rich people onto the prescription lists is Krasas, Deves, the Money Bags. There's nothing he enjoys more than ill-gained loot. And finally, he goes way too far and he is so blatant with what he's doing that Sulla decides to reign him in and say enough is enough, gives him a very public upbreding. And I think on Sulla's part, that is quite true politics because it enables Sulla himself to pose not as someone who is kind of selfish and grasping. He's not doing it supposedly for personal gain, but because he is the selfless defender of Rome, and if he is having to wash Rome in the blood of those who have done wrong and have offended the gods, then so be it. He knows his duty as an upstanding citizen. So this is something extraordinary that Sulla is doing, publishing these lists, killing all these people. Sanya has dead squads. He doesn't need to do it because he's gone. Why does he do it then? Well, he's a very vengeful man. As Marius was, he wants his vengeance. He's been brooding on his vengeance for years. Okay. And I think the longer he brood, the larger his appetite for vengeance has grown. And very grizzly stories are told about Salus Behaviour during the prescriptions. Again, they may be exaggerated, but the fact that they're all, I think it's always telling. So how do you know that someone has been killed? Well, the bounty hunters have to decapitate the corpse of anyone that they have hunted down and bring the head to Sulla and his agents. And these agents would then inspect the head. And if they satisfied, then they will release the promised fee. And if the heads belong to someone whom these agents know Sulla particularly hated, they will alert their master. And it is claimed that Sulla would keep some of the heads, you know, particular choice specimens. And you could imagine him kind of going in for a glute over his enemies. I said I was very much on Sulla's team in the last episode. And everything I hear about since he's sad to be in person. So if vengeance is his, I think also, of course, it enables him to impoverish his enemies and to enrich his friends, money is power. And Sulla himself would, you know, he would buy lots of these kind of properties at knock down prices. And then he would sell them on to his own family and friends. So Marys is Villa, for instance, the one that was built to look like a legionary camp on the Bay of Naples. He sells that basically for about, you know, for quid to his own daughter. So Marys is Villa passes into the family of Sulla, exactly the kind of thing that Sulla loves. And so his entire regime is entrenched by this process. So Salas, Roman historian writing a few decades later, I mean, he identifies what Sulla is doing very precisely. And he says that not until Sulla had glutted all his followers of wealth, did the slaughter at last come to an end. And it's that emphasis on his followers, I think, that is key. Sulla wants to make sure that those who follow him have a material basis for doing so as well as personal loyalty to him. Smart politics, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, corrupt politics, but smart brutal politics, but smart. Yeah. And what about now, not all the Marians, of course, are in Rome. There are some outside Rome, most obviously, Marius, Jr. Where's he? What's he up to? He still hold up in Preneste. So that's where Sulla and the Samites were kind of marching towards before the Battle of the Colline Gate. Sulla pretty much the moment that he, you know, he's a dresser Senate. He's launched the prescriptions. He then gets his army back and he marches back on Preneste to finish the young Marius off. But before he can reach their news, it's brought to him that Marius has committed suicide. You know, he knows the game is up as Sulla is delighted. Because with the suicide of Marius, Jr, the line of Gaius Marius, his great rival, his former commander, the man he's measured himself against all his life. It's extinct. The Marian line is dead. And Sulla is so delighted by this that this, this adjective he has consistently applied to himself, Felix, the lucky one. He adopts it as a formal name. And we've said the more names you have in Rome, generally, the better you've done, the kind of the grander you are. So Sulla now has four names. And one of these is a celebration of the fact that he has made the Marian line extinct. You know, there are so many elements of Sulla's character that I think anticipate Octavian Augustus later on, not least the changing his name in the wake of victory. Well, and also his willingness, I mean, Octavian when he becomes a consul for the first time, I think, is only 18. The guy who provides the precedent for that is Pompey, who isn't given a consulship at this point by Sulla. But he's given a very, very important military command, namely to go to Sicily and Africa and to clean up the Marians who have taken refuge there. Pompey has a lovely time. He leads his legions with, I don't know, the kind of the assistance of a small boy given a given a new toy. He has such fun. So he goes to Sicily first, he cleans up there and he captures the Marian commander and rather than put him on trial, he has him executed, without any due legal process. And this causes a lot of outrage back in Rome. And Pompey's enemies give him this nickname, Aduliskentulus Carnifix, the teenage butcher, which will cling to him for quite a long time, even once he's into his middle age. But Pompey doesn't care about this, he cares. He's a winner. And so from Sicily he crosses to Africa where again, he wipes the floor with Sulla's enemies. And at the end of these campaigns, the legions who followed him are really, really impressed. They think Pompey is, you know, he's, he's dashing. He's a, he's a brilliant commander. He really does seem to have a smack of Alexander. And so they call him Magnus, the great Pompey, the great. At this point, Pompey is still only 25. Well, but he loves it. He loves it. Because of course, Alexander had been young. And so Pompey is sharing in the glamour, or you know, of a kind of a, a youthful kind of Macedonian king. So when Pompey returns to Italy, you know, it's kind of gone to his head. He doesn't want to behave like a conventional Roman commander who once he's returned to Italy has to did span his troops. Pompey says, he sends a message to Sulla and says, I'm not disbanding my legions. I want a triumph. And just to reiterate, he is only 25. This is completely without precedent. And Sulla says, no way, you know, this is too heavy to have a triumph. That offends against every custom. You know, this is the guy who's just slaughtered large numbers of people. But whatever, he's a conservative. Pompey doesn't back down. And he says to Sulla, more people worship the rising sun than the setting sun. He's a tremendous comment. I mean, he says he say this to Sulla. He does say it to Sulla not like immediately have put him on one of his lists or something. No, he doesn't. And not only does he grant the triumph, but he officially confirms his protege in the title that his soldiers are giving him the title of Magnus. So from this point on, it's Pompey's Magnus. So he's got another name. Interesting that Sulla would do that when Sulla is somebody who is so retuned to the jealousers and resentments of Roman politics, that he would give way to Pompey. Now, people listening to this may say, well, Sulla does this, because he recognises that Pompeo is a throes. to him and he feels he has no choice. Pompey is the rising man, but Salah doesn't quite see it that way, does he? He has a more nuanced appreciation of Pompey. Salah by this point is not threatened by anyone, I mean, even Pompey. Salah is undisputed as the ruler of Rome. So I think what's going on, he's not intimidated by Pompey. It's kind of the opposite. I think he sees Pompey as basically despite all his abilities as a fundamentally unserious person. So right from the start, that point where Pompey had appeared to Salah on the road in Campania with all his troops lined up posing with his quiff and all of that, I think he got Pompey's measure. The, you know, Pompey's vanity, his taste for self-promotion, his kind of relish for the perks of success, really. It's telling that Pompey won't say at a triumph rather than a consulship. He wants the glamour and the swagger. You know, it's the baubles. Well, it's not just the baubles, but he enjoys being seen to be successful. And so Salah, who values Pompey as a commander, is happy to allow him to indulge him on that front. Whereas Salah himself, I mean, whatever you want to say about Salah, I mean, he is a serious player. No one would ever doubt that. He is a military genius. As Pompey is, and like Pompey has a great army of loyal legions, but he's much more ruthless than Pompey. And he has been playing a very long game, and he has won more spectacularly than anyone in Roman history. But there does remain about Salah, these kind of paradoxes that we've been alluding to throughout the series. So yes, he's a cynic, but he does also have kind of strains of idealism in him. He does believe in Rome. He is a true patriot. And we've said that he's a revolutionary, but he is also a conservative. And so this is why, even as the prescription risks are still going up in the forum, and as the blood is drying on the street, Salah wants to make sure that he can regularize his position in the Republic. You know, it's important to him that he has constitutional legitimacy. And so he does this not by holding a whole succession of consulships, as Sina has done, but by dusting down a magistracy from the ancient past of Rome. And people who listen to our series on Hannibal may remember that when Hannibal was at his most successful, he just inflicted a particularly devastating defeat on the Romans. And it seemed like he might prove victorious. The Romans had appointed a very distinguished statesman to an office called dictator. And this dictator had been given absolute power over the whole of the Republic without an election. And a six-month limit had been set on this office. But in that six months, he could do whatever he wanted. And the duty of a dictator is very clear that in a time of danger and disaster, the dictator is called upon to save the Republic and then to step down. And this is what Salah wants. And he intimates this very strongly to the Senate and the Senate, duely award him the dictatorship. But Salah does not want a time limit set on it. He doesn't want to be confined to six months. He wants it to be open-ended. And so again, the Senate, you know, you don't oppose a guy with loads of legions that is back. They give Salah an open-ended dictatorship. Which is of course, you know, it's against every constitutional norm. But to reiterate, Salah's ambition to use his dictatorship to nurse the Republic back to constitutional health. It's not a sham. It's completely genuine. And as dictator, he goes to great efforts to rectify what he sees as the besetting faults of the Republic. And Salah's diagnosis is an unsurprising one. And it is that the champions of senatorial authority have grown too weak. And the popularists, the populists, the people who appeal over the head of the, you know, the conventional norms of political discourse to the mass of the people beyond that they have gone too far. So he's kind of centrist-daddery, I guess, only backed by legions and dictatorial power. Well, you say centrist-daddery. I mean, you don't see him as an out-and-out reactionary as ultra-conservative. I think he is an ultra-conservative because that rhythm of those who appeal to the people, those who cast themselves as a conservative, those are the rhythms of the Republic. And they always have been. Okay. But I don't think that Salah sees himself as a reactionary. He sees himself as combating what I think it's not an anachronism to describe as populism. He is Alice to Campbell. Well, it is, of course, a populist that has been turned very murderous. And he's been, he's been the object of it, the fact that he also is murderous. I mean, he's kind of ignoring that. But they're clearly, you know, there clearly are problems. And Salah, I guess, would say, "Well, I've earned myself the right to try and apply my prescription. The gods have given me this chance. I'm going to go for it." And if you were on team Salah, you would look at his record. And you would say he wants to clean up Rome and sort out Roman politics and put it on a more stable footing. And frankly, he did it. No? That's absolutely what they'd say, because he takes a whole raft of measures designed to combat populism. So he tries to restore the Senate, for instance, to help. The Senate has been very badly depleted by the wars and the prescriptions and so on. And Salah not only restores it, but expands its numbers. So it had been 300 before the Civil War. Salah raises its number to 600. And he makes sure, interestingly, to include members of the Italian elites. So this is kind of an olive branch to the Italians who have always regarded Salah as their enemy. He's basically saying, you know, let bygones be bygones, you are Romans now. Come into the Senate, help, help us heal the wounds of our city and and of Italy. He also passes laws that are very obviously influenced by events of the past few years. So he passes a law that requires a consul to wait an absolute minimum of 10 years before he can run for the consulship again. So that's obviously targeted at people like Marius and people like Sinner. Right. He legally regulates the age at which ambitious young nobles can run for magistracies. So 30 is set by law as the the minimum age that someone can run for a junior magistracie. And you cannot become a consul before the age of 40 again by law. This has previously been, you know, founded on tradition. Salah is basically saying, we can't rely on tradition anymore. It has to be prescriptive. And of course, the magistracie that he really hates because it has been weaponized against him. So repeatedly is the Tribunate. And he goes out of his way to emasculate the Tribunate. So he forbids them to propose bills and remember that it was a bill that had been proposed by a Tribune that had allowed Marius to try and strip him of his command at 88 BC. They are also, this is a very cunning move. Anyone who becomes a Tribune is then banned from running for further magistracies. So you're never going to do it. Yeah. No. No, it's the Tribune that becomes a dead end. And Salah's aim is very transparently to make sure that never again will there be a Marius, a sinner, a Marius junior in Roman political life. And you can see exactly he's trying to block off all the the avenues that they had taken to what Salah sees as rank populism and illegality. And it takes him two years to perform this surgery on the Republic. And then after two years, Salah feels that he has succeeded that the Republic is cured. And one morning to everyone's absolute astonishment, he appears one day in the forum and he doesn't have the 24 lictus that he's been going around with in his role as dictator. Remember, the council has 12 lictus. Salah's been going around with 24. But now this morning, they've all gone. And it's a stunning moment because the man who's been responsible for the deaths of more Romans than anyone else in the history of the Republic has simply laid his dictatorship aside and become a completely private citizen. He has no office at all. And he had done this, so to quote Aryan, the historian of this period, fearing neither his enemies at home nor the exiles abroad, such was the extent of his daring and his good luck. So Salah's in his late 50s at this point, he could have stayed on. He could thought, well, I'll be dictated to the end of my days. But he seems to die at least in style or something. He's given up his power and gone into retirement. How does he thinking he can get away with this? That parallel. Yeah. You know who in the end of the 18th century, Salah is often compared to. Is George Washington? Because George Washington had laid down the presidency as Salah had laid down the dictatorship. Two massive differences, though. I agree. Salah has his own teeth. Salah has all his energy. And a night out was Salah would be a tremendous laugh. And a night out with George Washington would purgatory. I think a night out with Salah would be a tremendous laugh because he has an absolutely brilliant retirement. How is he able to enjoy his retirement? I mean, he has all these enemies. I think in part, it's because he chooses to spend a lot of time on the Bay of Naples where he is surrounded by his loyal veterans. And the reason for this is that Sulla has been planting colonies, which are settlements of Romans, and particularly discharged soldiers, where the Italian rebels had been based. So one of these colonies is founded at Pompeii, which Sulla had stormed back in 89. And it's from this point on, it's really that Pompeii comes to rank as a Roman town. And the same fate is visited on Nola, which actually only finally surrendered in 80bc. So that is after Sulla had laid down his dictatorship. So that really is the last holdout. So Sulla plants a colony there, and he's ever a man for a vindictive gesture. And so he re-names Nola colonial phalics after himself, which such a triumph. And where is he? What's he doing? Well, of course, I mean, he's had his pick of beach side villas. He's got a lot of real estate along the Neapolitan coast. And his main villa is between Naples and Puthioli, the great port, and he has such a lovely time. So he throws himself into the pleasures of the Bay of Naples, the oysters, the spars, the yacht parties, all of that. Good, sounds brilliant. As Marys had done, he has massive drinking bouts. These go on for days and days and days. And he hangs out with all his old mates from his Bohemian days. So people who listen to our first episode may remember that he loved a stand-up comic. He loved an actor. He loved a Cortesan, and he loved a drag queen. And he gets all of these old friends of his down to how to party. So it's commented of one particular of these friends, Matrobius, who was a drag queen. The Matrobius had seen better days, but Sulla never ceased to insist that he was in love with him all the same. And so he's there with his drag queens and his stand-up comics, necking wine. It's our great time. He has had the best time, I think, of anyone we've ever done on the rest of his history, because he's ticked to very difficult tick boxes. One, he's in retirement on the, basically, the Bay of Naples, that dream honeymoon destination, stuffing himself with oysters at a ripe old age with drag queens and actors and having a great laugh. And secondly, he's still got the heads of his enemies. So that's brilliant. The jokes, the stand-up comedians make with those props the hand. I mean, they'll be tremendous. You can do some fantastic routines with the seven heads of your adversaries. He could play football, rugby, whatever. God almighty, I'm so envious. I'm so, so envious. This actually doesn't last for very long though, does it? That's the downside. No, he, so he, he dies in 78 BC. So not, you know, just kind of a couple of years after, really. Yeah, but what a way to bow out. And unsurprisingly, he seems to have died of liver failure. Right. That seems to be the lightest explanation for what kills him. And when he's dead, there are at this point people in Rome who find their courage and who say, you know, actually, I think we should dam his memory. And at the very least, we should not give him any public funerary honors. You know, he was a terrible man. But again, this is an echo of what happens when Augustus dies, Sulla's veterans descend on his villa and they, they escort his body back to Rome out onto the campus marshes where great state funeral is held. And obviously, there is no one in Rome to oppose this band of veterans. And they build a huge pie for Sulla and they put the body on it. And as they lay it, a great wind comes gusting across the campus and it whips the flames into life. And the body is consumed. And then the moment it's been consumed, it starts to rain. And everyone says, Oh, this proves it. Sulla is lucky. He's been lucky. Absolutely to the end. But I guess the question that listeners may be asking themselves is, does that luck hold in the years and the decades that follow his death? You know, have his reforms worked? Has the surgery that he's performed on the Republic? Has it proven successful? Has he managed to restore the Republic back to a full and enduring health? Or is the future darker? Has Sulla set an example of what any general in the future with an army at his back might achieve given sufficient daring, given sufficient genius? And does the future belong perhaps not to a Republic at all, but to a form of autocracy? Right. I want to ask you two questions about that. So number one, everybody listening to this podcast knows, well, a lot of people listen to this podcast, anyone will know that in the long run, the Roman Republic does not endure and becomes an empire. Who do you think is more important in the death of the Roman Republic? Marius or Sulla? Sulla. Because Marius, he's a brilliant political operator, but he's not as as pitiless in his cynicism, as Sulla is, and Sulla by leading his troops on Rome sets an example that is properly tabo-busting. So what had once been unthinkable is now looking at the back of basically every Roman general's mind. So Cicero, who we will be doing a bonus on with Catherine Edwards who's written a great biography of him, the famous Orator of Rome, he wrote a letter to a friend in which he just said Sulla could do it. Why can't I? This is what they will be pondering. He's put his finger on exactly the issue. The once a tabo is broken, it's very difficult to restore it. Lally's perfectly into my second question. We've already alluded to the similarities between Sulla and a much better known Roman, the man who does actually bury the Republic and become the first Roman Emperor, which is Octavian, who becomes Augustus. What's the difference between Sulla and Octavian? Why didn't Sulla become the first Roman Emperor? Why didn't he found a dynasty and destroy the Republic completely? Because he's a conservative. Because even though he's the man who has led an army for the first time against Rome, he admires and respects the constitutional norms and he wants to see them upheld. You mentioned Octavian, who, of course, in due course will become Augustus and establish the autocracy of the Caesar's that will endure for centuries and centuries and centuries. The person you've missed out is Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar is very much embroiled in the aftermath of the conflict between Marius and Sulla. Because Julius Caesar, we've mentioned this, by marriage, the nephew of Marius, and he is prescribed and very, very narrowly avoids being killed, gets a pardon from Sulla. Sulla says there is a lot of Marius in this young man. We have to be careful. But actually, when Caesar, himself marches on Rome, becomes a dictator, as Sulla had done, Caesar said that Sulla had been a fool because he had laid down his dictatorship. Caesar, of course, does not lay down his dictatorship and ends up murdered. But the lessons that Caesar chooses to draw from the war between Marius and Sulla, even though himself is a marion, he chooses to look to Sulla as the most significant player in that conflict. Well, that's the sublime irony of the whole thing, isn't it, that a man who was dedicated to the principles of conservatism shows his successes, the way to demolish the structures, the institutions in some ways for which he was fighting. Anyway, an absolutely fascinating and thrilling series. And as you rightly say, not quite over, because for rest history club members, there is a bonus to come about Cicero, so a generation later, and what he made of Marius and Sulla. And that is out this week, and it's out with the brilliant Catherine Edwards. And if you want to listen to that and you're not a member of the club, you can of course go to the restishistory.com and sign up. And you should, of course, whether you want to join the club or not, sign up to our amazing newsletter, which comes every week, and it's completely free. So Tom, thank you very much for that. That was absolutely riveting. Bye-bye, everybody. Bye-bye.