Chapter VI

Rome Divided

Res publica in duas partes scissa est.

When Sulla sailed eastward in 87 BCE, he left behind a Republic without a government. The Senate, terrified by the precedent of his march on Rome, obeyed him in silence but trusted him no longer. The consuls who followed him were chosen to erase his memory. His command was ratified in form, but his authority had evaporated with his absence. From the moment his ships disappeared beyond Brundisium, his enemies began to fill the void.

Sulla’s position in Greece was precarious from the first. He had taken his legions out of Italy without legal sanction, and though he held the title of proconsul, he was in practice a private man at the head of a private army. No funds came from Rome, no reinforcements, no fleet. The Senate’s envoys avoided him; its decrees named him outlaw. In later years he would say that Fortune never deserted him, but at this moment she seemed to test how far her favor could be stretched. He fought for money, for weapons, for every loaf of bread. His paymasters were the cities of Greece, his treasurers the priests of the temples, his mint the furnaces of looted sanctuaries. What he lacked in resources he replaced with discipline and the obedience of men who believed in him more than in the Senate that had abandoned them.

While he besieged Athens and faced Mithridates’ armies, another war unfolded in Italy—not a war of legions but of factions. The consuls for the year 87 were Lucius Cornelius Cinna and Gnaeus Octavius. Cinna, elected with the support of the populares, had sworn before the Senate to uphold Sulla’s laws and maintain peace. It was an oath he had no intention of keeping. Once in office, he revived the issue that had nearly broken the Republic during the Social War: the distribution of the new citizens among the tribes. His plan would have allowed the Italians, recently enfranchised, to vote in all thirty-five tribes and thereby overwhelm the old electorate. To the conservatives this was revolution by arithmetic; to the new citizens it was long-delayed justice.

Octavius, a rigid optimas, opposed him fiercely. Their quarrel soon became war. In the streets, armed gangs of clients and slaves fought with stones, clubs, and torches. The Forum became a battlefield. Senators fled to their houses, and the temples closed their doors. When Cinna tried to push his law through the Assembly, Octavius’s supporters stormed the rostra. Blood ran down the steps of the Comitium. The Senate declared Cinna deposed and elected another consul in his place. Driven out of Rome, he gathered what troops he could from Campania and the southern towns—men left restless by the Social War, soldiers without pay or loyalty to anyone but their next commander.

Among them he found allies who had once served under Sulla but now saw their fortunes tied to any man who promised coin. He offered them both money and revenge. Then, across the sea, he sent envoys to the exiled Marius. The old general, living in Africa since his flight, had watched Sulla’s rise with bitterness. When news reached him that Cinna was raising an army against the Senate, he saw in it a last chance to return.

He crossed to Italy with a small force of slaves and fugitives, landing in Etruria late in the year. His hair was long and matted, his eyes bloodshot, his face marked by the fevers of the coast. The sight of him terrified the countryside; old veterans of his wars joined him, and towns opened their gates out of fear or sympathy. Cinna marched north to meet him. The two men embraced, not out of friendship but of calculation—each needed the other. Cinna had legitimacy; Marius had the name that could still raise soldiers. Together they advanced on Rome.

The Senate was unprepared. The optimates had lost their leader; Sulla was far away.

One man might still have saved the Republic—Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, the consul of the previous year and commander of a powerful army in Picenum. He was among the ablest soldiers of his generation, but as notorious for avarice as for courage. During the Social War he had plundered allies and enemies alike, enriching himself while pretending to defend the Senate’s cause. The people detested him, yet the Senate tolerated him, for he alone held an army strong enough to decide the struggle.

As Cinna and Marius marched on Rome, Strabo advanced from the north but halted short of the city, unwilling to declare for either side. He wrote to both camps, weighing their replies, and resolved to stand by whoever emerged the stronger. When he finally entered Rome, he did so under the pretext of defending the Senate, but his soldiers treated the city as hostile ground. Their looting and extortion made the name of Pompeius more feared than the enemy’s. Soon after, a pestilence struck his camp. He died suddenly—some said of the plague, others that lightning struck his tent, a sign, men whispered, of divine retribution for his duplicity.

His death left his army leaderless and his household to a son barely out of youth. That son, Gnaeus Pompeius, would one day be called Magnus, “the Great.” At this moment he was only seventeen, but already marked by ambition and by the inheritance of his father’s soldiers and fortune. In the collapse of the old order, he learned early how power could pass from one hand to another, not by law but by calculation.

The Senate, deprived of Strabo’s uncertain aid, stood defenceless. The gates were closed, but no army stood to protect them. The populace, weary of years of disorder, cared little who ruled as long as the fighting ended. The city surrendered without battle. Cinna and Marius entered at the head of their troops.

What followed was not a massacre of thousands, as later writers claimed under Sulla’s influence, but it was a time of terror all the same. The executions were targeted, deliberate, and sufficient to extinguish opposition. Octavius, Marius’s old enemy and co-consul, was killed, his head displayed on the rostra. The orator Marcus Antonius was hunted down in his hiding place by a band of Marius’s slaves and cut to pieces. Catulus, Marius’s former colleague, took his own life. Other names vanished quietly—senators, knights, and men of municipal rank whose only crime was loyalty to Sulla. Many fled; others bribed their way to safety. The killing was controlled by lists but widened by revenge. Rome learned again how easily its laws could be dissolved into fear.

Cinna, though violent by necessity, aimed at restoring order once his enemies were destroyed. Marius wanted vengeance, nothing more. He stalked the streets in armor, surrounded by freedmen who acted as his guards and executioners. When he entered the Senate, the senators rose not in respect but in dread. He refused to bathe, to change his clothes, or to sleep in a bed, as if he were still in the field. His body, hardened by years of campaigning, was now wasted by illness. Fever consumed him, but his will remained like iron. The cruelty that surrounded him was not the madness of a tyrant but the last assertion of a man who refused to yield to age or defeat.

Early in the new year, 86 BCE, Marius and Cinna were elected consuls. For Marius it was the seventh time—a number that to Romans recalled the legends of kings. The office was his triumph and his epitaph. Within a fortnight he was dead. Some said he succumbed to fever; others that the weight of his crimes broke him. The city received the news in silence. No funeral was held, no honors decreed. Cinna continued alone, master of the Republic.

The regime that followed was harsh but organized. The Senate, cowed, confirmed Cinna’s acts. His policy was to secure Italy and preserve his own power until Sulla could be neutralized. He recalled exiles who had supported the populares, distributed land to veterans, and completed the registration of new citizens. Yet beneath the surface the city remained uneasy. The treasury was empty; trade had stopped; the fields around Rome lay untended. The new administration lacked the authority that law alone could give. It ruled by presence, by fear, and by the exhaustion of the people.

Meanwhile, in Greece, Sulla learned of these events through rumor and fragments of letters smuggled across the sea. His name had been erased from the public records, his property confiscated, his friends proscribed. He read the news without visible anger. To his officers he said only that Rome had fallen into the hands of those who knew not how to rule. But the knowledge shaped his every act. He took heavier fines from the Greek cities, minted coins bearing his own name, and kept the proceeds not for the Senate but for himself and his legions. He governed as if he already ruled an empire apart. The war against Mithridates became the means of creating an army bound not by oath to the Republic but by gratitude to its commander.

Back in Italy, Cinna strengthened his control. He was consul for the third time in 85 and for the fourth in 84. To the people he promised stability; to his allies, spoils. His government was cruel in method but not purposeless. He sought to unite Italy under one system of citizenship, to rebuild the treasury, and to prepare an expedition against Sulla before the general could return. The Senate outwardly cooperated, but in secret many prayed for Sulla’s victory.

By the time Marius’s ashes were cold, Rome had ceased to be the city Sulla had known. It was a capital of factions, ruled by decrees passed under the shadow of swords. No one dared speak openly of the East, yet every rumor of Sulla’s victories spread like a spark through the streets. The Republic waited—not in hope, but in the dull expectation that one storm would soon be followed by another.

After Marius’s death, Cinna held power alone, and for a time Rome seemed to breathe again. The killings stopped; the tribunals fell silent. The terror had burned itself out, leaving a kind of exhausted calm. Yet the calm was that of a battlefield after smoke has settled, not of peace. The Republic still trembled beneath the weight of unresolved hatreds.

After the victories in Greece — the fall of Athens and the rout of Mithridates’ generals at Chaeronea and Orchomenus — Sulla found himself master of the East, yet no nearer to peace. His army was exhausted, his supplies dwindling, and every message from Italy told of Cinna’s tightening grip on Rome. In the autumn of 85 BCE he met Mithridates near Dardanus to end the war once and for all. The terms were hard but merciful: the king would surrender his fleet, withdraw from Asia, and pay a heavy indemnity. Sulla accepted no triumph, no vengeance. He wanted time. Behind this sudden leniency lay calculation; each month spent in Asia was a month lost to his enemies at home.

The soldiers grumbled. They had fought through hunger and plague, expecting vengeance for the massacres of their countrymen, and now the murderer of Romans was allowed to live and reign. Plutarch says that in the camps men murmured that their general had bartered glory for gold. Sulla knew their anger but ignored it. He distributed part of the indemnity among them, spoke calmly of the greater war that still awaited them in Italy, and ordered sacrifices to mark the peace. The murmur faded. The legions obeyed, for they trusted him as they trusted no Senate and no law.

For Sulla himself there was no triumph, only haste. He had learned from rumor that Cinna had raised new levies and was preparing to cross into Greece. If that happened, the war would begin again on Roman soil, and perhaps not to his advantage. He wrote to his officers that they must be ready to embark at the first fair weather. His letters to the Senate went unanswered, his messengers returned with silence. Rome was no longer a master to obey but a city to reclaim.

Thus the peace of Dardanus was less a conclusion than a departure. The war in the East had given him victory; the war in Italy would decide what that victory meant.

Cinna’s position was stronger than it appeared. He controlled Italy through loyal prefects, commanded veteran troops, and dominated the Senate. His consular colleague each year was a subordinate or a dependent; no man shared authority with him long. The populares hailed him as the restorer of liberty; the optimates saw in him only another master. But even his enemies admitted that he ruled with method. He restored the census rolls, reopened the courts, and directed the registration of new citizens throughout Italy. The law of Sulpicius, for which blood had been shed, was finally enacted. All free Italians were now Romans, their names entered tribe by tribe.

Yet these measures, however necessary, could not bring stability. The new citizens cared little for the quarrels of the capital; they wanted land, roads, and relief from taxes. The old Roman aristocracy, stripped of power but still rich, withheld cooperation. Cinna filled offices with his adherents, confiscated the estates of proscribed Sullans, and sold them cheaply to supporters. Wealth changed hands, not by merit but by favor. The treasury, drained by civil war, could not meet expenses. To raise revenue he revived the ancient war tax on property and coined debased silver. Prices rose, confidence collapsed, and usury flourished.

The countryside reflected the same disorder. Bands of veterans, dismissed without pay, roamed in search of work or plunder. Slave revolts flared in Apulia and Lucania. In the towns, local magistrates ruled by whim, uncertain whether to obey Cinna’s decrees or the Senate’s faint authority. Italy had not been pacified; it had only been silenced.

Abroad, Sulla was still in command. Word reached Rome that he had crushed Mithridates’ armies and dictated peace at Dardanus. To Cinna, this was not victory but danger. The man he had outlawed now commanded five veteran legions and possessed the wealth of Asia. When reports came that Sulla was reorganizing the eastern provinces and minting his own coinage, the alarm was justified. The Senate proposed negotiation; Cinna refused. He understood that reconciliation would mean his destruction.

In 85 BCE he began preparations for an expedition to Greece. His plan was to transport an army across the Adriatic, confront Sulla before he could return, and destroy him while still isolated. Shipwrights worked in the harbors of Brundisium and Tarentum; new levies were raised in Campania and Samnium. But enthusiasm was thin. The Italians had no wish to fight another civil war; the veterans distrusted every commander. Cinna’s recruiting officers met resistance and desertion.

As these efforts dragged on, the regime grew harder. The Senate, still packed with his clients, obeyed outwardly but resented the strain. The urban plebs, once his base, suffered from shortages and inflation. Grain convoys from Sicily were irregular, the price of bread doubled, and riots flared. Cinna met protest with executions. His rule, efficient at first, hardened into repression.

Meanwhile in Asia, Sulla governed as though Rome no longer existed. He exacted tribute from cities, appointed magistrates, and held courts in his own name. The fines he imposed were immense, but he enforced them with impartial rigor. The Greek historians, even while cursing his exactions, admitted that under his command banditry ceased and the sea was cleared of pirates. He sent no dispatches to the Senate, made no attempt to justify his acts. His coins, bearing his name L. Sulla Felix, circulated throughout the East. By the end of 85 BCE he had turned the remnants of a starving army into a self-sufficient state.

From time to time, couriers reached him with fragments of news from Italy — the deaths of friends, the confiscation of his house, the desecration of his family tomb. Each message deepened his resolve. Those around him noticed no change in his manner. He spoke of Rome rarely, but when he did, his words were measured: that he would one day return, and that those who had torn down the Republic would answer to him.

In 84 BCE, Cinna finally attempted to move his plan against Sulla. Two legions were ordered to assemble at Ancona for embarkation. The troops, weary of endless preparations and suspicious of their commander’s motives, mutinied. Stones flew, swords flashed. Cinna tried to quell the tumult, exposing himself unarmed before the ranks. A missile struck him; another followed. He fell, trampled by his own soldiers. The body of the man who had ruled Rome for four years was left unburied on the shore until his attendants recovered it under cover of night.

His death ended the regime more completely than any decree. There was no one to replace him. His lieutenants quarreled; his armies scattered; the Senate regained nominal control but lacked direction. For a brief season the Republic had no master, only memories of violence and fear.

In the months that followed, Italy drifted. Governors hesitated to act, magistrates obeyed the last order they had received, and towns armed themselves against marauders. The people, long accustomed to decree and counter-decree, lived from day to day, uncertain whose name would next be proclaimed in the Forum. The old laws existed, but none trusted them. The veterans of both sides watched the horizon, knowing that Sulla could not remain abroad forever.

Across the sea, he prepared his return with patient precision. His legions were rested, rich, and loyal. He sent envoys to the Senate demanding restoration of his rights and the punishment of those who had opposed him. The Senate, divided and fearful, replied with evasions. In the summer of 83 BCE, Sulla embarked from Patrae and set sail for Italy.

When his fleet appeared off the coast of Brundisium, there was no resistance. The garrison surrendered, and the gates were opened. To many Italians the arrival of Sulla seemed not invasion but deliverance — a return to discipline after years of disorder. To others it was the beginning of vengeance.

The peace with Mithridates left Sulla master of Asia, but it also left him with a hollow army. The campaigns through Greece and Boeotia, the sieges, the marches, the fevers of the coast, had thinned his ranks almost as surely as battle. Whole cohorts had vanished in the marshes of Orchomenus and on the walls of Athens. What remained was the iron core of the legions that had followed him from Italy, veterans hardened by six years of continuous war, men who had learned to live without pay, forage without orders, and fight without promise of reward. Yet even they could not carry him home without reinforcement.

In ordinary times a Roman commander refilled his lines through levies sent by the Senate or by his allies in Italy. Sulla had neither. Declared outlaw, he could not even write to the Senate without risk of arrest to his messengers. His entire system of supply, reinforcement, and recruitment had to be invented anew. What he achieved in the following months would later be studied by soldiers as the first modern example of a private army built upon the ruins of the Republic’s.

The first source of replenishment came from the Greek allies who, though conquered, found in Sulla a ruler who at least restored order. Thessalian horsemen, famous since Philip’s wars, were the earliest to join him. They had fought under both sides during the Mithridatic invasion and now sought the favor of the strongest. Sulla accepted them cautiously, disarming their chiefs and placing Roman centurions among them. From Boeotia and Achaea he took light troops—slingers, archers, and scouts—men skilled at terrain the Romans never mastered. These were not legionaries but auxiliaries, bound by oath and by pay, and they gave his army a mobility it had lacked.

At the same time he integrated elements of the defeated enemy. Appian writes that many of Mithridates’ mercenaries, once surrendered, were spared and set to labor in the camps, repairing fortifications or driving wagons. A few were armed and formed into irregular units under Roman command. They were mainly Greeks, Cappadocians, and Galatians—disciplined soldiers for hire, who had served whatever master offered coin. To the Romans they were foreigners, but to Sulla they were instruments. He needed men, and he took them wherever he found them.

Disease and attrition had cost him heavily at Athens. Plutarch speaks of famine and plague, of men dying beside the walls while waiting for the final assault. Even after the victories in Boeotia, Delbrück estimated that Sulla may have lost nearly a third of his original strength—perhaps ten thousand men. Yet when he sailed home three years later he still commanded five legions. The figures imply continuous recruitment and careful consolidation. He merged weakened cohorts, promoted survivors, and filled gaps with local volunteers. Discipline never wavered. Lucullus, then his quaestor, handled pay and supply with the precision of an accountant; the legions, though mixed in origin, moved and fought as a single body.

The language of command in such an army was complex. Orders were given in Latin, but half the auxiliaries spoke Greek. Centurions learned to translate on the march; interpreters stood behind the tribunes during parades. Many officers—Lucullus, Hortensius, Murena—were educated men fluent in both tongues, and Sulla himself, long resident in the East, used Greek with ease. The camp became a kind of bilingual city. Inscriptions found at Chaeronea show Latin and Greek side by side on dedications to Mars and Athena, a small trace of the world Sulla created—a Roman army with Greek hands and Roman discipline.

Hans Delbrück, writing two thousand years later, saw in this the mark of genius. “Sulla’s army,” he wrote, “war eine Mischbildung, halb römisch, halb hellenisch, aber in der Zucht römisch rein.” It was half Roman, half Hellenic, but Roman in its discipline. That fusion would later reappear in Caesar’s forces in Gaul and in the armies of the early Empire. Sulla had invented it by necessity.

The cost of maintaining such an army was ruinous. Without subsidies from Rome, he relied on confiscations and forced loans from the Greek cities. The treasures of Delphi, Epidaurus, and Olympia were touched but not desecrated—officially “borrowed” for the use of the Republic. The fine temples of Asia became banks of war. Lucullus oversaw the minting of new coinage in the name of L. Sulla Imperator. The soldiers received their pay in these newly struck denarii, the first Roman coins to bear the personal name of a living commander without the Senate’s authority. As Arthur Keaveney later observed, “Sulla thus transformed the army’s financial dependence: its loyalty was paid in his coin, not Rome’s.”

That dependence became moral as well as material. The soldiers no longer served the Senate, nor even the idea of the Republic, but the man who fed and led them. Fritz Heuss called this the moment when the Roman army ceased to be national and became personal. In Asia there was no censor, no consul, no treasurer—only the general. Every ration, every donative, every promise came from his hand. When he signed himself Felix, the Fortunate, it was less boast than statement of fact: his men believed their fortune was bound to his.

Still, discontent smouldered. The veterans remembered the slaughter of Italians in the Asiatic Vespers and expected vengeance. When Sulla clasped Mithridates’ hand at Dardanus, they felt cheated. Plutarch reports murmurs of mutiny, the men accusing him of selling their victory for gold. Sulla answered not with punishment but with reasoning. He gathered the legions, praised their endurance, and reminded them that they fought now for Rome herself, not for profit. He spoke of the greater war waiting across the sea, where traitors ruled their homes. Then he distributed a part of the indemnity among them, a gesture that quieted the bitterness. The gold of Mithridates bought silence where persuasion alone might have failed.

In the months that followed, Sulla reorganized his army for the return. Old cohorts were brought up to strength; equipment was renewed from captured arsenals. New standards were issued, bearing the device of Fortune, the goddess he claimed as patron. Some scholars believe this was the moment when the image of the winged Victory first appeared on his silver coinage, later adopted by the emperors. It symbolized not piety but destiny—his conviction that divine favor followed the stronger will.

Ernst Badian, writing of this period, observed that Sulla’s forces had become “a state within the state,” self-sustaining and self-legitimating. The soldiers were citizens in name only; their real loyalty was to the commander who paid them. When they returned to Italy, they would do so not as the army of the Republic but as the army of Sulla. This transformation, begun in Asia out of necessity, would mark every civil war that followed. Caesar, Pompey, even Octavian would inherit the model of the army that could make its general a ruler.

How many men marched home with him we cannot know. Appian speaks of five legions—perhaps thirty thousand infantry and a few thousand horse. Delbrück thought the total nearer thirty-five thousand, counting auxiliaries. Losses from the Eastern campaigns had been replaced, but the nature of the replacements had changed the character of the force. It was no longer a homogeneous citizen army but a composite of Romans, Italians, Greeks, and Asiatics. What held it together was discipline and expectation: the certainty that the next campaign would bring not only victory but reward.

When Sulla reviewed his troops on the coast of Patrae before embarking, the scene was unlike any Roman muster before it. Standards glittered above ranks that spoke a dozen dialects. The veterans of the old Italian legions stood beside recruits from Achaea, Thrace, and Asia Minor. The air smelled of salt and forge smoke; the hills behind were stripped bare for ship timber. Lucullus, ever methodical, checked lists and stores, noting that even the pack animals bore Sulla’s brand. There was order, but not ceremony. The general addressed his officers briefly, reminding them that they were returning not to Rome’s applause but to Rome’s judgment.

He knew that Cinna’s death had thrown Italy into confusion, yet he also knew that his own name was still that of an outlaw. Every man in the ranks understood that they would be landing as invaders on their own soil. Sulla said nothing of politics. He promised only pay and land when the war was won, and for the moment that was enough. The legions shouted his name in acclamation, the Greek auxiliaries echoing the sound awkwardly but with the same fervor.

As the ships took on supplies, Sulla walked the beach alone. Lucullus later wrote that he seemed restless, measuring the distance between himself and Italy not in miles but in time. He had spent four years in exile, commanding as if the Republic no longer existed. Now he was returning to claim it back—or to replace it. The soldiers slept beside their weapons; the horses stamped in the dark. Offshore, the hulls of the transports rocked gently at anchor, each one carrying men who had long ceased to think of themselves as part of any city but the camp.

Hans Delbrück called this the true turning point of Roman history: not the crossing of the Rubicon by Caesar, but the crossing of the Adriatic by Sulla. The difference lay in cause. Caesar crossed a river to preserve his command; Sulla crossed a sea to recover a homeland that had cast him out. When he sailed from Patrae in the summer of 83 BCE, his army was ready, disciplined, and utterly his.

Those who watched the fleet depart from the Greek shore might have thought they were witnessing the end of a long foreign war. In truth, they were seeing the beginning of a new one—the civil war that would decide who ruled Rome. Behind the departing sails lay the silent ports of Asia, emptied of tribute and men; before them lay Italy, still divided between exhaustion and fear. Between the two stood Sulla’s legions, a creation of necessity and will, born in exile, bound by gold, and convinced that the gods had chosen them to march home.