The History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen [good english books to read txt] 📗

recruits were uniformly trained. Connected, doubtless, with this change were the various improvements which Marius introduced in the armament, the carrying of the baggage, and similar matters, and which furnish an honourable evidence of his insight into the practical details of the business of war and of his care for his soldiers; and more especially the new method of drill devised by Publius Rutilius Rufus (consul 649) the comrade of Marius in the African war. It is a significant fact, that this method considerably increased the military culture of the individual soldier, and was essentially based upon the training of the future gladiators which was usual in the fighting- schools of the time. The arrangement of the legion became totally different. The thirty companies (-manipuli-) of heavy infantry, which— each in two sections (-centuriae-) composed respectively of 60 men in the first two, and of 30 men in the third, division—had hitherto formed the tactical unit, were replaced by 10 cohorts (-cohortes-) each with its own standard and each of 6, or often only of 5, sections of 100 men apiece; so that, although at the same time 1200 men were saved by the suppression of the light infantry of the legion, yet the total numbers of the legion were raised from 4200 to from 5000 to 6000 men. The custom of fighting in three divisions was retained, but, while previously each division had formed a distinct corps, it was in future left to the general to distribute the cohorts, of which he had the disposal, in the three lines as he thought best. Military rank was determined solely by the numerical order of the soldiers and of the divisions. The four standards of the several parts of the legion—the wolf, the ox with a man's head, the horse, the boar—which had hitherto probably been carried before the cavalry and the three divisions of heavy infantry, disappeared; there came instead the ensigns of the new cohorts, and the new standard which Marius gave to the legion as a whole—the silver eagle. While within the legion every trace of the previous civic and aristocratic classification thus disappeared, and the only distinctions henceforth occurring among the legionaries were purely military, accidental circumstances had some decades earlier given rise to a privileged division of the army alongside of the legions— the bodyguard of the general. Hitherto selected men from the allied contingents had formed the personal escort of the general; the employment of Roman legionaries, or even men voluntarily offering themselves, for personal service with him was at variance with the stern disciplinary obligations of the mighty commonwealth. But when the Numantine war had reared an army demoralized beyond parallel, and Scipio Aemilianus, who was called to check the wild disorder, had not been able to prevail on the government to call entirely new troops under arms, he was at least allowed to form, in addition to a number of men whom the dependent kings and free cities outside of the Roman bounds placed at his disposal, a personal escort of 500 men composed of volunteer Roman burgesses (p. 230). This cohort drawn partly from the better classes, partly from the humbler personal clients of the general, and hence called sometimes that of the friends, sometimes that of the headquarters (-praetoriani-), had the duty of serving in the latter (-praetorium-) in return for which it was exempt from camp and entrenching service and enjoyed higher pay and greater repute.

Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform

This complete revolution in the constitution of the Roman army seems certainly in substance to have originated from purely military motives; and on the whole to have been not so much the work of an individual, least of all of a man of calculating ambition, as the remodelling which the force of circumstances enjoined in arrangements which had become untenable. It is probable that the introduction of the system of inland enlistment by Marius saved the state in a military point of view from destruction, just as several centuries afterwards Arbogast and Stilicho prolonged its existence for a time by the introduction of foreign enlistment. Nevertheless, it involved a complete—although not yet developed—political revolution. The republican constitution was essentially based on the view that the citizen was at the same time a soldier, and that the soldier was above all a citizen; there was an end of it, so soon as a soldier-class was formed. To this issue the new system of drill, with its routine borrowed from the professional gladiator, could not but lead; the military service became gradually a profession. Far more rapid was the effect of the admission—though but limited—of the proletariate to participate in military service; especially in connection with the primitive maxims, which conceded to the general an arbitrary right of rewarding his soldiers compatible only with very solid republican institutions, and gave to the capable and successful soldier a sort of title to demand from the general a share of the moveable spoil and from the stale a portion of the soil that had been won. While the burgess or farmer called out under the levy saw in military service nothing but a burden to be undertaken for the public good, and in the gains of war nothing but a slight compensation for the far more considerable loss brought upon him by serving, it was otherwise with the enlisted proletarian. Not only was he for the moment solely dependent upon his pay, but, as there was no Hotel des Invalides nor even a poorhouse to receive him after his discharge, for the future also he could not but wish to abide by his standard, and not to leave it otherwise than with the establishment of his civic status, His only home was the camp, his only science war, his only hope the general—what this implied, is clear. When Marius after the engagement on the Raudine plain unconstitutionally gave Roman citizenship on the very field of battle to two cohorts of Italian allies en masse for their brave conduct, he justified himself afterwards by saying that amidst the noise of battle he had not been able to distinguish the voice of the laws. If once in more important questions the interest of the army and that of the general should concur to produce unconstitutional demands, who could be security that then other laws also would not cease to be heard amid the clashing of swords? They had now the standing army, the soldier-class, the bodyguard; as in the civil constitution, so also in the military, all the pillars of the future monarchy were already in existence: the monarch alone was wanting. When the twelve eagles circled round the Palatine hill, they ushered in the reign of the Kings; the new eagle which Gaius Marius bestowed on the legions proclaimed the near advent of the Emperors.

Political Projects of Marius

There is hardly any doubt that Marius entered into the brilliant prospects which his military and political position opened up to him. It was a sad and troubled time. Men had peace, but they were not glad of having it; the state of things was not now such as it had formerly been after the first mighty onset of the men of the north on Rome, when, so soon as the crisis was over, all energies were roused anew in the fresh consciousness of recovered health, and had by their vigorous development rapidly and amply made up for what was lost. Every one felt that, though able generals might still once and again avert immediate destruction, the commonwealth was only the more surely on the way to ruin under the government of the restored oligarchy; but every one felt also that the time was past when in such cases the burgess-body came to its own help, and that there was no amendment so long as the place of Gaius Gracchus remained empty. How deeply the multitude felt the blank that was left after the disappearance of those two illustrious youths who had opened the gates to revolution, and how childishly in fact it grasped at any shadow of a substitute, was shown by the case of the pretended son of Tiberius Gracchus, who, although the very sister of the two Gracchi charged him with fraud in the open Forum, was yet chosen by the people in 655 as tribune solely on account of his usurped name. In the same spirit the multitude exulted in the presence of Gaius Marius; how should it not? He, if any one, seemed the right man—he was at any rate the first general and the most popular name of his time, confessedly brave and upright, and recommended as regenerator of the state by his very position aloof from the proceedings of party—how should not the people, how should not he himself, have held that he was so! Public opinion as decidedly as possible favoured the opposition. It was a significant indication of this, that the proposal to have the vacant stalls in the chief priestly colleges filled up by the burgesses instead of the colleges themselves—which the government had frustrated in the comitia in 609 by the suggestion of religious scruples—was carried in 650 by Gnaeus Domitius without the senate having been able even to venture a serious resistance. On the whole it seemed as if nothing was wanted but a chief, who should give to the opposition a firm rallying point and a practical aim; and this was now found in Marius.

For the execution of his task two methods of operation offered themselves; Marius might attempt to overthrow the oligarchy either as -imperator- at the head of the army, or in the mode prescribed by the constitution for constitutional changes: his own past career pointed to the former course, the precedent of Gracchus to the latter. It is easy to understand why he did not adopt the former plan, perhaps did not even think of the possibility of adopting it The senate was or seemed so powerless and helpless, so hated and despised, that Marius conceived himself scarcely to need any other support in opposing it than his immense popularity, but hoped in case of necessity to find such a support, notwithstanding the dissolution of the army, in the soldiers discharged and waiting for their rewards. It is probable that Marius, looking to Gracchus' easy and apparently almost complete victory and to his own resources far surpassing those of Gracchus, deemed the overthrow of a constitution four hundred years old, and intimately bound up with the manifold habits and interests of the body-politic arranged in a complicated hierarchy, a far easier task than it was. But any one, who looked more deeply into the difficulties of the enterprise than Marius probably did, might reflect that the army, although in the course of transition from a militia to a body of mercenaries, was still during this state of transition by no means adapted for the blind instrument of a coup d'etat, and that an attempt to set aside the resisting elements by military means would have probably augmented the power of resistance in his antagonists. To mix up the organized armed force in the struggle could not but appear at the first glance superfluous and at the second hazardous; they were just at the beginning of the crisis, and the antagonistic elements were still far from having reached their last, shortest, and simplest expression.

The Popular Party

Marius therefore discharged the army after his triumph in accordance with the existing regulation, and entered on the course traced out by Gaius Gracchus for procuring to himself supremacy in the state by undertaking its constitutional magistracies. In this enterprise he found himself dependent for support on what was called the popular party, and sought his allies in its leaders for the time being all the more, that the victorious general by no means possessed the gifts and experiences requisite for the command of the streets. Thus the democratic party after long insignificance suddenly regained political importance. It had, in the long interval from Gaius Gracchus to Marius, materially deteriorated. Perhaps the dissatisfaction with the senatorial government was not now less than it was then; but several of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented were by no means willing to follow it. In fact, amidst the chase and turmoil of twenty years there had been rubbed off and worn away very much of the fresh enthusiasm, the steadfast faith, the moral purity of effort, which mark the early stages of revolutions. But, if the democratic party was no longer what it had been under