702. Roman Civil War: The Barbarian Invasion (Part 2)

What was the ancient city of Rome actually like in the first century BC? Who was Lucius Cornelius Sulla, another great, but aristocratic, Roman general who would clash with Gaius Marius in a totemic struggle termed the Social War? And, who were the terrifying Germanic tribes amassing on the borders of the empire, potentially spelling its doom…? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss Rome’s apocalyptic threat from the North, Marius’ wars in defence of the empire, and the rise of his greatest adversary: Sulla. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:03Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

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• 2:39Speaker 00

  Even citizens found their city confusing. The only way to negotiate it was to memorize notable landmarks, the fig tree perhaps, or a market's colonnade, or best of all, a temple large enough to loom above the maze of narrow streets. Fortunately, Rome was a devout city and temples abounded. The Romans' reverence for the past meant that ancient structures were hardly ever demolished, not even when the open spaces in which they might once have stood had long since vanished under brick. Temples loomed over slums or meat markets. They shented veiled statues whose very identities might have been forgotten, and yet no one ever thought to demolish them.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  These fragments of an archaic past preserved in stone, fossils from the earliest days of the city, provided the Romans with the desperately needed sense of bearing. Eternal, like the gods whose spirits pervaded them, they stood like anchors dropped in a storm. Meanwhile, on all sides, amid a din of hammering, rumbling wagon wheels and crashing rubble, the city was endlessly being rebuilt, torn down and rebuilt again. Now, that's a description of Rome, the great teeming city, the great metropolis of the Mediterranean world.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  And listeners may be wondering, which great writer, which master of the English language constructed those sentences? Was it Edward Gibbon? Was it Dan Brown? Well, dear listeners, it was our very own Tom Holland in his book Rubicon, the book that catapulted him to greatness. So, Tom, Rome, 105 B.C., biggest city in the Mediterranean. It's not yet the mega-city that it will become under the Emperor Augustus 100 years later. It's probably about 400, 500,000 people, max.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  But to visitors, as your wonderful prose conveyed, it is overwhelming, isn't it? Rather like your prose, actually.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  I think for visitors, it is, it's experienced as a kind of monstrous city. It's crowded, it's confusing, it's completely chaotic. It has this terrible haze of brown smog which hangs over it and which can be seen, you know, many, many miles before you actually see the city itself. And then you arrive in the city and it's crammed with teetering, jerry-built apartment blocks, insulae, they were called, islands. They were kind of islands rising above the chaos of the streets below, which are notorious as death traps. And if there's a fire and you are on the top stories, I mean, that's it, you're burnt to a cinder. And everywhere, there are kind of shanties sprouting up.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  So if there's a fire, the shanties will immediately emerge in the space that's been left and they're spreading out through the gates, along the roads that lead into Rome. And there is also an incredible lack of the kind of monumental architecture that most people, I imagine, when they think of ancient Rome would be in their minds' eye. Rome in this period is not the Rome of Gladiator. There are no amphitheaters, there are no palaces, there's very little gleaming marble. And so Greek ambassadors, who are used to exactly that kind of cityscape, things that are elegant, that are planned, that are spacious, that are centrally organised, when they come to Rome, they think this is an absolute dump.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  I suppose it's like someone from New York going to a third world city, something like that.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  They think it's backward, they think it's ramshackle, they think it's disorganised. But the Roman response to this is to say that the chaos of their city is the index of its liberty, that kings can impose urban plans on cities because they are autocrats. But because Rome is a republic and its great men are much too jealous of one another to allow any of them to build kind of pompous imposing monuments, this means that its chaotic, brick-fronted cityscape is an expression of the fact that the Romans are a free people. And it's telling that it's only under the rule of Augustus, the first of the Caesars, the first of the autocrats, that it will start its transformation into a city from

• 7:12Speaker 01

  brick into marble.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  He's the Napoleon III of Roman history. So Napoleon III who transforms Paris.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think Napoleon III is surely the would-be Augustus.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, correct. Because also Napoleon III was an absolutely ludicrous man, whereas Augustus was arguably the greatest politician who ever lived. Anyway, that's by the by. So Rome, 105 B.C. One thing obsesses the city more than anything else, and that, of course, is politics. Because we ended last time with the great political drama of Marius effectively stabbing his patron, Metellus, in the back. But Marius, you ended last time by saying how worried Marius was about his own lieutenant, Sulla, and we will come on to this. But just give us a sense. So it's a great kind of theatre, isn't it? It's a theatre for political show.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  It's a great stage, yes. You know, that's why Romans don't feel that they, you know, they need to have a kind of cultural cringe towards the Greeks, because the Greeks are all ruled by monarchs, or indeed by Rome. But the Romans are a free people and it is their right to elect their own magistrates. And so the city is constantly bearing witness to this. Everywhere you go, there is graffiti. If people don't like candidates, then they may, you know, they may literally piss on them.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  So, you know, if there are kind of statues of them, they will, they will go and express their contempt for them in the most literal manner.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  There's a, there's a hint for people if they have strong views about Britain's politicians.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  I suppose they don't tend to have statues, but there might be alternative ways in which they could do that.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And we said in the previous episode how Marius, while he's in Africa, his agents are busy promoting his name. I mean, this is the chief of which they're doing it. They're going around writing graffiti, pissing on his rivals, all of that. And so I guess Rome stands supreme as the, you know, the great theatre of ambitions and dreams. There's nowhere like it anywhere else in the world. This is where you have to be if you want to shape politics. And as a citizen of Rome, you have the opportunity to do that, either by running as a candidate or even if you're, you know, the very poorest of the poor, you have a vote, your opinion matters.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  So although Rome is a republic, there is one man in 105 B.C. who stands head and shoulders above all his rivals, who in a sense is the princeps, the, the top man of the city. And this is Gaius Marius, the protagonist of our first episode. And we tracked his early career in that episode. So he's an out-of-towner, he's burly, he's uncultured, but he's a natural politician, he's a brilliant soldier. And in 108, he'd been elected consul, so the top magistrate in the Roman Republic, because the voters and the senate were fed up with a war that had been dragging on in Namibia, in North Africa, what's now Algeria, and they wanted it sorted out.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  And Marius had been the guy that they had said, go and sort this out. And it is amazing that Marius had ever got the nod, because he is what the Romans called a novus homo, a man without any consular pedigree. And these things really matter to the voters. So if you're a novus homo and you get elected, it's a massive, massive deal. And it's huge tribute to his reputation, because it essentially marks him out as the go-to person if there is some massive military crisis.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he has come back to Rome, late 105, and he came back with Jgurtha of Earlobes fame, the bloke whose earrings were ripped off at the end of the last episode, the defeated enemy.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Who grins horribly as he's being chucked into a dungeon.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Right. Are all the baths as cold as this, or whatever great banter, mad banter Jgurtha came out with as he was on his way to his demise. But more importantly... Marius has come back to Rome with his number two. So he's a man who really first featured at the end of the last episode. And this is Lucius Cornelius Sulla. It's the man with whom Marius, in all the history books, is always bracketed. And you described him last time, golden-haired, patrician, daring, swashbuckling, all of this. And Sulla has made his name during, I mean, he's really made his name, hasn't he? In the campaign against Jgatha, in a way that Marius finds, his, his boss finds a little bit unsettling.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, because Jgatha had fled to the neighboring king. And so it required a mission of great daring to, to get him out from there. And Sulla had gone in, I mean, he might easily have been killed, but he is very brave and he's very diplomatically skilled. And he manages to extract Jgatha and bring him back for his horrible death in a dungeon in Rome. And Sulla is enormously proud of this. The Romans are not people who approve of modesty. And so he has had a signet ring made, which illustrates the, the process by which Jgatha had, is being handed over by the, by the king who he'd taken refuge with.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And this infuriates Marius and we will be hearing more about Sulla in due course in this episode. But for now, it's all about Marius. Because on the first of January, 104 B.C., as we described at the end of our last episode, Marius celebrates this great triumph, this military parade through Rome, in which he's able to display Jgatha, display his treasure. All his legions who'd fought with him on that campaign are cheering him. It's great. I mean, you couldn't want for anything more if you're a Roman general. It's absolutely brilliant. And he rides in this, this chariot, he's arrayed in triumphal robes. I think the idea that you have a slave who stands behind you and says, remember you are mortal.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  It's, it's not 100% validated, but you can absolutely see why that story emerges. There is a sense that this is the greatest kind of experience that any Roman can have. However, even as Marius is riding through the streets of Rome and being cheered by the watching crowds, there is a mood of panic, maybe even desperation in the city. Because Jgatha may have been defeated. The dignity of the Roman name may have been upheld in Africa. But to the north, beyond the Alps, there is a much more terrifying threat than some African king

• 13:39Speaker 01

  massing on the frontiers of Rome's empire. And again, we mentioned this in the previous episode. Yeah. It's an immense migration of Germans, the Teutons and the Cimbri, from Jutland to the frontiers of the Roman world. So it's almost, you might, a kind of proto Viking invasion.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in the last episode, to please people who online like to count how often we refer to either the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones. I compared them with the, the white walkers, the people who in the Game of Thrones TV series you see right at the beginning, they're massing all the time. You know, all the internal politics of Westeros is nothing compared with the existential apocalyptic threat that these blokes represent. And actually, I'm going to congratulate myself on my own comparison. I think it's an absolutely superb comparison.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Because, I mean, these people, the Teutons and the Cimbri, they're massive, they're terrifying, they look weird. They, they are an existential threat.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  They're reputed to be cannibals.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Right. This is Plutarch on them. He said, they were impervious to cold because they'd been brought up in ice-bound countries full of forests. I mean, Tom, the parallels are stacking up.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. And also, I think, isn't this also the case with the white walkers? The Teutons and the Cimbri accompanied by women and children.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, because some of them are women and children, yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  And in fact, actually in Game of Thrones, the, the children are the most frightening. There's always something terrifying about a murderous, sinister child.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  And frankly, if you've ever met a German child, you know, it's the same story.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Well, they're Danes really, aren't they?

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're the worst.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  And the women also are very frightening because they're said to fight alongside the men.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  And it's an entire people on the move. So there are tens of thousands of them, according to the, the Roman sources. I mean, we don't know how accurate they are, but basically there are loads and loads of them. And they are experienced by the Romans less as an army than as some kind of force of nature. You know, a great flood, a tide, a tsunami, whatever you want to, to reach for. You know, the news had been brought to them that, that this monstrous tide of people is advancing towards you. And so they'd sent an army under a consul into a region called Noricum, which is basically Austria today, in 113 B.C. And the consul had set an ambush for these, these barbarians. And the barbarians had rumbled it and had outsmarted the consul and given him a serious mauling.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  And so he'd withdrawn and he had assumed that the barbarians would pursue him and invade Italy. In fact, they don't, they swing westwards into Gaul, which is a big relief to the Romans. But I think it's also a little bit unsettling because it's clear that the Cimbri and the Teutons are unlike any enemy that they've come up against before. There's no predicting what they'll do. When you're fighting Carthaginians or Greeks or even Gauls, there's a sense in which the Romans understand what makes these people tick. But with these barbarians from the far north, and again, this is maybe the kind of white walker comparison, the Romans don't understand what they want, they don't understand what's going to motivate them. They don't understand how they're going to behave.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And so that means it's very difficult, I think, for the Romans to devise a strategy to cope with this onslaught. And this becomes manifest in a succession of disastrous Roman attempts to go and be proactive and meet the Teutons and Cimbri and wipe them out beyond the limits of Roman power. Because the barbarians, they're just roaming around Gaul, kind of looting and pillaging and killing and all that kind of stuff. And the Romans keep going and trying to, to, to attack them and they keep being defeated. So first in 109 B.C. and then two years later near what, what today is Bordeaux. And one consul in that battle is killed and the other one is cornered.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  And the only way that he can extract himself is to agree that he and his army will go beneath the yoke.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Oh my God.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, ultimate humiliation. You put up, you know, two spears and put another spear across it. And everyone has to symbolically bend and crawl and, well, not symbolically, I mean, you, you literally do it. But it's obviously a symbol of, of humiliation. So that's very bad. And then I had forgotten the full details of this defeat. So it happens in 105 and it's a culminating disaster in the Roman attempts to stop the barbarians. It happens outside Arrasio, which is the town in southern Gaul, which gives its name to Orange. So ultimately to the Orange Order. I mean, that's a basic thought. And in this battle, the Romans, it's said, lose over 100,000 men, which is more than they lose in Canai.

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Is that plausible, really, that they lost that many? I mean, these figures are all made up, aren't they, really?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  But I don't think they're made up. It's clearly a massive defeat. And yet it's barely remembered. And you think how much is written about Canai and, and the impact that it had on the Romans. At the time, it must have just seemed overwhelming. It must have seemed a disaster on par with that. And when the news of it is brought to Rome, there is this terrible mood of panic. And they call it the terror Cimbricus. And that phrase ever afterwards is applied by the Romans to a kind of mood of civic panic. You know, the kind of, the mood of terror that can sweep an entire city.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  And everyone, even Marius's old enemies in the Senate, agree that basically faced with this crisis, there is only one man for the job.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Obviously, I mean, this is Marius. So Arrasio was 105, then in 104, Marius has been elected as one of the two consuls, hasn't he, for the year? So this is his second consulship already. You said, remember Plutarch predicted the, well, Plutarch reported the prophecy that he would get seven. And you said he'd be a big stretch room to get even one. You were wrong, Tom. He's now got two.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  To justify myself, we also said in the previous episode that it is, essentially, it's either illegal or massively frowned upon for someone who's had a consulship then to have a second consulship.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, you did, you did say that.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  And if you do have a second consulship, then at the very least, it should be at a kind of decent distance from the original one. But Marius, you know, he'd been consul in 107, so this is only three years later. So that, I think, is the measure of the state of absolute panic that everyone in Rome is feeling. That they haven't really got any choice. Constitutional proprieties don't really count when your city is facing an existential threat. And so it is that as Marius is riding through the streets of Rome in his triumphal robes, on his chariot, enjoying his triumph. You've got to wonder, you know, if that story was true, if the the nest full of

• 20:36Speaker 01

  seven eaglets fell into his arms and it did indeed prophesy that he was going to have seven consulships. I mean, is he thinking about that? Maybe it'd be nice to think so.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. Although there is still tension, isn't there? I mean, he is still a self-made man. He is still an outsider. There must be people in Rome from the old elite who are just like, really, this guy, the this Parvene again?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And Marius, on the day of his triumph, the day that he also takes up his second consulship, he makes a massive power play because he goes straight to the meeting of the Senate, wearing his triumphal robes, which is very much not the done thing. And he apologised for it and goes and changes. But you have to think, you know, he's reminding everybody in the Senate that he is the guy who has already won one war and that they're depending on to win a second one. So it causes indignation, but I think Marius probably felt it was worth the indignation. The Senate doesn't give him sole command. So there is still, you know, he is one of two consuls. So Marius's enemies can feel, well, at least

• 21:43Speaker 01

  he's not, you know, his power is not completely preponderant. He still has a colleague at the top.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  But I think it is a measure of the emergency and of Marius's reputation as Rome's only plausible saviour, that throughout this war against the Cimbri that's going to be fought, and it stretches from from 104 B.C. to 101, he's going to hold consecutive consulships. So that's four consulships on top of his previous one. So that's five consulships. And just to emphasise, this is something completely unprecedented.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  So this is a little by Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving, you know, winning four elections in the 1930s and 1940s. It's unprecedented. It violates not the letter of the constitution, but the spirit of it, but the established tradition. But people see it as a reasonable reaction to times of existential threat, unprecedented in their history.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  And that's the that's the analogy, I suppose.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  That's the measure, I think, of the threat that Rome feels that it is facing.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  And also the degree to which Marius is really the one person they feel can sort this out. Now, Marius, it has to be said, is not a flamboyant general. He's not Alexander the Great. He's not even Julius Caesar. He is a guy who is basically all about digging ditches and latrines and routine. That's very much what the Romans in military terms are about.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  Isn't that like what the Scipios had been like, though? Had they not been like dogged, resolute, managerial, all of that?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  That that is the essence of the Roman military approach. They love, you know, every night they will build a camp. And so Marius goes very much with the grain of this tradition. He bases himself in the Provinquia, the future Provence, southern Gaul. And he concentrates on building up Rome's battlefield effectiveness, which essentially means focusing on getting his men practised with spades as much as with arms. You know, he wants to toughen them up. He want, you know, lots of forced marches, carrying heavy boulders, lots of digging trenches, all of that kind of thing. But also imposing discipline, imposing

• 23:58Speaker 01

  battlefield techniques, all of this kind of stuff. It's often been said that this constitutes a military revolution, what Marius puts his men through in this period, a transformation in how Rome fights wars. And this is now a very contested topic. And people who are interested in this matter, and it's, I think it's, it's, it's a matter of interest, not just for those who are interested in military history, but for the whole sweep of Roman history. It's a really live, fascinating topic. We have a bonus this week with Brett Deveraux.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Oh, brilliant.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Who has very stimulating opinions on the whole question. So don't miss that.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  I love this subject and I love Brett Deveraux, and I shall be tuning in.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Great.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm a member of the Rest is History Club.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  What if people aren't? Well, how would they listen to it?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  They could go to therestishistory.com and sign up there.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. What lovely organic moment that was in the podcast.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  I know, so unscripted. Magnificent.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Anyway, right, back to the narrative. Yeah.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  So whether Marius is instituting a revolution, or whether he is just doing tried and tested Roman techniques, doesn't matter. He is whipping the Romans into shape. And by 102, he feels ready at last to go on the offensive, not least because by this point, the Teutons and the Cimbri, who previously had been travelling in one great kind of amorphous mass, have now gone their own separate ways.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Oh, that is a schoolboy error from the Teutons and the Cimbri madness.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Listen, they're just barbarians. They don't know better.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Crazy, insane. I have no time for them now.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Okay, but the Teutons, who are Marius's first target, they still outnumber Marius's army three to one.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  And also, they they've beaten the Romans nonstop. They don't think there's a problem. And what follows is the kind of classic contrast between Roman discipline and barbarian kind of courage and and headstrong charging and all that kind of stuff, that anyone who's got into the Romans in their childhood will instinctively remember.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  It's like the opening scene of Gladiator. That's what this is, isn't it?

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yes, it absolutely is. I mean, this is basically the kind of contrast that was seared into me when I was obsessed by the Romans when I was about eight. So Marius, he approaches the Teutons and then he he builds a big camp, you know, all that digging comes in, and he holds it as a kind of, and it basically an impregnable position. And he refuses to answer challenges. And again, this is very Gladiator. One of the Teutons comes forward and issues a challenge personally to Marius. And Marius's response is an excellent one. If you want death, find a rope, make a noose and hang yourself.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  Russell Crowe was born to say that line. He really was.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was. They missed a trick there.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  So the Teutons hang around issuing these insults. Marius doesn't answer. The Teutons get fed up. They move on, looting, plundering as they go. Marius upsticks, shadows them, building camps every night so they can't be attacked. And then on the banks of the Rhone, he surprises a huge force of a collection of German allies who are travelling with the Teutons.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And wipes them out. And then four days later, on a plain near a city called Aquae Sextiae, which is Aix-en-Provence today, he encircles the Teutons. So he does a kind of cani and completely wipes them out. They are utterly slaughtered. And so many corpses are left strewn on the battlefield, that for years afterwards, the local vintners, it is said, enjoyed the most superlative of vintages.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  A lovely Provencal rosé with a with a with a hint, just a hint.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  A little hint of flesh.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  A rotting Teuton.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Mmm, delicious.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  A little hint of the German corpse. When I drink my fine French wines. Wow.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Delicious.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  This is the Rest is History wine tasting tour. It would be really, everyone really needed.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  So the Teutons are now gone and basically been turned into fertiliser for grapes. But this still leaves the Cimbri in the field.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And they, the Romans will not meet with the Cimbri until the following year. So 101, on the 30th of July. And on that day, they too meet with complete annihilation at the hands of Rome's greatest general. And the battle takes place outside a city called Bercelli in northern Italy. And it's a complete victory for Marius. So the Cimbri are broken. They retreat. They have drawn up all their wagons in their rear, as was always their practice. And that means that they can't escape. And they run into the wagons. And there, according to Plutarch, they were killed by their own women, who were assembled on the line of the wagons. And to quote Plutarch, clad in black, the women killed their own

• 29:05Speaker 01

  husbands, brothers, fathers. Then they strangled their little children with their own hands and flung them down under the wheels of the wagons or the hoofs of the animals. And finally, the women cut their own throats.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  It's extreme reaction.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Not entirely the kind of behaviour of Danish women today, I would say.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Times have changed. So that's the the Cimbri gone. And the Roman authors inevitably give absolutely massive casualty figures, you know, kind of 140,000 killed, 60,000 prisoners taken. I mean, we don't probably exaggerate it, but clearly it's a massive monumental victory. And the barbarian invasion is over. Marius has saved Rome. He's saved Italy. He's the hero of the hour. And the person, Dominic, who brings the news of the victory to Rome, do you want to reveal who that is?

• 29:53Speaker 00

  I do. Listeners, brace yourselves. It's none other than Gaius Julius Caesar. Now, if you're thinking that's Julius Caesar, you're wrong. It's actually his father. And only a fool would think it is Julius Caesar himself. Isn't that right, Tom?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  That would be mad. Only a total idiot would get his, the father and son muddled up. And thank God, we're not at home to idiots on the Rest is History.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  No, it is on this podcast. Right. So Julius Caesar, not the Julius Caesar, but a Julius Caesar.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  His dad.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Brings the news back to Rome. And I mean, people will understand why we're laughing, but who cares?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  I think they'll probably guess.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  And Marius is the hero of the hour. And actually, there are two interesting indications of this, aren't there, Tom? And would you like to talk people through them?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Right. So the first may seem a little bit obscure, but it bear it in mind, because it's going to have, it's an indicator of things that are to come. So in the wake of the battle, Marius has obviously fought it not just with Roman legions, but with armies of Italian allies, the Soccii. And at the end of the battle, Marius had very impulsively granted citizenship to two cohorts of the Soccii, of these Italian allies. So about 1,000 men in total. And this was completely illegal. He had no right to do this.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  And it was very controversial back in Rome, because obviously the Romans guard their citizenship very jealously. But the Senate suck it up. They realise they can't really go against the hero of the hour. The other indication of just what a hero Marius is. He's had these five consulships and four of these have been because he has been in charge of the war against the barbarian invaders. But now that the barbarian invaders have gone, Marius runs to the consulship again and is elected again. So this is a sixth consulship and only one man back way back in the midst of time had achieved this. So Marius is now the equal record holder. And just to emphasise, you know, it's a big

• 31:52Speaker 01

  enough feat for a novice homo, a man from, you know, who has no pedigree, to get one consulship. Marius is now the joint record holder. Six consulships, stupefying.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  But to be fair, he deserves it. Is he not the goat at this point of Roman history? He's he, Jagotha, stuff in Spain, seeing off the white walkers. I mean, he's got an unbelievable record of success. And if any man in Roman history deserves six consulships, surely it's Gaius Marius.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Well, you might say that, but obviously, in a society like Rome's, which is founded on relentless competition between alpha males, the fact that one particular alpha male has done stunningly well for himself, isn't necessarily greeted with overwhelming joy and approbation by other alpha males. So the very scale of Marius's success kind of stores up trouble for him. No one in Rome likes someone who is too much of a winner. That's the whole ethos of the Republic.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  And there's a class element to this, isn't there? I mean, Marius, by definition, I suppose, because of his background, because of his plain style and sleeping on the ground in a military blanket or whatever, he is your classic popularis, isn't he? He's the man who appeals to the people. You know, he's the champion of ordinary working people. Isn't that Marius's shtick?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  That is very much his shtick. Yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  And by definition, therefore, that means that conservatives, the patrician types, they're going to see him as an as somebody who is not one of them. And they're going to look for somebody, they're going to look for a champion.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Marius is much too tall a poppy. So they want to nurture and, you know, grow other poppies that can kind of measure up to him. And the one that they go for is a guy called Quintus Lutatius Catullus. And he had been Marius's colleague as consul in 102 B.C. So that's the year in which they had defeated the Teutons. And he is everything that Marius isn't. So he's a very old school aristocrat. He's enjoyed a very expensive education. He has amazing connections. He's so not Marius that to to be enthusiastic for him is kind of almost pointedly to do Marius down. Now, Catullus initially had

• 34:18Speaker 01

  made a bit of a hash of things. So in the campaign against the Cimbri, it was his failure to hold defensive positions along the line between Gaul and Italy that had enabled the Cimbri to break through the defences and advance into northern Italy. But he'd redeemed himself. He'd joined forces with Marius. They'd won the great victory together. Catullus hadn't, you know, I mean, he's not a great general, but he'd fought with dogged competence. And the Romans, I guess, they love a bit of dogged competence. They don't hold, you know, they, they, they see that as a mark in Catullus's favour.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  And so Catullus had been awarded a triumph alongside Marius. But he's an aristocrat. Marius is an out of towner. Obviously, Catullus is resentful of the fact that Marius is really the one getting all the plaudits, getting all the cheers. And so the rivalry between them over the years that follows is kind of baked in. So Marius, for instance, he builds a temple to celebrate the favour that had been shown him by the gods. And Catullus does exactly the same. And so it carries on. And this, no, it's nothing unusual. This is, this is how people tend to behave in the Roman Republic. The great men do tend to dislike each other, to be rivals of one another.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  But Catullus isn't really a, I mean, he's not a serious threat to Marius, is he? I mean, the way you've described his record.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  He's a plodder.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. He's a mediocrity.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think Marius really feels threatened by him. There is, however, one man who I think does live a bit rent free in his head. And this is another aristocrat, a former lieutenant of his, a soldier, a politician of formidable abilities. We've mentioned him before. This is Lucius Cornelius Sulla. And I think it's time now, we've mentioned him several times already in this series, to have a bit of a closer look at him.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  The glamour boy of Roman politics, right? I mean, he really is, he has the glamour that Marius perhaps doesn't quite have. He's sophisticated. He is patrician. He is blue blooded. He's cool. He's ruthless. He's cunning, all of these things. But, but there are, but there are similarities as well as differences, right?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, they completely are. So both of them are brilliant soldiers. Both of them have a real talent for politics. Both of them are incredibly ambitious. And both of them, I think, have been very driven to escape what by the standards of senatorial politics is a degree of relative poverty. So although Marius, his, his background is kind of the regional aristocracy, the out of town aristocracy, his parents are not wealthy compared to the great, you know, senatorial figures of Rome.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  And Sulla, even though he comes from an ancient patrician family, his background also has been relatively poverty stricken. So his father had died essentially bankrupt and so left Sulla very, very hard up. And this means that throughout his youth, Sulla had found his means humiliatingly disproportionate to his ambitions, to his expectations.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  You know, it's like someone, I guess, who's been given a very expensive education and then the father goes bankrupt. You have to go and get a job in Burger King or something. It's that kind of thing.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Does that, does that happen to people with expect, I mean, do they end up working Burger King?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  I had a friend who, who did experience that.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Wow. It's the classic thing of the person in them, living in the kind of massive country house who can't heat it because daddy spends all the money on hookers.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  I think it's worse than that because if we can trust Plutarch, and that is quite a big if.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  But he, he reports traditions that Sulla is hanging out in very kind of seedy lodgings in rough areas of town. He doesn't seem to have had, you know, the equivalent of a stately home. And he is hanging out with kind of the demimond, with bohemians.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  And these include prostitutes, drag queens, and the very worst of the worst stand up comedians.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Oh, no. Mime artists, people of that ilk.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Plutarch is appalled by this. One of the few things you can say is touching about Sulla, that he's very loyal to them throughout his life.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Loves a drag queen, a stand up comic.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  He literally does love a drag queen, as we will see. He's, he's very keen on stand up comics and drag queens, and indeed prostitutes.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  God almighty.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  We've said how he's a very good looking man. He has this kind of, this, this hair that's so golden that it's almost red, which is very striking in Rome. He has kind of blue eyes, actually, a bit like a Cimbrian. So again, very striking. And he's, again, if we can trust Plutarch, he seems to have operated as a bit of a gigolo. Both his stepmother, rather sinisterly, and Rome's most famous courtesan are said to have become obsessed by him. And in their wills, both these women leave most of their property to Sulla. So if we can trust these stories, Sulla has essentially been pimping himself out. He is being paid by the estates of the women who've fallen for him. And it is these estates

• 39:35Speaker 01

  that then kind of in his late twenties, early thirties, enables him to embark on the political career that his contemporaries and peers would have begun in their late teens.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  So he's a late starter. So he's 30 and suddenly he is able to dream of big things. But in a way, as much as Marius, Sulla feels that he is struggling against impediments that had held him back early in his career, I think. And I think those are points of resemblance between them. And maybe explains why both of them appear so driven in their respective careers.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  They're both in a way, late developers, aren't they?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  I mean, Marius was, what was he, not even 40 when he really appears in the history books? And Sulla is 30 by the time he's got all this money and is can launch his career. And he, I mean, he's utterly ruthless, isn't he, Sulla? I mean, this is one of his defining characteristics. He will do absolutely whatever is necessary to get ahead.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is why he is very content to be Marius's lieutenant. He profits from it. First in Africa, and then he serves with Marius against the barbarians in the north, the Teutons and the Cimbri. But he's also happy in due course when he has to, to turn on Marius, as Marius had turned on Metellus, his patron.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  So we mentioned this, this ring and how it niggles Marius. He hates this ring, kind of showing Sulla getting Jagotha. In the war against the Cimbri, Sulla begins serving with Marius, and then he switches and joins the staff of Catullus. And by doing that, he's not just broadening his range of military experience, he's also identifying himself with the conservative interest in the Senate, because that is the kind of the alignment that Catullus represents. And that is, of course, the faction most opposed to Marius. And so I think Sulla is definitely making a statement with that, that he, you know, he's served his apprenticeship and now he's moving on. He's leaving Marius behind.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  So in the nineties, in the wake of the, the defeat of the, the Teutons and the Cimbri, Sulla, I mean, he does well enough. He, you know, he gets a magistrate here, a magistrate there. He goes on a diplomatic mission. He's the first Roman to establish relations with the Parthians in the Far East, this kind of Iranian power. But he doesn't make a tremendous name for himself. And the, the consulship remains out of his reach. And the problem is that Sulla lacks what Marius had enjoyed, namely the chance to do spectacularly well in a, in a glorious war. But Sulla doesn't despair about this. He, he's ambitious, but he's also very patient.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  And even though he's a tremendous cynic, I mean, kind of balefully so, he is simultaneously very superstitious. And Sulla absolutely believes himself to be the favourite of Venus, the goddess of love, the goddess of fortune, the goddess who grants to those who are her particular favourites, sex appeal, which Sulla has, and good fortune, which Sulla is convinced is going to be his in due course. So by 91 B.C., Sulla is 47. The minimum age by convention that you can run for the consulship is 40. So he's seven years over that threshold. And I reckon by Sulla's own high standards, you know, he has to reckon that that's a bit

• 43:00Speaker 01

  of a failure. He should have got the consulship by this point. But he remains confident that everything's going to be fine, that he is going to get a consulship in due course, that he is going to become one of the great men of not just in contemporary Roman politics, but in the entire sweep of Roman history, and that he is indeed what the Romans called phalanx, which means both fortunate and favoured by Venus. And he is not wrong, because in due course, he is going to get his chance with absolutely seismic consequences for the Roman Republic.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  And you will be getting that chance after the break.

• 43:51Speaker 01

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• 44:04Speaker 00

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• 44:30Speaker 01

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there, and it is, of course, the Americas. So 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?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  So they asked over 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.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory. And keep thinking. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Tom, throughout history, change has often been driven by businesses and institutions that end up having a massive impact on society as a whole. And there's probably no better example than the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford and his managers revolutionised production through their pioneering assembly lines. And they influenced factories and working practices in countries all over the world.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Another example of a business driving technological and social change is Amazon, which is increasing the number of its electric vehicles used for deliveries in Europe to over 10,000 by the end of this year, 2026.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Now, on top of that, over 50% of Amazon deliveries now come with less packaging, or sometimes no added packaging at all. It helps to avoid unnecessary waste, and it makes recycling at home that much easier. Find out more at amazon.co.uk/sustainability.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Welcome back, everybody, to the Rest is History. The year is 91 B.C. And as you look out, what you can see is the Bay of Naples, the epitome of Roman chic and wealth and luxury and pleasure. Naples, of course, Tom, Neapolis, a former Greek colony. But for the Romans, it's become the great sort of tourist destination, hasn't it? It's the place where they go to get a little taste of Greece.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you've got these kind of ancient streets basking in the sun, and you can go there and debate with philosophers and have doctors consult you and have affairs with kind of witty, well-read courtesans, and all of the things that you would get in Greece. And so unsurprisingly, throughout the 90s, as all this wealth is flooding into Rome, and the aristocracy are getting richer and richer, the entire coastline of the bay has become incredibly fashionable, kind of the Saint-Tropez or whatever of ancient Rome. And luxury villas are starting to sprout up along its length. So Marius is one of the super rich who's commissioned a villa. Typically, he's had it kind of structured to look like a Roman military encampment.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Oh, God.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Stuck out on a promontory.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  God, he never changes, does he?

• 47:56Speaker 01

  You've got spas. We love a spa on the Rest is History. You've got marinas, you've got yachts, you've got oyster beds. So these have been developed by a local entrepreneur called Sergeus Arata. Absolutely floods the market with very high-end oysters. And then Arata goes one better and invents the heated swimming pool. So there's something of, I guess, of kind of West Hollywood as well as Saint-Tropez, about the whole kind of the whole vibe. And it generates a massive property boom.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  But it's not just villas that are being developed, because a few miles up the coast from Naples is a place called Putioli. And this is a one-time Greek port that, unlike Naples, has been completely flattened, rebuilt and expanded, complete with these enormous concrete moles. Because the kind of the volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius, which looms over the Bay of Naples, enables the Romans to make concrete that can be used underwater. And so this enables this kind of huge port to be built. And the significance of Putioli for the Romans is that it's a deep-water port. It's basically the only deep-water port they have on the Roman side of Italy that can provide the capital with all these kind

• 49:08Speaker 01

  of goods that are starting to flood in across the Mediterranean, from all the various parts of the Mediterranean world that Rome now controls. So you've got grain, you know, Rome is a city, perhaps, of half a million people. They need to be fed. You've got slaves to fuel Roman enterprises, in particular, what are called the latifundia, which are these kind of vast, enormous agricultural estates, which are spreading across Italy and have to be worked by slave labour. Gold and silver, of course. And the irony is, is that what Peru was the 16th century Spain, Spain is the first century B.C. Rome. So there are all these enormous complexes of mines in Spain, tens of thousands of slaves

• 49:53Speaker 01

  being worked to death in this kind of great landscape, pocked with tunnels and quarries. I mean, just hell on earth, fumes so heavy that the chemicals burn the skin. And it's said that birds, if they fly over the mines, just drop dead. And to this day, if you get a core of ice from the poles, you can see the chemical trace elements of all the smelting that was going on in this period.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  No way.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  So it's vast kind of industrial scale. And of course, from the Eastern Mediterranean, we talked about this in the previous episode, how the Romans take over this province that they call Asia, the western seaboard of what's now Turkey, you get these incredible luxuries: sculptures, spices, paintings, exotic plants, celebrity chefs, sex manuals, all these kind of things. They're coming to Putioli and then being taken on to Rome.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  So presumably, as a result of all this, Naples and the surrounding areas, so Campania, and indeed cities like Pompeii, which is just along the coast, these places must be coming enormously rich.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And these, at this point, are not Roman. So they are absolutely benefiting as well. And I would say the whole of the Bay of Naples and Campania, which is the region that the Bay of Naples is set in, you know, it's becoming probably the richest, the single richest area in the world, with the exception of Rome. You're having massive inflows of wealth and goods. And if you're an Italian, and you belong to the elite, and you can speak Latin, and you have good business contacts, then the opportunities for making yourself rich, particularly if you, you know, you have businesses that reach overseas, are the same as those that any Roman merchant has. You know, the opportunities

• 51:35Speaker 01

  are absolutely enormous. And there is this one particular honeypot, which is this, the province of Asia, what had previously been the Kingdom of Pergamum, and which had been left to the Roman people by its last king in his will back in 133 B.C.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  And it's become a province, the Romans call it Asia. And for several generations now, Roman and Italian business interests have been bleeding this province absolutely white. And the most profitable enterprise of all is to set up private companies that can then operate the taxation system and extort taxes out of the wretched locals. And the name of these cartels is publicani. And it's publicani because they are operating for the benefit of the Roman public.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  But, you know, there is nothing public-spirited about them at all. And their scam is basically not just to extort the official tribute that is owed to Rome, but also to strong-arm the provincials into essentially paying for the privilege of being fleeced. They have their own private gangs of heavies. And it's absolutely terrible for the, you know, the poor provincials. And the Italian merchant class has its nose at least as much in this particular trough as the Roman business class does. And so to the people of Asia, who feel that they've been, you know, this is a plague, Romans and Italians, they see them all as Romeo,

• 53:05Speaker 01

  as Romans. They don't really distinguish between them. And so for, I think, for Italian businessmen, if they're overseas, you know, it's great. They share all the privileges and advantages of Roman citizenship. They can get just as rich as the Romans.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  So what's the problem? Well, the problem is that when they come home, they find that they are in Italy still very much second-class citizens. And so I think the more successful they are, paradoxically, riding on the Roman coat tails, the more they come to resent the Romans, the more they come to feel that the Romans are not cutting them the slack that is their due as people who properly should be Roman citizens themselves. So the discontent of these Italians who've made a lot of money in Pergamum, this has been growing and growing and growing for a series of reasons, right? They have to do military service.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  And that falls disproportionately on them. They don't get all the benefits of Roman citizenship when they come home. So they don't get the vote, they don't get the same legal standing, they don't get all of this. The case of Marius is a really good example of the disparity of opportunities. So if you're a Roman, as Marius is, you can win six consulships if you're from Arpenum. But if you're from Pompeii, you can't win a single consulship, right? You can't win a single Roman office.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Because you don't have the vote.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Well, you described how Marius had enfranchised a thousand Italians after he'd beaten the White Walkers. And I guess if he can do that just randomly, why can't you enfranchise all of them? I mean, that is a reasonable question that these Italians are asking.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  And obviously, the Romans don't want to make this concession because to them being Roman is special, and they want to guard the exclusivity of Roman status.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Some of the Romans do. So there are statesmen in Rome who think, actually, if, you know, the Italians have a point, and if we make them Roman citizens, then think how much manpower we'll have. They can see that it promises Rome a kind of absolute military preponderance if they do give the Italians the full Roman citizenship. And the guy who takes the lead in pushing this argument is a Tribune called Marcus Livius Druusus. And fun fact, Livia, the wife of the Emperor Augustus, someone who's seen Licordius will remember her, she is this guy's adoptive granddaughter. So there are family links everywhere in Roman history. Anyway, this guy Druusus, in 91, he brings forward a bill to give the Italian allies full Roman citizenship.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  And to his opponents, this is an existential moment because just as there are very good reasons for allowing the Italians to have citizenship, so also are there very good reasons not to allow them. Because the anxiety of the conservatives, the anxieties of Druusus's opponents, is that Rome is a city-state, it has these very ancient institutions. And the question they ask is, how are these institutions, how is the civic infrastructure of our city going to cope with the sudden enrollment of millions of new citizens throughout the length and breadth of Italy? I mean, it is, both sides obviously have really good arguments on their side. And so unsurprisingly, the whole city comes to be gripped by the tension of this debate,

• 56:19Speaker 01

  which has kind of flared up suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. And as it had done back in the period of the Tribune of the Gracchi, kind of 30 years previously, so now the argument turns violent. So amid riots, amid violent demonstrations, Druusus's legislation is defeated. And then a few days later, while Druusus himself is sitting in the, the kind of the portago of his villa, he is surprised by an assassin and murdered.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  And the news of this murder is greeted across Italy with a great explosion of anger. And this anger will culminate in them turning to open warfare. And this war will be called by historians in English, the social war.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Worst name for a war ever.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  It sounds like it's been organised by the local golf club or something. But this is a very, very brutal conflict. And actually, for the Romans, one of the most dangerous wars that they ever fight. Because essentially, everything that the Romans have created risks being brought down by it. Now, the Italians have been knitted into the fabric of their empire. Without the Italians, they could never have achieved what they've achieved. And now the Italians have turned on them. You know, this is a massively fateful conflict for them.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Right. So it's an existential threat for the Romans, and it begins in the east, doesn't it? There's an uprising, the murder of Druusus, a massive scandal. There's an uprising in Asculum, which is in the east of Italy. All the Romans in the city are murdered, they're massacred. The wives of the Italians who don't join the rebellion are tortured and are scalped, aren't they? So there's a, I mean, this is a hideously violent occasion.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  I think deliberately to make a statement that the Italians are not messing around, that they seriously mean business. And also, I think, to encourage other Italians to feel, well, you know, these guys really mean business, we'd better pile in as well. So Asculum, which you mentioned, the place where the whole thing explodes, it's in a region called Pisenum on the Adriatic coast, what's now modern-day Marche in Italy. But it doesn't take long for the flames of rebellion to spread across the Apennines and reach Campania. So the Bay of Naples, this great gilded golden place.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  So Pompeii joins the rebellion. And inland, there's a city called Nola, again, like Pompeii, not Roman. This gets captured by the Italian rebels and transformed into a kind of bristling stronghold of the revolt. But actually, I mentioned the Apennines, that is the real focus of the rebellion. That's the real focus of the uprising. Because of course, it's mountainous, and so it's much more difficult for the Romans to reach than the kind of the flat level plains. And the particular focus of the rebellion is a region called Samnium, which lies directly to the east of Campania. Very, very mountainous, very poor, trickle-down economics from Rome's empire has not reached, has not reached the Samnites.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  And the Samnites, I mean, they're a pretty remarkable people, aren't they? The Romans regard them as backward, which I think is very cruel cultural snobbery. So to give people a sense of the Samnites' interesting traditions, they like witchcraft, they wear rings of iron around their necks, and they shave their pubic hair, not just privately, but am I not right in saying they shave their pubic hair in public?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  And the Romans, for some unfathomable reason, find this revolting.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, mad from the Romans.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  One thing the Romans do like about the Samnites is their armour, which is very fancy and beautiful.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  And in fact, in due course, Samnite armour will be the armour that is worn by one of the particular kinds of gladiator, which I think is both a mark of respect and of contempt, because you're basically putting the Samnites to fight for you, for your entertainment in an arena. But just to say, I mean, the Samnites are a very proud people.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  A proud rugged people.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  They're a proud, genitally smooth people.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Mountain people, yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Who, centuries before, had, you know, they had fought a great war that went on for many decades against the Romans. They'd only been defeated with great difficulty. And I think they have not forgotten their ancient glory, even though centuries have passed since that happened. And they, you know, they dust down their armour, they dust down their swords, they have a nice quick shave, and then they're off to create havoc down in the plains. And the Romans are taken completely by surprise. And it's rather as though, I think, the sense of shock they feel, it's as though, I don't know, you're in Godalming or

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Tunbridge Wells.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Tunbridge Wells, and suddenly you find you're being attacked by Jacobites or something. It's just so unexpected. It's like these soldiers have risen from a past that you thought was completely dead and buried.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a hell of a twist.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  And there is the inevitable bad start. Roman wars always seem to begin with a bad start. So there are various defeats, there is a consul is slain. But the Romans do still have immense reserves of manpower, even though they've lost all the Italians. And they do have three top generals. And one of these three top generals, of course, is Marius, who is now in his 60s. And by this point, he has become, I think it's fair to say, a man of size. And his critics say that this is what comes of having a luxury villa on the Bay of Naples.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Inevitably.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  However, despite his bulk, he's still, you know, he's still got it. He's still got his talent for winning battles. And actually, he had been serving as a deputy to the consul who got killed. And Marius had been downriver, and he saw corpses starting to float by him, realised what had happened, and he went round the back of the Italians and captured their fort. And this was a kind of consolation victory that cheered everybody up and kept Marius's name on the lips of the Romans. But he's not the top general. So at number two, there is the guy who's the chief landowner in Pisenum on the east flank of Italy where the uprising had begun. And this is a guy called Naus Pompeius Strabo.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  And he's widely mistrusted in Rome, partly because he has a very shady character. He's always stabbing people in the back. And partly because he has a squint.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Which in Latin is Strabo, that's what it means. And the Romans tend to view people with squints as being untrustworthy. So Strabo is seen as a person who is a dangerous character. However, he is very effective, and he catches the rebels in Pisenum in a pincer attack. And he then moves to Asculum, you know, the birthplace of this revolt, and he puts it under siege, and it looks like it's going to fall. So this is very good. So he's number two in the hit parade. But number one, the breakout Roman star in the social war is Lucius Cornelius Sulla. And he is the guy who is operating on the western flank of Italy, just as Strabo is operating on the eastern half.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  And this means that Sulla has responsibility for prosecuting the war in Campania, the Bay of Naples and Samnium.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  He advances it across Campania, capturing all the rebel holds, strongholds, including Pompeii. And if you go to Pompeii today and you look at the walls, you can see the marks left on those walls by his artillery, by the stones fired by his catapults. Captures Pompeii. He then invades Samnium. He ambushes a Samnite army in a mountain pass and then he storms the Samnite capital in an incredible, incredibly brutal three-hour assault. And by this point, there is only one rebel-held stronghold left in Campania, and this is the city of Nola, which we mentioned had been captured early on in the conflict and turned into the kind of the great centre of rebel resistance.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  And so Sulla moves up to its walls with his six legions that he's by this point got, and he puts it under siege. And, you know, he's looking to finish off the revolt in Campania, in the theatre of war for which he has responsibility. He himself, however, he doesn't stay there. He heads back to Rome. And this is a bit like Marius coming back from Africa to Rome, because Sulla has his eye on the ultimate prize. He thinks, I've made this tremendous name for myself. I'm now Rome's top general. This is my opportunity at last to get the consulship. And so he's going back to Rome to stand in those consular elections.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  And does he get it?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  He does. He wins it very easily. And the fact that he wins the consulship is manifestation of the fact that he is now seen by the Roman people as a person who has put all his peers, including Marius, in the shade. He is a very, very significant player now in Roman politics. So he is celebrated as a master of tactics, of strategy, of siege warfare, of ambushes, of diplomacy. He's been given this special award by his men, which is only ever given to a general who has saved his army from a position of extreme danger. So it's evident that his men think he's fantastic too. Meanwhile, Marius, to Sulla's delight, is being widely mocked for being fat and old.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  He's 68, so he's basically decrepit.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Harsh.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  And he had, you know, we said that he was, he was out in the field, but he's given up. He's fallen ill. He's gone to his villa and he's just sitting there, eating.

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  Oh, Marius.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  And he seems yesterday's man.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  God.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  And so for Sulla, when he becomes consul on the first of January 88 B.C., it's an incredibly sweet moment. And it's made all the sweeter by the fact that his consulship promises him the opportunity to win even more victories, even greater glory, and even juicier prize. And this is because, while the Romans have been busy slogging it out in Italy, fighting the Soccii, fighting the Italian allies, another disastrous war has broken out, this time on the easternmost flank of the Roman Empire in Asia, in that hapless province that

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  has been bled white by Roman and Italian businessmen.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  But of course, a really important place for the Romans, right? Because it represents wealth, the eastern Mediterranean, richer than the West. So this, I mean, it's actually been provoked by the Romans themselves, is it not?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Completely, yes. So the guy responsible, he's a man called Manius Aquilius, and he's a very close associate of Marius. And this may or may not be a coincidence. He had served Marius as a legate and as his consular colleague against the Cimbri. So the year that they defeat the Cimbri. And in 90, he had been sent to Asia as part of an official commission charged by the Senate to sort out kind of various border disputes that had, that were kind of rumbling between rival kings in what is now northern Turkey. And there was one kingdom in particular that Roman businessmen had been casting kind of greedy eyes on for quite a while.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And this is a place called Pontus on the coast of the Black Sea. And Aquilius, with what turns out to be completely fatal complacency, had sponsored an invasion of Pontus by a kind of client Roman king. And why he had done this is a bit of a mystery, because he's doing this while the social war is raging. So you'd think the Romans had their hands full enough. Maybe he does it because he's been bribed by the business interests.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Or maybe he's trying to provoke a war that Marius can then take command of. So maybe he's doing it to serve his old boss. I mean, both or neither may be possible. We can't be sure. But either way, I mean, it turns out to be a really foolish thing to have done, because Rome is fighting this desperate war back in Italy. And the king of Pontus turns out to be much more formidable than Aquilius had anticipated. And the king of Pontus is a guy called Mithridates. And he's very bold, very cunning, and as it turns out, incredibly vindictive. And he very easily swats aside the invasion of his kingdom.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  And then he takes an astonishing step, which is to invade the province of Asia. I mean, a jaw-dropping step. And it's jaw-dropping because for over a century now, no king in the eastern Mediterranean has dared to provoke a war with Rome.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  They know what follows. They know that it, you know, it's absolute curtains if you do that. But Mithridates had done it. And so people may be wondering, well, why has he taken this bold step? It's partly because he's been preparing for it, you know, for a very, very long time. He's massively beefed up his offensive capabilities. He has an army that is, well, actually, it's literally shiny new, because, you know, his elite troops all have kind of beautiful jewellery on their armour and their swords are embossed with gold. So it creates a tremendous spectacle. But also, Mithridates, he's a very cunning man. And even while he likes flamboyant soldiers, he likes a spot of espionage himself.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's got good intelligence.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  He'd personally gone undercover in Asia and he'd talked to the Greek communities there. And he'd realised just how much the locals loathed the Romans, how desperate they were to see the Romans, the back of the Romans, and also how weak Rome's defences are. And he thinks, actually, you know, maybe Rome's empire in Asia is a bit of a straw tiger. Maybe we, if I invade, maybe I can pull it off. And so he takes the plunge and he's not wrong, because everything goes brilliantly for him. In a matter of weeks, Roman power in Asia completely collapses. Aquilius flees to the island of Mittelin, just off the Aegean coast. And Mithridates himself arrives with his army on the shoreline of the Aegean.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  So unbelievable. Rome has lost the province of Asia to an oriental king. Unbelievable humiliation.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  And yet the reaction back home is quite complicated, isn't it? So for the business class who've invested in Asia or who have, you know, dealings with Asia, this is obviously an absolute disaster, because a lot of them are bankrupted. And, you know, for the Italians, let's call them, so the people who are fighting against the Romans, you know, they relied on these business links to fund their war, didn't they?

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  This is a massive shock. But the interesting thing, I think it's so interesting, that the Romans actually think, well, this is going to be an absolute walkover. Because Easterners, Orientals, are completely, you know, given over to luxury sex manuals and celebrity chefs. They fight like women. This is because they're so rich. So basically, their wealth will cripple them and we'll be able to defeat them, and then we'll be able to take all their money.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so absolutely brilliant.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  It's a massive win for us.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  And so all the leading men in Rome, all the nobles, they want a piece of the action. But the man who is in pole position because he's consul is Sulla. And sure enough, shortly after he's become consul, so early in 88 B.C., he is officially confirmed as the man who is going to lead the expedition against Mithridates. And, you know, he couldn't be happier. And so he heads back to Nola to continue the siege there, a very, very happy man. His plan is, he will capture Nola, he will serve his term as consul, and then he will fulfil the commission by leading his men eastwards to attack Mithridates, win tremendous glory for himself, and just as importantly, become fabulously rich. However...

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  He has reckoned without his old commander and bitterest rival Marius, who feels that the command in the war against Mithridates should properly be his. And remember, we floated the possibility that Aquilius had actually started this war with Mithridates with the aim of giving Marius the chance to do this. We don't know whether that's true, but it is certainly the case that in the early weeks of Sulla's consulship, Marius is absolutely on manoeuvres. So we mentioned how he has become slightly overweight. He starts to go out onto the Campus Martius, the great kind of open space outside Rome, where people go and do their exercises.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  And he starts, you know, doing, doing gym work, very public workouts, running, riding, weapon training, and crowds start turning up to watch him, this, you know, this great veteran working off his, his fat, turning it back into muscle, cheering him on. And simultaneously, Marius starts building a political alliance to try and undermine Sulla and have the command against Mithridates transferred from Sulla to himself, to Marius. And the key ally that Marius gets is a guy called Sulpicius. And Sulpicius is a Tribune who is very committed to the idea that all the Italians should be given the citizenship.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  He thinks this is the best way to end the war. And by this point, actually, he has a lot of support in this opinion. Lots of Romans have come to this conclusion and they're starting to give Italians who haven't rebelled or Italians who are laying down their arms, the chance to become full Roman citizens.

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  But Sulpicius wants to push this very far. Sulla is, he's not tremendously enthusiastic about this. He's, he's always dragging his heels on the question of whether the Italians should be given the full citizenship. And so too does Sulla's colleague as consul, a guy called Pompeius Rufus. And so they, both of them had pledged to back Sulpicius's policy, but then once they're in power, they go back on it. And Sulpicius feels that he is, has been betrayed and is absolutely irate about it. And so this is why Sulpicius decides that he will back Marius's command, because Marius in return says, well, I will, I will back your, your move to see all the Italians enfranchised.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  The other thing that Sulpicius can give Marius is that he's incredibly popular out on the streets of Rome. He's very good at whipping up a mob. And so this is the deal. Marius and Sulpicius agree terms. Marius will get the command, Sulpicius will get Marius's backing for the Italians all getting the vote. And so it is that a fateful political drama is set in train.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  So first thing that happens, Sulpicius reintroduces his bill. So he reintroduces his bill and at the same time, his supporters take to the streets. There's rioting in the city, isn't there? It's all kicking off. Sulla is at his camp outside Nola and he gets news and he comes rushing back and he has this meeting with Pompeius Rufus, who is the consul's colleague. And Sulpicius, I mean, this is an amazing thing. Sulpicius hears the news that Sulla is having this meeting in secret and he sends a gang of thugs to break it up. And Tom, what happens next?

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  Well, in the resulting confrontation, the son of Pompeus Rufus, the consul, is murdered. Rufus himself barely escapes with his life and Sulla, I mean, this is such a humiliation, is forced to take refuge in Marius's house. So massive embarrassment, but it's not the end of Sulla's humiliations. Because before he's allowed to return to Nola, he has to acquiesce in Sulpicius's legislation, this bill that he'd previously blocked, and he has to agree that his consul's colleague Pompeus Rufus be stripped of his consulship. And so Sulla has to agree to all this. He has no choice, otherwise, you know, he's going to get beaten up. And so he heads back to Nola, painfully conscious of this great chasm that has been revealed between the show of his power and the reality of it.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  However, he does have one thing that can console him, and that is that he has this command against Mithridates. It's brilliant. And this is now, you know, the key thing that he has. It's the key to all his future prospects, because the damage that's been done to his prestige is such that only a triumphant eastern war can possibly repair it. So everything for Sulla is dependent on his going off to beat Mithridates and winning a glorious victory. And then Dominic, he's in his camp outside Nola and a messenger arrives from Rome. And he is one of Marius's staff officers and he brings news of a plebiscite. And this is a bill that had been proposed by Sulpicius, that had been ratified by the

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  people and passed into law. And by terms of this plebiscite, Sulla is demoted from his command against Mithridates. He has it removed from him. And the person who gets the command in Sulla's place inevitably is Marius. And this staff officer has ridden into Sulla's camp, not just to give Sulla this news, but to take command of Sulla's legions, all six of them.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  And for Sulla, this is stunning devastating news, because it threatens not just to deprive him of his dreams of a great victory over Mithridates, but essentially to terminate his career in the most humiliating circumstances. And so the question that now hangs in the air, what is Sulla going to do?

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  Well, ladies and gentlemen, there is only one way to find out. The stage is set for one of the great confrontations in all classical history. It is the death match between Marius and Sulla. And on this match, the future of Rome itself will turn. Now, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, you can find out what happens next straight away by listening to the next episode. If you're not a member of the Rest is History Club, I urge you, I implore you to go to therestishistory.com and sign up and you'll be able to listen to the rest of this series. You'll be able to join our own battle hardened legion and you'll be able to find out what happens next in the struggle for the destiny of Rome itself.

• 1:19:07Speaker 00

  So go to therestishistory.com and your life will be absolutely improved in every conceivable way. So on that, Bombshell Tom, thank you very much. This is thrilling stuff. We will see you next time. Goodbye.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Bye bye.

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