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

What shocking, unprecedented act did Sulla commit with his legions after having his ambitions frustrated once more by his bitter rival, the tribune Marius? How did Marius escape capture and death? And, would Marius retaliate…? Join Tom and Dominic as they unfold the mounting rivalry between two Roman generals - Marius and Sulla - as they battle for ultimate control of the empire, and Sulla takes a fateful step that will change the fate of the Republic forever…. 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]⁠ _______ 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

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• 2:58Speaker 00

  So it happened that Marius was selected to command the war against Mithridates in place of Sulla. When Sulla was brought the news of this, his instinct was to rely on military force to oppose his demotion. And so he summoned his men to an assembly. They were all desperate to fight Mithridates, since the war promised them a great deal of plunder. And they were worried that Marius might recruit other soldiers in their place. Sulla spoke to them of how disgracefully he had been treated by Sulpicius and by Marius. And while he did not openly allude to his secret intention, since he was nervous how

• 3:38Speaker 00

  this might go down with the soldiers, he urged them to prepare for such orders as he might give them. The soldiers, however, perfectly understood his meaning. And since they were anxious not to miss the campaign against Mithridates, they boldly articulated for Sulla what he had hesitated to put directly into words, then told him to be of good courage and to lead them on to Rome. Sulla was delighted by this and promptly set out with his six legions for the city. All his senior officers, however, saving only a single Quistor, deserted

• 4:17Speaker 00

  him, since they refused to be complicit in an attack on their own country. As for Sulla, when envoys from Rome met him on the road and asked him why he was marching with his legions against his native city, he answered, to deliver her from tyrants. So what an extraordinary moment. So that's an account by Ariane, the Greek historian. And he's writing about one of the landmark moments in all Roman history, one of the most melodramatic moments in all classical history. We're in 88 B.C. And it is the decision

• 4:56Speaker 00

  by a Roman commander to lead an army for the very first time against Rome itself to attack his own capital city. Tom, this is a monumental moment in Roman history. And you could argue a key step in the process that leads from the Roman Republic to, in a centuries time, the launch of the Roman Empire under Augustus. So why don't you fill us in on the circumstances that have brought us to this extraordinary point?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  I mean, it really is that fateful. It is, as you say, a stupendous moment. And the circumstances that have led us to this point, we covered them in our previous two episodes. But just to give a synopsis, so we've been talking about this venomous rivalry between the two greatest generals in Rome. There's the old bruiser Gaius Marius, and there is the man who had once been his lieutenant, who is loosh, ruthless, much younger than Marius, and much posher. So this is Sulla, who is a patrician. And the Romans have been fighting a very brutal war against their own Italian erstwhile allies for three years.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  And by 88, it's not yet over. But the Romans are by now on the front foot. At one point, it did look very bad for them, but they've made a really, really good recovery. And Sulla has been the great hero of this war. And his reward has been that the people have voted him consul, which is the highest magistracy in the Roman Republic. And it's been the great object of Sulla's entire political career to get it. But the consulship has also won him something perhaps even more valuable. And this is a command against a king in what is now Turkey. It's a region called Pontus, a butting the Black Sea. And the king of this area, the king of Pontus is called Mithridates. And he has invaded

• 6:58Speaker 01

  the Roman province of Asia, which abuts the Aegean Sea. And astoundingly, he has driven the Romans into the Aegean. Now, to get this command is the great prize in Roman politics at this point. Because in Rome, it is universally assumed that eastern kings, oriental despots, as they would describe them, are vicious, but fundamentally effeminate. And they are also sensationally rich. And so the command against Mithridates seems to promise whoever has it, very easy pickings. So glory and riches, which for any kind of self-respecting

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Roman commander is the absolute, you know, essence of what you want. And so this is why it's not just Sulla who wants to go off and have a crack at Mithridates, it's his men as well. I think this is why they're so keen to follow him when when the command gets stripped from him.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Of course, what has happened, we ended the last episode, there has been a great twist. So Gaius Marius, that's Sulla's old commander, you know, his old patron in some ways, I suppose. But of course, now his great rival, Marius, who is basically Elvis Presley, circa 1972, he is living on the, like, seafront real estate. He's been stuffing himself with, you know, I don't know what he's, oyster burgers.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Oysters, surely.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Despite the fact that he's 69 and that he is a thousand stone, he wants the command himself, doesn't he? You talked before about Marius from a provincial background, this gnawing need for fame, for success, to stick it to the elite who've looked down on him.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  And Sulla is part of that elite.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  So that enhances the sense of rivalry between them. And I think also, we've been alluding throughout this series to a prophecy supposedly given to Marius when he was a boy, that he would come to hold seven consulships, which would be a record total. And so far, he's only had six. So I think that Marius may well be dreaming of that elusive seventh consulship as well.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And Marius and Sulla absolutely detest each other. And Marius's hatred for Sulla has grown because he now feels put in the shade by the person who was formerly his deputy. And there's a sense in which that kind of resentment is the most toxic of all, the resentment of someone who had always been preeminent, and who now finds himself being put in the shade by someone that he'd always slightly looked down upon. So what Marius does, Sulla is away, he's besieging this town called Nola in Campania, beside the Bay of Naples. Marius seizes his chance while Sulla, the consul, is absent from Rome.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  And he teams up with this tribune called Sulpicius, who presents a bill to the Roman people. And by the terms of this bill, Sulla is to be deprived of his command and Marius is to get it. And the plebiscite is duly passed, it becomes law, and Marius sends one of his staff officers to inform Sulla of this plebiscite. But more than that, to take command of his army on behalf of Marius. So Marius's staff officer rides from Rome down to Nola, and he arrives in Sulla's camp. And Sulla has with him six legions, of which five are earmarked to go with him

• 10:37Speaker 01

  on the expedition against Mithridates. So this is about 30,000 battle hardened men in total. And listeners at this point may be wondering, well, if Sulla has six legions with him, how many legions does Marius have with him in Rome? And the answer is Marius has absolutely no legions whatsoever. So you would think this is pretty basic maths. How can as hardened an operator as Marius has always been throughout his life, how could he possibly have been so stupid as to drive his greatest rival into this corner where there are six legions kind of at his back? This seems to, I would guess, completely mad to people today listening.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  But it's the, I mean, I'm going to hazard a guess at the answer to this, which is that marching in Rome has never been done before. And you say Sulla has the legions, but the legions, you know, Sulla's borrowed the legions from Rome. They're not his personal legions. We're not in the first century or second century AD. The absolute convention surely is that Sulla just says, fine, I don't like it, but I, you know, I'll have to go along with it. And off he goes back to Rome. You know, you don't want to earn the apobrium of your fellow elitists in Rome who would, you know, it's unthinkable basically that you wouldn't obey the order, isn't it?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  I think for Marius, it is literally unthinkable. He hadn't even crossed his mind because as you say, it is, it is, goes against every custom tradition and law of the Roman Republic, the notion that an army of Rome might choose to behave like the private militia of its own commander. It's just unthinkable.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Imagine when Harry Truman sacked Douglas MacArthur in the war, in the Korean War. Imagine if General MacArthur had got his troops and said, fine, we're marching on Washington. I mean, it's that level of unthinkable, right?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Or, you know, Montgomery marching on London in 1944 or something. I mean, it would be an insane thought. And that's why it doesn't occur to Marius that it's remotely possible.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  But of course, it does occur to Sulla. And what is striking is that he doesn't seem to have hesitated at all. I mean, there's no kind of standing on the banks of a Rubicon thinking, oh, should I, shouldn't I? He just goes for it. And I think this reflects a number of factors. So firstly, Sulla knows that his men think he's absolutely brilliant. Sulla, all his life, has used his charm when he chooses to as a weapon. And I don't think it's any different with the rank and file legionaries. They are ready to follow him basically wherever he leads. Sulla is charming, but he is also a very, very dangerous man to offend. And although he's a very good looking man, people have noted throughout

• 13:27Speaker 01

  his career that when he gets angry, mysterious white spots start to appear across his face. And when these white spots start to appear, it's probably not a good sign. So I think that's, you know, that's something very ominous and a clear marker that Sulla is not a person that you want to put into a strop. On top of that, as we've said, Sulla has a deep, personal rivalry with Marius. He really detests him. He is furious at the frustration of his ambitions and of a deal that he thought was absolutely done. And so he therefore has an utter belief in the justice of his own cause. And this matters

• 14:09Speaker 01

  because Sulla, above all, is very superstitious. He believes that he is what the Romans called Felix, lucky, a favorite of the goddess Venus. And so he trusts on fortune, on Venus, on everything that is right and proper, that they will back him, that they will give him the good luck that Sulla regards as essentially as his kind of divine right.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  Can I ask a question? So in later years, it was quite common for generals to think that their armies belonged to them. So Pompey the Great, Caesar, Crassus, you know, Antony, Octavian, these commanders who end up fighting for supreme power in Rome and, you know, taking the city, being kicked out of the city, retaking all of this. And that's a result, obviously, of the structural circumstances. You know, this isn't their own willfulness. This is just what people do at this point. Sulla's the first person that does this. Now, is this, as it were, great man history? Sulla could have decided differently. This is about his own individual, you know, genius or whatever. Genius is the wrong word, but you know what I mean? Or is it that by this point, Roman politics has degenerated, it's

• 15:19Speaker 00

  already begun to corrode the partisanship, the polarization or whatever, which makes it possible for him to make this decision? So in other words, is he genuinely thinking completely outside the box? Or if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have done it pretty soon afterwards?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  I think there are all kinds of circumstances, but there are two obvious ones. And the first is that as Rome's supplies of manpower have grown larger, and as campaigns require armies to be away and in the field for longer. So the opportunities for individual commanders to establish a personal link with their men and identify their own interests with those of their men starts to grow. So I guess that what Sulla decides to do is something that a general at some point in Roman history was almost bound to do. And on top of that, political life in Rome has been quite brutal over the previous decade. So that we talked

• 16:14Speaker 01

  in the first episode, two tribunes were murdered. Sulla himself was, you know, menaced by heavies when he went back to Rome as consul. And so there is a kind of a coarsening, I think, of the, the traditional respect that the Romans had for their kind of constitutional norms. But having said that, I mean, those constitutional norms remain very, very strong. And when Sulla leads his legions on Rome, the news of his advance is greeted with utter shock and consternation. People cannot believe what has happened. And I think the fact that it hadn't crossed Marius's mind, it's the kind of the best indicator of how still at this point, it was basically seen as something inconceivable, except for someone as bold

• 16:58Speaker 01

  and ruthless as Sulla. So as he leads the legions towards Rome, everyone in Rome is going, what the hell's going on? What's happening? And they send envoys out to beg Sulla not to cross this kind of, dare I say, sacral boundary, which encloses Rome, called the Pomerium. And to cross that for a citizen in arms is an utter taboo. No one ever does it. But Sulla dares to do it. He brushes all the appeals aside, his soldiers cross the Pomerium into the sacred space that is Rome itself, and they start pushing through the narrow streets. And as they do so, their fellow citizens who are appalled by what is happening,

• 17:40Speaker 01

  clamber up the stories of their various houses, up onto the tops of the insulae, the blocks of flat, and start hurling tiles down at their fellow citizens, these legionaries, as they are advancing through the streets. And for a moment, the legionaries quail. I guess they, maybe they're stunned to be greeted by such violence. And maybe there's a kind of a wave of shame and anxiety. But Sulla does not allow them time to think. He orders archers to dip their arrows in fire, and then to fire these arrows at the roofs where the people are throwing tiles down. And flames begin to crackle and spread down the line of the city's highways, these highways that the legionaries are marching

• 18:21Speaker 01

  down. And as they go, Sulla follows them, and he is riding down the greatest of all the highways, the broadest road in Rome. It's called the Via Sacra, the Sacra Way. And he advances into the very heart of Rome, where the Senate House stands. And he orders his legionaries to stand guard on the Senate House. The city is his. The unthinkable has happened. A general in arms has made himself the master of Rome. And just to emphasize, I mean, this is such an incredibly fateful step. And having taken it, Sulla moves very, very fast to take advantage of what he's done. He can't afford not to.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  But he still takes the political and legal side of things seriously, doesn't he? Because he wants basically political and legal sanction for what he's done retrospectively.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yes, completely. And this is always the case in coups, isn't it? That a coup will work if the person who conducts the coup can present himself as being on the side of legitimacy, because that then transforms the former defenders of legitimacy into rebels. I mean, you see it throughout the course of history. And so it is now in 88 B.C. in Rome. So the key for Sulla is to have Marius and Sulpicius, this, this tribune who had presented the bill to the people, to have him stripped of his command. He wants them declared public enemies, because then Sulla can frame everything that he's doing as a defense of the Republic. And so Sulla is there in his armor, in the Senate House,

• 19:52Speaker 01

  telling them, this is what you've got to do. Everyone in the Senate is well aware that he has his soldiers outside. And so unsurprisingly, they do indeed proclaim Marius, Sulpicius, Marius's son, and nine other of his leading henchmen, outlaws. And the death squads then start fanning out. Sulpicius is betrayed by a slave. He is hunted down and murdered. But the other 11 outlaws do manage to get away. Marius briefly tries to, to resist with his own attempted armed force. It's obviously not going to work. So he slips away and he vanishes. And he is not caught. And clearly for Sulla, this isn't, it's probably an annoyance

• 20:33Speaker 01

  rather than a catastrophe. I mean, he's now the master of Rome, but he would really like to have dispatched Marius. And the fact that Marius is still out there somewhere, well, that is a factor that will continue to be a feature of the, of the story as it develops.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  So for the time being, he's master of Rome. And we've already talked about how his priority is to establish his own legitimacy, to present himself as the guardian of the constitution, to present Marius as the person who's a threat to it. And we talked in the previous episode about how Sulla, you know, golden haired, swashbuckling, ruthless, sort of sexy, he is the candidate, the personification of the traditional conservative elite, isn't he?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Well, except that he has to march on Rome.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  He has, of course, but it's not unheard of for reactionaries or conservatives. I mean, I think of, I don't know, Spain in 1936, General Franco, people to launch coups in defense of what they claim is the old order. And that's what he's doing now.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And it's incredibly Roman, incredibly Roman, to be, if you're going to be a revolutionary, to be a revolutionary in the cause of the status quo, which is exactly what, what Sulla is.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  And on the other side of that equation are the people that Marius has been appealing to. Now, Marius, it's interesting, why the, why don't more of the people of Rome take to the streets? I mean, his constituency are the populares, are the kind of ordinary people. So presumably this isn't a city under occupation. Most people in Rome are on Marius's side?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Probably the mass of the population, if asked, would be pro Marius. But the key players in Roman politics, as ever, are the elites, the people in the Senate. And most of them, I mean, they disapprove of how Sulla has done it, but they do approve of what Sulla has done. The senatorial conservatives really dislike the populists, if you like. And so they do approve of the measures that Sulla is taking, essentially to kick Marius out of the city. Resentment of him has been, you know, long term. He's very, very unpopular with the senatorial elites. However, that said, I mean, Sulla is in a bit of a bind.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Because on the one hand, the whole reason he's done this is so that he can take his legions eastwards and go and fight Mithridates and win a glorious war there. And so to do that, he knows that he needs supporters in positions of power. And particularly, he needs consuls in the following year, 87, when he's going to be going off to the east. He needs supporters in position. Equally, if he imposes his own followers on the electorate, then that would make his claim to embody the rule of law completely ludicrous. He would be very nakedly a tyrant. And I think that really would provoke widespread popular opposition to him. So what Sulla does eventually is to settle for a compromise. So the consular

• 23:30Speaker 01

  elections are held, and Sulla's allies are defeated. And so he has to accept, as the two consuls that will be following him in 87, people who are hostile to what he's done. And one of these two men, a guy called Lucius Cornelius Senna, he had gone so far as to threaten Sulla with prosecution. So that's quite something for Sulla to swallow, but he does. However, he gets the two consuls, including Senna, to come up with him onto the Capitol, which is the sacred hill, the hill of Jupiter, the great temple of Jupiter is on it. And he orders them to swear a public oath that they will not reverse his

• 24:14Speaker 01

  legislation. They will not stab him in the back. And Senna, and the other consul, does so. And Senna then spontaneously picks up a stone and throws it. And he says, if I break my word, may I similarly be hurled out of Rome. You know, very flamboyant. Now, does Sulla trust this? I mean, Sulla is a tremendous cynic. He's a brutal realist. I think almost certainly not. But the problem is that if he is to leave for the war against Mithridates in 87, he can't afford to hang around and, you know, make sure that everybody in Rome is absolutely trustworthy. And the whole while that Sulla has been busy in the

• 24:55Speaker 01

  year of his consulship in 88, in the wake of his march on Rome, trying to sort things out in Italy, to make sure that it's going to be safe for him to leave Italy for the war against Mithridates, the situation in the east has been getting darker and darker.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  So the war in the east, or the situation in the east, this guy, Mithridates, is the greatest threat to Rome in a long time. I mean, we had the white walkers in the previous episodes, but this guy's a king. He's very rich, isn't he? And he has ancient prophecies on his side. So we love an ancient prophecy. And he's got loads of ancient prophecies on his side.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Loads. There are all kinds of omens that have been current in the east for many decades, telling of how a great king is going to appear in the world. And he will come out of the east, and he will be an instrument of divine retribution against the overweening Roman superpower. And essentially, these prophecies have been bred of the kind of feeling of impotence and helplessness that most people in the eastern Mediterranean have felt before the spectacle of Roman supremacy. And so Mithridates, who was actually dead to attack Rome, the first king to do so in over a century, you know, he's very successful in invoking these prophecies and applying them to himself. But more than that,

• 26:14Speaker 01

  he has a tremendous eye for propaganda and a kind of striking image. So people may remember that the whole war against Mithridates had actually been provoked by a Roman ally of Marius, a guy called Manius Aquilius, who had kind of incited a neighboring king to invade Pontus's kingdom, and it had all gone absolutely tits up. And Aquilius had ended up fleeing mainland Asia and kind of going out to an island just off the shore of Asia. And at a crucial point, he goes down with a stomach bug. And so when Mithridates agents arrive where he is in his sick bed, he is helpless to escape. And so he is captured.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  And this offers such scope for a man as skillful at propaganda as Mithridates. So he has Aquilius chained to a seven-foot barbarian and dragged back from the coastline of Asia all the way to Pergamum, the capital of Asia. When they reach Pergamum, Aquilius is tied backwards onto an ass and paraded through the streets. And so everybody is able to vent their hatred of the Romans on him. And then finally, a very, very famous scene. Mithridates has gold melted down, and then Aquilius's nostrils are held, his mouth is pulled open, and that gold is poured down Aquilius's throat. And it's such a memorable gesture that people

• 27:42Speaker 01

  will claim that it's done to other Roman generals who fall prisoner of rebellious people in the east for many decades to come.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Crassus. Didn't the Thessalonians basically have to Crassus?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  The story is told of Crassus as well. But I think this is the originator of the story. And Mithridates, you know, he proclaims to the people of Asia why he has imposed this punishment on Aquilius. He says that it is an illustration of how the Romans have only one abiding motive: greed, deep-seated for empire and riches. And, you know, he's not wrong. The Romans have been absolute bloodsuckers when it comes to the poor cities of Asia.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  As a result of this, the other Greek cities in Asia, they've been simmering with a similar kind of resentment towards overweening Roman power. This upstart, this parvenu from Italy that is trying to impose itself onto the Greek world, they pile in behind Mithridates, don't they? They're very up for this.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  They do, because Mithridates sends secret instructions to the leading figures in all the various cities of Asia, that they are to prepare a massacre of every Roman and Italian in Asia, most of whom belong to the business class that have been leeching onto the hapless Greeks. And the Greeks in Asia could not be happier to join in. And when the massacre hits the Romans and the Italians, it hits them as a bolt from the blue. So they are completely without warning, as it seems to them. They're rounded up, and they are slaughtered, perhaps by hired assassins, or perhaps by vengeful mobs. Some

• 29:21Speaker 01

  of them are hacked to pieces as they cling to sacred statues or to altars. Others are shot as they attempt to swim out into the sea. And once they're dead, their bodies are then left to rot and buried outside the city walls of all the various cities that have participated in this massacre. And of course, the casualty figures are very inflated. So it's said that 80,000 men, women, and children were killed. But there's no question that these figures are believed back in Italy. And the impact on the Romans is kind of analogous, perhaps, to the impact that 9/11 had on Americans. It comes as a similar shock. The idea that the commanding heights, not just of their power, but of their economy, could be hit

• 30:03Speaker 01

  in this way, and so much bloodshed be inflicted, comes as a complete surprise.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  But the difference with 9/11 is that Osama bin Laden did not then launch an invasion of Canada or something. But this is what Mithridates does, isn't it? Because you've already mentioned that he's eyeing up Greece. And he's now going to absolutely double down. He thinks Rome is vulnerable. And although Greece is not, I mean, Greece is not part of the Roman Empire, as it were, but it's part of the Roman sphere of influence at this point, presumably economically as well as diplomatically.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's completely under the shadow of Roman power. Remember that the city of Corinth had been annihilated as evidence for the Greeks of what would happen if any Greek city chose to oppose the Romans. And so cities in Greece now are governed by pro-Roman oligarchs. And they do Rome's bidding, and in return, Rome rewards this class of collaborators. And the classic example of this is the most famous of all the Greek cities, and that is Athens. So Athens, by this point, it used to be an imperial power itself. That empire has long, long gone. Its democracy, to the degree that it still exists, is a complete sham. Its independence...

• 31:18Speaker 01

  You know, it's nominal. It's nothing more really than a fig leaf. But if you are a millionaire, you know, with responsibility for running Athens, times are pretty good. The Romans, you know, smile on you. They give you favourable treaties. They allow you to enjoy special trading relations with other parts of Rome's empire. And the plutocrats, basically, you know, they are happy to sell the rest of the Athenian people down the river in return for the power and wealth that backing Rome gives them. But obviously, the richer they get, the more the resentments of the mass of the people, the demos, as they are called, just fester and fester. And so unsurprisingly, when news of what has happened in Asia reaches Athens,

• 32:03Speaker 01

  everyone's completely gripped by this incredible spectacle. The collapse of Roman rule, the conquests of Mithridates, the massacre of so many Romans and Italians. And the business elite are obviously appalled, but the mass of people in Athens are, you know, they're thrilled and this old longing for freedom, which has been repressed for so many years, but in Athens is still felt as something living as part of the, you know, the historical patrimony of the Athenian people. It rouses the demos, the Athenian people, to dream that freedom might after all be theirs. And so a revolution breaks out and it's led by a naturalised Athenian called Aristion.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And inevitably, this being Athens, he is a philosopher. But just because he's a philosopher doesn't mean that he can't preside over a pogrom. And so he leads the mass of the people against the plutocrats. Those who don't flee are massacred. And then he sends envoys to Mithridates on the other side of the Aegean, saying, could we have an alliance? And Mithridates says, yeah, absolutely. This is brilliant. And he promptly sends an expeditionary force across the Aegean to Athens so that this alliance between Athens and the King of Pontus can be expressed in military terms. And of course, those military terms are targeted against Rome. And it seems with Athens now allied to Mithridates, what is to stop other Greek cities from doing the same?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  And back in Italy, where Sulla has been watching the situation develop, not necessarily to Rome's advantage, he realises that speed is an absolute premium now. You know, he has to get across the Adriatic, get into Greece, see off Mithridates armies, because otherwise the whole of Greece and maybe Macedon as well, which is currently a Roman province, it might all just slip away.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Tricky for Sulla though, isn't it? Because he's basically, I mean, he's got a lot of problems at once. He's got Marius on the loose. No one knows where Marius is or what he's going to get up to. He has one of the new consuls, Sinner. Sinner did that business with the stone. I'm not going to cause any trouble. I mean, one of the characteristics of very cynical ruthless people is they assume that everybody else is as cynical and ruthless as they are. So Sulla can't trust Sinner. One thing we haven't really talked about, actually, you know, Sulla was involved in this war against the Italian, the rest of Italy, the social war. That's still going on, isn't it? And actually, nobody really has decided. I mean, there's still a massive political argument about how to end that particular war. I mean, almost everybody thinks that the Italians should be given the vote and they should,

• 34:40Speaker 00

  you know, they should be incorporated fully into the Roman Republic. But exactly how is still a moot point. So Sulla is taking a big risk by leaving all this behind unresolved to go over to Greece and presumably to Asia. But I guess, does he think he has no choice, that this is existential for Rome?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  I think it's probably less Rome than him. He, you know, he has marched on Rome. He has dared very greatly in the cause of ensuring that he can lead this war against Mithridates. So he, he has to go, but you're right, that in every sense, if he crosses the Adriatic and leaves Italy behind, there is no guarantee that he will remain legally a general of the Roman Republic. It's very likely that his enemies will secure power. And if they do, then they will name him an enemy of the state. So it's, it is a huge gamble. And I think that for that reason, before he leaves, he makes one attempt to provide some military security for himself in Italy while he is away.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  So in the dying days of his consulship, he'd been consul with this guy Pompeius Rufus, who had been beaten up by Marius's thugs before Sulla's march on Rome and stripped of his consulship. And Sulla, when he marches on Rome, he has this colleague, this friend of his, this associate, Pompeius Rufus, reinstalled as a consul. And because Pompeius Rufus can absolutely be relied upon, what Sulla really wants is for him to have a great army of legions so that, you know, he will be a heavyweight to his other enemies in Rome and Italy. So he thinks, there is this guy Strabo in Pisenum, which is the area on the kind of the central Italy on the Adriatic coast.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  And Strabo, people may remember, Strabo means squint. Strabo has, it's a nickname. He's a very sinister figure, but very effective. And he has been laying siege to the city of Asculum, where the social war had originally broken out. Done a very good job. He storms it. He's basically crushed the revolution, the rebellion, the social war in central Italy. But Sulla's wheeze is to say, well, if the war is over, then Strabo doesn't need his legions anymore. So as consul, I will force through a bill saying that Strabo should hand over his legions to Pompeius Rufus and then my ally will have the legions. And of course, this is exactly basically what Marius has done.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, does it not occur to Sulla that actually Pompeius Rufus, when he arrives, that Strabo might say, no, I'm going to keep the legions myself, just as Sulla had done, you know, in his turn?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I think this is what's so interesting, because you were saying, you know, it doesn't, how unthinkable is it for people to do what Sulla has done? I think it's so unthinkable that even Sulla thinks that no one else will do it. That's the measure of how kind of fateful a step his march on Rome was. So as you say, what is to stop Strabo doing to Pompeius Rufus, what Sulla had done to Marius's ambassadors? Well, Pompeius Rufus turns up and Strabo greets him with a kind of very menacing politeness. And then he says, I'm afraid I can't hang around here. I'm called away on urgent business. I'll be away for the next couple of days. But, you know, do as you will, do take over my legions. So the next day, Pompeius Rufus gathers all the soldiers around him

• 38:07Speaker 01

  and he celebrates his command in the traditional manner by performing a sacrifice. And as he is conducting the sacrifice, a gang of Strabo's soldiers start to push in on him. And as he raises the sacrificial knife to kill the victim that's being sacrificed, these soldiers seize him and they strike him down. And a Roman scholar later described it, he perished as though he were the sacrificial offering himself. The Strabo comes back and he says, I'm shocked, shocked to discover what's happened. But he takes no action against the mutineers and the legions remain securely under his command. And so Sulla does not have that body of legions backing him that he had hoped for.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Question about Strabo. Is Strabo at this point loyal to Marius? Is he operating in his own?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  He's his own man.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  He's his own man. So isn't that a sign of how generally, structurally, Roman politics and Roman kind of military politics is kind of breaking down? That, because you described Strabo as a warlord. I mean, this is not just a general as part of an institution. This is an independent military power broker, kingmaker, you know, in different circumstances, I guess.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's exactly what Strabo is doing, is waiting to see who's going to win, but keeping his legions close to him. And so this is a really malign situation in Italy. But it is one that Sulla sighs, well, what the hell, I'm off. He gets in his ships, he loads his men up, they cross the Adriatic, he lands on the far side and he is going to war in the east.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Well, we'll find out what happens in the east. And indeed, what on earth has happened to our protagonist, Gaius Marius, after the break?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Hello, this is Tom Holland from Goalhangers, The Rest Is History.

• 39:57Speaker 00

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• 40:09Speaker 01

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• 40:23Speaker 00

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• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an amazing film. It stars Andrew Scott as Stagg, Brendan Fraser as Eisenhower and Damien Lewis as Montgomery. Pressure is an absolute must see.

• 40:50Speaker 00

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• 42:25Speaker 00

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is History. The year is 87 B.C. It's all looking very febrile in the East, but also in Rome. And just before the break, we were wondering what had happened to the protagonist of this entire series, Gaius Marius. Well, Tom, what has happened to Marius? So, he fled Rome. What has become of him since?

• 42:46Speaker 01

  He's in a real bind because he's been declared a public enemy. Sulla has leaned on the Senate to have that bill passed. And so, he is now an outlaw. And on top of that, as you were saying, he's very old, he's very fat, and he has one of the most recognisable faces in the whole of Rome. So, basically, you know, what is a 69-year-old overweight, six-times consul to do? There's only one thing he can really do, and that is to go undercover. And so, this is what Marius does. And he takes refuge on one of the many estates he has outside Rome. And he's hidden in a cartload of beans.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And hidden by the beans, he is then taken by a loyal carter down to Ostia, which is the port of Rome. And from there, he takes ship to Africa. And Africa is the obvious place he would go because that is where he had won his first great military victories. He has lots of allies and supporters there. But, complete disaster. There's a storm. And Marius and his companions, they get driven ashore. And from that point on, it is a non-stop catalogue of scrapes and near misses. So, they escape squads who've come to arrest them by the skin of their teeth. They hitchlifts with passing merchants, who then decide that they don't want to have anything to do with him, and dump him on the shore.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  There's one particularly hairy incident where Marius ends up hiding naked in a marsh, kind of burying himself in mud. So, I always kind of think of it, you know, it's like Marlon Brando in the mud.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Colonel Kurtz.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Colonel Kurtz, yeah. What is it? You're an errand boy.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  It's that moment. But unfortunately, he is discovered and he's hauled out from the mud, all covered in the gunk of the swamp, and he gets locked up in a cell. And the local kind of town council think, wow, now we've taken him, we'd better get rid of him. But they're all very nervous. So, they think, well, let's get a paid assassin to do it. And they fix on a Cimbrian, so one of those barbarians who'd been defeated ironically by Marius.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Like a Dane.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so lots and lots of had been taken as slaves, and this is presumably a slave. And they give this Cimbrian a sword and say, go in and finish off Marius. So, he goes into the cell. It's very dark, and all the Cimbrian can see is the kind of, I like to imagine, red glare of his eyes, kind of staring at him from the shadows. And then he hears Marius's voice, "Man, do you dare to kill Gaius Marius?" And the Cimbrian does not dare. He's absolutely terrified.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Oh, my words. His Martin Sheen runs away.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, he runs out of the cell wailing, "I cannot kill Gaius Marius." He is, you know, this guy is just too terrifying. And the local authorities, they decide that, you know, they can't kill him either. Marius is the, you know, he's the great savior of Rome. He's such an impressive man. They don't want to just dispatch him. So, what they do is they give him back his clothes and they put him on a boat. And they say, just, you know, get out of here. We don't have anything else to do with you. And so, this enables Marius to cross from Italy to Africa. And he makes land by where Carthage had stood. So, these ivy-clad ruins, absolutely deserted. And the governor of Africa sends him a message, saying, "If you stay here,

• 46:14Speaker 01

  then I will uphold the decrees of the Senate and treat you as a public enemy. So, I'm giving you a chance to get out." And Marius groans, and then he gives a very famous answer. It's very celebrated in later Roman history. "Tell the governor that you have seen Gaius Marius, a fugitive, sitting among the ruins of Carthage."

• 46:35Speaker 00

  I mean, you're doing it with an American accent, but I just think this is made for Russell Crowe, especially Russell Crowe now.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  No, it's Marlon Brando.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  When he's a little bit heavier, you know, he's somebody people associate with Rome. I mean, this is absolutely made for him.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, who would you have a Sulla?

• 46:53Speaker 00

  A young Jude Law is basically ideal for Sulla, but he's too old now.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Oh, I think Jude Law, Jude Law would be good.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Although Tom Holland, I've always had Tom Holland in mind for Octavian, by the way. I think he'd be a brilliant Octavian.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  I think you're right about that. But yeah, okay, well, let's say Gaius Marius, from this point on, we'll give him an Australian accent. So, is it all over for Marius? He's stuck in Carthage, he's got no arms, he's got no backing, he's being disrespected by the local governor. It's not all over for him, actually, because remember that prophecy, which had decreed that he would end up holding seven consulships?

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Fate will not be denied.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  And you are right, Dominic, because back in Italy, circumstances are becoming more favourable for Marius. So, by this point, Sulla has left for the war with Mithridates, and the two new consuls have embarked on their magistracies. So, one of these two consuls we've already mentioned, this is Sinner. And we've said, he hates Sulla. And he has solemnly and publicly sworn an oath on the capital not to reverse Sulla's legislation, but we've been asking all along, can he be trusted? Sinner is a very, very slippery customer. His colleague, a guy called Nias Octavius, he's not a fan of Sulla either, but he is the kind of man who probably can be trusted to keep an oath because he is old school. He's a classic conservative. He's the kind of person who, once he's sworn an oath to

• 48:12Speaker 01

  the gods, is liable to keep it. Clearly, Sinner and Octavius are very different calibre of men. And it doesn't take long for them to fall out. And they fall out over this kind of perennial bugbear of Roman politics by this point, which is the question of how far the Italians should be given full enfranchisement, full Roman citizenship. And under normal circumstances, these kind of disagreements would have been contained within the Senate House. But as we've been saying, the climate in Rome is becoming ever more violent. Politics is being militarised. And so, arguments that begin in the Senate have a tendency now to escalate.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  And it doesn't take long for the disagreements between Sinner and Octavius to get very badly out of control. And it ends up with Sinner being expelled by Octavius, officially stripped of his consulship by the Senate, and once again proclaimed a public enemy. So, essentially now, what has happened in Rome is that every time there's a disagreement between the consuls, it ends with one of the consuls being decreed an outlaw. And this is not, does not make for a healthy politics.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  It does not at all. And how much is that a break with established Roman politics?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Massively.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  So, actually, this is a really good, for democracies that may have modelled themselves on Rome and are obsessed with not following the example of Rome. This is a really good example in the dangers of excessive polarisation. And, you know, everything becoming, you know, political disagreements, being litigated in the courts, and painting your opponents as the enemies of the Republic, isn't it? I mean, this is what happens.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yes, because if you use very violent rhetoric, that violent rhetoric can become real. And once it becomes real, then essentially you've let a very dangerous genie out of a bottle. And this is essentially what has happened.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  So, there's basically no space left for pluralism. I mean, insofar as there was a limited amount of pluralism, differences of opinion, reasonable differences of opinion.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  The idea that every citizen has freedom of speech is really important in the Republic. And it's upheld. People can basically say what they like. That, you know, this is why even those who are not in the Senate are so ready to scroll graffiti insulting their enemies across the city. It's taken for granted that this is the right of people living in a free state. But if you are going to end up killed or declared a public enemy every time you have a disagreement with one of your peers, then it becomes incredibly dangerous. Octavius has taken this step, so Sinner now does exactly the same. And he does a Sulla. He goes to Nola, where this, you know, siege is still dragging on. And he works his magic on the legionaries, who are camped out beside the city, that one legion that had been left behind to prosecute the siege.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  And then, he gets that legion on side, and then he goes on a tour of various cities around Italy, recruiting more men, raising cash. And he then takes a fateful step. He sends a messenger to Piscinum, on the east coast of Italy, where Strabo is camped out with all his legions. And so, Strabo then duly crosses the Apennines from Piscinum. And he makes camp outside Rome, beside the Coline Gate, which is the gate in the north of the walls of Rome. And he's obviously a very menacing presence. This very sinister operator with all these legions camped outside one of the main gates of your city.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  And what makes it all the more ominous is that actually, he hasn't come out on Sinner's side. He hasn't come out on Octavius's side. He's clearly waiting to see which of these two consuls is going to need him the most, and then demand his price. One man, however, has, by this point, swung fully behind Sinner, and that is Marius. So, Marius has, you know, he gets the news that Sinner is on the loose. He crosses from Africa with his son and with assorted henchmen. And he then uses the magic of his name to recruit a private army himself. Lots of escaped slaves, lots of old soldiers, people like that, rallying to, you know, the old man, the magic of his name.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And so, Sinner is nervous of Marius. Basically, by this point, everyone is nervous of Marius because he is, he's completely wired. I mean, he's really ready to kill anybody who annoys him by this point. He's very, very Colonel Kurtz, I think, by now.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Right. So, you think Marius is, well, he's 69, he probably doesn't have that much longer to live, or something has flipped in his head, or what is it?

• 52:44Speaker 01

  I think this is kind of, it's like King Lear thing, that he's so stupefied by, you know, the collapse of all his fortunes, that something's gone inside his head. He is much more murderous, much more headstrong than he had ever been before. But Sinner thinks, well, it's better to have Marius on your side than against you. So they team up and they advance on Rome and they put the city under siege. And at one point, they actually managed to break in through the walls. But at this point, Strabo clearly thinks, I don't really want Marius inside Rome. So he, he comes to Octavius's help and the men of Sinner and Marius are thrown, flung back out. And so the, the stasis between these three blocks of men, Octavius in Rome,

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Strabo in his camp outside the Coline Gate, Marius and Sinner with their men. It, it's kind of, there's very kind of uneasy tension there. And then suddenly it becomes clear that all along the gods have had Marius's back. Because at this point, a grotesque series of disasters intervene on Marius's behalf. So Strabo's camp is abruptly swept by plague and he catches it himself and retires to bed. The tent is then struck by lightning and Strabo is insinuated.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  He's what, by the lightning?

• 54:01Speaker 01

  By the lightning. So he's got plague, then he gets hit by lightning. I mean, it's a really bad day at the office.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  What are the chances of that happening? That just seems mad.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Very low. And then his funeral procession is held and he's so unpopular that the crowd sees his ashes. And it's only the intervention of a tribune that prevents them from being desecrated. And he leaves behind this very dark reputation, that the arch trimmer. But he also leaves behind a young son, only 19 years old, Pompeius, Pompey, as he's better known. And this is someone of whom we will be hearing more later in this series.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Pompey the Great has entered the story.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  He has.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  So exciting.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  But at this point, he's only 19 years old. He hasn't really made a name for himself yet. But he will be making a name for himself very soon.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  I'm so pumped he's back in the story. All right. So let's pull the camera back a bit. Strabo is dead. Sinner and Marius have the, absolutely the upper hand. And presumably now they can just waltz into Rome.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no one to stop them.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  And do they behave with decorum, elegance and grace?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  They absolutely do not. Octavius, the consul, refuses to flee. Instead, he sits in his chair of office. And this is where he's surprised by Marius's men who chop him up into little pieces. Marius, by this stage, has gone completely psychotic, his bitterness and rage. You know, this is all that he is. He's an absolute monster. And he is out to get everyone whom he holds to blame for his recent misadventures. And some are murdered by his gangs of slaves, others are targeted for prosecution. And meanwhile, Dominic, you've been poo pooing this prophecy the whole way through the series. But you are going to have to eat your words because at this point,

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Marius is elected to his seventh consulship, the record breaking consulship. So that proves it.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  Wow. I'm like Wayne Rooney, having to row down the Hudson, which he did, if you recall. Because he made a foolish prophecy during the World Cup, that Norway wouldn't reach the quarterfinals.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  I mean, it would be great to see you rowing down a river.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  Well, that Wayne Rooney comparison that's dogged me for so long, I'm happy to lean into it once again. Do you know what, who Marius reminds me of at this point? So it's Colonel Kurtz melded with Daenerys Targaryen.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. He's, he's a fat 69 year old Daenerys Targaryen.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Probably too heavy for a dragon.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  He's gone mad. He's, he's like caressed by resentment and victimhood and he's killing everybody.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. All his men are out slaughtering everybody. Marius himself goes on a massive bender. He abandons himself completely to violent drinking bouts. And when he's not drunk and he's asleep, he's suffering terrible nightmares. And two weeks after he has been elected to his seventh consulship, he dies. And this grim, terrible old man at last is gone.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  But he dies of what? Booze?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Apoplexy, booze, over excitement. Basically, he's, you know, he's run his course.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  But he's died as he wanted.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  He's consul, he's drunk, he's killing people.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's the master of Rome. He's had his seventh consulship. I mean, who wouldn't want to be Gaius Marius at that point? Brilliant. Loving it.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  So he leaves behind him as the heir to his cause, a son. He is only 22 at this point. He's very good looking. He's a bit of a playboy and he is utterly committed to continuing the blood feud with Marius's enemies. And especially with Sulla. So the Merians are still on the scene, but the death of Marius effectively means that Sinner is now unchallenged as the leader of this new regime that has taken power in Rome. And the years that follow the death of Marius will be commemorated by the Romans as what they called Quinanum Tempest, the Age of Sinner. And he will maintain himself in the consulship for the next three years.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  So a succession of continuous consulships. And, you know, there's no nonsense about keeping his oath to Sulla, quite the contrary. Everything he does has as its goal, the destruction of his, his great enemy. And with Sulla absent in the east, Sinner knows that he, he has a breathing space at least. But they do, you know, he and his regime know what is threatening. They know that if Sulla is successful in his war, you know, should he defeat Mithridates? Should he survive to return to Rome with all his legions? Then there will be the showdown to end all showdowns. And so unsurprisingly, during these years, Sinner's priority

• 58:47Speaker 01

  is to prepare for the return of Sulla.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Okay, so. That's what's been going on in Rome. But all this time, Sulla has been away in the east prosecuting his war to try to restore Roman hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  He started in Macedon, didn't he? Macedon, which is of course a Roman province at this point. So how did it go?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, the reason he's gone to Macedon is he wants to secure it against the threat of that expeditionary force that Mithridates had sent to Athens after the Athenians and Mithridates had signed their treaty. And the arrival of Sulla and his army in Macedon is alarming for Mithridates' men because they know the calibre of the Romans. And so rather than confront them, they, they retreat southwards back to Athens. And they hold themselves up in the port of Athens, which is separate from the main body of the city. So the main body of the city of Athens is protected by walls. And so also is the port of Athens, Piraeus, that is also surrounded by walls.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  And it's in the port that Mithridates' force embed themselves. Because obviously from there, they can be supplied by Mithridates. You know, they, they have access to the sea. Meanwhile, what of Athens itself? Well, people may remember the guy in charge in Athens is this philosopher Aristion, who has by this point inevitably installed himself as its tyrant. And the situation facing the Athenians now is, I mean, it is a nightmare. So Aristion, I mean, he may be great at giving academic lectures. But the question is, is he any cop at fighting the world's most terrifying military machine?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Because I guess success in academia doesn't always mean that.

• 1:00:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  You're going to be much cop as a fighter.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  And does it prove that way for this fellow?

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  So the Athenians wake up one morning to their ultimate nightmare because they find camped out in front of their city walls, an army of vengeful legionaries commanded by Rome's greatest general. This is not what you want to see if you are a citizen of a rebellious Greek city. And especially not if you are a citizen of a city commanded by an academic, who I'm afraid to say proves himself sorely unsuited to prosecuting a war against the Romans.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  So Ariston's approach is to compose rude songs about Sulla's complexion and to teach it to all the Athenians and to get them to chant these songs from the battlements. And Aristion himself yells out assorted witticisms about Sulla and his wife, complete with extravagant hand gestures. So he's, he's like one of those academics on X or Blue Sky.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Blue Sky. He's a Blue Sky person.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Who disgraces themselves by getting, getting into abusive slagging matches with their enemies.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  I can think of so many examples. I mean, it, it makes me happy just to think of it, to be frank.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  So this is Ariston's approach. You know, he has these colleagues, his fellow philosophers, who watch this and think it's ridiculous. So there's another, another philosopher, a guy called Posidonius, who's very keen on Roman rule, thinks it's tremendous. And thought therefore that it was obviously mad for the Athenians to oppose the Romans. He completely despises Aristion. And he says that Ariston's behaviour is proof that swords should never be placed in the hands of children. So we're possibly being unfair to Ariston because actually the Athenians, under his command, they do put up a very lengthy resistance. But I guess that that probably owes more to fear than to Ariston's leadership qualities. Because of course, everyone in Athens knows what had happened to Corinth.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Corinth had been completely razed, you know, the city had vanished from the face of the earth. And also I guess they're hoping for reinforcements from Mithridates. They're allied to the king, maybe he will send troops over. But they wait and wait and wait, nothing arrives, they start to eat shoe leather, they start to eat rats. There are stories that cannibalism starts to be practised. And finally, Ariston sends a delegation to Sulla to try and negotiate terms. And they do what Athenian ambassadors in a tight corner always do, which is to discourse very windily about the glories of the city's past. And Sulla listens to them do this and he raises a hand and he silences them. And he says, Rome did not send me here to be lectured on ancient history.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Do you know what? I mean, I actually was always on Sulla's team anyway, but I'm even more on it now. He sounds great.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Well, Sulla is not, I mean, he's not Pete Hegseth. He's a very cultured, intelligent, literate man, very, very clever, very, very intellectual. But he is faced by open rebels against Roman rule. And so he is in no mood to show the glories of, you know, Athenian civilization, any respect whatsoever. So he needs to build siege engines. So he sends his engineers to go and chop down the woods in the, um, the groves where Plato and Aristotle had taught philosophy to their students and the, uh, the wood is used to build siege engines. And when at last, as was always going to happen, um, in March 86, the Romans break into Athens.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Sulla gives his troops full licence to do what they want to do. They can kill who they want to kill. They can loot what they want to loot. They can plunder what they want to plunder. And meanwhile, Aristion has flared up to the Acropolis, taken reference there, where he continues to defy Sulla, continues to chant his abusive slogans. I mean, absolutely mad behaviour. And inevitably, it doesn't take the Romans long to, to storm the Acropolis. It too is plundered and Aristion is clinging to the altar of Athena in the Parthenon. The Romans show that no respect. They drag him away and they force him to drink poison. And that is the end of Aristion.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  So meanwhile, what about Mithridates's army, which has been in the, in Peraeus? You described they were holed up in the ports. Have they just been watching and doing nothing the whole time?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Basically, yes, because Mithridates hasn't sent them any reinforcements. And instead, what he's done is to raise an absolutely massive army and send that overland. So it's going across the north of Greece and then down through the pass of Thermopylae towards Athens. And as it approaches Athens, Mithridates orders the troops who are holed up in the, the port of Athens, Peraeus, to evacuate and to go and join this invasion force. So they do this, uh, the port is left empty, the Romans march in and the port, they do absolutely flatten. However, Athens, Sulla decides, he's not going to obliterate Athens. Athens is just, is in the final reckoning, too famous, too celebrated. And so Sulla declares, I spare the living out of respect for the dead.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  But even though Athens has been spared the fate of Corinth, it is in a terrible state after this siege and after it's captured by Sulla's men. The streets are spattered in blood. It's been looted. Every last fig leaf of, of independence has been stripped away. And the fate of those who had served in Aristion's government is terrible. They're all executed. The supporters of this government are stripped of the vote. The democracy is effectively abandoned. And this really is the end of the Athenian democracy as something that has anything more than just a kind of, you know, antiquarian function. And the wreckage is inherited by all the businessmen who had fled from Athens when the coup happened to Sulla.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  And now they're reinstalled, um, basically as, as Roman puppets. And from this point on, Athens is a subject city. It, it has no future as a power with any pretensions to any influence whatsoever. From this point on, basically, it's going to serve, I suppose, it's going to serve Romans as Oxford serves Americans as a kind of, you know, a, a high end finishing school, a kind of, you know, a university town.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  All right. So that's the end of Athens. That's sad. But Sulla and Mithridates's invasion force, presumably they are now heading for a bit of a showdown, are they? Cause there's two big armies in Greece and that there's only room for one of them.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Well, there's one absolutely colossal army and then the Sulla's army, which is hugely outnumbered. However, the Romans have never lost a major pitched battle in Greece. Uh, and Sulla is, you know, he's a man who backs himself. We know this by now. And so he marches out very coolly. He meets Mithridates invasion force. Um, it's been divided into two. Sulla annihilates both of them. And that's the end of Mithridates invasion force. And it's done very quickly and brutally.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  That was quick.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  That essentially is the end of the war. Sulla has done what he set out to do. He's taken Athens back and he's what, he, he has destroyed Mithridates offensive capability. And he opens negotiations with the, uh, the general of this invasion force who survived the, the defeat. And then the following autumn, amazingly, he meets with Mithridates in person on the shores of the Hellespoch, so up by Gallipoli. And this is very unusual behaviour from a Roman, because the Romans do not usually negotiate with the kind of person who might have been responsible for wiping out tens of thousands of their compatriots, which is what Mithridates had done. But actually, both men have good reason to, um, to reach terms.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  So for Mithridates, I mean, he knows the game is up. He's lost all his troops. He'll be lucky to survive. And if he can reach terms with Sulla, then that's tremendous for him. That effectively, in the situation that he's in, is a result. Equally, Sulla doesn't have time to finish Mithridates off. He really urgently needs to get back to Italy. Cause as we've been hearing, things have not been developing in Italy necessarily to Sulla's advantage. Because by this point, he has been declared a public enemy by Sinner and his regime. And he's been condemned to death. His property has been razed and his family and his supporters have been forced to flee.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  So when Mithridates says to Sulla, look, this is what I'll do. I will withdraw from all the Roman territory that I had conquered. So effectively the province of Asia, I will give it back to you. You can have all the cities. I will withdraw to the limits of the kingdom of Pontus. And I will accept Roman weapons inspectors coming in to make sure that I'm behaving myself, that I'm not kind of redeveloping my offensive capabilities.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  Hands blix.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yes, hands us blixers. And Sulla says, okay. And he gives the killer of all these Romans and Italians a peck on the cheek and the treaty is signed. And this is a massive result for Mithridates, because no one ever has emerged so unscathed from a war with the Republic. I mean, this is a really good result for him. I mean, the people for whom it's a disaster are the, um, the Greek cities of Asia. Cause these are all the guys who'd personally slaughtered all the Roman and Italian businessmen. And now they've come back under Roman rule. So they have a terrible time of it, because not only do they have to pay five years back tax, but they're also obliged to pay the full costs of the war and the costs of the Roman garrisons that Sulla slaps on them.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  So they go back to being leached white of their cash, which is what had been happening before Mithridates invasion.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  On the other hand, though, if you're, if you're living in Asia, it's a sign that you can fight the Romans and get away with it.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  I don't think that is the lesson they draw.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  I think, I think the lesson they draw is don't mess with the Romans and they will not mess with the Romans ever again. You know, they have, they have learnt their lesson. As too has Athens, because after he's sorted out Asia, Sulla returns across the Aegean to Athens. And there he inflicts further humiliations on the city. I mean, a little bit, I mean, always dangerous to compare people from history to Nazis. But there is a slight element of gurring, turning up and having the pick of an art gallery to what Sulla does next. So there is this great unfinished temple to Zeus, um, which has been, been taken centuries and centuries to, to complete. And so Sulla pulls down all the, the various columns of this temple and has them ready to be transported to Rome.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  He also loots the city's libraries of all their holdings. So henceforward, if philosophers like Aristion want to study the original manuscripts of Aristotle, they'll have to go to Rome. And I think that this is a very pointed insult from Sulla at the academic community in Athens. And he also rounds up a large number of Greek athletes so that they can feature in the triumph that he is planning. And the Olympics are actually left so denuded of star quality that in the next Olympics, they can only stage the sprint every, all the other competitions.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Quickly anyway, boring.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So probably the worst Olympics ever. But of course, you know, is, is Sulla counting his chickens before they've hatched by planning a triumph? He has been declared a public enemy. So in constitutional terms, his command is illegal. And not only that, but Sinner, who is by far the ablest of his enemies, back in Italy, he is planning an expedition from Italy across the Adriatic to Greece to confront Sulla before Sulla can cross the Adriatic and come to Italy. So that massive showdown that both sides have been anticipating for much of this episode, Rome's first full blown civil war, that is now imminent. It is gonna happen.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  Wow. So we are building towards the great showdown. And in the next episode, our climactic episode of this series, we will find out what happens to Sulla. Will he make himself master of Rome? Will he celebrate his triumph and what then? And of course, this is the key step, you might argue, uh, looking back towards the establishment of a new kind of Rome, an imperial Rome, a generation or two later. So there's only one way to find out what happens and that's listen to the next episode. There's no, there's literally no other way that you will find out the story. There are no other historical accounts of this. There will just be the Rest is History's account.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Now, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, you can listen to that final episode right now. If you're not a member of the club, if you've identified what the winning side is and you want to be on it, you don't want to be prescribed and have your property seized, then I would suggest you go to therestishistory.com, sign up, you will get the final episode, you get a host of unbelievable additional benefits. But also you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're on the right side of history, the winning side. You are not a member of Marius's party. So I encourage you to do that. I also encourage you to sign up for the Rest is History's free newsletter. It's completely free and it has all kinds of fascinating articles about this story and other stories, feedback from listeners and all kinds of things like that. So it's absolutely brilliant.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  Tom, I actually can't wait to find out what happens to Sulla. So I'm going off now, I'm going off now to listen to that final episode. Bye bye.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Very wise.

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  Bye bye.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

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• 1:14:47Speaker 03

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• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  Is history anything more than the story of heroes and villains? Of course it is, but not in our brand new The Rest is History book, A History of the World in Fifty-One Heroes and Villains. Now, in this book, we have picked out some of our very favourite characters from, uh, the last few years of The Rest is History. So we've got Genghis Khan, we have Cyrus the Great, we have, uh, Marie Antoinette. And obviously we have Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Now, some of these people are, uh, friends of the show. Some of them are unwanted acquaintances. Some of them are downright foes of the show. But we had one rule, they had to be interesting and there had to be interesting stories about them.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

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