Cicero - Anthony Everitt [13]
The savior of the day held the Consulship a record seven times, but, for all that, he was a clumsy politician. He made sure that his demobilizing veterans were given allotments of land by founding colonies in various parts of the Mediterranean. He was helped by an unscrupulous and radical Tribune, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus. Marius’s popularity with the chauvinistic Roman mob fell sharply when it emerged that some of the colonies were to be for people from the Allied communities as well as for Roman citizens. In an illegal action that had bleak implications for the future, Marius brought soldiers into the Forum to put down a disturbance against the reforms.
In 100 BC Saturninus, bidding for a third year as Tribune, overreached himself and his chief rival in the election campaign was killed in a riot. Marius, who was in the last resort a constitutionalist, abandoned his ally. The Senate declared a state of emergency and Saturninus holed himself up on the Capitol Hill overlooking the Forum. Marius cut off the rebels’ water supply and forced their surrender. To protect them from being lynched, he locked them inside the Senate House. Probably without his sanction, some youths climbed up onto the roof and killed the prisoners by hurling roof tiles down on them.
Although he had not been directly involved in the killings, a young man called Caius Rabirius was reported to have gotten hold of Saturninus’s head and carried it around the table at a dinner party as a joke. It was an incident he would come to regret bitterly more than thirty-five years later when a new generation of radical politicians sought belated revenge. It would also cast a shadow across Cicero’s path.
The Senate, back in control, repealed Saturninus’s reforming legislation and a discredited Marius, out of favor both with the People and the ruling elite, withdrew into private life. The Republic subsided into an uneasy calm, which lasted from 99 to 91. The great political and constitutional issues of the time remained unsolved. The agricultural question had not been permanently answered: where would the land be found for the superannuated soldiers of Rome’s next war? The disgruntled Allied communities in Italy continued to agitate for their rights. Rome’s swollen population of unemployed immigrants from the countryside was a bonfire waiting to be lit. The ruling class resisted giving its most talented members long-term commands or postings for fear of creating overmighty citizens; as a result, deep-seated problems at home and abroad were left untended.
To the uninstructed eye, Rome was at the height of its power and wealth. It controlled a vast empire that stretched from Spain to Asia Minor. No serious external threat was in sight or could be imagined. However, behind the facade of this magnificent edifice the internal structure was unsound. The walls could not bear the weight they were carrying. Sooner or later collapse was inevitable.
This was the self-defeating political system that Cicero and his contemporaries inherited. AS boys and young men they witnessed the demolition gangs move in.
2
“ALWAYS BE THE BEST, MY BOY, THE BRAVEST”
From Arpinum to Rome: 106–82 BC
Looking back towards the end of his life, Marcus Tullius Cicero recalled the scenes of his childhood in the countryside near the town of Arpinum with much affection. “Whenever I can get out of Rome for a few days, especially during the summer, I come to this lovely and healthful spot, although I can’t often manage it,” he tells a friend in one of the fictional dialogues he wrote on philosophical themes. “This is really my country, and my brother’s, for we come from a very old local family. It is here we have our sacred rituals, it is here our people came from, it is here you can detect our ancestors’ footprints.”
Cicero could not claim