Cicero - Anthony Everitt [23]
It was another death soon after that caused the conflagration that set Italy alight. Drusus knew that he was at personal risk and seldom went out of doors, conducting business from a poorly lit portico at his house on the Palatine Hill. One evening as he was dismissing the gathering he suddenly screamed that he had been stabbed and fell with the words on his lips. A leather worker’s knife was found driven into his hip, but the assassin was never caught.
Drusus’s murder was the final blow to Italian aspirations. Communities across the peninsula rose in revolt. The struggle, called the War of the Allies, was bloody and bitter. Young, well-connected and ambitious Romans were expected to serve on military campaigns; although Cicero seldom showed any interest in soldiering, the war was too close to home for him to ignore. He temporarily abandoned his studies to serve in the army of Cnaeus Pompeius Strabo as a member of his general staff. He met the commander’s son for the first time, young Cnaeus Pompeius (whom we know as Pompey). Exact contemporaries, they were about sixteen or seventeen years old—and of course without an inkling of how closely their destinies were to be interlinked in future years.
Rome sustained some serious defeats and there was a distinct risk that the rebellion, which was centered on the Adriatic side of Italy, might spread. The neighboring Etruscans and the Umbrians seemed on the point of secession. So in 90 the Senate, facing disaster, gave way. They awarded Roman citizenship to all those Allies who stayed loyal and, it seems, also to those who surrendered. This was decisive, and, although fighting continued for some time at a terrible cost in human lives and suffering, Rome emerged the military victor—and the political loser.
Italy was now united and very gradually the old cultural divisions and languages of the peninsula gave way to an overall Latinity. In the short run, the shock to the Republic’s stability and to the self-confidence of its ruling class was great. And there was worse to come. The War of the Allies signaled a new bloodier spiral into social and political chaos. Soldiers in the Forum, elder statesmen massacred, half the Empire in revolt—nothing like it had been seen in the history of the Republic. It was nearly ten years before something approaching normality returned, in 82; during this period, according to a modern estimate, 200,000 lost their lives from a free population in Rome and Italy of about 4,500,000.
With typical, tricky mean-mindedness, the Senate corralled the new Italian citizens into a small number of the tribus, or voting groups, into which the General Assembly was divided, thus reducing their electoral impact. A radical Tribune, Publius Sulpicius Rufus, now intervened; he had been a friend of the dead Drusus and promoted a policy of fair play for the newly enfranchised Italians. In 88, he brought forward a proposal to distribute the new citizens across the complete range of the tribus. Uproar ensued among the optimates and Sulpicius, the latest in the line of civilian reformers, recruited 600 young equites as bodyguards; they were nicknamed the “anti-Senators.”
One of the Consuls in 87 was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, a descendant of an old but impoverished family who had arrived comparatively late on the political scene. Sulla had misspent his youth among a demimonde of actors and hustlers and first made a name for himself on the battlefield when he was thirty-one. His appearance was remarkable, for his face was disfigured by a birthmark which people said looked like a mulberry with oatmeal sprinkled on it. A conservative, he aimed to restore the Senate’s traditional authority. His Consulship was a reward for signal achievements in the War of the Allies. He was given a military command once his Consular year was over to deal with a serious crisis