History Against the Pagans 1 part 14/24

But Lucius Julius Caesar, after he had fled defeated at Aesernia, having gathered forces from every side and fighting against the Samnites and Lucani, killed many thousands of the enemy. And when he had been hailed imperator by the army and had sent messengers to Rome about the victory, the senate laid aside the saga—that is, the garb of mourning which it had assumed at the outbreak of the Social War—as this hope smiled upon it, and recovered the ancient dignity of the toga. Then Marius slew six thousand of the Marsi and stripped seven thousand of their arms. Sulla, sent with twenty-four cohorts to Aesernia, where the citizens and soldiers of Rome were being pressed by the tightest siege, by a very great battle and the greatest slaughter of the enemy saved the city and the allies. Gnaeus...

Pompeius routed the Picentes in a serious battle, by which victory the senate recovered the broad-striped toga and the other insignia of dignity, when, on the first breathing-space afforded by Caesar's victory, it had assumed merely the togas. Porcius Cato the praetor conquered the Etruscans, and Plotius the legate the Umbrians, with very much blood spent and the most difficult toil. In the consulship of Gnaeus Pompeius and Lucius Porcius Cato, Pompeius long besieged the city of Asculum; yet he would not have stormed it, had he not, by a most grievous onslaught, overcome the populace as it burst forth into the plain. Eighteen thousand of the Marsi were slain in that battle, together with their commander Fraucus, and three thousand taken captive.

But four thousand Italian men, fugitives from that slaughter, having gathered into a single column, by chance had climbed up the ridge of a mountain, where, overcome and stiffened by the snows, they froze to death a pitiable death. For just as they had stood, stunned with fear of the enemy, some leaning back against tree-trunks or rocks, others propping themselves on their own arms, all with eyes open and teeth bared, they appeared like living men; and there was no sign of death to those looking from afar except the long-lasting immobility, which by no means can the vital energy of human life long endure.

On the same day the Picentes engaged and were defeated; their leader Vidacilius, having summoned his chief men, after a magnificent banquet and lavish cups, challenging them all to follow his example, drank poison and so was consumed—while all praised his deed, but none followed it. In the six hundred and sixty-first year from the founding of the City, when the Roman army had gone to besiege Pompeii, and Postumius Albinus, a man of consular rank, then a legate of Lucius Sulla, had by intolerable arrogance roused the hatred of all the soldiers against himself, he was killed with stones. Sulla the consul declared that civil bloodshed could be expiated only by the enemy's blood; and the army, stirred by the consciousness of this deed, attacked the battle so fiercely that each man saw he must perish unless he conquered.

Eighteen thousand of the Samnites were slain in that battle; he also pursued and killed Iuventius, the Italian leader, and a great multitude of his people. Porcius Cato the consul, having the Marian forces, when he had done some things vigorously, boasted that Gaius Marius had not done greater things; and on this account, while he was waging war against the Marsi at Lake Fucinus, he was laid low by the son of Gaius Marius amid the tumult of war, as though by an unknown perpetrator. Gaius Gabinius the legate was killed in the storming of the enemy's camp. The Marrucini and the Vestini were laid waste by Sulpicius, Pompeius' legate, in pursuit. Popaedius and Obsidius, Italian commanders, were overwhelmed and killed by the same Sulpicius near the river Teanus in a horrible battle.

Pompeius, having entered Asculum, beat with rods and struck down with the axe the prefects, the centurions, and all their chief men; he sold the slaves and all the plunder under the spear; the rest he ordered to depart free indeed, but naked and destitute. And although the senate hoped that there would be some relief from this plunder for the use of the public treasury, Pompeius nevertheless contributed nothing of it to the needy treasury. For at the same time, when the treasury had been utterly exhausted and the funds for the pay of grain were lacking, the public places which around the circuit of the Capitol had been handed over into the possession of the pontiffs, augurs, decemvirs, and flamens, were, with want compelling, sold, and a sufficient amount of money, which might be a subsidy for the time of want, was received.

Indeed at that time, into the very bosom of the city, the wealth scraped together from every side—of all the cities overthrown and the lands stripped bare—was being heaped up, while Rome herself, driven by shameful want, was auctioning off her own choicest parts. Wherefore let her then consider her own times, when, like an insatiable belly devouring everything and ever hungry, more wretched herself than all the cities which she made wretched, leaving nothing, she had nothing, and was driven by the goad of domestic famine to the continuation of warlike unrest. At the same time King Sothimus, having entered Greece with great Thracian auxiliaries, ravaged all the territories of Macedonia, and at last, overcome by Gaius Sentius the praetor, was compelled to return into his kingdom.

In the six hundred and sixty-second year from the founding of the City, while the Social War was not yet finished, the first civil war was set in motion at Rome; and in the same year the Mithridatic War, though less infamous, was nonetheless no less grievous, was begun. Indeed concerning the span of the Mithridatic War it has been variously handed down, whether it first began from this point or rather then especially blazed up, particularly since some report it to have been waged for thirty, others for forty, years. But although these things, heaped up in confusion, blazed up amid evils waged in the same times, yet by me each shall be set forth separately, even if briefly.

Marius—while the consul Sulla was about to set out with his army against Mithridates into Asia, yet was halting in Campania on account of the remnants of the Social War—aspired to a seventh consulship and to undertake the Mithridatic War. When Sulla learned of this, being a truly impatient young man and goaded by intemperate anger, he first encamped before the City with four legions, where he killed Gratidius, Marius' legate, as it were the first victim of the civil war; then he burst into the City with his army and demanded torches to set the City ablaze. When all had hidden themselves in fear, he came swiftly with his column along the Sacred Way into the forum.

Marius, when he had vainly attempted to stir up the nobility, inflame the plebs, and at last to arm the equestrian order against Sulla, finally, having incited the slaves with the hope of liberty and plunder to arms, and having dared in vain to resist, at last withdrew to the Capitol. But when the Sullan cohorts rushed in upon him there, he fled in all directions with great slaughter of his men. There then Sulpicius, Marius' colleague, was laid low, betrayed by his own slave; the slave himself, however, the consuls decreed should be freed for having pointed out an enemy, but for having betrayed his master should be cast down from the Tarpeian Rock. Marius, fleeing, when he had been hemmed in by the pressure of his pursuers, hid himself in the marshes of Minturnae.

out of which, unhappily smeared with mud and ignominiously dragged forth, brought in a base spectacle to Minturnae and thrust into prison, he terrified by his mere countenance the executioner sent to him. Then, having slipped from his chains, he fled across to Africa; and having summoned his son out of Utica, where he was being kept under guard, he immediately returned to Rome and was joined in a partnership of crimes with Cinna the consul. Therefore, to overthrow the entire commonwealth, they divided the army among themselves into four parts. Three legions indeed were given to Marius; Gnaeus Carbo was set over a part of the forces.

Sertorius received a part—that very Sertorius, already here a kindler and partaker of civil war, who even after this was ended afterwards stirred up another war in Spain, which he dragged out through many years with the greatest disasters to the Romans. The remaining portion of the army followed Cinna. Furthermore Gnaeus Pompeius, who had been summoned by the senate with an army to aid the commonwealth, and who had long held himself in suspense in the pursuit of revolution, despised by Marius—or rather by Cinna—betook himself to the other consul Octavius, and soon clashed with Sertorius. The intervention of night broke off the unhappy battle; six hundred soldiers on each side were butchered.

On the next day, when the bodies were being sorted out for burial in a mingled heap, a Pompeian soldier recognized the body of his own brother, whom he himself had killed: for in the clash the helmet had taken from each the recognition of the face, and frenzy the consideration of it. Yet there is little of guilt as regards ignorance, so that he might seem not to have known about a brother whom it is not doubted he knew to be a fellow citizen. And so the victor more unhappy than the vanquished, when he recognized both his brother's body and his own parricide, cursing civil wars, at once piercing his own breast through with his sword and pouring out at the same time tears and blood, threw himself upon his brother's corpse.

And what did this avail toward the confusion of the cruel undertaking—that at the very first outset of the civil wars an infamous report spread abroad, that brothers indeed unknowing but fellow citizens knowing had clashed, that the brother who was victor in crime had sought the spoils of his slain brother, and soon, the guilty author of so great a monstrosity, had avenged by his own death, with the same sword and the same hand, the parricide which he had committed? Did so sad an example move the animosities of the contending parties? Did the terror of error repel from anyone the danger of crime? Did this natural piety and reverence—which is common even with the beasts—which one man committed by slaying and perishing, because he trembled that it could be done against himself, and, overcome by conscience, withdrew himself from such an undertaking?

Nay rather, in the nearly forty years that followed, civil wars were so continually prolonged that the greatness of praise came to be reckoned by being weighed against the greatness of crime. For all, after such a precedent, in such warfare would have shrunk from the perils of parricides, had they not willed the parricides themselves. Therefore Marius, having entered the colony of Ostia by force, there practiced every kind of lust, avarice, and cruelty. Pompeius perished, struck by a thunderbolt; his army, however, seized by a plague, was almost entirely consumed. For eleven thousand men of Pompeius' camp died, and six thousand of the side of the consul Octavius were blasted.

Marius burst with hostile force into the cities of Antium and Arioia and killed all in them except the traitors, and gave their goods over to his own men to plunder. Afterward the consul Cinna with his legions and Marius with his fugitive slaves, having entered the City, killed the noblest men of the senate and very many men of consular rank. But how small a portion is this of the misery displayed? Have I defined in a single word the slaughter of the good, of which there was so great a number, so great a duration, so great a cruelty, and so great a variety? Yet it is fairer that I should have withdrawn something of usefulness from my case than that I should have heaped so much horror upon men's knowledge, whether these things be set before the learned or the unlearned.

For it is of our fatherland, of our citizens, and of our forefathers that we speak these things—men who, harassed by these evils, did such abominable deeds that even those who hear of them in later ages shudder, men who assuredly do not wish these things to be too greatly exaggerated, either by the moderation of sufficient knowledge, if they know them, or by the regard of merciful reverence, if they do not know them. Therefore Marius, when he was heaping up the heads of the slain citizens—brought to the banquets, offered up at the Capitols, gathered at the Rostra for a spectacle and an ornament—and had seized a seventh consulship together with Cinna, consul for the third time, at the very beginning of his consular command was at last snatched away by a tardy death. Cinna supplied the deaths of the good with the slaughter of the wicked.

For when the band of fugitive slaves brought in by Marius was insatiable for plundering and rendered no part of the booty to the consuls, the authors of the plunder, it was enticed into the forum as though for the purpose of pay, surrounded by soldiers, and destroyed unarmed. Eight thousand of the fugitives were slain that day in the forum of the City, and the same Cinna, consul for the fourth time, was killed by his own army. Meanwhile the surviving senators, who had escaped by flight the power of Cinna, the cruelty of Marius, and the madness of Fimbria and the boldness of Sertorius, having crossed over into Greece, by entreaties compelled Sulla to bring help to the imperiled—nay, now almost lost—fatherland. Therefore Sulla, as soon as he reached the Campanian shore, overwhelmed the consul Norbanus in battle.

Seven thousand Romans then had Romans killed, six thousand of the same were taken captive, and a hundred and twenty-four of Sulla's side fell. But Fabius Hadrianus, who held authority as propraetor, aspiring to a kingdom of Africa by means of a band of slaves, was burned alive with all his household by their masters at Utica, faggots having been heaped together. Damasippus the praetor, at the instigation of the consul Marius, most cruelly killed Quintus Scaevola, Gaius Carbo, Lucius Domitius, and Publius Antistius, who had been summoned into the senate-house as though for consultation. The bodies of the slain were dragged by the public executioners with a hook and cast into the Tiber. At the same time Sulla's generals waged very many battles against the Marian parties with a most unhappy good fortune. For both Quintus...

Metellus cut down the forces of Carrinas and overran his camp, and Gnaeus Pompeius grievously slaughtered Carbo's cavalry. There was then also a very great battle of Sulla and the younger Marius at Sacriportus, in which twenty-five thousand of Marius' army were slain, as Claudius writes. Pompeius also stripped Carbo of his camp, and, pursuing him as he fled, now by cutting down, now by forcing to surrender, deprived him of the greater part of his army. Metellus overwhelmed the column of Norbanus, where nine thousand of the Marian side were slain. Lucullus, when he was being besieged by Quintius, broke out and in a sudden battle destroyed the besieging army; for more than ten thousand are reported to have been slain there then.

Then Sulla, with Camponius the leader of the Samnites and the remaining forces of Carrinas, joined battle before the very City and the Colline Gate at the ninth hour of the day, and at last won in a most grievous battle. Eighty thousand men are said to have been routed there; twelve thousand surrendered themselves; the rest of the multitude, turned to flight, the insatiable wrath of the victorious citizens consumed. Sulla, as soon as he entered the City victorious, killed three thousand men who had surrendered through envoys, unarmed and unsuspecting, contrary to right and contrary to the pledge given. Very many also then, not to say the innocent, but even men of Sulla's own party, were slain, of whom they say there were more than nine thousand. Thus free slaughters throughout...

the City were carried on, with assassins wandering everywhere as either wrath or plunder enticed each one. Therefore, when now all openly groaned at what individuals had feared, Quintus Catulus said openly to Sulla: 'With whom at last shall we be victors, if in war we kill the armed, in peace the unarmed?' Then Sulla, on the advice of Lucius Fursidius the chief centurion, was the first to introduce that infamous tablet of proscription. The first proscription was of eighty men, among whom were four of consular rank—Carbo, Marius, Norbanus, and Scipio—and among them Sertorius, then most especially to be feared. Likewise another was published with five hundred names, which when Lollius—being indeed carefree and conscious of nothing against himself—...

was reading it, when he suddenly came upon his own name there, while in alarm he was withdrawing himself from the forum with covered head, he was killed. But not even in the tablets themselves did there seem to be any faith or end of the evils. For some whom they had proscribed they slew, others, after they had slain them, they proscribed. Nor was the manner of death itself simple or of one condition, so that even the right of enemies might be preserved in the slaying of citizens—enemies who demand nothing of the vanquished except their life. For Sulla ordered Marcus Marius, dragged out of a goatherd's hut, to be bound, and led across the Tiber to the tomb of the Lutatii, his eyes gouged out and his limbs cut off little by little or even broken, to be butchered. After him the senator Publius Laetorius and Venuleius the triumvir were killed. The head of Marcus Marius was sent to Praeneste.

When he saw this, Gaius Marius, seized by utter despair, while he was being besieged by Lucretius, that he might not fall into the hands of his enemies, joined with Telesinus in a mutual death-stroke. And while he himself drove his hand more violently against his opponent as they clashed, he blunted the arm of the one who struck him by the wound near his own body. So when that man had been slain, he himself, only lightly wounded, offered his neck to his own slave. Sulla cut the throat of the praetor Carrinas. Then, setting out from Praeneste, he ordered all the leaders of the Marian forces—that is, the legates, quaestors, prefects, and tribunes—to be killed. Pompey, when Carbo was attempting to flee from the island of Cossyra into Egypt, had him dragged back to himself into Sicily and killed him, together with several of his associates.

Sulla was created dictator, so that his lust for domination and cruelty might be both armed and veiled by the reverence of an honorable and preeminent title. Pompey, having crossed over into Africa, made a sortie around Utica and killed eighteen thousand men. In that war Domitius, the Marian commander, while he fought among the foremost, was slain. The same Pompey, pursuing Hiarbas, king of Numidia, who was fleeing, caused him to be stripped of all his forces by Bogud, son of Bocchus, king of the Moors; and when Hiarbas had at once returned to Bulla, the town being handed over to him, he killed him. And so, when Publius Servilius and Appius Claudius had been created consuls, Sulla at last was seen as a private citizen. With this end were concluded two most deadly wars: the Italian Social War and the Sullan Civil War.

These wars, dragged out over ten years, consumed more than one hundred and fifty thousand Romans; and Rome lost in this civil war as great a number of her choicest men and native-born soldiers as, in an earlier time—when she was already looking warily about herself against Alexander the Great—the census found among men of differing ages. Besides this, she lost twenty-four men of consular rank, six of praetorian, sixty of aedilician rank, and nearly two hundred senators—apart from the countless peoples of all Italy, who were destroyed here and there without discrimination. Let no one deny, if he can, that Rome conquered with the very same loss by which Italy lost. O for shame! Do then even these times have any need of an ambiguous comparison? Nay, most of all, they say:

for what is so fitly compared to civil wars as civil wars? Or will it perhaps be said that even in these times there have been no civil wars? To which we shall answer: they ought indeed more justly to be called social wars, but it serves our purpose if they be named civil. For when in their causes, their names, and their passions all things are shown to be alike, then the reverence due to the Christian religion claims for itself so much the more in these matters as the angered power of the victor has presumed the less. For whereas for the most part wicked tyrants, rashly invading the commonwealth and usurping a royal standing, have torn away the body of the Roman empire and from it have either brought in wars unjust of themselves or stirred up wars just against themselves—with the Britons and Gauls both raised up as peoples and equipped:

these wars—as near as they were to foreign wars, so far were they from civil ones—why should they not rightly be called social wars, since the Romans themselves nowhere named the wars of Sertorius, or Perpenna, or Crixus, or Spartacus as civil? In such a defection, then, or rebellion of allies, Rome would now in any case labor under less odium, if perhaps there had arisen either a grievous battle or a bloody victory. Yet, since in these our times all things bring more of necessity and less of shame—that is, the cause, the battle, the victory—whether for extinguishing the insolence of tyrants, or for restraining the defection of allies, or for branding men with an example of vengeance:

to whom, at last, is it doubtful how much more mildly and how much more clemently civil wars are now waged—stirred up, as they say—nay, rather repressed than waged? For who has heard of a single civil war carried on for ten years in these times? Who could recall one hundred and fifty thousand men slain in a single war—even of enemies by enemies, not to say of citizens by citizens? Who has known that multitude of the best and most illustrious men—which it would be long to set forth—butchered in time of peace? Finally, who has dreaded, read, or felt those infamous lists of those marked for death?

Should it not rather be known to all that, with all men composed in one peace and made secure in one and the same welfare, the vanquished and the victors alike rejoiced together in a common gladness; nay, that even in the so vast provinces, cities, and peoples of the whole Roman empire, scarcely a few have ever at any time arisen whom a just vengeance has condemned even against the victor's will? And, that I may not load words upon words, I would say it not rashly: that as great a band of common soldiers was lately extinguished, even in war, as was then slain in peace among the nobility. Therefore, when Sulla was dead, Lepidus, a champion of the Marian party, rising against Catulus, the Sullan commander, stirred up again the still-living ashes of the civil wars. Twice then was it fought in battle;

very many of the Romans—now by the very fewness of the wretched, and still raging with that frenzy—were slain. The city of the Albans, assailed by siege and tormented by extreme famine, was preserved by the surrender of its pitiable remnants; there, then, Scipio, the son of Lepidus, was captured and killed. Brutus, fleeing into Cisalpine Gaul with Pompey in pursuit, was slain at Regium. So this civil war, no less by the madness of Catulus than by weariness of Sullan cruelty, vanished—like fire in stubble—with the same swiftness with which it had blazed up.

In the six hundred and seventy-third year from the founding of the City, while on every side the crashes of wars resounded—one of which was in Spain, another in Pamphylia, a third in Macedonia, a fourth in Dalmatia—the Roman commonwealth, still bloodless and drained by intestine destruction as though by fevers, was compelled to drive back by arms the most valiant nations of the West and the North. For Sertorius indeed, a man powerful in cunning and daring, when he had belonged to the Marian party, fleeing Sulla, slipped away out of Africa into the Spains and roused the most warlike nations to arms. Against him, to define it briefly, two commanders were sent, Metellus and Domitius; of whom Domitius was overwhelmed, together with his army, by Hirtuleius, Sertorius's lieutenant.

Manlius, proconsul of Gaul, having crossed over into Spain with three legions and fifteen hundred horsemen, joined an ill-fated battle with Hirtuleius; stripped by him of camp and forces, he fled back almost alone into the town of Ilerda. Metellus, worn out by many battles, wandering through trackless places, wearied the enemy by delay until he could join forces with Pompey's camp. Pompey, having drawn together his army at Pallantia, when he tried in vain to defend the city of Lauro, which Sertorius was then besieging, was beaten and fled. Sertorius, having overcome and routed Pompey, most bloodily plundered captured Lauro; the remaining column of the people of Lauro, which had survived the slaughter, he led off into Lusitania in pitiable captivity.

Moreover he boasted that Pompey—that is, that famous commander of the Romans—had been vanquished by him, the man whom Rome, endowed with great confidence, had sent to this war not in place of a consul but in place of consuls. Galba writes that Pompey had then thirty thousand foot and a thousand horse, but he records that Sertorius had sixty thousand foot and eight thousand horse. Afterward, however, Hirtuleius, having engaged with Metellus at Italica, a city of Baetica, lost twenty thousand soldiers, and, defeated, fled with a few into Lusitania. Pompey took Belgida, a noble city of Celtiberia. Then Sertorius, engaging with Pompey, killed ten thousand of his soldiers; but on the other wing, where Pompey was winning, he himself lost nearly as many.

Besides these, many battles were fought between them. Memmius, Pompey's quaestor and likewise his sister's husband, was killed. The brothers of Hirtuleius were slain. Perpenna, who had joined himself to Sertorius, was crushed. Finally Sertorius himself, in the tenth year at last of the war he had begun, was killed by the treachery of his own men—the same by which Viriathus too had been slain—and so put an end to the war and gave the Romans a victory without glory; although afterward a part of his army followed Perpenna, who, defeated by Pompey, was slain together with his whole army. And when all the cities had been received by voluntary surrender without delay, only two held out, namely Uxama and Calagurris; of these Pompey overthrew Uxama, and Afranius, having reduced Calagurris by a continuous siege and

destroyed it with final slaughter and burning, when it had been driven by pitiable want to infamous foods. The slayers of Sertorius judged that a reward was not even to be sought from the Romans, since indeed they remembered that it had formerly been denied to the slayers of Viriathus. And although they then achieved Roman security by no reward, nevertheless Spain, ever strong in fidelity and in strength, while she has given to the commonwealth the best and most invincible kings, has never from the beginning down to the present day either sent forth from herself any of the tyrants, or let go alive and in power any tyrant rushing in upon her from without.

Meanwhile Claudius, having drawn by lot the Macedonian war, attempted by war to drive from the borders of Macedonia the various nations which are spread about the Rhodope mountains and were then most cruelly ravaging Macedonia—for among other things horrible to tell and to hear which they did to their captives, when there was need of a cup, they would seize the bloody, still-haired skulls of human heads, smear them over through the inner cavities where the brain had been badly scooped out, and use them eagerly and without horror as though they were real cups; of these the most bloodthirsty and most monstrous were the Scordisci—these, then, as I said, Claudius attempted by war to expel from the borders of Macedonia, and exposed himself to great masses of evils; whence, being sick at heart and hemmed in by cares, and on top of this seized by disease, he perished.

His successor Scribonius, declining the force of the nations that had been attempted in the previous war, turned his arms into Dardania and overcame it. But Publius Servilius, the former consul, most cruelly attacking Cilicia and Pamphylia, while he strove to subdue them, almost destroyed them. He took Lycia and its cities, having besieged and overwhelmed them. Besides this, ranging over Mount Olympus, he overthrew Phaselis, demolished Corycus, and, having explored the slopes of the Taurus range that incline toward Cilicia, he reduced the Isaurians, broken by war, under his sway; he was the first of the Romans to lead an army through the Taurus and to make a boundary-road for the journey.