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

Introduction

0:00The king is the lord. From Focus Features and the acclaimed director of Jason Bourne. The king says work harder, you work harder. Starring Andrew Garfield. There's enough! We've given you enough! In a land of kings, one man will defy an empire. There will be no peace until we are free. And ignite a revolution. Ten thousand rebels converge on London. Based on the true story behind the legend of Robin Hood. We rule ourselves now. The Uprising. Rated R. Under 17 on a minute without parent. Only in theater September 10. Discovered at Dolby Cinema.

0:30This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked. Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas.

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Sulla marches on Rome

2:27So it happened that Marius was selected to command the war against Mithridates in place of Sulla.

2:58When 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 this might go down with the soldiers, he urged them to prepare for such orders as he might give them.

3:36The 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 quaestor, deserted him, since they refused to be complicit in an attack on their own country.

4:14As 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 Arian, a 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 BC, and it is the decision by a Roman commander to lead an army for the very first time against Rome itself to attack his own capital city.

4:58Tom, 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 century's time, the launch of the Roman Empire under Augustus.

The rivalry between Marius and Sulla

5:13So, why don't you fill us in on the circumstances that have brought us to this extraordinary point? 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 louche, ruthless, much younger than Marius, and much posher.

5:51So, 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. And by 88, it's not yet over, but the Romans are by now on the front foot. At one point, it looked 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.

6:29But 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, abutting the Black Sea, and the king of this area, the king of Pontus, is called Mithridates, and he has invaded 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.

7:22And 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 Roman commander is the absolute 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 the command gets stripped from him. Of course, what has happened, we ended the last episode, there has been a great twist.

7:52So 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 at. Oyster burgers. Oysters, surely. Despite the fact that he's 69 and that he is a thousand stone, he wants the command himself, doesn't he?

8:22You talked before about Marius from a provincial background, this gnawing need for fame, for success, to stick it to the elites who've looked down on him. And Sulla is part of that elite. Right, exactly. 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.

8:55And so far, he's only had six. So I think that Marius may well be dreaming of that elusive seventh consulship as well. 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.

9:32So 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. And he teams up with this tribune called Salpicius, 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.

10:05But more than that, to take command of his army on behalf of Marius. So Marius' 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 on the expedition against Mithridates. So this is about 30,000 battle-hardened men in total.

10:35And 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?

11:08This seems to, I would guess, completely mad to people today listening. But is there not, I mean, I'm going to hazard a guess at the answer to this, which is that Marius 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'll, you know, I'll have to go along with it.

11:38And off he goes back to Rome. You know, you don't want to earn the opobrium of your fellow elitists in Rome who would, you know, it's unthinkable, basically, that you wouldn't obey the order, isn't it? 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.

12:09It's just unthinkable. 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 unthinkability, right? Yeah, I think so. 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. But, of course, it does occur to Sulla. And what is striking is that he doesn't seem to have hesitated at all.

12:42I mean, there's no kind of standing on the banks of a Rubicon thinking, oh, should I or 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.

13:14And although he's a very good looking man, people have noted throughout 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 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.

13:53And so, he therefore has an utter belief in the justice of his own cause. And this matters because Sulla, above all, is very superstitious. He believes that he is what the Romans called phalix, lucky, a favourite 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 essentially as his kind of divine right.

14:24Can 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, a great amount of history?

14:56Sulla 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 already begun to corrode the partisanship, the polarisation 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? I think there are all kinds of circumstances, but there are two obvious ones.

15:28And 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.

16:04So, we talked 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 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.

16:35People cannot believe what has happened. And I think the fact that it hadn't crossed Marius' mind is the kind of the best indicator of how still at this point it was basically seen as something inconceivable, except for someone as bold 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.

17:08And 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, clamber up the stories of their various houses up onto the tops of the insuli, the blocks of flat, and start hurling tiles down at their fellow citizens, these legionaries, as they are advancing through the streets.

17:42And for a moment, the legionaries quail. I guess 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 down.

18:13And 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 Sacral 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.

Sulla takes the city

18:40And 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. Well, 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. 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,

19:11because 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 BC in Rome. So the key for Sulla is to have Marius and Salpicius, 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 telling him this is what you've got to do.

19:44Everyone in the Senate is well aware that he has his soldiers outside. And so unsurprisingly, they do indeed proclaim Marius, Salpicius, Marius' son, and nine other of his leading henchmen, outlaws. And the death squads then start fanning out. Salpicius 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 resist with his own attempted armed force. It's obviously not going to work.

20:15So he slips away and he vanishes and he is not caught. And clearly for Sulla, this is an... It's probably an annoyance 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 story as it develops. 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.

20:50And 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 elites, isn't he? Well, except that he has just marched on Rome. 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 defence of what they claim is the old order.

21:23And that's what he's doing now. 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 Sulla is. And on the other side of that equation are the people that Marius has been appealing to. Now, Marius, it's interesting, why don't more of the people of Rome take to the streets? I mean, his constituency are the popularis, are the kind of ordinary people. So presumably this isn't a city under occupation. Most people in Rome are on Marius' side?

21:53Probably 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 kind of 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.

22:25The 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. 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.

22:58Equally, 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 election, the consular 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.

23:36And one of these two men, a guy called Lucius Cornelius Sinner, 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 Sinner, 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 legislation.

24:06They will not stab him in the back. And Sinner and the other consul does so. And Sinner 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.

24:43And the whole while that Sulla has been busy in the 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.

Mithridates and the Asian massacres

25:01So 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 is a king. He's very rich, isn't he? And he has he has ancient prophecies on his side. So we love an ancient prophecy and he's got loads of ancient prophecies on his side. 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.

25:33And 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 dared 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, he has a tremendous eye for propaganda and a kind of striking image.

26:10So 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 neighbouring 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 just off the shore of Asia. And at a crucial point, he goes down with a stomach bug.

26:40And so when Mithridates' agents arrive where he is in his sickbed, he is helpless to escape. And so he is captured. 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.

27:12And so everybody is able to invent their hatred of the Romans on him. And then finally, a very, very famous scene. Mithridates has gold melted down. And then Aquilius' nostrils are held, his mouth is pulled open, and that gold is poured down Aquilius' throat. And it's such a memorable gesture that people will claim that it's done to other Roman generals who fall prisoner of rebellious people in the East for many decades to come. Crassus. Isn't that something supposedly happened to Crassus?

27:42The 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. 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.

28:21This 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. 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.

28:54And 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 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.

29:29And 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 in this way and so much bloodshed be inflicted comes as a complete surprise.

29:59But 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. 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.

30:35And 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.

31:06Its independence, 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.

31:41But 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, everyone's completely gripped by this incredible spectacle. The collapse of Rome and 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.

32:12And 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 naturalized Athenian called Aristion. 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.

32:45And 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?

33:24And back in Italy, where Sulla has been watching the situation develop, not necessarily to Rome's advantage, he realizes 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. 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.

33:55He has one of the new consuls, Sinna. Sinna 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 Sinna. 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.

34:27I mean, almost everybody thinks that the Italians should be given the vote and they should, 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? I think it's probably less Rome than him. He, you know, he has marched on Rome.

34:59He has dared very greatly in the course of ensuring that he can lead this war against Mithridates. So 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.

35:37So 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.

36:10So he thinks there is this guy Strabo in Piscenum, which is the area on the kind of the mid central Italy on the Adriatic coast. 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. He's done a very good job. He storms it. He's basically crushed the revolution, the rebellion, the social war in central Italy.

36:43But 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. 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.

37:15I think this is what's so interesting, you were saying, you know, 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.

37:46I'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 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.

38:19And 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. Question about Strabo. Is Strabo at this point loyal to Marius? Is he operating in his own? He's his own man. 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?

38:55Because you describe 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. 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 says, well, what the hell? I'm off. He gets in his ships. He loads his men up. They cross the Adriatic.

39:26He lands on the far side and he is going to war in the east. 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? Hello, this is Tom Holland from Goalhangers. The rest is history. And I'm James Holland from Goalhangers. We have ways of making you talk. We're here to introduce Pressure, an unmissable World War II drama from the producers of Darkest Hour, now hitting the big screen.

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Marius in exile

42:15So, welcome back to The Rest is History. The year is 87 BC. 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? He's in a real bind because he's been declared a public enemy. Sulla has leaned on the cellet to have that bill passed.

42:49And 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 recognizable 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.

43:22And 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.

43:53So, they escape squads who've come to arrest them by the skin of their teeth. They hitch lifts with passing merchants who then decide that they don't want to have anything to do with him and dump him on the shore. 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. It's like Marlon Brando in the mud. Colonel Kurtz. Colonel Kurtz. Yeah. What is it? You're an errand boy.

44:23It's that moment. But fortunately, 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, well, now we've taken him. We 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. Like a Dane. Yeah. So, lots and lots of had been taken as slaves.

44:53And 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. Oh, my word. As Martin Sheen runs away. Yeah. He runs out of the cell wailing, I cannot kill Gaius Marius.

45:26He 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.

45:56So, these ivy-clad ruins, absolutely deserted. And the governor of Africa sends him a message saying, if you stay here, 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.

46:29I mean, you're doing it with an American accent. But I just think this is made for Russell Crowe, especially Russell Crowe now. No, it's Marlon Brando. When he's a little bit heavier. You know, he's somebody people associate with Rome. I mean, this is absolutely made for him. Yeah. Who do you have as Sulla? A young Jude Law is basically ideal for Sulla, but he's too old now. No, I think Jude Law. Jude Law would be good. Although, Tom Holland. I've always had Tom Holland in mind for Octavian, by the way. I think he'd be a brilliant Octavian. I think you're right about that. But yeah, OK. Well, let's say Gaius Marius from this point on will give him an Australian accent.

47:01So 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. Fate will not be denied. 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

47:32have embarked on their magistracies. So one of these two consuls we've already mentioned, this is Sinna. 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? Sinna 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.

48:04He's the kind of person who, once he's sworn an oath to the gods, is liable to keep it. Clearly, Sinna 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.

48:37Politics is being militarized. And so arguments that begin in the Senate have a tendency now to escalate. And it doesn't take long for the disagreements between Sinna and Octavius to get very badly out of control. And it ends up with Sinna 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

49:08the consuls, it ends with one of the consuls being decreed an outlaw. And this does not make for a healthy politics. It does not at all. And how much is that a break with established Roman politics? Massively. So actually, this is a really good, for democracies that may have modeled themselves on Rome and are obsessed with not following the example of Rome, this is a really good example in the dangers of excessive polarization and, you know, everything becoming, you know, political disagreements, being litigated in the courts, and painting your opponents as the enemies

49:41of the Republic. Isn't it? I mean, this is what happens. 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. 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. The idea that every citizen has freedom of speech is really important in the Republic. And it's upheld.

50:11People can basically say what they like. You know, this is why even those who are not in the Senate are so ready to scraw 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.

50:41And 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. 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 Piscenum on the east coast of Italy, where Strabo is camped out with all his legions. And so Strabo then duly crosses the Apennines from Piscenum.

51:13And he makes camp outside Rome beside the Colline 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. 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.

51:45One 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.

52:16And 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, he's, he's, he's really ready to kill anybody who annoys him by this point. He's very, very Colonel Kurtz, I think, by now. Do 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? I think there's a kind of a slight King Lear thing that he's so stupefied by, you know, the, the collapse of all his fortunes that something's gone inside his head.

52:47He 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, Strabo in

53:20his camp outside the Colleen gate, Marius and Sinner with their men, it, it's kind of this 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 incinerated.

53:53He's, what, by the lightning? 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. What are the chances of that happening? That just seems mad. 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 art trimmer, but he also leaves behind a young son, only 19 years old, Pompeius, Pompey, as he's better known.

54:28And this is someone of whom we will be hearing more later in this series. Pompey, the greatest end of the story. He has. So exciting. 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. I'm so pumped he's back in this story.

The death of Marius

54:48All right.

The death of Marius

54:49So let's pull the camera back a bit. Strabo is dead. Sinner and Marius have absolutely the upper hand and presumably now they can just waltz into Rome. Yeah, there's no one to stop them. And do they behave with decorum, elegance and grace? 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.

55:20You 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, Marius is elected to his seventh consulship, the record-breaking consulship.

55:51So that proves it. 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. I mean, it would be great to see you rowing down a river. Well, that Wayne Rooney comparison that's dogged me for so long, I'm happy to lean into it once again. Do you know who Marius reminds me of at this point? So it's Colonel Kurtz melded with Daenerys Targaryen. Yes. Yes. He's a fat 69-year-old Daenerys Targaryen.

56:24Right. Probably too heavy for a dragon. He's gone mad. He's like coarsened by resentment and victimhood and he's killing everybody. 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.

56:55But he dies of what? Booze. Apoplexy, booze, overexcitement. Basically, he's, you know, he's run his course. But he's died as he wanted. He's consul. He's drunk. He's killing people. 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. 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

57:27with Sulla. So the Marians are still on the scene. But the death of Marius effectively means that Sulla 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 Cinnanum Tempus, the age of sinner. And he will maintain himself in the consulship for the next three years. So a succession of continuous consulships.

57:59And, 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 great enemy. And with Sulla absent in the east, Sulla knows that 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

58:31to end all showdowns. And so unsurprisingly, during these years, Sulla's priority is to prepare for the return of Sulla. Okay, so that's what's been going on in Rome.

Sulla besieges Athens

58:47But all this time, Sulla has been away in the east prosecuting his war to try to restore Roman hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. He started in Macedon, didn't he? Macedon, which is, of course, a Roman province at this point. So how did it go? 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

59:23know the calibre of the Romans. And so rather than confront them, 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. And it's in the port that Mithridates' force embed themselves, because obviously from there they can be supplied by Mithridates.

59:55You know, 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?

1:00:30Because I guess success in academia doesn't always mean that you're going to be much cop as a fighter. And does it prove that way for this fellow? 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.

1:01:06So Aristion'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 like one of those academics on X or blue sky. Blue sky. He's a blue sky person. Who disgraced themselves by getting into abusive slagging matches with their enemies.

1:01:42I can think of so many examples. I mean, it makes me happy just to think of it, to be frank. So this is Aristion's approach. You know, he has these colleagues, his fellow philosophers who watch this and think it's ridiculous. So there's 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 Aristion's behaviour is proof that swords should never be placed in the hands of children. So we're possibly being unfair to Aristion because actually the Athenians under his command, they

1:02:15do put up a very lengthy resistance. But I guess that that probably owes more to fear than to Aristion's leadership qualities. Because, of course, everyone in Athens knows what had happened to Corinth. Corinth had been completely razed. The city had vanished from the face of the earth. And also, I guess they're hoping for reinforcements from Mithridates, their ally 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.

1:02:46There are stories that cannibalism starts to be practised. And finally, Aristion 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. Do you know what? I mean, I actually was always on Sulla's team anyway.

1:03:18But I'm even more on it now. He sounds great. 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 Athenian civilisation, any respect whatsoever. So he needs to build siege engines. So he sends his engineers to go and chop down the woods in the groves where Plato and Aristotle

1:03:52had taught philosophy to their students. And the wood is used to build siege engines. And when at last, as was always going to happen, in March 86, the Romans break into Athens. 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 fled up to the Acropolis, taken reference there, where he continues to defy Sulla, continues to chant his abusive slogans.

1:04:24I mean, absolutely mad behaviour. And inevitably, it doesn't take the Romans long 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. So meanwhile, what about Mithridates' army, which has been in Piraeus? You described they were holed up in the ports. Have they just been watching and doing nothing the whole time? Basically, yes. Because Mithridates hasn't sent them any reinforcements.

1:04:55And instead, what he's done is to raise an absolutely massive army and send that over land. So it's going across the north of Greece and then down through the path of Thermopylae towards Athens. And as it approaches Athens, Mithridates orders the troops who are holed up in the port of Athens, Piraeus, to evacuate and to go and join this invasion force. So they do this. 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.

1:05:27Athens 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. But even though Athens has been spared the fate of Corinth, it is in a terrible state after this siege and after its capture by Sulla's men. The streets are spattered in blood. It's been looted. Every last fig leaf of independence has been stripped away. And the fate of those who had served in Aristaion's government is terrible.

1:06:00They are 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 is 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. And now they're reinstalled basically as as Roman puppets. And from this point on, Athens is a subject city.

1:06:30Secondly, 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 high end finishing school, a kind of, you know, a university town. All right. So that's the end of Athens. That's sad.

Peace with Mithridates

1:06:54But Sulla and Mithridates' invasion force, presumably they are now heading for a bit of a showdown, are they? Because there's two big armies in Greece and there's only room for one of them. 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 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. It's been divided into two. Sulla annihilates both of them.

1:07:26And that's the end of Mithridates' invasion force. And it's done very quickly and brutally. That was quick. That essentially is the end of the war. Sulla has done what he set out to do. He's taken Athens back and he has destroyed Mithridates' offensive capability. And he opens negotiations with the general of this invasion force who survived the defeat. And then the following autumn, amazingly, he meets with Mithridates in person on the shores of the Hellespont. So up by Gallipoli.

1:07:57And 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 reach terms. 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.

1:08:28That 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, because 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 Sulla and his regime, and he's been condemned to death. His property has been raised and his family and his supporters have been forced to flee.

1:08:58So 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. Hands blicks. Yes, hands us blicks us. And Sulla says, OK. And he gives the killer of all these Romans and Italians a peck on the cheek, and the treaty is signed.

1:09:35And 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 Greek cities of Asia, because these are all the guys who 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.

1:10:10So they go back to being leeched white of their cash, which is what had been happening before Mithridates' invasion. On the other hand, though, if you're living in Asia, it's a sign that you can fight the Romans and get away with it. I don't think that is the lesson they draw. 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 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.

1:10:44I mean, a little bit, always dangerous to compare people from history to Nazis, but there is a slight element of Goering turning up and having the pick of an art gallery to what Sulla does next. So there is this great unfinished temple to Zeus, which has been taken centuries and centuries to complete. And so Sulla pulls down all the various columns of this temple and has them ready to be transported to Rome. 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.

1:11:21And I think that this is a very pointed insult from Sulla at the academic community in Athens.

1:11:30And 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. I mean, the sprint's over so quickly anyway. Boring. Yeah. So probably the worst Olympics ever. But of course, you know, 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.

1:12:03And not only that, but Sulla, 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 going to happen. It is going to happen. Wow. So we are building towards the great showdown.

1:12:36And 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, 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 to listen to the next episode. There's literally no other way that you will find out the story.

1:13:09There are no other historical accounts of this. There will just be the Rest is History's account. 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.

1:13:44So 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. 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. Very wise. Bye-bye.

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