A History of Rome, Vol 1 by A H.J. Greenidge

A >> A H.J. Greenidge >> A History of Rome, Vol 1

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49

The departure of Jugurtha implied the renewal of the war. The compact
made with Bestia and Scaurus had been tacitly, if not formally,
repudiated by the senate, and the fiction that Jugurtha had surrendered,
although it had played its part in the negotiations which brought him to
Rome, disappeared with the compact. Since, however, the right of
Jugurtha to retain Numidia, which was the objectionable element in the
late agreement, seems to have been implied rather than expressed, it may
have seemed possible to take the view that Jugurtha's surrender was
unconditional, and that the war was now the pursuit of an escaped
prisoner of Rome. Such a conception was absolutely worthless so far as
most of the practical difficulties of the task were concerned; for,
whether Jugurtha was an enemy or a rebel, he was equally difficult to
secure; but it may have had a considerable influence on the principles
on which the Numidian war was now to be conducted, and we shall find on
the part of Rome a growing disinclination to give Jugurtha the benefits
of those rules of civilised warfare of which she generally professed a
scrupulous observance in the letter if not in the spirit. The object of
the war was, through its very simplicity, extraordinarily difficult of
attainment. It was neither more nor less than the seizure of the person
of Jugurtha. Numidia had no common government and no unity but those
personified in its king, and the conquest of fragments of the country
would be almost useless until the king was secured. The hope of setting
up a rival pretender, whose recognition by Rome might have enabled
organisation to keep pace with conquest, had perished with the murder of
Massiva,[968] although it is very questionable whether the name even of
the son of the warlike Gulussa would have detached any of the military
strength of Numidia from a monarch who had stirred the fighting spirit
of the nation and was regarded as the embodiment of its manliest
traditions. The outlook of the consul Albinus, the new organiser of the
war on the Roman side, was indeed a poor one, and it was made still
poorer by the fact that a considerable portion of his year of office had
already lapsed, and the events of his campaign must of necessity be
crowded into the few remaining months of the summer and the early
autumn. Had there been any spirit of self-sacrifice in Roman commanders,
or any true continuity in Roman military policies, Albinus might have
set himself the useful task of organising victory for his successors;
yet he cannot be wholly blamed for the hope, wild and foolish as it
seems, of striking some decisive blow in the narrow time allowed
him.[969] The military operations of the war at this stage become almost
wholly subordinate to political considerations. Senate and consuls were
being swept off their feet and forced into a disastrous celerity or
superficiality of action by the growing tide of indignation which
animated commons and capitalists alike; and the feeling that something
decisive must be accomplished for the satisfaction of public opinion,
was supplemented by the lower but very human consideration that a
general must seem to have attained some success if he hoped to have his
command prolonged for another year. The senate, it is true, might have
insight enough to see that success in a war such as that in Numidia
could not be gauged by the brilliance of the results obtained; but how
were they to defend their verdict to the people unless they could point
to exploits such as would dazzle the popular eye? But although a
feverish policy seemed the readiest mode of escape from public suspicion
or inglorious retirement, it had its own particular nemesis, of which
Albinus seemed for the moment to be oblivious. To finish the war in a
short time meant to finish it by any means that came to hand. But, if a
striking victory did not surrender Jugurtha into the hands of his
conqueror--and even the most glorious victory did not under the
circumstances of the war imply the capture of the vanquished--what means
remained except negotiation and the voluntary surrender of the
king?[970] Such means had been employed by Bestia, and every one knew
now with what result. The policy of haste might breed more suspicion and
bitterness than the most desultory conduct of the campaign.

Albinus made rapid but ample preparation of supplies, money and
munitions of war, and hurried off to the scene of his intended
successes. The army which he found must have been in a miserable
condition, if we may judge by the state which the last glimpse of it
revealed; but his fixed intention of accomplishing something, no matter
what, must have rendered adequate re-organisation impossible, and he
took the field against Jugurtha with forces whose utter demoralisation
was soon to be put to a frightful test. The war immediately assumed that
character of an unsuccessful hunt, varied by indecisive engagements and
fruitless victories, which it was to retain even under the guidance of
the ablest that Rome could furnish. Jugurtha adhered to his inevitable
plan of a prolonged and desultory campaign over a vast area of country;
the size and physical character of his kingdom, the extraordinary
mobility of his troops, the credulity and anxious ambition of his
opponent, were all elements of strength which he used with consummate
skill. He retired before the threatening column; then, that his men
might not lose heart, he threw himself with startling suddenness on the
foe; at other times he mocked the consul with hopes of peace, entered
into negotiations for a surrender and, when he had disarmed his
adversary by hopes, suddenly drew back in a pretended access of
distrust. The futility of Albinus's efforts was so pronounced--a
futility all the more impressive from the intensity of his preparations
and his excessive eagerness to reach the field of action--that people
ignorant of the conditions of the campaign began again to whisper the
perpetual suspicion of collusion with the king.[971] The suspicion might
not have been avoided even by a commander who declined negotiation; but
Albinus's case had been rendered worse by his unsuccessful efforts to
play with a master of craft, and it was with a reputation greatly
weakened from a military, and slightly damaged from a moral, point of
view that he brought the campaign to a close, sent his army into winter
quarters, and left for Rome to preside at the electoral meetings of the
people.[972] The Comitia for the appointment of the consuls and the
praetors were at this time held during the latter half of the year, but
at no regular date, the time for their summons depending on the
convenience of the presiding consul and on his freedom from other and
more pressing engagements.[973] Albinus may have arrived in Rome during
the late autumn. Had he been able to get the business over and return to
Africa for the last month or two of the year, his conduct of the war
might have been considered ineffective but not disastrous, and the
senate might have been spared a problem more terrible than any that had
yet arisen out of its relations with Jugurtha. For Albinus, though
sanguine and unpractical, seems to have been reasonably prudent, and he
might have handed over an army, unsuccessful but not disgraced, and
recruited in strength by its long winter quarters, to the care of a more
fortunate successor. But, as it happened, every public department in
Rome was feeling the strain caused by a minor constitutional crisis
which had arisen amongst the magistrates of the Plebs. The sudden
revival of the people's aspirations had doubtless led to a certain
amount of misguided ambition on the part of some of its leaders, and the
tribunate was now the centre of an agitation which was a faint
counterpart of the closing scenes in the Gracchan struggles. Two
occupants of the office, Publius Lucullus and Lucius Annius, were
attempting to secure re-election for another year. Their colleagues
resisted their effort, probably on the ground that the conditions
requisite for re-election were not in existence, and this conflict not
merely prevented the appointment of plebeian magistrates from being
completed, but stayed the progress of the other elective Comitia as
well.[974] The tribunes, whether those who aimed at re-election or those
who attempted to prevent it, had either declared a _justitium_ or
threatened to veto every attempt made by a magistrate of the people to
hold an electoral assembly; and the consequence of this impasse was
that, when the year drew to a close,[975] no new magistrates were in
existence and the consul Albinus was still absent from his
African command.

Unfortunately the absence of the proconsul, as Albinus had now become in
default of the appointment of a successor, did not have the effect of
checking the enterprise of the army. It was now under the authority of
Aulus Albinus, to whom his brother had delegated the command of the
province and the forces during his stay at Rome. The stimulus which
moved Aulus to action is not known. The unexpected duration of his
temporary command may have familiarised him with power, stimulated his
undoubted confidence in himself, and suggested the hope that by one of
those unexpected blows, with which the annals of strategic genius were
filled, he might redeem his brother's reputation and win lasting glory
for himself. Others believed that the perpetually suspected motive of
cupidity was the basis of his enterprise, that he had no definitely
conceived plan of conquest, but intended by the terror of a military
demonstration to exact money from Jugurtha.[976] If the latter view was
correct, it is possible that Aulus imagined himself to be acting in the
interest of his army as well as of himself. The long winter quarters may
have betrayed a deficiency in pay and provisions, and if Jugurtha
purchased the security of a district, its immunity would be too public
an event to make it possible for the commander of the attacking forces
to pocket the whole of the ransom.

It was in the month of January, in the very heart of a severe winter,
that Aulus summoned his troops from the security of their quarters to a
long and fatiguing march. His aim was Suthul, a strongly fortified post
on the river Ubus, nearly forty miles south of Hippo Regius and the sea,
and so short a distance from the larger and better-known town of Calama,
the modern Gelma, that the latter name was sometimes used to describe
the scene of the incidents that followed.[977] We are not told the site
of the winter quarters from which the march began; but the
ineffectiveness of the former campaign and the caution of Albinus, who
did not mean his legions to fight during his absence, might lead us to
suppose that the troops had been quartered in or near the Roman
province; and in this case Aulus might have marched along the valley of
the Bagradas to reach his destined goal, which would finally have been
approached from the south through a narrow space between two ranges of
hills, the westernmost of which was crowned at its northern end by the
fortifications of Suthul. This was reported to be the chief
treasure-city of Jugurtha; could Aulus capture it, or even bargain for
its security with the king, he might cripple the resources of the
Numidian monarch and win great wealth for himself and his army. By long
and fatiguing marches he reached the object of his attack, only to
discover at the first glance that it was impregnable--nay even, as a
soldier's eye would have seen, that an investment of the place was
utterly impossible.[978] The rigour of the season had aggravated the
difficulties presented by the site. Above towered the city walls perched
on their precipitous rock; below was the alluvial plain which the
deluging rains of a Numidian winter had turned into a swamp of liquid
mud. Yet Aulus, either dazzled by the vision of the gold concealed
within the fortress which it had caused him such labour to reach, or
with some vague idea that a pretence at an investment might alarm the
king into coming to terms for the protection of his hoard, began to make
formal preparations for a siege, to bring up mantlets, to mark out his
lines of circumvallation,[979] to deceive his enemy, if he could not
deceive himself, into a belief that the conditions rendered an attack on
Suthul possible.

It is needless to say that Jugurtha knew the possibilities of his
treasure-city far better than its assailant. But the simple device of
Aulus was admirably suited to his plans. Humble messages soon reached
the camp of the legate; the missives of every successive envoy augmented
his illusion and stirred his idle hopes to a higher pitch. Jugurtha's
own movements began to give proof of a state of abject terror. So far
from coming to the relief of his threatened city, he drew his forces
farther away into the most difficult country he could find, everywhere
quitting the open ground for sheltered spots and mountain paths. At last
from a distance he began to hold out definite hopes of an agreement with
Aulus. But it was one that must be transacted personally and in private.
The plain round Suthul was much too public a spot; let the legate follow
the king into the fastnesses of the desert and all would be arranged.
The legate advanced as the king retired; but at every point of the
difficult march Numidian spies were hovering around the Roman column.
The disgust of the soldiers at the hardships to which they had been
submitted in the pursuit of this phantom gold, the last evidence of
which had vanished when their commander turned his back on the walls of
Suthul, now resulted in a frightful state of demoralisation. The lower
officers in authority, centurions and commanders of squadrons of horse,
stole from the camp to hold converse with Jugurtha's spies; some sold
themselves to desert to the Numidian army, others to quit their posts at
a given signal. The mesh was at last prepared. On one dark night, at the
hour of the first sleep when attack is least suspected, the camp of
Aulus was suddenly surrounded by the Numidian host. The surprise was
complete. The Roman soldiers, in the shock of the sudden din, were
utterly unnerved. Some groped for their arms; others cowered in their
tents; a few tried to create some order amongst their terror-stricken
comrades. But nowhere could a real stand be made or real discipline
observed. The blackness of the night and the heavy driving clouds
prevented the numbers of the enemy from being seen, and the size of the
Numidian host, large in itself, was perhaps increased by a terrified
imagination. It was difficult to say on which side the greater danger
lay. Was it safer to fly into darkness and some unknown ambush or to
keep one's ground and meet the approaching enemy? The evils of
preconcerted treachery were soon added to those of surprise. The
defections were greatest amongst the auxiliary forces. A cohort of
Ligurian infantry with two squadrons of Thracian cavalry deserted to the
king. Their example was followed by but a handful of the legionaries;
but the fatal act of treason was committed by a Roman centurion of the
first rank. He let the Numidians through the post which he had been
given to defend, and through this ingress they poured to every part of
the camp. The panic was now complete; most of the Romans threw their
arms away and fled from slaughter to the temporary safety of a
neighbouring hill. The early hour at which the attack had been made,
prevented an effective pursuit, for there was much of the night yet to
run; and the Numidians were also busied with the plunder of the camp.
The dawn of day revealed the hopelessness of the Roman position and
forced Aulus into any terms that Jugurtha cared to grant. The latter
adopted the language of humane condescension. He said that, although he
held the Roman army at his mercy, certain victims of famine or the
sword, yet he was not unmindful of the mutability of human fortune, and
would spare the lives of all his prisoners, if the Roman commander would
make a treaty with him.[980] The army was to pass under the yoke; the
Romans were to evacuate Numidia within ten days. The degrading terms
were accepted: an army that before its defeat had numbered forty
thousand men,[981] passed under the spear that symbolised their
submission and disgrace, and peace reigned in Numidia--a peace which
lacked no element of shame, dictated by a client king to the sovereign
that had decreed his chastisement.

The Roman public had become so familiar with discredit as to be in the
habit of imagining it even when it did not exist; but humiliation
exhibited in an actual disaster on this colossal scale was sufficiently
novel to stir the people to the profoundest depths of grief and
fear.[982] To men who thought only of the empire, its glory seemed to be
extinguished by the fearful blow; but many of the masses, who knew
nothing of war or of Rome's relations with peoples beyond the seas, were
filled with a fear too personal to permit their thoughts to dwell solely
on the loss of honour. To yet another class, whose knowledge exempted
them from such idle terror, the army seemed more than the empire. Rome
had not yet learnt to fight with mercenary forces; and the men who had
seen service formed a considerable element in the Roman proletariate.
Such veterans, especially those whose repute in war could give their
words an added point, were unmeasured in their condemnation of the
conduct of Aulus. The general had had a sword in his hand; yet he had
thought a disgraceful capitulation his only means of deliverance. On no
side could a word be heard in defence of the action of the unhappy
commander. The blessings of the wives and children of the men whom
Aulus's treaty had saved were, if breathed, apparently smothered under a
weight of patriotic execration.

The feeling of insecurity must have been rendered greater by the fact
that the State still lacked an official head, and the African
dependencies possessed no governor in whom any confidence could be
reposed. The year must have opened with a series of _interregna_, since
no consuls had been elected to assume the government on the 1st of
January; Numidia had again been made by senatorial decree a consular
province; but since no consul existed to assume the administration,
Albinus was still in command of the African army.[983] It was the
painful duty of the ex-consul to raise in the senate the question of the
ratification of his brother's treaty. Even he could never have attempted
to defend it; his dominant feeling was an overwhelming sense of the
weight of undeserved ignominy under which he lay, tempered by an
undercurrent of fear as to the danger that might follow in the track of
the universal disfavour with which he and his brother were regarded. The
action that he took even before the senate's opinion was known, was a
proof that he regarded the continuance of the war as inevitable. He
relieved his mind and sought to restore his credit by pushing on
military preparations with a fevered energy; supplementary drafts for
the African army were raised from the citizens; auxiliary cohorts were
demanded of the Latins and Italian allies. While these measures were in
progress, the judgment of the senate was given to the world. It was a
judgment based on the often-repeated maxim that no legitimate treaty
could be concluded without the consent of the senate and people.[984] It
was a decision that recalled the days of Numantia or the more distant
history of the Caudine Forks; but the formal sacrifice that followed and
was thought to justify those famous instances of breach of contract, was
no longer deemed worthy of observance, and Aulus was not surrendered to
the vengeance or mercy of the foe with whom he had involuntarily broken
faith. This summary invalidation of the treaty may have been the result
of a deduction drawn from the peculiar circumstances which had preceded
the renewal of the war--circumstances which, as we have seen, might be
twisted to support the view that Jugurtha was not an independent enemy
of Rome and was, therefore, not entitled to the full rights of a
belligerent.

The senate's decision left Albinus free to act and to make use of the
new military forces that he had so strenuously prepared. But a sudden
hindrance came from another quarter. Some tribunes expressed the not
unreasonable view that a commander of Albinus's record should not be
allowed to expose Rome's last resources to destruction. Had they meant
him to remain in command, their attitude would have been indefensible;
but, when they forbade him to take the new recruits to Africa,[985] they
were merely reserving them for a more worthy successor. Albinus,
however, meant to make the most of his limited tenure. He had his own
and his brother's honour to avenge, and within a few days of the
senate's decree permitting a renewal of the war, he had taken ship for
the African province, where the whole army, withdrawn from Numidia in
accordance with the compact, was now stationed in winter quarters. For a
time his burning desire to clear his name made him blind to the defects
of his forces; he thought only of the pursuit of Jugurtha, of some
vigorous stroke that might erase the stain from the honour of his
family. But hard facts soon restored the equilibrium of his naturally
prudent soul. The worst feature of the army was not that it had been
beaten, but that it had not been commanded. The reins of discipline had
been so slack that licence and indulgence had sapped its fighting
strength. The tyranny of circumstances demanded a peaceful sojourn in
the province, and Albinus resigned himself to the inevitable.

At Rome meanwhile the movement for inquiry that had been stayed for the
moment by the co-operation of Jugurtha and his senatorial friends, and
by the obstructive attitude of Baebius, had been resumed with greater
intensity and promise of success. It did not need the disaster of Aulus
to re-awaken it to new life. That disaster no doubt accelerated its
course and invested it with an unscrupulous thoroughness of character
that it might otherwise have lacked; but the movement itself had perhaps
taken a definite shape a month before the result of Aulus's experiment
in Numidia was known, and was the natural result of the feeling of
resentment which the conspiracy of silence had created. It now assumed
the exact and legal form of the demand for a commission which should
investigate, adjudicate and punish. The leaders of the people had
conceived the bold and original design of wresting from the hands, and
directing against the person, of the senate the powerful weapon with
which that body had so often visited epidemics of crime or turbulence
that were supposed to have fastened on the helpless proletariate. Down
to this time special commissions had either been set up by the
co-operation of senate and people, or had, with questionable legality,
been established by the senate alone. The commissioners, who were
sometimes consuls, sometimes praetors, had, perhaps always but certainly
in recent history, judged without appeal; and in the judicial
investigations which followed the fall of the Gracchi, the people had
had no voice either in the appointment of the judge or in the
ratification of the sentence which he pronounced. Now the senate as a
whole was to be equally voiceless; it was not to be asked to take the
initiative in the creation of the court, the penalties were to be
determined without reference to its advice, and although the presidents
would naturally be selected from members of the senatorial order, if
they were to be chosen from men of eminence at all, these presidents
were to be merely formal guides of the proceedings, like the praetor who
sat in the court which tried cases of extortion, and the verdict was to
be pronounced by judges inspired by the prevailing feeling of hostility
to the crimes of the official class.

Caius Mamilius Limetanus, who proposed and probably aided in drafting
this bill, was a tribune who belonged to the college which perhaps came
into office towards the close of the month of December which had
preceded the recent disaster in Numidia. The bill, the promulgation of
which was probably one of the first acts of his tribunate, proposed
"that an inquiry should be directed into the conduct of all those
individuals, whose counsel had led Jugurtha to neglect the decrees of
the senate, who had taken money from the king whether as members of
commissions or as holders of military commands, who had handed over to
him elephants of war and deserters from his army; lastly, all who had
made agreements with enemies of the State on matters of peace or
war".[986] The comprehensive nature of the threatened inquiry spread
terror amongst the ranks of the suspected. The panic was no sign of
guilt; a party warfare was to be waged with the most undisguised party
weapons: and mere membership of the suspected faction aroused fears
almost as acute as those which were excited by the consciousness of
guilt, There was a prospect of rough and ready justice, where proof
might rest on prepossession and verdicts be considered preordained. The
bitterness of the situation was increased by the impossibility of open
resistance to the measure; for such a resistance would imply an
unwillingness to submit to inquiry, and such a refusal, invidious in
itself, would fix suspicion and be accepted as a confession of misdeeds
which could not bear the light of investigation. With the city
proletariate against them, the threatened members of the aristocracy
could look merely to secret opposition by their own supporters, and to
such moderate assistance as was secured by the friendly attitude which
their recent agrarian measures had awakened in the Latins and Italian
allies.[987] But the latter support was moral rather than material, or
if it became effective, could only secure this character by fraud. The
allies, whom the senate had driven from Rome by Pennus's law, were
apparently to be invited to flood the _contiones_ and raise cries of
protest against the threatened indictment. But this device could only be
successful in the preliminary stages of the agitation. The Latins
possessed but few votes, the Italians none, and personation, if resorted
to, was not likely to elude the vigilance of the hostile presidents of
the tribunician assembly, or, if undetected, to be powerful enough to
turn the scale in favour of the aristocracy. For the unanimity of
opposition which the nobility now encountered in the citizen body, was
almost unexampled. The differences of interest which sometimes separated
the country from the city voters, seem now to have been forgotten. The
tribunes found no difficulty in keeping the agitation up to fever-heat,
and its permanence was as marked as its intensity. The crowds that
acclaimed the proposal, were sufficiently in earnest to remain at Rome
and vote for it; the emphasis with which the masses assembled at the
final meeting, "ordered, decreed and willed" the measure submitted for
their approval, was interpreted (perhaps rightly) as a shout of
triumphant defiance of the nobility, not as a vehement expression of
disinterested affection for the State.[988] The two emotions were indeed
blended; but the imperial sentiment is oftenest aroused by danger; and
the individuals who have worked the mischief are the concrete element in
a situation, the reaction against which has roused the exaltation which
veils vengeance and hatred under the names of patriotism and justice.