Marc Hyden

Gaius Marius: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Saviour

(Pen & Sword, 2017), 344 pp. $39.95

Marc Hyden’s Gaius Marius: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Saviour takes as its subject one of the most arresting figures of Late Republican Roman history (and, indeed, of Classical History in general): the seven-time consul, two-time triumphator, military innovator, and superbly successful general Gaius Marius. Not, to be sure, that Marius has not received biographical investigation before now, but most of these other biographies are either much shorter than Hyden’s (those of Thomas Carney, Phillip Kildahl, and Federico Santantagelo immediately spring to mind) or are somewhat more narrowly focused on particular elements of his career (such as that of Richard Evans). Furthermore, these are typically scholarly monographs which take for granted an extensive familiarity with this history and political structure of Rome and the Mediterranean in the late Second and First Centuries BCE. Hyden’s book, by contrast, was obviously composed with a general audience in mind. It therefore supplements the life of its subject with a discussion of his times as well, seeking to supply a complete picture of Marius to an audience which may have an interest but not necessarily have a thorough understanding of the period in which he lived.

Chapter I, “Arpinum”, delves into the early life of Marius, noting that he was born in a somewhat rural community which, while technically Roman, was still at a remove from the center of power and politics. According to the Marius himself, he had come from poverty, though Hyden is almost certainly correct in his suspicion of this, if for no other reason than that Marius presently became a junior officer in the Roman army. This is further elaborated in Chapter II, “Numantia”, in which Hyden notes that military service at that time was predicated on wealth, with officers having to meet a certain property requirement. Marius therefore almost certainly came from what might now be called a “well-to-do” background. Either way, he presently found himself doing military service in what is now Spain under Scipio Aemilianus. His service impressed Scipio (and indeed, Marius was singled out for praise by his commander), and introduced him to Jugurtha of Numidia, who served as part of an allied African contingent and who would subsequently play a significant role in his later career.

At some point, Marius decided to attempt to enter politics, and the vicissitudes of running for and holding office in the capital is the subject for Chapter III, “Cursus Honorum”. He had managed to cobble together a somewhat lackluster run of officeholding before a military disturbance gave him the chance to show his mettle in war once again. This disturbance involved his fellow Numantine War veteran and acquaintance Jugurtha, who had managed to parley his fine service with Scipio and Rome’s subsequent endorsement of his character to his elevation of joint rule of Numidia in the years leading up to 112 BCE. Not content with this, Jugurtha would then attempt to seize sole power, in pursuit of which he alternately enraged the Romans with his misdeeds and attempted to win back their favor with honeyed words and gifts. When the Romans finally tired of him and of their own half-hearted prosecution of a war to bring him in line, they elected Quintus Caecilius Metellus consul to deal with Jugurtha once and for all, and the latter selected Marius to be his chief subordinate. These events are narrated in chapters IV and V (“Jugurtha” and “Metellus”, respectively), the latter of which also discussing how Marius began to harbor ambitions for the office of consul and for the command against Jugurtha, leading to tension between lieutenant and general.

Ultimately, Marius was able to secure both of these commodities, winning election to high office for the year 107 and then the commission in Numidia. This is treated in chapter VI, “Novus Homo”, in which Hyden also touches briefly on the so-called “Marian reforms” of legionary recruitment, which allowed for soldiers to volunteer for the army regardless of whether they were assidui, or men whose property would have rendered them eligible (or liable) for such service. Hyden correctly observes that poorer soldiers had certainly been enrolled in the army before 107, though it seems that in the past that had only been when volunteers or conscripts from the assidui proved insufficient. Marius was apparently the first to bypass the initial solicitation of the assidui entirely, and threw his call for soldiers open to all who wished to serve. This action was the subject of much, albeit imprecise, commentary in the ancient sources, and a not inconsiderable amount of debate in the modern scholarship.

Chapters VII through XII treat the ultimately successful Numidian campaign and the role played in it by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a lieutenant of Marius whose own ambitions caused him to break with Marius and eventually develop a virulent enmity with his quondam general. This division would take a few years, however, and in the meantime the successful prosecution of the war in Africa would lead the Romans to re-elect Marius to four additional terms and dispatch him north to deal with the rising threat posed by the Germanic Teutones and Cimbri. His success in both the Numidia and the Cimbric wars as well as his constant re-elections (which violated Roman custom and was certainly extra-legal) led to considerable friction between Marius – a political newcomer referred to derisively as a novus homo – and the established officeholding élite, which is also discussed. Chapter XIII and XIV tells of how poorly Marius attempted to fit into his new role as elder statesman without a war to fight, and of the waning of his power and influence.

Yet a new war broke out in 91 BCE, this time against Rome’s Italian subject peoples somewhat euphemistically called “allies”, and Marius was once again sent into battle. However, he was neither re-elected consul nor given an independent command, but was once again relegated to the role of subordinate. The death of his superior in battle allowed Marius to display his undimmed gifts as a commander, inspiring in him an urge to wage war on Rome’s behalf once again. As a consequences, Marius attempted to have the commission against Mithridates of Pontus transferred to himself from the man originally designated for it, his own one-time legate Sulla. The cause of this war and the political and legal machinations whereby Marius attempted to take direction of Rome’s effort in it are discussed in Chapters XVI and XVIII. Also discussed is how Sulla refused to acquiesce to the transfer and provoked civil war in Rome, and how Sulla ultimately emerged as its victor. Marius found himself outlawed as a result of his loss and condemned to death, which compelled him to engage in series of harrowing adventures to evade his execution. Ultimately, Marius is able to return to Rome as the leader of another civil war, as described in chapter XIX, and is able to win re-election as consul a final time before his death a month later in 106. Chapters XX-XXIV close out the text by narrating what happens to the Marian faction, ending on several chapters which note how Marius came to be remembered throughout the rest of Rome’s history.

Hyden’s text has much to recommend it. It is very clearly written and eminently readable, almost entirely bereft of specific and occasionally cumbersome historical and classical terminology with which more academic monographs are replete. All the quotations from the ancient sources are translated, and use of Latin is almost totally absent, which should be quite helpful for a general audience. His account follows the ancient accounts pretty closely, and while he draws on comparatively few of these, they are the generally the best and most appropriate ones. While there are certainly occasional departures from current scholarly consensus about the life and times of Marius – about which more directly – his analysis is solid and generally corresponds to the opinions of the academic literature.

Nevertheless, there are a few blemishes in Hyden’s book. First and foremost of these are his repeated assertions that Marius and other politicians were hindered by their status as “Plebeians”, hearkening back to the well-known divide between the Plebeians and Patricians, who were Rome’s original hereditary aristocracy. Yet the distinction between the two, and any sort of debility that Plebeian status may once have incurred, had largely disappeared by the second century BCE. As an example, Hyden notes that when Marius first voiced his intention to run for the office of consul, his commander Metellus “was shocked by the request and recommended that he reconsider. Marius’s ancestors … weren’t patricians” (56-57). But Metellus himself was not a patrician: Livy (27.21.9) specifically names a Quintus Caecilius Metellus as a plebeian aedile for the year 209, an office which, as its name implies, was only open to non-patricians. On a related note, upon his election to the office of consul for the year 107, Marius became a novus homo, as discussed above. The overwhelming sense from the classical authors was that this phrase was used pejoratively in the Roman Republic, and would therefore have hardly been a “proud and rare distinction” as it is described by Hyden (66). Finally, Hyden describes how Sulla in 87 BCE Sulla was recalled from his command against Mithridates, and was to be succeeded by Lucius Valerius Flaccus. Before Flaccus could take over the command, he was murdered by his legate Gaius Flavius Fimbria, “once Marius’ consular colleague in 104” (246). But that Fimbria is typically regarded as the father of the legate in question here.

Again, these are minor enough points and not enough to detract with what is otherwise a fine, accessible treatment of the complex figure of Gaius Marius and the turbulent epoch in which he lived, a task at which Hyden’s text succeeds with aplomb.

Seth L. Kendall
Georgia Gwinnett College
[email protected]