701. Roman Civil War: Rise of the General (Part 1)

19:42Tom Holland:generating a pretty febrile mood in rome and it's the kind of mood again perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the present day in which an outsider if he has luck if he has talent if he has boldness on his side you know he might be able to prosper he might you know people from from not the obvious backgrounds might be able to get to the top of the tree might be able to make themselves

20:10Dominic Sandbrook:the masters of the republic and this brings us very neatly doesn't it to um our protagonist to Gaius Marius so Marius is born in 157 BC in Arpenum which is about uh 80 miles outside Rome is there a British town that would be a nice equivalent for Arpenum Tom I guess it's kind Kind of Swindon, basically. Wow. Roundabouts. Roundabouts and warehouses.

20:36Tom Holland:I mean, having said that, Arpinum is actually a kind of very old city. So perhaps the parallel doesn't exactly hold. But I guess that the people in Rome would view Arpinum as, I don't know, people in W1 might view Swindon. Right. Yeah. As being not exactly the obvious breeding ground of great dominant figures in the state. And actually, Arpinum is a classic example of how the kind of the immediate hinterland around Rome, so Latium as it's called, has come to be knitted into the fabric of the Republic and basically kind of turned into the people of Latium have been turned into Romans. so arpinum had been conquered back in 305 bc and its people initially had been given a slightly inferior form of roman citizenship so the romans called it civitas sine suffragio citizenship without well without suffrage without the vote they have lots of rights but they don't have the right to vote for magistrates but then in 188 bc arpinum finally gets the full deal so citizenship with the right to vote and that means that the parents of marius who belong to the local aristocracy in arpenham they basically belong to the first generation in the town who can take this for granted who can feel that they are part of not just the local politics of their own small town but of the great city 80 miles to the west this of course means that The young Marius growing up in Arpinum, he's aware of himself as a Roman, but he is also still very much aware of himself as a provincial.

22:12Tom Holland:That he's in a city where people have not been able to vote for magistrates in Rome, let alone run as magistrates in Rome for very long, only a few decades. And so probably as a boy, he doesn't hold out much prospect for himself, you know, as a future political star, because there is a very deep vein of snobbery in the Roman people. And they may resent the nobiles, the aristocracy, for their wealth and their sense of superiority. But they do simultaneously love families with strong brand recognition. And I guess, again, if you want an American parallel, it would be like, you know, the way people keep voting for Clintons or Bushes or whatever.

22:52Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. But unlike, let's say, Bill Clinton, or indeed, I think any of the Bushes, Marius is the recipient of an extraordinary omen. Well, he's the subject of an extraordinary omen when he's a little boy. And Plutarch recorded this, didn't he? Something to do with an eagle.

23:08Tom Holland:Plutarch, it has to be said, will always prioritise a fun story over a likely story. He'd be a very good history podcaster. Yeah, he absolutely would. So this is Plutarch. When Marius was still a boy and living out in the country, he caught an eagle's nest in his cloak as it fell from a tree. This nest contained seven baby eagles. His parents were so surprised by this freak occurrence that they asked a local soothsayer what it portended. And the soothsayer replied that Marius would become the greatest man in the world and was destined to hold the consulship no less than seven times.

23:44Dominic Sandbrook:Wow and of course Plutarch is writing this sometime after the events after he knew what happened to Marius a skeptic might say that Plutarch was making this up but I choose to

23:54Tom Holland:believe it I choose to believe that this happened well just to say that there is as we will see in due course evidence that Marius did believe something like this he did believe that he

24:04Dominic Sandbrook:was destined to have seven consul ships but seven consul ships now that I know that that is an absolutely extraordinary prediction and maybe you should explain to the listeners precisely

24:16Tom Holland:why it's such a mad prediction it's completely implausible because of the significance that the consulship plays in rome's republic so every year two consuls are elected and they wield the powers of the monarchy that had been expelled from rome back in 509 bc so the consuls are the magistrates who lead Rome's armies into war, who preside over the Senate and over the elections that are held in the city, and who crucially mediate between the Roman people and the gods. And these powers, of course, are potentially very, very intoxicating. And this is why there are two consuls, so that each one can keep a watch on the other.

25:01Tom Holland:And it's why their term of office is limited to a single year so that they won't have time to entrench their power. And for a century now, so as Marius is growing up, it's been a no-no for someone to have more than one consulship. That hadn't always been the case, but it's become kind of institutionalized. And whether this is an official law or whether it's just the pressure of custom is, I think, unknowable. But it's clearly the case that you're not supposed to have more than one consulship as Marius is growing up. And what makes it even more of a challenge for Marius, you know, any prospect of seven consulships, just having one consulship seems an almost impossible dream.

25:40Tom Holland:Because he is what the Romans called a novice homo, a new man, someone who has no tradition of holding magistracies in his family and particularly consulships. And it's obvious why this would be the case, because Marius is from Arpanum and Arpanum has only just been given the vote. So, of course, you know, his family haven't had time to get loads of consulships. And just to emphasise how mad it is even to dream of having seven consulships, no Roman in history has held seven consulships. The record is six, seven just seems impossible.

26:15Dominic Sandbrook:All right, well, we'll see whether he gets there. But let's kick off with Maris's first steps on the ladder. and i guess if you're an ambitious and talented young man from nowhere from a provincial town the obvious way to get ahead is through proving yourself in the one thing that the romans prize more than any other which is the kind of you know the military arena because you know this is the bedrock of roman power isn't it the army and this is where marius is really intending to make his

26:44Tom Holland:name yes if you want to make a name for yourself what you ideally want is some desperate and hard fought war in which you can go off and be a hero and fortunately for marius in in 134 bc exactly such a war is being fought in the northeast reaches of spain so remember we said that the romans are pushing northwards into the iberian peninsula and they have come up against the people of a city called numantia and this war has been grinding on for two decades and the senate have got absolutely fed up with it so the senate is the the assembly of the nobles the the kind of the movers and shakers in Rome.

27:19Tom Holland:And so accordingly, they say, we need our top man to go and sort this out. And there's no question who the top man in Rome at this point is. It's a guy called Scipio Aemilianus. And people who listened to our episode on the destruction of Carthage may remember that he is the general who brings that final war against Carthage to a close and wipes the city out. And it's a measure of how desperate the Senate is to have Scipio take over this command. that they allow him to have a second consulship. So he said, this is very, very irregular. They really, really need Scipio at the front, though. So they kind of turn a blind eye to the irregularity of it.

28:00Tom Holland:And so Scipio travels to Spain in command of a vast army. He has 20 ,000 men, which is roughly four legions. So a very sizable fighting force of Roman citizens. He also has lots of Sochi, these Italian allies who fight alongside the Romans. And also he has auxiliaries and the sake and these auxiliaries come to 40 ,000 in all. And among the auxiliaries, there is there are some particularly glamorous and celebrated fighters. And these are horsemen from a region in North Africa. Basically, it's Algeria now called Numidia. And the Numidians have been allies of the Romans for almost a century. The alliance had been forged in the war against Hannibal.

28:45Tom Holland:Originally, the Numidians had been on the side of Hannibal and then they had switched sides. And when Carthage falls, the Numidians had been given a lot of Carthaginian territory as a kind of reward and to cement their status as allies of the Roman people. And the particular contingent of horsemen at Numantia is led by a very charismatic young Numidian prince called Jugurtha. And he has brought not only cavalry, but also 12 war elephants. And there is a kind of ancestral relationship between the Numidian royal family and the families of the Scipios. Because Scipio Africanus, the guy who had defeated Hannibal, he'd been great mates with this Numidian king.

29:28Tom Holland:So there's a kind of sense that this is a family business. Now, when Scipio travels to Numantia, he takes with him as a junior officer the young Marius. and marius does really really well there just a quick question about marius so do we have any

29:47Dominic Sandbrook:sense of his appearance personality sort of i don't know his bearing his vibe at this point

29:52Tom Holland:i think he's he's like um if you imagine channing tatum wow he's big okay he's brave he's physically tough he loves fighting he's in other words he's a natural soldier and he's a soldier in the kind of traditional old school way that the romans love so he he despises fancy cooking he's not interested in celebrity chefs okay he despises snooty manners he doesn't have a you know a kind of expensive education he loves sleeping on hard ground with his men with only his cloak to cover him you know it's all that kind of thing right so he's very roman a roman in the way that the romans like to imagine themselves yeah you know he hasn't been spoiled by all these snooty manners and things and by Greek learning and stuff.

30:39Tom Holland:He's not a man for a sex manual. Well, we'll maybe come to that in due course. I think at this point, he's not a man for a sex manual. He is, he's rough and tough and hardy and he loves fighting barbarians. And this is, this is everything the Romans want in a kind of a young, upwardly mobile officer. He's also a very strict disciplinarian. And to be honest, the Romans love a strict disciplinarian. They love being whipped into shape. And this is what Marius is very good at. And he fights and kills one of the commanders of the Numantians in hand to hand combat. And Scipio, Emilianus, is watching this and thinks it's absolutely brilliant.

31:17Tom Holland:And later that evening, Scipio is with all his officers. And one of them asks him, you know, who do you see as being the coming man? Who among the younger generation is someone to watch? and Scipio turns to Marius and he touches him on the shoulder very fondly and he says perhaps this is the man and this is a massive thing for Marius you know a commendation from the great war hero Scipio Emilianus and it marks him out as a man who you know deserves well of the Roman people it's it's it's something that can launch a political career he's a future England captain

32:00Dominic Sandbrook:That's exactly what he is, isn't he? He's the batsman who has been anointed by the team captain as the man who's going to carry the fortunes of the nation in the next 10 years.

32:10Tom Holland:I think that's a very fair comparison. So in 133 BC, Numantia falls. It's all great. Scipio goes back and Marius goes back as well. There is one problem, which is that Scipio dies very shortly afterwards. Had Scipio stuck around, then he would have been the perfect patron. So it is a bit of a blow. but Marius doesn't give up because he's got his battle scars he does have this commendation from Scipio which is a big deal because all of these really matter when it comes to elections particularly if you're an unknown you know you need a story to tell and Marius has a story to tell and fortunately he does also have an alternative source of patronage to Scipio and this is one of the very grandest of the noble families a family that has been serving as the patrons of marius's family in arpenham for several generations and these are the caicilli metelli and they are at this period probably the top aristocratic dynasty in rome they are madly efficient as a dynasty in hoovering up consulships, for instance, say between 123 and 98 BC, no less than seven of them will hold the consulship.

33:21Tom Holland:I mean, that's an unprecedented success rate for a single family. And they have been the great rivals of the Scipio family. But when Scipio Aemilianus dies, the great patriarch of the Metelli behaves very, very well in exactly the kind of way, again, that the Romans like to think that that their great men should so he runs out into the streets sobbing tearing his clothes crying out the great buttress of the city has fallen the man who was our bulwark and he orders his sons to help carry the funeral buyer of Scipio so in death there is reconciliation between these

33:58Dominic Sandbrook:two great families and how is it that Marius can ride both horses how can he have the patronage of

34:04Tom Holland:both if they're rivals or is that not a problem because um the the metelli are his political patrons and scipio had been his military patron and basically i you know if you're if you're not a threat to either of them you you can uh you can you can have both of them i think so maris is a

34:22Dominic Sandbrook:i mean although we've portrayed him as channing tatum as kind of rough hewn he's a smart political

34:28Tom Holland:operator to line up both of these yeah and the fact that you play the simple rough-hume soldier doesn't mean you're stupid i mean you may well be playing that part because you know that it appeals i mean there's obviously you can't do it unless there's a strong element of truth to it but it doesn't imply that there's not an element of calculation in projecting that image and again you know people will be able to think of of people in their own politics perhaps who you you know you

34:57Dominic Sandbrook:can draw comparisons with yeah so in britain we would talk about the greasy bowl wouldn't we about climbing the greasy pole which marius clearly is now hoping with their backing with his war record that he can do they don't have the same expression do they obviously what's the expression the romans

35:14Tom Holland:have so they they call it the cursus honorum so it's literally the kind of the the race track of honors of of magistracies and the race track is obviously derived from the circus maximus which is this great public space where all the people of Rome gather. And this racetrack leads from magistracy to magistracy. And the finishing line, of course, is the consulship, which is the top magistracy. But as we've said, this for a novice homo like Marius, a new man, I mean, it's a big ask. That finishing tape of the consulship is a very long way. So in the immediate present he has to focus on kind of more junior magistracies unfortunately there is one magistracy in particular which really seems to suit his skill set because this is a magistracy which requires the man who holds it to defend the interests of the people against the senatorial elites And this is perfectly suited to Marius.

36:15Tom Holland:The problem is that in 119 BC, when Marius decides to run for it, even though this office is a very potent one, it is also quite a dangerous one to hold. And this office is the tribune of the plebs, of the plebeians, of the people. And it comes with incredible powers. So the tribune has the veto, very famous. A tribune can veto any bill that he thinks threatens the interests of the plebs, of the people. He has a right to convene public assemblies, so not the Senate, but gatherings of the general citizenship, and get them to pass bills of his own, so plebiscites. His own person is absolutely inviolate.

36:57Tom Holland:It is completely forbidden to lay hands on him. And the reason why that's important is obviously is that if the tribune is passing measures or blocking legislation that is supported by the mass of the aristocracy, he has to be respected. But is he respected? This is the question. So this is the question. So Marius decides that he's going to run for the tribunate in 119. And we've said it's a very potent magistracy. But at this time, it is also a very dangerous one for anyone to have. Marius has been elected tribune just two years after one of his predecessors had been murdered. And this, of course, had been a terrible sacrilege.

37:35Tom Holland:We've said that the person of a tribune is inviolate. And the death squad that killed this tribune had been led by a consul. And the corpse of the tribune had been systematically insulted. The body had been decapitated and the head, the skull had been filled with lead to serve as a trophy. So in other words, class war, as Marius is looking to make his way, you know, the first kind of lengths of the Curse of Sonorum, has come to Rome. And for someone like Marius, who is a man of the people, no real pedigree or background, but very ambitious, this means that the tightrope he's going to have to tread is incredibly treacherous and potentially fatal.

38:25Dominic Sandbrook:So Marius is setting out on this potentially fatal tightrope and the stakes are very high and we'll find out what happens after the break.

38:37Dominic Sandbrook:This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Tom, throughout history, change has often been driven by businesses and institutions that end up having a massive impact on society as a whole. And there's probably no better example than the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford and his managers revolutionized production through their pioneering assembly lines, and they influenced factories and working practices in countries all over the world.

39:06Tom Holland:Another example of a business driving technological and social change is Amazon, which is increasing the number of its electric vehicles used for deliveries in Europe to over 10 ,000 by the end of this year, 2026.

39:23Dominic Sandbrook:Now, on top of that, over 50 % of Amazon deliveries now come with less packaging or sometimes no added packaging at all. It helps to avoid unnecessary waste and it makes recycling at home that much easier. Find out more at amazon.co.uk slash sustainability. Hola camaradas, it's Dominic here. Sorry to interrupt the episode, but I just thought you'd like to know that we've been thinking about something that you've been writing to us a lot one of the most requested subjects ever since we started the rest is history which is the spanish civil war now i can tell you exclusively that plans are afoot for us to do the spanish civil war at some point hopefully next year in 2027 but as a little taster or teaser on our sister show the book club my co-presenter tabby and i have just released an episode on perhaps the emblematic novel of the Spanish Civil War, which is Ernest Hemingway's book, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

40:28Dominic Sandbrook:So in this episode, we do dig into the history. We talk about the clash between fascism and idealism. We talk about the roots of the conflict and, of course, the way in which it drew in so many foreign intellectuals and artists and writers, Hemingway, of course, among them. And many of you will know that Hemingway was in Spain during the war. He was a correspondent in Madrid, which was under siege by Franco's forces. And he draws on that experience in For Whom the Bell Tolls to tell the story of an American volunteer who's part of a guerrilla unit who are fighting Franco's troops. So if you keep listening, at the end of this episode, we will have an exclusive short clip which discusses the history of the Spanish Civil War.

41:13Dominic Sandbrook:Welcome back, everybody, to The Rest is History of the Year. is 119 BC and the ambitious provincial self-made man Gaius Marius who is now already in his late 30s so he's only two years short of his 40th birthday he has won his first major political office his first major magistracy he has become as he intended a tribune of the plebs and as we were saying before the break Tom although it's meant supposedly inviolate this is an increasingly dangerous role in the febrile politics of Rome at this point for a man like Marius to hold. Now, why specifically at this point is this so politically febrile?

41:57Dominic Sandbrook:What makes this so contentious?

41:59Tom Holland:Because the previous decade and a half, the Tribunate had been used to foster what, in the opinion of conservatives in the Senate, are very radical, very dangerous, and in the opinion of conservatives, very un-Roman reforms and policies. And these have been pushed by two brothers. The eldest of these is Tiberius Gracchus. He had become tribune in 133 BC. His younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, he had become tribune 10 years later. And both these brothers had used their tribunates to push for reforms that were very overtly in favour of the poor. So the measures that they pushed for included having publicly held land, state held land, being divided up and given as allotments to those who had no land in the city.

42:53Tom Holland:So the bottom of the bottom, the most impoverished layers of Roman society. They had pressed for corn to be sold below the market rate so subsidized food and they pushed for the poorest citizens when they got levied into the army to be given their own clothes their own kind of kit and equipment and this was seen by the senate as monstrously left-wing to be anachronistic about it militant class war politics yeah and particularly um gaius gracchus the younger the tony ben of republican Rome because he had far more than his elder brother a very self-consciously revolutionary vision so he basically he wanted to turn the republic into a kind of version of the democracy that the Athenians had he wanted very deliberately to alter the balance of power between the nobles between the the the senatorial elite and the mass of the people and I suppose ultimately he wanted to enshrine the populace the people as the arbiters of rome rather than the sonatus the senate so it would be i guess the people in the senate of rome rather than the other way around that's his that's his kind of ambition and to conservatives in the senate i mean this is beyond the pale this is monstrous and they see tiberius gracchus and particularly gaius gracchus as potential tyrants why else would they be pushing these reforms it could only be because they want absolute power And something that confirms the senatorial conservatives in this opinion is a very sinister trend.

44:27Tom Holland:So Tiberius Gracchus, when he'd finished his one year as tribune, he'd immediately sought re-election. And Gaius Gracchus in 122 BC, he'd finished his term, stood again and actually been elected. And this is really sinister because it is pretty fundamental to the way that the Romans understand politics that you shouldn't hold a magistracy for more than one year. Because if you do, then you have the chance to entrench your own powers, your own support. And so the enemy of the Gracchi in the Senate feel themselves entirely justified in imagining that it is an ambition for tyranny that is motivating the Gracchi.

45:10Tom Holland:And the office of the tribunate may be inviolate, but it's not as inviolate as maintaining the integrity of the Republic. And so twice this great cry had gone up that the Republic needs defending. The Constitution is in peril. And twice this cry had been answered. So in 133, Tiberius Gracchus had been clubbed to death with the leg of a stool. He'd been cornered and had his head smashed to pieces. and then in 121 Gaius Gracchus as we heard before the break he'd been murdered his corpse decapitated the skull filled with lead and 3 000 of his followers had been rounded up and executed without trial by the consuls and these executions had been justified in terms of a national

45:57Dominic Sandbrook:emergency to stress if people think well this is probably part of the run of the mill you know roman politics is very violent that's not right at all right this is a massive rupture with the previous traditions of roman politics completely these are the first eruptions of civil violence

46:14Tom Holland:on the streets of rome since the expulsion of the monarchy back in 509 bc it's that big a deal wow so for 400 years or so for 400 years and it is experiencing something completely shocking so what's the significance of these atrocities i think both more and less than they seem so more because it's a fatal precedent. I guess if you're being florid, you would say that a fatal toxin has been injected into the body politic.

46:47Dominic Sandbrook:And we're never florid.

46:48Tom Holland:If a consul can justify putting an elected tribune to death and completely ignoring his inviolability simply by referencing a national emergency, then what's to stop magistrates in the future doing exactly the same? I mean, it's a kind of Weimar process.

47:07Dominic Sandbrook:isn't it it's it's it it leads to bad places if you can kill a tribune then why can't you can kill anybody i mean one consul could kill another consul and say they're a threat to the the the

47:20Tom Holland:survival of the republic because when you break a taboo yeah the taboo is never as strong as it had been before it was broken exactly so it's very pregnant with menace for the future at the same time i think it's it's kind of less than it seems because the instincts of the romans remain across the board incredibly conservative there isn't actually a threat of open class warfare of the kind that was always tearing greek cities apart and this is because as we've said the romans the mass of the romans are just inherently very very conservative they may feel resentful of the elites but they simultaneously feel very respectful of them again i think there's something of the way that maybe i mean american listeners may disagree with this but from this side of the atlantic people seem to really hate billionaires in america but also simultaneously respect them yeah i think there's something of that in the kind of the roman attitude to the senatorial elite um it's part of the tradition that the senate and the people should work together and the people feel that tradition to be as precious as the senate do so it's not like actually rome is going to collapse into as i say into into class conflict and so this for someone like marius you know here is an opportunity because he he is he's perfectly suited to play the part of the people's friend a popularis in latin you could translate that perhaps as as a populist people are very nervous you know among the tribunes they're very nervous of pushing legislation that might offend the elites because they've seen what's happened but marius is bold enough to do this so he he passes a bill um that restricts the ability of the nobles to influence voters in the voting pens it's kind of like it's not exactly introducing a secret bannet but it's kind of something along those lines and this is the first overtly populist gesture since the death of gaius gracchus and to quote plutarch this won him a reputation as a person of great courage a formidable opponent of the conservatives in the senate and someone who could be relied upon to stick up for the common man and plutarch isn't exaggerating there marius was i think being brave because it is a period of massive reaction so the historian sallust writing a few decades later he described it as um a kind of a faction of the of the few ruled by the few um justice and these few consist of just the kind of you know the top the grandest the snootiest nobles and among these nobles are the metelli so obviously for you were asking previously you know is there a risk for marius of of running against the interests of the metelli there absolutely is because the metelli are furious with him for you know this law that he's introduced and they withdraw their patronage and this has a knock-on effect for marius's prospects because for several years after his tribunate he struggles to get another magistracy and in fact in in 116 massive embarrassment he manages to lose two elections in this on the same day oh my god you know he's clearly not doing well but you know to pursue the sports analogy he backs himself right he's not gonna it's not gonna be cast down by a few disappointments form is temporary class is permanent and he's got class he's got class and the evidence of that class is that he's able to keep the backing of the people but in due course he's able to win back the support of the metelli because the metelli can see he is actually someone it's worth having on side and so relations between them are patched up and so a decade on from his tribunate maris is back in the race you know the cursa sonorum is going well for him um he's secured admittedly by the skin of the of his teeth but you know he's got it a governorship in spain and this enables him to do what he does best which is to demonstrate his talents as a commander and he promotes himself as a kind of no-nonsense enthusiast for law and order common sense governorship right so again to quote plutarch the province back then that spain was still very savage and uncivilized since the spaniards thought banditry an honorable profession and marius is uh having none of that lots of crucifixions and

51:37Dominic Sandbrook:scourgings and enslavements as i say common sense so he's robust he's robust in spain uh but also So he now we haven't mentioned his personal life at all, but actually his personal life has taken a very exciting turn because he is married into, well, the most single, most well-known family in all Roman history, hasn't he?

51:56Tom Holland:He has. Yes. Although at the time it's it's very ancient, it's very patrician, but it's slightly down on its luck. It hasn't had a great success in elections for centuries and more. And this, of course, is the family of the Caesars. so marius marries julia who is the sister of the father of julius caesar so marius is going to be the young julius caesar's marital uncle and so big part in colin mcculloch's books all of this yeah so marius is being knitted into the you know a key aristocratic family and he's got the matteli back on side by this point yeah so brilliant and this is crucial because he's got the backing of one metellus in particular and this is a guy called quintus caecilius metellus who is he is an absolutely instinctive oligarch i mean he's very much politically not maris's cup of tea he's a person of great personal integrity but in that kind of flinty slightly off-putting manner that is characteristic of very moral upstanding romans but crucially for marius this reputation as someone who is both very upstanding and a very effective soldier has won metellus electionship to the consulship for the year 109 and this is great for marius because metellus as consul has been appointed to the command of an exceedingly challenging war in africa and this in turn means that metellus is going to need a trusted and competent legatus a number two a deputy and marius is the obvious candidate he's a man of proven courage of proven ability and he is also a long-term client of the metelli and so marius says yes doesn't he and he

53:54Dominic Sandbrook:says yes both because he's obviously he's he's obviously very good at fighting wars so be mad for him to say no but also you know the military sphere and the political sphere uh you know they're interconnected aren't they in rome in this period and marius is thinking that you know uh proving himself on the battlefield is the perfect way to reboot his stalled political career well i think

54:22Tom Holland:more specifically it might give him a chance to have a crack at the ultimate and go for the consulship and marius hasn't told metellus this it's like a kind of dream that he's hugging to himself but his his plan i think is to go to africa to win a few dashing victories to make a name for himself in rome to have his backers in rome of which he has quite a lot by this point to kind of really hype him up and then to go back run for election and you know he might be in with a chance but obviously this does require him to make a good fist of things in africa and things there have not been going well for the Romans at all.

54:57Tom Holland:So it's not going to be easy. So the reason for this is because they are up against an enemy who knows them very, very well. And this is none other than an old comrade of arms of Marius. They'd served together at Numantia. And this is the Numidian prince Jugurtha, the guy who had brought the cavalry and the 12 elephants to Numantia. And I say prince, but in fact, by this point, he's killed his two cousins who are the legitimate heirs to the numidian throne the legitimate princes and made himself the king of numidia so he's a usurper sitting on the throne and to oil the wheels of his rise to power um to get the approval of the powers that be in rome he has lavished massive bribes he's just been spraying them around and And even Jugurtha had been surprised by the level of corruption that this had revealed in a city supposedly made up of stern, flinty, unyielding moralists.

55:59Tom Holland:Right. And he made a very famous comment on Rome, which Sallust recorded. He described it as a city for sale and bound for imminent destruction should a buyer be found. and on top of this the other reason that jugurtha has really been pushing things too far is that he he hasn't been behaving as the romans think a kind of tame client king should so in 112 in direct contravention of roman instructions he had attacked and killed the second of his two cousins who'd kind of retreated and he's holed up in a town called kirta and in the course of this attack which the romans had had told jugurtha anyway not to do jugurtha's men had killed a number of romans um and this is too much really for the senate back in rome no matter how many bribes jugurtha is shoveling their way and so they think okay this has gone too far we need to topple him this however proves easier said than done and the reasons for this are numerous firstly numidia is kind of flat and open so it's perfect cavalry country and the strength of the romans of course is their legions their heavy infantry also the roman forces in africa are very flabby and out of shape so they need a strict disciplinarian to turn up and whip them into shape and a consul who had been sent out to fight jugurtha had shown himself to be absolutely useless and you know it resulted in a series of embarrassing defeats so again to pursue the sporting analogy you know the england manager has lost to andorra um yeah to iceland or iceland yes and metellus is the guy who's been appointed to go and whip them into shape yeah basically

57:41Dominic Sandbrook:they've been messing around with wags yeah exactly they're barely training and you've got a new manager who's a disciplinarian and uh and he's bringing in marius who is the number two

57:52Tom Holland:the set piece coach or whatever yeah exactly grim faced set piece coach who will make them like train six times a day yes so salas describes metellus as a formidable and unrelenting man and so he is he goes in gets them onto the training ground you know practicing their corners whatever and whips them into shape and then he he's he gets them ready they go on the offensive they defeat jugurtha in a pitch battle all jugurtha's war elephants are wiped out and And Metellus very cleverly then starts suborning Jugurtha's inner circle so that Jugurtha doesn't know who he can trust. Jugurtha inevitably opts for a guerrilla war.

58:29Tom Holland:This is the classic thing. I mean, you know, this is where Numidia is the place where the French will end up fighting their war in Algeria. Right. Centuries and centuries later. And Metellus, rather like the French do, he responds by ravaging the countryside, taking vast numbers of prisoners, capturing settlements one by one, burning them if they resist, kind of calculated series of atrocities. And the Senate think this is brilliant, to quote Salas. They decreed supplications to the immortal gods in return for the successful deeds of Metellus. And really the only fly in the ointment as Metellus' year as consul draws to a close is the fact that Jugurtha is still on the loose.

59:09Tom Holland:But Metellus is assuming that's not really an issue. He's done so well that even though he's no longer consul, he's presuming that he will continue to be in charge of this war. And it is at this point that Marius makes his move. so in the summer of 108 he goes to metellus and he says that he wants to head back to rome and he wants to run for the consulship and metellus is stunned by this um you know he responds with complete astonishment then with contempt and then he makes a joke of it but marius is absolutely obdurate and metellus who thinks he hasn't got a hope i mean he's just a novice homo what hope does he possibly have he says fine okay you can go back but very pointedly he keeps marius with him in the field until the very last moment so that marius only gets back to rome in the very nick of time to register himself for the consular election and i think that metellus is doing this to ensure that marius won't have time to do any of the campaigning that you know is essential if you're going to be consul but metellus has badly underestimated marius because we said that marius has lots of agents back in Rome and unknown to Metellus these have been doing a lot of campaigning while Maris has been away in Africa and they have been playing the popularist card they've been saying look Metellus is stiff arrogant chilly haughty this isn't the kind of person that we want what we want is a man of the people a man like a man like you that's pretty um sneaky of

1:00:43Dominic Sandbrook:Marius is turning on his own patron. He completely is. That's poor. That has slightly messed with my sense of Gaius Marius, who I always thought was...

1:00:51Tom Holland:It's like Rupert Lowe turning on Nigel Farage.

1:00:53Dominic Sandbrook:That is absolutely not the analogy that I would have picked. So I always thought that Marius would never have stooped to that, but I was wrong.

1:01:03Tom Holland:Well, we said he gives the impression of being, I think, a bit of a meathead.

1:01:08Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah.

1:01:09Tom Holland:But that's the show. So Marius is a very shrewd, calculating commander, but also a politician. He's very, very effective. And he knows that, you know, in politics, as in war, you have to prepare for success. And that's what he's been doing. And he knows that there is a huge constituency and not just among the mass of the people in the Senate as well, who are fed up with this kind of faction of the few. These guys who've been in control and hogging the consulship for year after year after year and want them out of the way. and so he is the guy who dares to put his head above the parapet and he duly reaps the reward so not only is he elected consul for 107 bc he gets metellus's african command my god if you're metellus you are absolutely raging at this point he's furious he's absolutely livid he's he's the guy who's basically defeated girtha and he's closing in on the kill and just as he's doing that suddenly he gets a message saying you've got to hand over your command to your former deputy but it is what it is you know metellus has got to do what the senate tells him and so he goes back to rome in a massive strop and his mates in the senate there tried to make things up for him by voting him a splendid title numidicus you know the guy who's defeated the numidians and we've said how the number of names that you have in rome is a marker of your status um he now has a fourth name so that's some consolation i guess meanwhile marius is in africa he takes control of the war against jugurtha and within a year he has brought it to a successful conclusion um jugurtha himself is driven out of numidia and goes to mauritania the neighboring kingdom what's now morocco but marius is not going to leave him there to um continue to stir up trouble he wants a line drawn under the whole war with jugurtha and so accordingly he has an eye for talent um he's got this general staff and he picks out the shrewdest the cleverest the most diplomatic able the bravest of all his lieutenants sends this officer to um the king of mauritania to negotiate the surrender of jugurtha and this officer you know proves himself to be everything that marius had hoped incredibly subtle incredibly fearless he pulls the diplomatic mission off jugurtha falls into roman hands this lieutenant takes jugurtha back to marius and marius then heads back to Rome with Jugurtha in chains.

1:03:33Dominic Sandbrook:Do you know, I've been massively looking forward to this. Well, actually dreading it, because I remember having to translate this, like some passage about Jugurtha's in chains. Yeah, in Sallust. It was Sallust, yeah, we had to do this at school. I mean, I don't want to make listeners switch off, but the act of translating this was soul-destroying. It was so dull. But you're going to make it exciting, aren't you?

1:03:54Tom Holland:I thought from your enthusiasm for Colin McCulloch that you were going to say that you remember this moment as a particularly grim and terrifying moment so maris has gone back and um it's the first of january 104 so it's the new year the roman new year and he's been given a triumph you know this great kind of celebrated procession through the streets of rome that gets given to victorious generals and he's celebrating it on the on new year's day his triumph involves him riding in a chariot um dressed in the robes of a triumphal general through rome with his legions all the loot that he's taken in umidia and his legions following him and jugurtha is led in chains before the cheering mass of the roman people being booed and spat at and people throwing eggs and whatever at him kind of moderately interesting and fun i think no it's genuinely

1:04:43Dominic Sandbrook:interesting i just don't i think the key thing looking at your notes is that i probably didn't know the word for earlobes and that and that that was that was what threw me because because at the

1:04:53Tom Holland:end of the triumph jugurtha is taken to one side and taken to this hideous prison and there his his earrings are pulled off and they're yanked off so brutally that his entire earlobe comes away with the earrings and surely any young sandbrook would have enjoyed that if he'd got to translate it and then he's thrown into this freezing cold dungeon and i'll quote plutarch jugurtha's wits unsettled by this and grinning horribly he cried out by hercules what cold baths you have here in rome great banter i don't think it's banter i think he's gone mad by this point already really and so he's chained up down in the bottom of this hideous cell and six days later he dies of the cold and malnutrition and that's the end of jugurtha and so for marius everything's turned out brilliantly so he's got his consulship he's gone to africa he's won his war he's got a brilliant name for himself as rome's greatest general there are just two slight clouds on the horizon and the first of these is that beyond the alps the teutons and the kimbri are reported to be moving on italy the asteroid is heading towards earth the zombie apocalypse is breaking out do you know what they are they're the white walkers they're the white walkers from westeros yeah and so in rome all eyes are fixed on marius he is the hero of the hour he is rome's greatest soldier and so it's not surprising that it's on his shoulders that responsibility for saving the city is laid by a desperate and terrified people then there is a second cloud and this is less obvious.

1:06:43Tom Holland:It's more private. I'd say that at this stage, it's just a kind of a little niggle. But it is one that threatens a good deal of trouble in the future, to put it mildly. So just as Metellus had been upstaged by Marius, so does Marius feel just a little bit upstaged by his own lieutenant. And this is, of course, the guy who had successfully negotiated the surrender of jugurtha and this lieutenant like marius himself is a naturally ambitious man a man with a hyper keen sense of his own worth and a man with all kinds of military and political talents and there are some in rome marius's enemies in the senate prominent among them who have begun to attribute the defeat of jugurtha not to marius but to this lieutenant they're saying oh marius is just showboating the guy who really ended the war is this person and this person this lieutenant you know he doesn't disavow this perspective and in fact he's had a signet ring made for himself which shows him negotiating the surrender of jugurtha and so he kind of flashes it around And to quote Plutarch, by insisting on wearing this ring all the time, he greatly irritated Marius, who was incredibly sensitive when it came to his own honour, scorned to share his glory with anyone else and was always ready to take offence.

1:08:13Tom Holland:And Dominic, the name of this lieutenant, we are going to be hearing a lot about him in the episodes to come. It is Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In our next episode, we are going to be finding out who he is, what's his background, his upbringing, all of that. And we will also, of course, be following Marius to war with the Teutons and the Kimbray.

1:08:40Dominic Sandbrook:Crikey. So exciting. So if you'd like to hear that episode right now, and if you'd like to hear the final two episodes of this absolutely thrilling, swashbuckling Roman series. and if you're not already a member of the rest is history club because of course if you're in the club you can listen to the next episode well if you want to hear it join our own band of marauding barbarian cannibals the rest is history club at the rest is history.com and you can of course always find out more about this series and about what's coming next on the rest is history by subscribing to our newsletter now if you don't want to join the rest is history club first of all you're insane so i you know i have no time for you um i don't i don't care what you do frankly because you've made poor life choices however you can actually because we're kind you can actually hear the first five minutes of the next episode right now we are going to be playing the first five minutes of that episode now so after that you probably will want to join the club um now we're only doing it because we like you we're not doing it to entice you to join the club Anyway, here are the next five minutes.

1:09:47Dominic Sandbrook:Goodbye, everybody. Enjoy them. Ave, acque vale.

1:09:52Tom Holland:Even as Marius is riding through the streets of Rome and being cheered by the watching crowds, there is a mood of panic, maybe even desperation in the city, because Jugurtha may have been defeated. The dignity of the Roman name may have been upheld in Africa. But to the north, beyond the Alps, there is a much more terrifying threat than some African king massing on the frontiers of Rome's empire. And again, we mentioned this in the previous episode. Yeah. It's an immense migration of Germans, the Teutons and the Cimbri from Jutland to the frontiers of the Roman world. So it's almost a kind of proto-Viking invasion.

1:10:43Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. So in the last episode, to please people who online like to count how often we refer to either the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, I compared them with the White Walkers, the people who in the Game of Thrones TV series you see right at the beginning, they're massing all the time. You know, all the internal politics of Westeros is nothing compared with the existential apocalyptic threat that these blokes represent. And actually, I'm going to congratulate myself on my own comparison. I think it's an absolutely superb comparison. Yeah. Because, I mean, these people, the Teutons and the Kimberi, they're massive.

1:11:16Dominic Sandbrook:They're terrifying. They look weird. They are an existential threat. They're reputed to be cannibals. Right. This is Plutarch on them. He said they were impervious to cold because they'd been brought up in icebound countries full of forests. I mean, Tom, the parallels are stacking up.

1:11:32Tom Holland:You're absolutely right. And also, I think, isn't this also the case with the White Walkers? The Teutons and the Cimbri are accompanied by women and children. Yeah, because some of them are women and children, yeah. And in fact, actually, in Game of Thrones, the children are the most frightening. There's always something terrifying about a murderous, sinister child. And frankly, if you've ever met a German child, you know, it's the same story. Well, they're Danes, really, aren't they? Yeah, they're the worst. And the women also are very frightening because they're said to fight alongside the men.

1:12:04Tom Holland:Of course. And it's an entire people on the move. So there are tens of thousands of them, according to the Roman sources. I mean, we don't know how accurate they are, but basically there are loads and loads of them. And they are experienced by the Romans less as an army than as some kind of force of nature. You know, a great flood, a tide, a tsunami, whatever you want to reach for. You know, the news had been brought to them that this monstrous tide of people is advancing towards you. And so they sent an army under a consul into a region called Noricum, which is basically Austria today in 113 BC.

1:12:38Tom Holland:And the consul had set an ambush for these barbarians and the barbarians had rumbled it and had outsmarted the consul and given him a serious mauling. And so he'd withdrawn and he had assumed that the barbarians would pursue him and invade Italy. In fact, they don't. They swing westwards into Gaul, which is a big relief to the Romans. But I think it's also a little bit unsettling because it's clear that the Cimbri and the Teutons are unlike any enemy that they've come up against before. There's no predicting what they'll do. When you're fighting Carthaginians or Greeks or even Gauls, there's a sense in which the Romans understand what makes these people tick.

1:13:20Tom Holland:But with these barbarians from the far north, And again, this is maybe the kind of White Walker comparison. The Romans don't understand what they want. They don't understand what's going to motivate them. They don't understand how they're going to behave. And so that means it's very difficult, I think, for the Romans to devise a strategy to cope with this onslaught. And this becomes manifest in a succession of disastrous Roman attempts to go and be proactive and meet the Teutons and Cimbri and wipe them out beyond the limits of Roman power. Because the barbarians, they're just roaming around Gaul, kind of looting and pillaging and killing and all that kind of stuff.

1:14:00Tom Holland:And the Romans keep going and trying to attack them and they keep being defeated. So first in 109 BC, and then two years later near what today is Bordeaux. And one consul in that battle is killed, and the other one is cornered. And the only way that he can extract himself is to agree that he and his army will go beneath the yoke. Oh, my God. Yeah, ultimate humiliation. You put up two spears and put another spear across it, and everyone has to symbolically bend and crawl. Well, not symbolically. I mean, you literally do it, but it's obviously a symbol of humiliation. So that's very bad. And then I had forgotten the full details of this defeat.

1:14:42Tom Holland:So it happens in 105 and it's a culminating disaster in the Roman attempts to stop the barbarians. It happens outside Arausio, which is the town in southern Gaul, which gives its name to Orange. So ultimately to the Orange Order. I mean, that's an amazing thought. And in this battle, the Romans, it said, lose over 100 ,000 men, which is more than they lose at Cannae.

1:15:09Dominic Sandbrook:Is that plausible, really, that they lost that many? I mean, these figures are all made up, aren't they, really?

1:15:13Tom Holland:I don't think they're made up. It's clearly a massive defeat, and yet it's barely remembered. And you think how much it's written about Cannae and the impact it had on the Romans. At the time, it must have just seemed overwhelming. It must have seemed a disaster on par with that. And when the news of it is brought to Rome, there is this terrible mood of panic. So thank you very much for listening to that. And if you liked it and you would like to hear more, then you can find the full episode at the rest is history dot com.

1:15:55Hi, everybody.

1:15:56Dominic Sandbrook:Dominic again. Now here is the clip that we promised you from our show The Book Club, which talks about Ernest Hemingway's book For Whom the Bell Tolls, and specifically the history of the Spanish Civil War. So Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all. It's been a backwater, basically. It's been really politically turbulent. There is a king. It's nominally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like there's these huge estates called the Latifundiae, which go back to the Roman period.

1:16:29Tom Holland:I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I started reading up for this episode.

1:16:32Dominic Sandbrook:Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolutely gigantic rural estates run by landowners, almost kind of feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialized the Basque country, the North and Catalonia. But those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured. And there's lots of labor unrest. There's a big anarchist movement. There was a socialist movement. There's a communist party. In the 20s, there was a coup and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, under the king.

1:17:13Dominic Sandbrook:But that didn't really work out. They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polarised and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So, for example, in the North in 1935, there are assassinations. There are kind of paramilitary movements and whatnot. The son of the previous dictator, Primo de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the Falange, which actually sort of gives its name really to. It's then co-opted by the right, by the conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War. I mean, whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question.

1:17:51Dominic Sandbrook:Right, so it all comes to a head in 1936. There's an election at the beginning of the year, which means that a popular front, which is a kind of left-wing alliance of liberals, socialists, you know, sort of left-wing parties, some of the separatists or more nationalist groups from the areas like the Basque Country or Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrest because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. And in July 1936, the army launches, right-wing elements within the army launch a coup. The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work.

1:18:29Dominic Sandbrook:So basically the trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona, and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army, and their allies, who are often like big landowners, the Catholic church, and so on, who want to defend the status quo. They've got half the country, often kind of rural areas, more conservative, and so on. But the big cities and Catalonia and so on, so Madrid, Barcelona, places like that, they stay loyal to the elected government. So on the one hand, you have what are called the nationalists. And these are the forces of the right, the army, the coup plotters, and so on.

1:19:10Dominic Sandbrook:Effectively, from day one, they have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy, and then Hitler in Germany. And then on the left, you have the elected government, who are the Republicans, and they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poison chalice. And they do appeal to Britain and France for help, but they don't really get it. And they have help from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody. I mean, this is always the way with civil wars, because people feel it's an existential struggle. The future of their country is at stake.

1:19:49Dominic Sandbrook:They come to believe, you know, their neighbours, the people in the next town, the landowners or the priests or the anarchists or whoever are going to kill them and their families. So we've got to kill them first. People, in some places, there are horrendous, horrendous sadistic massacres and things.

1:20:05Tom Holland:I think they found something like at the end of maybe the start of the 21st century or something, that Spain had the highest number of mass graves after Cambodia.

1:20:15Dominic Sandbrook:So if you want to hear the full episode, just go to Apple or Spotify or YouTube and search for The Book Club. And there it is.