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

24:27Tom Holland:And the whole while that Sulla has been busy in the year of his consulship in 88, in the wake of his march on Rome, trying to sort things out in Italy to make sure that it's going to be safe for him to leave Italy for the war against Mithridates, the situation in the east has been getting darker and darker.

24:46Dominic Sandbrook:So the war in the East or the situation in the East, this guy Mithridates is the greatest threat to Rome in a long time. I mean, we had the White Walkers in the previous episodes, but this guy is a king. He's very rich, isn't he? And he has ancient prophecies on his side. So we live on ancient prophecy and he's got loads of ancient prophecies on his side. Loads.

25:08Tom Holland:There are all kinds of omens that have been current in the East for many decades, telling of how a great king is going to appear in the world and he will come out of the East and he will be an instrument of divine retribution against the overweening Roman superpower. And essentially, these prophecies have been bred of the kind of feeling of impotence and helplessness that most people in the Eastern Mediterranean have felt before the spectacle of Roman supremacy. And so Mithridates, who was actually dead to attack Rome, the first king to do so in over a century. You know, he's very successful in invoking these prophecies and applying them to himself.

25:47Tom Holland:But more than that, he has a tremendous eye for propaganda and a kind of striking image. So people may remember that the whole war against Mithridates had actually been provoked by a Roman ally of Marius, a guy called Manius Aquilius, who had kind of incited a neighbouring king to invade Pontus's kingdom and it had all gone absolutely tits up and Aquilius had ended up fleeing mainland Asia and kind of going out to an island just off the um just off the the shore of of Asia and at a crucial point he goes down with a stomach bug and so when Mithridates agents arrive where he is in his sickbed he is helpless to escape and so he is captured and this offers such scope for a man as skillful at propaganda as Mithridates.

26:38Tom Holland:So he has Aquilius chained to a seven-foot barbarian and dragged back from the coastline of Asia all the way to Pergamum, the capital of Asia. When they reach Pergamum, Aquilius is tied backwards onto an ass and paraded through the streets. And so everybody is able to invent their hatred of the Romans on him. And then finally, a very, very famous scene. Mithridates has gold melted down and then Aquilis' nostrils are held, his mouth is pulled open and that gold is poured down Aquilis' throat. And it's such a memorable gesture that people will claim that it's done to other Roman generals who fall prisoner of rebellious people in the East for many decades to come.

27:24Tom Holland:Crassus. Isn't the thumbs basically happened to Crassus? The story is told of Crassus as well. But I think this is the originator of the story. And Mithridates, you know, he proclaims to the people of Asia why he has imposed this punishment on Aquilius. He says that it is an illustration of how the Romans have only one abiding motive, greed, deep seated for empire and riches. And, you know, he's not wrong. The Romans have been absolute bloodsuckers when it comes to the poor cities of Asia.

27:57Dominic Sandbrook:As a result of this, the other Greek cities in Asia, they've been simmering with a similar kind of resentment towards overweening Roman power. This upstart, this parvenu from Italy that is trying to impose itself onto the Greek world, they pile in behind Mithridates, don't they? They're very up for this. They do, because Mithridates sends secret instructions to the leading figures in all the various cities of Asia that they are to prepare a massacre of every Roman and Italian in Asia, most of whom belong to the business class that have been

28:30Tom Holland:leeching onto the hapless Greeks. and the greeks in asia could not be happier to join in and when the massacre hits the romans and the italians it hits them as a bolt from the blue so they are completely without warning as it seems to them they're rounded up and they are slaughtered perhaps by hired assassins or perhaps by vengeful mobs some of them are hacked to pieces as they cling to sacred statues or to altars others are shot as they attempt to swim out into the sea and once they're dead their bodies are then left to rot unburied outside the city walls of all the various cities that have participated in this massacre and of course the casualty figures are very inflated so it said that 80 ,000 men women and children were were killed but there's no question that these figures are believed back in italy and the impact on the romans is kind of analogous perhaps to the impact that 9-11 had on americans it comes as a similar shock uh the idea that the commanding heights not just of their power but of their economy could be hit in this way and so much bloodshed be inflicted comes as

29:41Dominic Sandbrook:complete surprise but the difference with 9-11 is that um osama bin laden did that don't not then launch an invasion of canada or something but this is what mithridates does isn't it because you've already mentioned that he's eyeing up greece and his he's now going to absolutely double down he thinks rome is vulnerable and although greece is not i mean greece is not part of the roman empire as it were but it's part of the roman sphere of influence at this point presumably

30:07Tom Holland:economically as well as diplomatically yeah it's completely under the shadow of roman power remember that the city of corinth had been annihilated as evidence for the greeks of what would happen if any greek city chose to oppose the romans and so cities in greece now are governed by pro-Roman oligarchs. And they do Rome's bidding. And in return, Rome rewards this class of collaborators. And the classic example of this is the most famous of all the Greek cities, and that is Athens. So Athens, by this point, it used to be an imperial power itself. That empire has long, long gone. Its democracy, to the degree that it still exists, is a complete sham.

30:49Tom Holland:its independence um you know it's nominal it's it's nothing more really than a fig leaf but if you are a millionaire you know with responsibility for running athens times are pretty good the romans you know smile on you they give you favorable treaties they allow you to enjoy special um trading uh relations with other parts of rome's empire and the plutocrats basically They are happy to sell the rest of the Athenian people down the river in return for the power and wealth that backing Rome gives them. But obviously, the richer they get, the more the resentments of the mass of the people, the demos, as they are called, just fester and fester.

31:34Tom Holland:And so, unsurprisingly, when news of what has happened in Asia reaches Athens, everyone's completely gripped by this incredible spectacle. the collapse of roman rule the conquests of mithridates the massacre of so many romans and italians and the business elite are obviously appalled but the mass of people in athens are you know they're thrilled and this old longing for freedom which has been repressed for so many years but in athens is still felt as something living as part of the you know the historical patrimony of the athenian people it it rouses the demos the athenian people to dream that freedom might after all be theirs and so a revolution breaks out and it's led by a naturalized athenian called aristion and inevitably this being athens he is a philosopher but just because he's a philosopher doesn't mean that he can't preside over a pogrom and so he leads the mass of the people against the plutocrats those who don't flee are massacred and then he sends envoys to mithridates on the other side of the aegean saying could we have an alliance and mithridates says yeah absolutely this is brilliant and he promptly sends an expeditionary force across the aegean to athens so that this alliance between athens and the king of pontus can be expressed in military terms and of course those military terms are targeted against Rome.

32:59Tom Holland:And it seems with Athens now allied to Mithridates, what is to stop other Greek cities from doing the same? And back in Italy, where Sulla has been watching the situation develop, not necessarily to Rome's advantage, he realizes that speed is an absolute premium now. You know, he has to get across the Adriatic, get into Greece, see off Mithridates' armies, because otherwise the whole of Greece and maybe Macedon as well, which is currently a Roman province, it might all just slip away.

33:31Dominic Sandbrook:Tricky for Sulla though, isn't it? Because he's basically, I mean, he's got a lot of problems at once. He's got Marius on the loose. No one knows where Marius is or what he's going to get up to. He has one of the new consuls, Sinna. Sinna did that business with the stone. I'm not going to cause any trouble. I mean, one of the characteristics of very cynical, ruthless people is they assume that everybody else is as cynical and ruthless as they are. So Sulla can't trust Sinna. one thing we haven't really talked about actually you know sulla was involved in this war against the italian the rest of italy the social war that's still going on isn't it and actually nobody really has decided i mean there's still a massive political argument about how to end that particular war i mean almost everybody thinks that the italians should be given the vote and they should you know they should be incorporated fully into the roman republic but exactly how is still a moot point.

34:22Dominic Sandbrook:So Sulla is taking a big risk by leaving all this behind, unresolved, to go over to Greece and presumably to Asia. But I guess, does he think he has no choice that this is existential for Rome? I think it's probably less Rome than him.

34:40Tom Holland:He has marched on Rome. He has dared very greatly in the course of ensuring that he can lead this war against Mithridates. So he has to go. But you're right that in every sense, if he crosses the Adriatic and leaves Italy behind, there is no guarantee that he will remain legally a general of the Roman Republic. It's very likely that his enemies will secure power. And if they do, then they will name him an enemy of the state. So it is a huge gamble. And I think that for that reason before he leaves he makes one attempt to provide some military security for himself in Italy while he is away so in the dying days of his consulship he'd been consul with this guy Pompeius Rufus who had been beaten up by Marius's thugs before Sulla's march on Rome and stripped of his consulship and Sulla when he marches on Rome he has this colleague this friend of his this associate Pompeius Rufus reinstalled as a consul.

35:42Tom Holland:And because Pompeius Rufus can absolutely be relied upon, what Sulla really wants is for him to have a great army of legions so that he will be a heavyweight to his other enemies in Roman Italy. So he thinks there is this guy Strabo in Piscenum, which is the area on the kind of the mid central Italy on the Adriatic coast. And Strabo, people may remember Strabo means squint. Strabo has it's a nickname. He's a very sinister figure, but very effective. And he has been laying siege to the city of Asculum, where the social war had originally broken out. He's done a very good job. He storms it. He's basically crushed the revolution, the rebellion, the social war in central Italy.

36:27Tom Holland:but sulla's wheeze is to say well if the if the war is over then strabo doesn't need his legions anymore so as consul i will force through a bill saying that strabo should hand over his legions to pompeius rufus and then my ally will have the legions and of course this is exactly basically

36:47Dominic Sandbrook:what marius has done yeah it does not occur to sulla that actually pompeius rufus when he arrives that Strabo might say, no, I'm going to keep the legions myself, just as Sulla had done in his turn.

36:59Tom Holland:I think this is what's so interesting. You were saying, how unthinkable is it for people to do what Sulla has done? I think it's so unthinkable that even Sulla thinks that no one else will do it. That's the measure of how kind of fateful a step his march on Rome was. So as you say, what is to stop Strabo doing to Pompeius Rufus what Sulla had done to Marius's ambassadors? us well pompeius rufus turns up and strabo greets him with a kind of very menacing politeness and then he says i'm afraid i can't hang around here i'm called away on urgent business i'll be away for the next couple of days but you know do as you will do take over my legions so the next day pompeius rufus gathers all the soldiers around him and he celebrates his command in the traditional manner by performing a sacrifice and as he is conducting the sacrifice a gang of strabo's soldiers start to push in on him and as he raises the sacrificial knife to kill the um the victim that's being sacrificed these soldiers seize him and they strike him down and a roman scholar later described it he perished as though he were the sacrificial offering himself the strabo comes back and he says i'm shocked shocked to discover what's happened but he takes no action against the mutineers and the legions remain securely under his command and so sulla does not have that body

38:22Dominic Sandbrook:of legions backing him that he had hoped for question about strabo is strabo at this point loyal to marius is he operating in his own he's his own man he's his own man so isn't that a sign of how generally structurally roman politics and roman kind of military politics is kind of breaking down that because you describe strabo as a warlord i mean this is not just a general as part of an institution this is an independent military power broker kingmaker you know in different

38:51Tom Holland:circumstances i guess yeah and i think that's exactly what strabo is doing is waiting to see who's going to win but keeping his legions close to him and so this is a really malign situation in italy but it is one that sulla says well what the hell i'm off he gets in his ships he loads his men up they cross the adriatic he lands on the far side and he is going to war in the east well

39:16Dominic Sandbrook:we'll find out what happens in the east and indeed what on earth has happened to our protagonist gaius marius after the break hello this is tom holland from goal hangers the rest is history and i'm james holland from goal hangers we have ways of making you talk we're here to introduce

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41:50Dominic Sandbrook:So welcome back to The Rest is History. The year is 87 BC. It's all looking very febrile in the East, but also in rome and just before the break we were wondering what had happened to the protagonist of this entire series gaius marius well tom what has happened to marius so he fled rome what has become

42:10Tom Holland:of him since he's in a real bind because he's been declared a public enemy um sulla has leaned on the to have that bill passed and so he is now an outlaw and on top of that as you were saying he's very old he's very fat and he has one of the most recognizable faces in the whole of rome so basically you know what is a 69 year old overweight six times consul to do there's only one thing he can really do and that is to go undercover and so this is what marius does and he takes refuge on one of the many estates he has um outside rome and he's hidden in a cartload of beans and hidden by the beans he is then taken by a loyal carter down to ostia which is the port of rome and from there he takes ship to africa and africa is the obvious place he would go because that is where he had won his first great military victories he has lots of allies and supporters there but complete disaster there's a storm uh and marius and his companions get they get driven ashore And from that point on, it is a nonstop catalogue of scrapes and near misses.

43:24Tom Holland:So they escape squads who've come to arrest them by the skin of their teeth. They hitch lifts with passing merchants who then decide that they don't want to have anything to do with him and dump him on the shore. There's one particularly hairy incident where Marius ends up hiding naked in a marsh, kind of burying himself in mud. So I always kind of think of it. It's like Marlon Brando in the mud. Colonel Kurtz. Colonel Kurtz. Yeah. What is it? You're a you're an errand boy. Yeah. It's that moment. But fortunately, he is discovered and he's hauled out from the mud, all covered in the gunk of the swamp.

44:02Tom Holland:And he gets locked up in a cell. And the local kind of town council think, well, now we've taken him. We better get rid of him. But they're all very nervous. so they think well let's get a paid assassin to do it and they fix on a cimbrian so one of those barbarians who'd been defeated ironically by marius like a dane yeah so lots and lots of had been taken as slaves and this is presumably a slave and they give this cimbrian a sword and say go in and finish off marius so he goes into the cell it's very dark and all the cimbrian can see is the kind of i like to imagine red glare of his eyes kind of staring at him from the shadows and then he hears marius's voice man do you dare to kill gaius marius and the cimbrian does not dare he's absolutely terrified oh my words martin sheen runs away yeah he runs out of the cell wailing i cannot kill gaius marius he is you know this this guy is just too terrifying and the local authorities, they decide that, you know, they can't kill him either.

45:05Tom Holland:Marius is the, you know, he's the great savior of Rome. He's such an impressive man. They don't want to just dispatch him. So what they do is they give him back his clothes and they put him on a boat and they say, just, you know, get out of here. We don't have anything else to do with you. And so this enables Marius to cross from Italy to Africa and he makes land by where Carthage had stood. So these, um, ivy-clad ruins, absolutely deserted. And the governor of Africa sends him a message saying, if you stay here, then I will uphold the decrees of the Senate and treat you as a public enemy. So I'm giving you a chance to get out.

45:44Tom Holland:And Marius groans, and then he gives a very famous answer. It's very celebrated in later Roman history. Tell the governor that you have seen Gaius Marius,

45:54Dominic Sandbrook:a fugitive sitting among the ruins of Carthage. I mean, you're doing it with an American accent, but I just think this is made for Russell Crowe, especially Russell Crowe now. No, it's Marlon Brando. When he's a little bit heavier, you know, he's somebody people associate with Rome. I mean, this is absolutely made for him. Yeah, who do you have as Sulla? A young Jude Law is basically ideal for Sulla, but he's too old now. No, I think Jude Law would be good. Although Tom Holland, I've always had Tom Holland in mind for Octavian, by the way. I think he'd be a brilliant Octavian. I think you're right about that.

46:29Tom Holland:But yeah, OK, well, let's say Gaius Marius from this point on will give him an Australian accent. So is it all over for Marius? He's stuck in Carthage. He's got no arms. He's got no backing. He's being disrespected by the local governor. It's not all over for him, actually, because remember that prophecy which had decreed that he would end up holding seven consulships. Fate will not be denied. And you are right, Dominic, because back in Italy, circumstances are becoming more favourable for Marius. So by this point, Sulla has left for the war with Mithridates and the two new consuls have embarked on their magistracies.

47:06Tom Holland:So one of these two consuls we've already mentioned, this is Sinner. And we've said he hates Sulla and he has solemnly and publicly sworn an oath on the Capitol not to reverse Sulla's legislation. But we've been asking all along, can he be trusted? Sinner is a very, very slippery customer. His colleague, a guy called Nias Octavius, he's not a fan of Sulla either, but he is the kind of man who probably can be trusted to keep an oath because he is old school. He's a classic conservative. He's the kind of person who, once he's sworn an oath to the gods, is liable to keep it. Clearly, Sina and Octavius are very different calibre of men, and it doesn't take long for them to fall out.

47:46Tom Holland:And they fall out over this kind of perennial bugbear of Roman politics by this point, which is the question of how far the Italians should be given full enfranchisement, full Roman citizenship. And under normal circumstances, these kind of disagreements would have been contained within the Senate House. But as we've been saying, the climate in Rome is becoming ever more violent. Politics is being militarized. and so arguments that begin in the senate have a tendency now to escalate and it doesn't take long for the disagreements between sinner and octavius to get very badly out of control and it ends up with sinner being expelled by octavius officially stripped of his consulship by the senate and once again proclaimed a public enemy so essentially now what has happened in rome is that every time there's a disagreement between the consuls it ends with one of the consuls being decreed an outlaw and this is not does not make for a healthy politics it does not at all and how much

48:47Dominic Sandbrook:is that a break with established roman politics massively so actually this is a really good for for democracies that may have modeled themselves on rome and are obsessed with not following the example of rome this is a really good example in the dangers of excessive polarization and And, you know, everything becoming, you know, political disagreements, being litigated in the courts and painting your opponents as the enemies of the republic. Isn't it? I mean, this is what happens.

49:14Tom Holland:Yes, because if you use very violent rhetoric, that violent rhetoric can become real. And once it becomes real, then essentially you've let a very dangerous genie out of a bottle. And this is essentially what has happened.

49:26Dominic Sandbrook:So there's basically no space left for pluralism. I mean, insofar as there was a limited amount of pluralism, differences of opinion, reasonable differences of opinion.

49:35Tom Holland:The idea that every citizen has freedom of speech is really important in the Republic. And it's upheld. People can basically say what they like. This is why even those who are not in the Senate are so ready to scraw graffiti insulting their enemies across the city. It's taken for granted that this is the right of people living in a free state. But if you are going to end up killed or declared a public enemy every time you have a disagreement with one of your peers, then it becomes incredibly dangerous. Octavius has taken this step. So Sinner now does exactly the same. And he does a sulla. He goes to Nola where this siege is still dragging on.

50:12Tom Holland:And he works his magic on the legionaries who are camped out beside the city, that one legion that had been left behind to prosecute the siege. And then he gets that legion on side and then he goes on a tour of various cities around Italy, recruiting more men, raising cash. And he then takes a fateful step. He sends a messenger to Piscenum on the east coast of Italy, where Strabo is camped out with all his legions. And so Strabo then duly crosses the Apennines from Piscenum and he makes camp outside Rome beside the Colline Gate, which is the gate in the north of the walls of Rome. And he's obviously a very menacing presence.

50:56Tom Holland:This very sinister operator with all these legions camped outside one of the main gates of your city. And what makes it all the more ominous is that actually he hasn't come out on Sinner's side. He hasn't come out on Octavius's side. He's clearly waiting to see which of these two consuls is going to need him the most and then demand his price. One man, however, has by this point swung fully behind Sinner, and that is Marius. So Marius has, you know, he gets the news that Sinner is on the loose. He crosses from Africa with his son and with assorted henchmen, and he then uses the magic of his name to recruit a private army himself.

51:38Tom Holland:lots of escaped slaves lots of old soldiers people like that rallying to you know the old man the magic of his name and so sinner is nervous of marius basically by this point everyone is nervous of marius because he is he's completely wired i mean he's he's he's really ready to kill anybody who annoys him by this point he's very very colonel kurtz i think by right do you think

52:03Dominic Sandbrook:marius has well he's 69 he probably doesn't have that much longer to live or something has flipped

52:08Tom Holland:in his head or what is it i think there's a kind of a slight king lear thing that he's so stupefied by you know the the collapse of all his fortunes that something's gone inside his head he is much more murderous much more headstrong than he had ever been before but sinner thinks well it's better to have marius on your side than against you so they team up and they advance on rome and they put the city under siege and at one point they actually managed to break in through the walls but at this point strabo clearly thinks i don't really want marius inside rome so he he comes to octavius's help uh and the men of sinner and marius are throat flung back out and so the the stasis between these three blocks of men octavius in rome strabo in his camp outside the colline gate marius and sinner with their men it it's kind of this very kind of uneasy tension there and then suddenly it becomes clear that all along the gods have had marius's back because at this point a grotesque series of disasters intervene on marius's behalf so strabo's camp is abruptly swept by plague and he catches it himself and retires to bed the tent is then struck by lightning and strabo is incinerated he's but by the lightning by the lightning so he's got plague then he gets hit by lightning.

53:29Tom Holland:I mean, it's a really bad day at the office.

53:31Dominic Sandbrook:What are the chances of that happening? That just seems mad.

53:34Tom Holland:Very low. And then his funeral procession is held and he's so unpopular that the crowd sees his ashes. And it's only the intervention of a tribune that prevents them from being desecrated. And he leaves behind this very dark reputation that the art trimmer, but he also leaves behind a young son only 19 years old pompeius pompey as he's better known and this is someone of whom we will be hearing more later in this series pompey the great has entered the story he has so exciting but at this point he's only 19 years old he hasn't really made a name for himself yet but he will be making a name for himself very soon i'm so pumped he's

54:18Dominic Sandbrook:back in the story all right so let's pull the camera back a bit strabo is dead cinema and marius have the absolutely the upper hand and presumably now they can just waltz into rome yeah there's no one to stop them and do they behave with decorum elegance and grace they absolutely do not

54:36Tom Holland:octavius the consul refuses to flee instead he sits in his chair of office and this is where he's surprised by Marius's men who chop him up into little pieces. Marius, by this stage, has gone completely psychotic. His bitterness and rage, you know, this is all that he is. He's an absolute monster. And he is out to get everyone whom he holds to blame for his recent misadventures. And some are murdered by his gangs of slaves. Others are targeted for prosecution. And meanwhile, Dominic, you've been poo-pooing this prophecy the whole way through the series, but you are going have to eat your words because at this point marius is elected to his seventh consulship

55:19Dominic Sandbrook:the record-breaking consulship so that proves it wow i'm like wayne rooney having to row down the hudson which he did if you recall because he made a full a foolish prophecy during the world cup the norway wouldn't reach the quarterfinals i mean it would be great to see you rowing down a river well that wayne rooney comparison that's dogged me for so long i'm happy to lean into it once again you know who maris reminds me of at this point so it's colonel kurtz melded with daenerys

55:48Tom Holland:targaryen yes yes he's a he's a fat 69 year old daenerys targaryen right he's probably too heavy

55:56Dominic Sandbrook:for a dragon he's gone mad he's he's like coarsened by resentment and victimhood and he's

56:01Tom Holland:killing everybody yeah all his men are slaughtering everybody maris himself goes on a massive bender he abandons himself completely to violent drinking bouts and when he's not drunk and he's asleep he's suffering terrible nightmares and two weeks after he has been elected to his seventh consulship he dies and this grim terrible old man at last is gone but he dies of what booze apoplexy booze over excitement basically he's you know he's run his course but he's died as he wanted he's consul

56:36Dominic Sandbrook:he's drunk he's killing people yeah he's the master of rome he's had his seventh consulship i mean who wouldn't want to be gaius marius at that point brilliant loving it so he leaves behind him

56:44Tom Holland:um as the heir to his cause a son uh he is only 22 at this point he's very good looking um he's a bit of a playboy and he is utterly committed to continuing the blood feud with marius's enemies and especially with sulla so the marians are still on the scene but the death of marius effectively means that sinner is now unchallenged as the leader of this new regime that has taken power in rome and the years that follow the death of marius will be commemorated by the romans as what they called cinanum tempus the age of sinner and he will maintain himself in the consulship for the next three years so a succession of continuous consulships and you know there's no nonsense about keeping his oath to sulla quite the contrary everything he does has as its goal the the destruction of his his great enemy and with sulla absent in the east sinner knows that he he has a breathing space at least but they do you know he and his regime know what is threatening they know that if sulla is successful in his war you know should he defeat mithridates should he survive to return to rome with all his legions then there will be the showdown to end all showdowns and so unsurprisingly during these years sinner's priority is to prepare

58:13Dominic Sandbrook:for the return of sulla okay so that's what's been going on in rome but all this time sulla has been away in the east prosecuting his war to try to restore Roman hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean. He started in Macedon, didn't he? Macedon, which is, of course, a Roman province at this point. So how did it go?

58:35Tom Holland:Well, the reason he's gone to Macedon is he wants to secure it against the threat of that expeditionary force that Mithridates had sent to Athens after the Athenians and Mithridates had signed their treaty. And the arrival of Sulla and his army in Macedon is alarming for Mithridates men because they know the calibre of the Romans. And so rather than confront them, they retreat southwards back to Athens and they hold themselves up in the port of Athens, which is separate from the main body of the city. So the main body of the city of Athens is protected by walls and so also is the port of Athens, Piraeus, that is also surrounded by walls.

59:18Tom Holland:And it's in the port that Mithridates force embed themselves because obviously from there they can be supplied by Mithridates. You know, they have access to the sea. Meanwhile, what of Athens itself? Well, people may remember the guy in charge in Athens is this philosopher aristeion who has by this point inevitably installed himself as its tyrant and the situation facing the athenians now is i mean it is a nightmare so aristeion i mean he may be great at giving academic lectures but the question is is he any cop at fighting the world's most terrifying military machine because i guess success in academia doesn't always mean that yeah you're going to be much cop as a fighter and does it prove that way for this fellow so the athenians wake up one morning to their ultimate nightmare because they find camped out in front of their city walls um an army of vengeful legionaries commanded by rome's greatest general this is not what you want to see if you are a citizen of a rebellious greek city and especially not if you are a citizen of a city commanded by an academic who i'm afraid to say proves himself sorely unsuited to prosecuting a war against the romans yeah so aristide's approach is to compose rude songs about sulla's complexion and to teach it to all the athenians and to get them to chant these songs from the battlements and aristide himself yells out assorted witticisms about sulla and his wife um complete with extravagant hand gestures so he's he's like one of those academics on x or blue sky blue sky he's a blue sky person who disgraced themselves by getting getting into abusive slagging matches with their enemies i can think of so many examples

1:01:15Dominic Sandbrook:i mean it makes me happy just to think of it to be frank so this is aristide's approach you know

1:01:20Tom Holland:he has these colleagues his fellow philosophers who watch this and think it's ridiculous so there's another another philosopher a guy called posidonius who's very keen on roman rule thinks it's tremendous and thought therefore that it was obviously mad for the Athenians to oppose the Romans. He completely despises Aristion and he says that Aristion's behaviour is proof that swords should never be placed in the hands of children. So we're possibly being unfair to Aristion because actually the Athenians under his command they do put up a very lengthy resistance but I guess that probably owes more to fear than to Aristion's leadership qualities because of course everyone in Athens knows what had happened to Corinth.

1:01:59Tom Holland:Corinth had been completely razed. You know, the city had vanished from the face of the earth. And also, I guess they're hoping for reinforcements from Mithridates, their ally to the king. Maybe he will send troops over. But they wait and wait and wait. Nothing arrives. They start to eat shoe leather. They start to eat rats. There are stories that cannibalism starts to be practiced. And finally, Aristion sends a delegation to sulla to try and negotiate terms and they do what athenian ambassadors in a tight corner always do which is to discourse very windily about the glories of the city's past and sulla listens to them do this and he raises a hand and he silences them and he says rome did not send me here to be lectured on ancient history do you know what i mean i i actually was always on

1:02:48Dominic Sandbrook:sulla's team anyway but i'm even more on it now he sounds great well sulla is not i mean he's not

1:02:55Tom Holland:pete hegseth he's a very cultured intelligent literate man um very very clever very very intellectual but he is faced by open rebels against roman rule and so he is in no mood to show the glories of you know athenian civilization any respect whatsoever so he needs to build siege engines so he sends his engineers to go and chop down the woods in the um the groves where plato and aristotle had taught philosophy to their students and the uh the wood is used to build siege engines and when at last as was always going to happen um in march 86 the romans break into athens sulla gives his troops full license to do what they want to do they can kill who they want to kill they can loot what they want to loot they can plunder what they want to plunder and meanwhile aristion has fled up to the acropolis taken reference there where he continues to defy summer continues to chant his abusive slogans i mean absolutely mad behavior and inevitably it doesn't take the romans long to storm the acropolis it too is plundered and aristion is clinging to the altar of athena in the parthenon the romans show that no respect they drag him away and they

1:04:10Dominic Sandbrook:force him to drink poison and that is the end of aristion so meanwhile what about mithridates's army which has been in the in piraeus you described they were holed up in the ports have they just been watching and doing nothing the whole time basically yes because mithridates

1:04:25Tom Holland:hasn't sent them any reinforcements and instead what he's done is to raise an absolutely massive army and send that over land so it's going across the north of greece and then down through the pass the thermopylae towards athens and as it approaches athens mithridates orders the troops who are holed up in the port of athens piraeus to evacuate and to go and join this invasion force so they do this uh the port is left empty the romans march in and the port they do absolutely flatten however athens sulla decides he's not going to obliterate athens athens is just is in the final reckoning too famous too celebrated and so Sulla declares I spare the living out of respect for the dead but even though Athens has been spared the fate of Corinth it is in a terrible state after this siege and after its capture by Sulla's men the streets are spattered in blood it's been looted every last fig leaf of independence has been stripped away and the fate of those who had served in aristide's government is terrible they're all executed um the supporters of this government are stripped of the vote the democracy is effectively abandoned and this really is the end of the athenian democracy is something that has anything more than just a kind of you know antiquarian function and the wreckage is inherited by all the businessmen who had fled from athens when the coup happened to sulla and now they're reinstalled um basically as as roman puppets and from this point on athens is a subject city uh it it has no future as a power with any pretensions to any influence whatsoever from this point on basically it's going to serve i suppose it's going to serve romans as oxford serves americans as a kind of you know a high end finishing school a kind of you know a university town all right so that's the end of

1:06:23Dominic Sandbrook:Athens that's sad but Sulla and Mithridates' invasion force presumably they are now heading for a bit of a showdown are they because there's two big armies in Greece and that there's only

1:06:33Tom Holland:room for one of them well there's one absolutely colossal army and then the Sulla's army which is hugely outnumbered however the Romans have never lost a major pitched battle in Greece and Sulla is you know he's a man who backs himself we know this by now and so he marches out very coolly he meets Mithridates invasion force um it's been divided into two Sulla annihilates both of them and that's the end of Mithridates invasion force and it's done very quickly and brutally that was quick that essentially is the end of the war Sulla has done what he set out to do he's taken Athens back and he's what he has destroyed Mithridates offensive capability and he opens negotiations with the general of this invasion force who survived the defeat.

1:07:19Tom Holland:And then the following autumn, amazingly, he meets with Mithridates in person on the shores of the Hellespont, so up by Gallipoli. And this is very unusual behavior from a Roman, because the Romans do not usually negotiate with the kind of person who might have been responsible for wiping out tens of thousands of their compatriots which is what mithridates had done but actually both men have good reason to um to reach terms so for mithridates i mean he knows the game is up he's lost all his troops he'll be lucky to survive and if he can reach terms with sulla then that's tremendous for him that effectively in the situation that he's in is a result equally sulla doesn't have time to finish mithridates off he really urgently needs to get back to italy because as we've been hearing things have not been developing in italy necessarily to sulla's advantage because by this point he has been declared a public enemy by sinner and his regime and he's been condemned to death his property has been raised and his family and his supporters have forced to flee so when mithridates says to sulla look this is what i'll do i will withdraw from all the roman territory that i had conquered so effectively the province of asia i will give it back to you you can have all the cities i will withdraw to the limits of the kingdom of pontus and i will accept roman weapons inspectors coming in to make sure that i'm behaving myself that i'm not kind of redeveloping my offensive capabilities hands blicks yes hands us blicks us And Sulla says, OK, and he gives the killer of all these Romans and Italians a peck on the cheek and the treaty is signed.

1:09:06Tom Holland:And this is a massive result for Mithridates because no one ever has emerged so unscathed from a war with the Republic. I mean, this is a really good result for him. I mean, the people for whom it's a disaster are the Greek cities of Asia, because these are all the guys who personally slaughtered all the Roman and Italian businessmen. and now they've come back under Roman rule. So they have a terrible time of it because not only do they have to pay five years back tax, but they're also obliged to pay the full costs of the war and the costs of the Roman garrisons that Sulla slaps on them. So they go back to being leeched white of their cash, which is what had been happening before Mithridates' invasion.

1:09:49Dominic Sandbrook:On the other hand, though, if you're living in Asia, it's a sign that you can fight the Romans and get away with it. I don't think that is the lesson they draw.

1:09:56Tom Holland:Okay. I think the lesson they draw is don't mess with the Romans and they will not mess with the Romans ever again. You know, they have they have learned their lesson as to has Athens, because after he's sorted out Asia, Sulla returns across the Aegean to Athens. And there he inflicts further humiliations on the city. I mean, a little bit always dangerous to compare people from history to Nazis. but there is a slight element of Goering turning up and having the pick of an art gallery to what Sulla does next so there is this great unfinished temple to Zeus which has been been taken centuries and centuries to to complete and so Sulla pulls down all the various columns of this temple and has them ready to be transported to Rome he also loots the city's libraries of all their holdings so henceforward if philosophers like aristide want to study the original manuscripts of aristotle they'll have to go to rome and i think that this is a very pointed insult from sulla at the academic community in athens and he also rounds up a large number of greek athletes so that they can feature in the triumph that he is planning and the olympics are actually left so denuded of star quality that in the next olympics they can only stage the sprint every all the other so quickly anyway boring yeah so probably the worst olympics ever but of course you know is is sulla counting his chickens before they've hatched by planning a triumph um he has been declared a public enemy so in constitutional terms his command is illegal and not only that but sinner who is by far the ablest of his enemies back in italy he is planning an expedition from italy across the adriatic to greece to confront sulla before sulla can cross the adriatic and come to italy so that massive showdown that both sides have been anticipating for much of this episode rome's first full-blown civil war that is now imminent it is gonna happen wow so we are building towards the great showdown

1:12:07Dominic Sandbrook:And in the next episode, our climactic episode of this series, we will find out what happens to Sulla. Will he make himself master of Rome? Will he celebrate his triumph? And what then? And of course, this is the key step, you might argue, looking back towards the establishment of a new kind of Rome, an imperial Rome, a generation or two later. So there's only one way to find out what happens, and that's to listen to the next episode. There's literally no other way that you will find out the story. There are no other historical accounts of this. There will just be the Rest is History's account.

1:12:45Dominic Sandbrook:Now, if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, you can listen to that final episode right now. If you're not a member of the club, if you've identified what the winning side is and you want to be on it, you don't want to be prescribed and have your property seized, then I would suggest you go to therestishistory.com, sign up. You will get the final episode. you get a host of unbelievable additional benefits but also you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're on the right side of history the winning side you are not a member of marius's party so i encourage you to do that i also encourage you to sign up for the rest is history's free newsletter it's completely free and it has all kinds of fascinating articles about this story and other stories feedback from listeners and all kinds of things like that so it's absolutely brilliant um tom i actually can't wait to find out what happens to sulla so i'm going off now i'm going off now to listen to that final episode bye-bye very wise bye-bye