Who was in the wrong here?
>>1015487
Marius held too much power, and wanted even more. Sulla just wanted his army from his consulate.
>>1015497
Yep. This is something that so many people don't seem to get. Rome was completely in the hands of traitors who had usurped her legal government, with all power in the city extralegally resting in the hands of two men, one a tribune of the plebs (Sulpicius Rufus) and the other a mere private citizen (Marius).
What should Sulla have done, let command over to Marius and allowed himself to be exiled or massacred by Marius and his supporters, as so many others were? Fuck that. Sulla fought with Rome's fighting men against Marius and his slaves and hired ex-gladiators to take back the city.
>>1015487
Well, Marius wanted Rome for himself when Sulla tried to heal a decadent Republican regime. Sulla was a man from the past, when Marius understood the future of Rome.
#TeamSulla tho, I admire what he did for Rome and his sacrifice.
>>1015572
Yeah and there was never any optimate angression towards populares leading up to Marius' coup.
>>1015487
>>1015572
The real question is why Sulla gathered support from his soldiers, considering that he was the head of the aristocratic faction, while Marius ran on the popular platform. In essence, Sulla's soldiers, almost exclusively lower and middle class, supported man who wanted policies against their interests.
>>1015487
Fuck people who put Sulla on a pedestal and act like he didn't basically put one of the final nails in the roman republic's coffin with his reforms.
The guy was known for being an extravagant asshole. He spent his time with actresses and dancers drinking wine all fucking day.
What Marius did was obviously perceived by Sulla as a betrayal but people act like Sulla was some fucking champion of Rome who wanted to give power back to the people or some shit which couldn't be further from the truth.
Sulla only stepped down because he knew roman tradition well enough to know he would get fucked up otherwise.
Don't pretend Sulla was anything other than a pragmatic power-grabbing prick.
>>1015487
>work under a great man and general
>look up to him and earn his trust
>accomplish great things under his command and watchful eye
>manage to luck out and be assigned to capture Jugurtha
>actually manage to capture him
>return to Rome and proceed to act like the guy who spent time, blood, and sweat into making me into the man I am today isn't good enough for his job anymore and that I should replace him because I'm the new hot shit because of my whopping total of 1 accomplishments
>betray my mentor to such a degree he spends the rest of his life bitter and angry
>act like he is the bad guy in this situation anyways
Seriously, Sulla was an opportunistic asshole.
Imagine going to war under your friend and earning his unflinching trust only to betray him in the most egregious of fashions in the public arena just so you can get a leg up in the political/military world.
Yea, a lot of Romans were opportunistic assholes but Sulla exemplifies the hypocrisy of some of then perfectly.
>>1015487
Sulla
>>1015657
There wasn't, your sarcasm's wasted. There's no aggression in defense.
>>1015701
The realest question is why didn't more soldiers support him? It's a no brainer that most did support him, and that so many defected over to him when he came back to Italy for the final time. He supported a gradual, Rome-favorable solution to the whole mess of a situation after the Social War, as opposed to Marius and Co.'s fuckstorm that would've put the Italians, including the rebels that lost, on equal footing with Roman voters. Sulla also supported the Senate being forced by law to award soldiers lands after service, which would end the destructive social force that was the entire armed forces being disenfranchised after the Marian reforms.
>>1015753
Oh, spent his time with actors and dancers and whores drinking wine all day? After retiring, you mean? Nothing wrong with that. He stepped down because he was tired of all the shit, and knew he had competent and loyal enough deputies that he could just give orders from his villa and he'd be obeyed. And he was, until he died from cirrhosis probably.
>>1015786
You mean
>return to Rome and become my own man, staying friends with the guy who spent time, blood, and sweat into making me who I am today
>realizing sadly that that man ISN'T good enough for his job anymore, being 80 years old and senile after two strokes
>realizing that that man doesn't even HAVE a job anymore, because he's a private citizen and wasn't even elected at all
>mentor betrays me and the Imperium vested in me by the Republic and violates Rome to such a degree that I remain bitter against many enemies for the rest of my life
>honorably and honestly continue the work of discharging soldiers and giving them their promised land
Sulla may not have been wrong per se, but he killed the Republic.
>>1017125
Fuck off Sulla
>>1017125
>return to Rome and become my own man, staying friends with the guy who spent time, blood, and sweat into making me who I am today
>realizing sadly that that man ISN'T good enough for his job anymore, being 80 years old and senile after two strokes
>realizing that that man doesn't even HAVE a job anymore, because he's a private citizen and wasn't even elected at all
>mentor betrays me and the Imperium vested in me by the Republic and violates Rome to such a degree that I remain bitter against many enemies for the rest of my life
>honorably and honestly continue the work of discharging soldiers and giving them their promised land
>throw old mentor's body in the tiber because I'm so fucking salty
I was always more of a Sulla fan. For all his positive reforms, Marius did more to destroy the Roman Republic than anyone save Caesar (who was himself something of a Marian).
Regarding Pompey, he was a very good general who was unlucky/foolish enough to lose to Caesar at the end of his career and thus have that overshadow everything else he accomplished. He wasn't called "the Great" for nothing.
Sulla was a fucking traitor
>>1018175
He pushed "the Great" himself, there's a reason why people like Alexander are referred to the Great, whereas Pompey is just Pompey
Pompey had every advantage against Caesar, and lost
Marius vs Sulla TV series needs to happen.
>>1018198
this
He was a pompous assclown that took advantage of other's accomplishments for triumphs.
If he were such a good general he never would have lost to Ceasar.
He was referred to as a vulture by the people after his death, mainly because it's thought that he stole Crassus' glory in the sparticus wars.
>>1018227
Conn Iggulden already wrote the script.
>>1018237
Does it have a name yet? any plans to eventually do the mongol series?
>>1015487
Well, let's see here.
We have two choices before us.
Option A.
>excellent general
>too much of a soldier not a good enough politician
>starts to get power hungry
>goes about it the wrong way
>people die
>creates reforms that contribute to fall of Roman Republic
>get fucked up by enemies
Option B.
>excellent general
>too ambitious from the get-go
>managed to create a good impression on Rome after a certain military success
>capitalizes on success and obtains more power
>more successful military campaigns
>while gone enemy faction has turned Rome to shit by going about change the wrong way (see above)
>go apeshit and murder all those you perceive as traitors
>people join in on hysteria and a lot of people get killed for their wealth
>creates reforms that contribute to fall of Roman Republic
>retires and becomes a degenerate
>gets sick/diseased and dies a sad, pitiful end
Neither are great to be honest.
Sulla was always a tyrant in the making. The proscriptions he undertook were far more invasive and bloody then anything Marius did. On top of that Marius's legacy on reforming the Roman Army is unprecented and the success of both the Republic and Principate after his reformations can be attributed heavily to his involvement.
Fuck Sulla.
>>1015701
thats not difficult of a question at all, implying that all of Sulla's soldiers were of italian descent, they fully expected to be compensated after retirement with land, which was the usual for soldiers prior to the marius reforms.
When those soldiers begin to become land owners, they have an invested interest in the future of the state to keep those lands secure, and Sulla represented the older regime that had served faithfully the property rights of the citizens before, as opposed to Marius who was still gambling on redistribution to all plebeians.
>>1018175
Caesar was an Optimate m8. And Pompey wasn't even that good a general, he was lucky when he was a kid and constantly underestimated; afterwards he was very rich and always always always had numerical superiority if he was going to fight.
>>1018231
Also stole Lucullus's glory in Pontus/the East.
>>1018237
No no no no. Conn Iggulden sucks ass if you're older than 14. His books are entertaining for children and young teens, I'll admit freely, but for him to write the script for a tv series is like Christopher Paolini writing the script for Lord of the Rings or Dragonriders of Pern.
>>1018246
Sulla was always a degenerate, he just hid it well. And his reforms had nothing to do with the fall of the Republic, because as soon as he died they were reversed.
>>1018302
>success of both the Republic and Principate
>750 years give or take a few (from 110 BC to AD 640) of suffering and civil wars and usurpations until Rome can breathe her final, grateful dying breath
>success
>>1018359
>which was usual for soldiers prior to the marius reforms.
"no"
>>1017125
Sulla started the first proscriptions. Your long winded bullshit is invalid. Tell that shit to the thousands of Romans killed in Sulla's arbitrary mass murders, or the tends of thousands killed afterwards in the Civil Wars after Sulla's precedent.
Sulla tried to fix the Republic, he ended up destroying it. It's pretty clear you've never read the history of this period.
>>1018628
Nope, that would be Marius and Co. Tell your bullshit to the dozens of nobles and even more of their slaves and supporters who were murdered by Marius after he came back.
>>1018359
>which was the usual for soldiers prior to the marius reforms.
senpai...look up the nature of Marius' reforms. The timeline goes like this:
>to join the army you need to fulfill land requirements to ensure soldiers fighting in the army had a stake in the defense of the republic. this is no problem during Rome's initial expansion because enemies were close to home and the campaigning season lasted during the summer.
>as Rome got bigger and enemies became further away campaigning became longer and longer. Soldiers could now expect to spend years away from home. Consequently many small farmers start to become bankrupt because they can't tend to their farms anymore.
>Farmers who return home join the urban poor and thereby don't have the property qualifications to man the army
>the pool of military recruits becomes smaller, causing manpower shortages for the Roman army
>Gracchi propose giving public land in southern italy to give more Romans the qualifications for military service. Rich senators go apeshit. They had already taken the public land for themselves and were loath to give it back. the same process of roman expansion that had bankrupted roman farmers gave rich romans the spoils of empires, namely, a huge slave labor force to man giant plantations known as latifundia, which grew cash crops. Plus, the senators don't want the Gracchi to get the enormous prestige that would come from land reform.
>Gracchi's basically thwarted in the 120s BC, the two brothers dying violently a decade apart. The problem festers till Teutones and Cimbri migrate to southern Gaul and start fucking shit up, defeating several substantial Roman armies whose aristocratic generals are shown to be incompetent. Romans become hysterical, thinking that these german are going to invade Italy and repeat the fabled sack of Rome by the Gauls several centuries prior.
>Meanwhile Marius is campaigning in Africa against the numidian king...
>>1019376
>cont. Marius had already done most of the legwork before being called back to Italy to defeat the barbarian invasion. Though Marius aspired to greatness, it was odd that the Roman elite should need his help considering his lowly origins. Anyway, he returns home, pressures the senate to give his bankrupt soldiers farms in Africa in return for defeating the germans and initiates his military reforms. during this time he is elected for the consulship for an unprecedented 4 years in a row.
>To raise more troops Marius lowers the property qualification for the Roman army substantially to recruit the urban poor into his army. He defeats the germans and settles the soldiers in Africa iirc. In the meantime, Sulla, who was Marius' subordinate, stole Marius' cred for defeating the numidians. In the future, though, generals who recruited among the poorshits had a mass of soldiers loyal to them alone because only they could guarantee them lands and plunder. The commanders in turn were reliant on using the soldiers
How much did Marius actually reform the army?
I get the feeling that even before his reforms the Triarii Principes Hastati thing had kind of faded out anyway.
>>1019417
>>1019427
>>1019428
>>1019429
>implying that saying Marius was wrong won't get us strangled in the forum.
>>1019491
its wierd too, cause when I read Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Goldworthy writes that the shattering pilum was a myth, though this author states it as fact. Not sure who to believe desu. Goldworthy hasn't just written popular books but a lot of scholarly works on roman military history. this author is writing for the cambridge companion, so I assume he's also an expert in the field...
>>1018612
>lack of reading comprehension from the Sulla apologist
Not surprised to be honest.
>>1019623
>lack of humor detection in a bitter humorless populare
To be expected.
>>1020156
>And Optimates wonder why the people hate them
Typical.
>>1015487
Both caused a shit ton of deaths but at least Marius' had more stable reforms that lasted longer (despite somewhat contributing the eventual downfall of the Republic).
So... I guess Sulla. He sort of opened pandora's box with the proscriptions. He also acquiesced like a bitch and gave Pompey a triumph for fucking up Marians despite the fact he wasn't a consul (he wasn't old enough so to do so would be illegal under Roman law at the time) which helped Pompey solidify his power-base.
Sulla definitely fucked up more, but I don't know who was "wrong" per-say.
I don't know too much about Sulla or Marius, but proscriptions sound like scary shit
>>1019598
It doesnt shatter it just bends.
>>1021904
You do know that Sulla only agreed to Pompey's triumph to embarrass him, right? The kid was all gung ho, thinking he would see streets bedecked with flowers and a populace cheering for him, but after Sulla's triumph two days before and Metellus's the day previous, the city was lackluster about it, and Pompey's own arrogance at wanting elephants to pull his chariot made it even worse when they couldn't fit through the gate.
To those who believe Sulla or Marius broke the social progress of Rome:
I think it's dangerous to approach things from the linear perspective of "social progress" because firstly it assumes that your audience agrees with you about what constitutes progress in the first place (rather than degeneration or simple change), secondly because it's an inherently flawed method of interpreting history since it tacitly assumes a single "end point", and thirdly because our concepts of social morality are anachronistic.
I don't find the policies of Marius any more attractive than those of Sulla in all honesty. Whatever good he might have done in his early years, his policies headed irrevocably in the direction not of stable democracy but of mob rule. Caesar was really only the last of the disruptive spiritual successors to Marius. Saturninus was disavowed because he was a political embarrassment, not because Marius disagreed with him. Catiline and Clodius sang from the same hymn-sheet.
Even his military reforms, the one sphere in which I think he made an undoubted positive impact, the long-term consequences were to put a lot more power into the hands of the generals and allow them effectively to hold the state to ransom, as generals then proceeded to do for the rest of the life of the Republic.
1/2
>>1021956
I'm not going to argue that Sulla was a great humanitarian, but I don't think he was a total monster either. During this period the Republic was revered in a way I think we now find difficult to appreciate, and what he was attempting to do was arrest what he (and many others) saw as its decline and reverse the Marian excesses where possible. He had to kill a lot of people to do it- really, he probably didn't kill enough- but again the precedent there was set by Marius's butchery of his own political supporters, and that it came to war at all was largely down to Marius's own failure to allow Sulla to attain any glory for himself.
There's something about Marius that strikes me as megalomaniacal. For all that Sulla did wrong, he did at least practise what he preached. He returned to Rome to destroy what he saw as a corruption of the system which allowed one man to rule unchallenged, and having attained that power himself he returned it to the Senate and retired.
If mentioning another person, Cincinnatus is a whole different kettle of fish.
2/2
Can we at least all agree that Sulla's genocide of the Samnites wasn't wrong?
>>1021988
Sulla did nothing wrong.
>>1021933
thats what i mean
>>1021967
>really, he probably didn't kill enough
nope. Sulla, even moreso than Marius, fundamentally changed the course of Roman history through the bloodiness of his proscriptions. He and his cronies wiped out dozens of senators without regard for their rank, seniority, wealth or whatever. This decimation wiped out many skilled leaders and holders of tradition. If this weren't enough, he packed the senate with hundreds of cronies, and his friends who ruled after them were irreparably tainted by their shameless profiteering from the proscriptions; Crassus and Pompey being some of the most prominent, but many others also winning offices, gold and much property from the dead whose houses sold at low prices.
>>1022080
As far as what you said is concerned, I think that they're about equal. For the most part Sulla persecuted the knight-businessmen who were a parasite and impediment to orderly rule of the Republic, but he killed many of them, and they were by that point crucial to the economy; Marius had a dozen of the most august, experienced men of Rome killed.
>>1022116
yeah, I'm not defending Marius at all. I think they're both terrible in different ways. But to me Sulla's actions are inexcusable, though at least he did try to fix the mess in the end. That said, he marched on Rome before Marius even carried out his killings, which was probably the worst precedent that could be set.
>knight-businessmen who were a parasite and impediment to orderly rule of the Republic,
I'd disagree. They were a symptom of the republic's failure to recognize that you can't run an empire like a city-state. They were simply filling a void that the conservative core in the senate were not willing to create institutions for, which is not surprising considering that many of them had vested interests themselves in the enterprises of the equites.
Marius pushed the concept of "new men" being advanced on the basis of their achievements and martial abilities and not on the old status quo of fostering ranks in the military or senate due to social status (equestrians and patricians).
Marius was GOAT.
Marius's reforms alone are enough to excuse any sordid shit at the end of his life. Marius by changing the organization and logistics of the Roman military ensured it's continued existence for centuries. Marius just lived to long, had he died younger there would have never have been a chance for him to end his career on a bad note. Nothing Marius did that was bad was not mirrored by Sulla, sulla however could not mirror the achievements of Marius. Sulla's own reforms, though well meaning, established a flawed system that allowed for the dissolution of the republic. Not only this his precedent of dictator for life was far more detrimental than Marius being Consul too many times or his other political misteps.
>>1015487
I'm unfamiliar with this area of history. Could someone explain it to me, using frog pictures?
>>1022575
read a book nigga
>>1022671
ALSO, Cinna was the hero the republic needed but didn't deserve. 84 BC worst year of my life
>>1022671
Which book, nigga?
>>1022734
someone posted an annotated bibliography to republican rome in pictures. I didn't save it but hopefully a kind anon who did can post it here
>>1022689
>the hero that accepts Marius back, resulting in the purge of dozens of senators and nobles and, indirectly, Sulla's proscriptions
>Sulla's proscriptions, which were a reaction to Marius's murders, which were only possible because of Cinna's political climate and tyranny
>hero
