The Storm Before the Storm should have just been called Sulla: A History. Mike Duncan covers the decades from 146 BC to Sulla’s death in 78 BC, the stretch where the Roman Republic’s norms started breaking long before Caesar arrived, and while it spends a little time on the Gracchi and enough on Marius to set the stage, at least half the book belongs to Sulla. That isn’t really a complaint, though. Once Sulla shows up he dominates the period, and I learned a lot about a man I barely knew going in.
I’m reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon now, and it probably covers enough of Sulla to pick up the story of Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar, but what Storm gave me was the grounding. Rubicon introduces Marius as a man in his sixties leading armies in the Social War, shortly before he comes out of retirement and starts his workout regimen, and without the earlier arc you lose the new man who saved Rome, held five consecutive consulships, and reorganized the army. Everyone comments on old Marius training with the young men on the Campus Martius, desperate for one more command. Coming from Storm, that reads as a fall from grace, but in Rubicon it mostly reads as stubbornness.
Storm follows Marius all the way back to the war against Jugurtha, the Numidian king whose defeat made his name, and that showed me how far back the rivalry between Marius and Sulla goes. It starts at the very beginning of Marius’s career as a general. Sulla, serving under Marius, arranged Jugurtha’s capture and then put the scene on his personal seal ring, which was a brash move when Marius was the one commanding the army. Those early chapters are the parts left out of Rubicon that I valued most. Storm also gives more background on the Gracchi and a real grounding in the Italian citizenship problem, and its elaboration on the conditions that led to the Social War made the later story much easier to follow.
Sulla was the first Roman general to march his army on Rome, and he did it twice. He used that power and the proscriptions to restore the Senate’s traditional authority, a revolutionary acting in the service of conservatism, and then he took the dictatorship with no fixed end date, gave it up anyway, and retired to write his memoirs. It seems like such a bad idea to grab that much power and then not keep it. His reforms only rolled the clock back a little on the Senate’s decline, and his real legacy was the precedent that an army loyal to its general could take Rome. Caesar learned that lesson but not the resignation, and Suetonius has him joking that Sulla didn’t know his political ABCs. Augustus learned both lessons and was far shrewder, keeping the real power while making a great show of honoring the Senate.
I hate to say it as a Cicero fan, but I suspect a lot of the populares’ bad reputation comes from our conservative sources. Cicero is our richest witness, and he was firmly on the optimate side. Grain for the poor, land for farmers, and citizenship for the Italians are all good causes. Granted, some of the men promising them were after power rather than acting out of good-heartedness, and Cinna doesn’t sound particularly admirable, but I like the Gracchi, and I’m sorry about how it ended for them.
Anytime debates are decided by armed gangs instead of the truth and strength of ideas, things have gone badly wrong, and Sulla’s purges were the natural, unfortunate outcome of a politics that had already moved from the Forum to the battlefield. At least he didn’t roll back citizenship and voting rights for the Italians. Then again, I suspect he would have if he hadn’t been forced to give his word to honor them so he wouldn’t have to fight his way back to Rome through all of Italy, and even with that promise, the Samnites fought him to the end at the Colline Gate.
If you’re planning to read Rubicon or anything else on Caesar, The Storm Before the Storm is a worthwhile ten-hour prequel. Duncan’s case that the Republic broke well before Caesar crossed the Rubicon makes the later story make more sense. I’ll cover Holland’s trilogy in one post once I finish it.