Las tutorías y la enseñanza

Once the peace of Dardanus was concluded Sulla, who had no intention of tolerating any challenge to his authority as governor of Asia, set out in pursuit of Fimbria. He caught up with him at Thyateira in Lydia. Fimbria at first made light of the threat posed by his foe and mockingly reminded him that he was now a public enemy. He became frightened, however, when Sulla began to draw a line of circumvallation round his camp, and many of his own troops, rightly divining they would be no match for Sulla, deserted to join in the work. So he called the remainder together and asked for a pledge of loyalty but, since the troops were unwilling to fight their fellow citizens, this was refused and the gathering had to be dismissed. Then, as the desertions continued, Fimbria went around among the tribunes and arranged that they should, by a seemingly spontaneous acclamation, call on the whole assembly to swear loyalty. They did so, but to no avail. Even one of his closest associates refused to swear, and Fimbria would have run him through with his sword if the bystanders had not intervened. Seeing how matters stood, Fimbria now had recourse to the desperate expedient of sending a slave into Sulla’s camp to assassinate him. This ploy failed, too, when the agent’s nervous fidgeting betrayed him.

With the contemptuous insults hurled by Sulla’s soldiers ringing in his ears, Fimbria at last realised there was nothing for it but to come to terms with his opponent. Approaching the line of circumvallation, he asked for an interview. Sulla did not deign to appear in person, but sent an emissary to say that if Fimbria would quit the province where he had no business to be, he would see to it that he got a safe-conduct to the coast. These were generous terms coming from someone who was almost complete master of the situation, but for Fimbria they still represented humiliation and the shattering of all his pretensions. Rather than be beholden to the mercy of Sulla, he slipped away to Pergamum and committed suicide in the temple of Aesculapius there while his army joined itself to Sulla. Anxious at every

turn to contrast his own legitimate authority with that of his enemies who were, in his view, mere usurpers, Sulla handed over Fimbria’s body to his freedman for burial, pointedly remarking that he did not intend to follow the example set by people like Marius and Cinna, who had deprived their murdered opponents of burial.1

With this problem safely disposed of, Sulla then turned to a task which must have been highly congenial for someone who always prided himself on giving friend and foe alike their due: the rewarding of those Asian states who had remained loyal to Rome, and punishment of these who had sided with Mithridates. Proceedings began with an assize at Ephesus before which those of the upper classes, responsible for bringing their cities to the side of Mithridates, were hauled and duly condemned to death. It was then decreed that all the ex-slaves, whom Mithridates had freed in order to bolster his power when the upper classes turned against him, should forthwith return to their masters. Not unnaturally, many of them objected to this and resisted by force of arms. They were joined by some of the towns who had supported Mithridates and were now goaded beyond endurance by Sulla’s harsh punishments. All of these disturbances were, however, ruthlessly suppressed by the Roman army.2

Well might some of the cities join the slaves in their rebellion when they heard of the collective punishment they were to suffer for their support of the king. Their chief citizens were summoned to Ephesus to learn their fate, and there were forced to listen to one of Sulla’s lectures. He recalled, at length, the history of Roman involvement in Asia and reminded his sceptical listeners how fairly they had always dealt with the inhabitants. He then went on to rake up the details of old treacheries the Asiatics had committed against these benevolent masters of theirs. The Mithridatic business was, in his view, but the latest manifestation of their base ingratitude. The proconsul naturally dwelt in particular on the horrific massacres that had lately been perpetrated, and sarcastically drew attention to the fact that the Asiatics had even violated the sanctuary of their own temples in order to lay hands on the hapless refugees. They had already received some punishment for these crimes when Mithridates had turned against them and set ex-slaves over them. Now he was going to punish them further. He would not visit on them the massacre they richly deserved since, as a Roman, he would not so sully his hands, but he intended to make them pay the cost of the entire war and more besides.3

But, just as he was to do in Italy a few years later, Sulla took care to differentiate between varying degree of guilt and to punish accordingly. Broadly speaking, he divided the culprits into two classes. Those who had perpetrated the massacres at the start of the war could expect no mercy whatsoever, even though some of them had afterwards rebelled against

Mithridates. Many of them had been free cities who had had treaties of alliance with Rome and were thus independent. Sulla now deprived them of their independence and henceforth they were to be subjects of Rome, liable for the payment of taxes to her. Many of the guilty cities had their walls razed 4_{and some, Ephesus for example, were deprived of part of their}

territory. Having lost their freedom in this way these cities, in common with those already subject to Rome, now found themselves liable for the payment of back taxes for the five years during which Mithridates had held sway.5 _{And this was not the only exaction Asia had to suffer. Sulla had}

declared his intention of making the Asiatics pay for the war and he now redeemed his promise by levying an indemnity on the province as a whole. In Roman eyes large areas of Asia stood attainted, guilty of failing to fulfil their obligations as allies as required by their treaties with Rome. Some, while refraining from massacre, had actively welcomed the king or meekly acquiesced in his rule without a struggle. Many of these had also failed to join in the resistance to the king, which had developed after a couple of years of his sway. Further, there were those, Lampsacus is a good instance, which, though never forced to submit to Mithridates, had failed to aid the Roman cause in any way.6 _{All of these, while allowed to retain their territory}

and their freedom intact, had, along with the greater offenders who had perpetrated the killings, to make their contribution to the cost of the Roman war effort.

As the publicani, whose exactions had done so much to madden the Greeks, had all fled for their lives or been killed when Mithridates overran the province, there now existed no machinery for collecting these monies, and Sulla was thus forced to proceed to rough ad hoc methods. For the purpose of collecting the indemnity Asia was divided into forty-four regions. So far from spending the winter in idleness, as is generally assumed, many of Sulla’s soldiers were busy men indeed, going from region to region to collect the cash. Not that they, or their comrades who were not engaged in this work, lacked for creature comforts, since the guilty cities were obliged to provide them with billets whose luxury bordered on the regal. Every host had to furnish his unwelcome guest with daily pocket money, four tetradrachmas for a soldier and fifty drachmas for an officer. The latter also had to be provided with two suits of clothes, one to wear in the house and one suitable for when he went abroad to parade himself before the citizenry in the town square. The host, too, had to provide an evening meal to which his guest might bring as many friends as he wished.7

So thoroughly did the soldiers do their work that the whole of the indemnity was collected in a single winter. Indeed, it had to be, for Sulla was still desperately short of funds and was already contemplating new and costly enterprises. Once he got his hands on this money, however, his zeal

Map 6.1

Asia M

slackened and he allowed the collection of the arrears of taxes to proceed at a more leisurely pace. When he left Asia the work was still incomplete, and his quaestor Lucullus remained behind to finish the job. As a result of these exactions the cities were reduced to the utmost beggary and misery. Already pillaged by Mithridates, in many cases, they now had to borrow this cash at exorbitant rates of interest. Theatres, gymnasia, harbours, in short every available piece of public property had to be mortgaged to raise the necessary money.8

In determining who was to be rewarded for loyalty two criteria were applied. Resistance to the king, whether at the beginning of his campaign or later, was the obvious test, but some other signal service might also qualify the city. In all cases the reward was the restoration or renewal of freedom, and in some instances this could be accompanied by an increase in territory. Thus Rhodes, for example, which had successfully withstood Mithridates throughout the war, now had its freedom confirmed and received the lands of rebellious Caunus. Ilium, on the other hand, in common with the rest of the Troad, had not been forced to submit to Mithridates, but when it had refused to open its gates to Fimbria, declaring that Sulla alone had pro- consular authority, it had been stormed and sacked. Such a demonstration could not be ignored and Sulla was glad to restore its privileges. In this case he had, of course, other reasons for treating the town with especial tenderness. Like all Romans, he would naturally feel a special affinity for the town from which, so legend had it, the Roman race had sprung. And as the man who had received particular marks of favour from Venus, the mother of the Roman race, he could not but be scrupulous about repairing the damage inflicted by Fimbria on the town from which her son Aeneas set out to found Rome.9

Such behaviour would be required of him as a man of virtus who took care ever to placate his patron deities.

But though cities were restored to their freedom, their position was not what it had been. Formerly they had been free by what were, technically at any rate, treaties made on equal terms. Many, however, had automatically rendered those treaties null and void by receiving Mithridates and, though they had redeemed themselves by their later resistance, the freedom they would henceforth enjoy was granted purely by the grace and favour of Rome. Thus, in contrast with their previous state, their independence now was dependent on the will of the conquering power. As a result, with the passage of time, the view that the independence of a city was based purely on suffer- ance and might be revoked at any time by the Senate became increasingly more common.10

Such, then, were the measures Sulla took for the better ordering of Asia. So widely were their effects felt that men looked upon the work as the second founding of Roman rule in the area, and many cities ever afterwards

based their calendar on what became known as the Sullan era, a system of reckoning dates which took as its starting point the year in which Sulla made his settlement of the province.11 _{Although at least one city,}

Halicarnassus, erected a statue to Sulla as a benefactor, it is unlikely that many others rushed to imitate its example for, in truth, his monetary exactions had condemned many of them to years of poverty and misery.12

There is no doubt that Sulla had been led by his own shaky financial position to wring every last penny out of the Asiatics. From the very beginning his campaign had been starved of funds. The domestic financial crisis had meant that he had been given a pittance with which to conduct the war, and he had then been cut off from all further supplies when the Cinnans had declared him an enemy. He had been obliged to make war on Thracian barbarians and pick Greece clean in order to fill his coffers, and Greece was a poor country which could yield but little. As a result of all of this, it was hardly to be expected that Sulla should neglect the opportunity to make those who could do so pay for the war, especially as they had rebelled against Rome and taken the enemy’s part.

Indeed, it is plain that Sulla, as he gathered in the money, saw himself in the role of a man dealing out a just punishment to the perfidious. Nobody will deny that the Asian cities had justification enough for what they did. The ferocity with which they turned on the Italian population is testimony to years of Roman misrule. But we can hardly expect the Romans to appre- ciate this point. As Sulla made plain in his speech at Ephesus, there was nothing wrong, in their view, with their system of government. He took care to remind his listeners that the Romans had always acted in good faith towards the province. Moreover the free cities had been Rome’s allies, bound to her by solemn treaties, freely entered into, and they had wantonly broken these agreements in order to make common cause with her bitterest enemy. Anybody who attempted to alter even the smallest detail in a treaty of alliance incurred, in Roman eyes, the special enmity of the gods.13 _{How much greater,}

then, would divine anger be at the spectacle of whole treaties being torn up? The Romans had returned to Asia as instruments of that divine anger.

But their craving to punish those who had behaved with such treachery was as nothing to their desire to exact vengeance for the massacre of their fellow Italians at the hands of the Asiatics. The spectacle of thousands of their fellow countrymen, most of whom were civilians, being done to death in a horrible slaughter had filled all Romans with revulsion, hatred and a desire for retaliation. Four years had done nothing to assuage these feelings or dim the memory of the dark deed. As they fought Mithridates, the Romans never ceased to remind themselves that this was the cold-blooded killer of their brothers and cousins. These emotions were most clearly articulated by Sulla’s soldiers at the time of the peace of Dardanus. They complained bitterly

at seeing Mithridates, the man who had given orders for the slaughter, escape so lightly. However, they could console themselves with the thought that, even if the prime culprit had escaped, they, at least, had his agents and associates in their grasp. And they clearly intended to make them pay for what they had done. Given all of these circumstances, there is perhaps some justification for Sulla’s claim that he had acted with considerable leniency. Having the province at his mercy and an incensed army to his back he could, as he reminded his listeners, have easily perpetrated his own slaughter in revenge. As it was he contented himself with the execution of the ring- leaders and imposing a monetary penalty on the rest. The proconsul had been harsh, but he could have been harsher.

It has sometimes been claimed that Sulla’s personal attitude towards Asia was, in fact, one of complete indifference and that, once he had got his hands on the money he needed, he took no further interest in the place. As proof of this contention it has been pointed out that piracy seems to have been allowed to flourish unchecked.14 _{Cilicia, where Sulla himself had once}

governed, had long been a stronghold for these robbers who plagued the coast of Asia Minor. Lured by the prospect of even greater loot, they had joined Mithridates’ fleet in large numbers. Now that the war was over they were unemployed once more and returned in droves to their old haunts. With their vast fleets they were able to overrun towns like Iassus and Clazomenae, and they even dared to pillage Samothrace while Sulla himself was staying there. It has been suggested that Sulla took no action against them because Asia was nothing to him and he was perfectly happy to see those who had supported Mithridates continue to suffer. But this is simply not true. Murena, as governor of Cilicia, was responsible for dealing with this menace and had already begun both land and sea operations against them. Bearing in mind the extent of the problem, it is unreasonable to expect that he could have instantly solved it, just as it is erroneous to infer from the impunity with which the pirates acted that nothing was being done about it.15

Nevertheless, Sulla’s thoughts were at this time actually turning away from Asia. They were turning westward – to Rome. Ever since Sulla had left Rome in 87 the quarrel between him and Cinna had lain in abeyance, for the simple reason that neither side was in a position to pursue it. Sulla, totally preoccupied with his own fight for survival, had no time to spare for domestic quarrels, and Cinna was far too weak to take strong measures against him. The East was, of course, entirely lost to the Cinnans and although Sicily and Sardinia were loyal, Africa for much of the time had been hostile. Even Italy itself was by no means certain. Nowhere indeed is this military weakness of Cinna’s to be seen more clearly than in the smallness of the army with which Flaccus had been sent to fight Mithridates. Now, however, with Mithridates defeated,

Sulla, at least, was in a position to resume the feud and he lost no time in doing so. Blithely ignoring the fact that he had been declared a public enemy, he sent to Rome, as any other proconsul would, a complete account of the