Gaius Marius

I'm going to gloss over the period of Roman history leading up to Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC very quickly.

If you want more detail on this, the guys on The Rest is History just did a podcast on Sulla and Marius.

Anyways, very briefly, Sulla, the worst man in history, was a lieutenant of Gaius Marius, who was a great Roman general, most famous for the Marian reforms, which transformed the Roman army from a volunteer army into a professional army.

And he defeated a tribe of Germans, two tribes of Germans, who were coming down from northern Germany or Jutland.

towards Rome.

They wanted to settle in Roman territory.

They smashed some Romans in between, and Marius was appointed an emergency command to go north and beat them by the Alps, and he did

successfully.

The Gracchi brothers famously were murdered over their political movements.

And then, of course, there's Marius, who was a consul for seven years straight, or seven terms, and Sulla, who invaded Rome, which was a heretic thing for the Romans to do, unbelievably terrible.

And then, so as these norms are falling, then kind of, it starts to translate into coinage, and the rules of coins start to change.

And You know, in the 50s and maybe a little bit into the 60s BC, people like Brutus, the famous Brutus, was elected a moneyer.

So for me, walking among those ruins in the Forum, I can't help but almost get goosebumps because you know this is where Brutus, the original Brutus, would have walked.

This is where Marius and Sulla would have walked, Caesar and Augustus and on and on and on.

And you go back in earlier.

Domitian, Trajan.

Thank goodness.

Do they imagine that the tools they use won't be used against them? Because I think Sulla and Marius might disagree, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Then right after that ends, Rome has a civil war against itself.

And that's when you have Marius and Sulla going at it.

The prescriptions and the murder of political enemies.

And Rome changes hands several times and every time is followed by a massacre.

After all, there's a reason they called it the Third Servile War, and that's because Rome had already fought two.

And if you go look at the First and Second Servile Wars, the first one fought about the time of Tiberius Gracchus.

The second one fought about the same time Caius Marius was beating up on the Cimbri and the Teutons.

And both of them extremely large by any sort of modern standards.

Earlier in the series, the breaks came from the men pushing against the system.

Marius and Sulla first.

then Pompey's own extraordinary commands, and then Caesar in 59.

Each of those men was accused of putting himself above the Republic, and the Senate's leaders had spent decades trying to hold them back, with mixed success and growing frustration.