Lives by Plutarch - 13 - Marius
Marius
Quote
"What particularly irritated the people was the sickening behaviour of the so-called Bardyaei (Marius' vanguard army), who butchered householders in their homes, did appalling things to their children, and raped their wives."
Notes
Marius is a harsh and bitter character. He never learns to read or write Greek since to him it's "a language whose teachers were other men's slaves."
He rises from humble origins through his military achievements, which are noticed by the famous general, Scipio, who gives Marius a positive endorsement. Marius gets a boost from that and is elected tribune.
He demonstrates his fearlessness and willingness to fight with the senators and the powerful. Plutarch writes that "people now thought of him as a man who could not be cowed by fear or diverted from his path by respect for his superiors, and as a formidable champion of the interests of the masses in opposition to the senate." Though he does go against the common people in favour of the senate sometimes too. He's not mindlessly partisan.
He marries a woman named Julia, who is also Julius Caesar's aunt. Caesar himself grows up looking to Marius and his achievements.
He continues being successful in the military and is popular with his men who respect him as someone who shares in their hardship and doesn't elevate himself above them: "everyone finds his own discomfort eased when someone else voluntarily shares it."
He continues his rise and is elected consul. Lots of people find him offensive since he doesn't respect the elites. In fact, he goes out of his way to attack powerful men because it makes him more popular with the common people.
When an invading army starts marching on Rome, even the elites turn to Marius for leadership. He has to be elected consul again, which is technically against the law, but people are willing to look the other way because of the situation.
Marius leads an army to face the invaders and he proceeds very cautiously against them. For a long time there's no fighting, though the two armies come in close proximity with each other. The invaders are trying lots of scare tactics to intimidate the Romans, but Marius knows that "familiarity strips the power to terrify". So by continuously exposing his men to the enemy, their power to intimidate them goes away.
Fighting eventually breaks out and it's pretty brutal as most wars are. A lot of the civilians committed mass suicide after it was clear the Romans had won. Meanwhile, Marius is elected consul again, by now for the fifth time.
There's a growing rivalry between Marius and his other commanders, but when they return to Rome it's Marius who gets credit for the victory. They call him the third founder of Rome.
He now takes on the role of consul in Rome, but he is really insecure about it and constantly looking to the masses for approval. It turns out politics is a bit different than the military. He looks to provoke more wars since that's mostly where his fame came from. In reality, his power and influence are waning, but he's in complete denial and doesn't want to let it go. "He was incapable of just quietly enjoying what he had."
His rivalry with another commander, Sulla, grows to a breaking point and Marius is forced into exile. It's a real low point as he's abandoned by most of his men and has to go into hiding. He's also kind of fat. At one point he and a few others are trying to escape in a boat and the others debate whether they should throw him overboard cause he's too big that he's slowing them down. He begs for his life but they do end up throwing him over. He makes it to shore and is at the mercy of complete strangers to help him. Some strangers do agree to hide him, but the Romans are still able to track him down and capture him. At this point he's completely naked and covered in mud.
The Romans sentence him to death, but everyone's too afraid to actually go through with it. Marius had been a hero to many of them and so they finally decide to let him live. He returns to Rome alive, but transformed "by his downfall."
Civil war breaks out in Rome and he joins in one side against Sulla as a commander. At this point he's 70 years old. He gathers an army of slaves, the Bardyaei, and has them kill anyone he chooses on his command. It seems like no one is safe from him. Even his refusal to return a greeting to someone might be a signal enough for the Bardyaei to kill. They butcher civilians, children, and rape the women.
Sulla returns to Rome with an army and Marius becomes a complete paranoid mess. He turns to alcohol to avoid his anxieties and sleeplessness, but it's too much for his body and he eventually dies. Though there are other accounts of his death that attribute it to other causes.
Marius' desire for recognition and power were insatiable: "This shows how fiercely and permanently ambition and jealousy had embedded in his mind a passion for that kind of activity. As a result of this passion, although he had lived for seventy years, was the first man ever to have been elected consul seven times, and had acquired enough property and wealth for many kingdoms at once, he still lamented his fate and felt that he was dying without having attained and achieved all that he desired."
Plutarch ends with some reflection on the importance of retaining meaningful memories at the end of one's life:
"Over time, events trickle out of the minds of forgetful, thoughtless people, and so, since they retain and conserve nothing, the empty space within them that should be filled with good things is filled instead with hopes, so that they neglect the present and look to the future, despite the fact that fortune may yet foil the future, whereas the present cannot be taken away. Nevertheless, these people eject the present from their minds as something foreign to them, while they dream of the future despite all its uncertainties. Nor is it surprising that they do this: after all, they accumulate and hoard all the blessings of life before reason and education have had a chance to build a solid foundation on which to preserve those blessings, and this makes it impossible for them to satisfy the insatiable appetites of their minds."