Marian Civil War — Marius's Seventh Consulship
Marius and Cinna took Rome by force in 87 BC, and Rome had never been captured by its own army before. Sulla had done it first, the previous year. Elected consul and given the eastern command against Mithridates, he had seen it transferred to Marius by a tribune's law, and marched six legions on the city — an act that every officer but one refused to accompany him for, and which he carried out anyway. He killed the tribune, declared Marius a public enemy, and left for Greece. Cinna, consul in 87, reopened the question of distributing the Italian new citizens across all the voting tribes, was driven from the city by his colleague, and did what Sulla had done: he went to the army at Nola, raised it, and marched. Marius came back from exile in Africa at seventy, having been hunted through swamps, and joined him with a force of his own. The city was starved into opening its gates. What followed was five days of killing. The heads of senators were displayed on the rostra, among them the consul Octavius and the orator Marcus Antonius; Marius's freedmen were reportedly used as executioners and killed for it afterwards. Marius took his seventh consulship in January 86 BC and died within a fortnight. Cinna governed for three years without elections and was killed by his own mutinous troops in 84. Sulla came back in 83, won the civil war at the Colline Gate, and proscribed several thousand people. The precedent was set on both sides: a Roman commander could now take the city from his own countrymen, and the next generation did it four more times.
- Year: 88 BCE
- Category: Political
