The Gabinian Laws

The first of the two leges Gabiniae of 67 replaced Lucullus in command of the war against Mithridates. Discussion of this law must be somewhat

more extensive than its importance might seem to warrant because certain misconceptions have until quite recently clouded the manner of Lucullus's replacement.

Unfortunately for Rome, Lucullus's invasion of Armenia in 70-69 did not produce the expected result—Tigranes' betrayal of his father-in-law. Instead, despite heavy defeats inflicted by the Roman army, and Lucullus's capture of Tigranes' own capital, Tigranocerta, in 69 and Nisibis in 68, the Armenian king hung on doggedly, while Mithridates was able to slip back into his kingdom in 68 with a new army provided by Tigranes. This was a major coup for Mithridates and an inexcusable error on the part of Lucullus, for the resourceful Mithridates, once again in Pontus, was able to disrupt the Roman rear and finally inflict a devastating defeat upon Lucullus's legate Triarius at Zela in 67.^[81]

Our sources tell of growing opposition to Lucullus at home in Rome from as far back as 71-70, when he took measures for debt relief in Asia. The decision in 69 that Cilicia would be a consular province for 68 and, at the beginning of 68, the assignment of Asia to a praetor are presented as attempts to erode Lucullus's position that preface the final stroke, the lex Manilia of 66 transferring the command to Pompey.^[82] Modern scholars have often accepted this picture without sufficient reflection.^[83] Already toward the middle of 69, before any bad news arrived from Armenia, the Senate had decreed that Cilicia would be one of the consular provinces for 68.^[84] Lucullus had, after all declared the war over; the assignment of Cilicia to another—leaving, of course, Lucullus in command of the war against

Mithridates—followed from acceptance of that claim. But, in any case, interference with Lucullus's command was avoided by senatorial authorization to the consul to whom Cilicia was finally allotted in 68, Lucullus's own brother-in-law Q. Marcius Rex, to raise three new legions to take to his province.^[85] Why a consul in Cilicia? Not to steal Lucullus's thunder. With preparations for war against Crete to the west against piratical colleagues of the Cilicians, and a second offensive in Armenia to the east against the kings, Cilicia had in 69 suddenly become a linchpin of strategic operations in the East, which now were to be conducted by no less than three consular armies.^[86] Cilicia needed a commander on the spot, not in Armenia. In any case, Marcius did not even leave for Cilicia until 67;^[87] he was hardly hastening to rob Lucullus's glory. In the event, the function Marcius was to serve was rendered obsolete by Pompey's arrival in Cilicia later in 67, but he may not have been entirely inactive in his province before Pompey appeared, since he was acclaimed as imperator and later laid claim to a triumph.^[88] Marcius's refusal later to diminish his own forces when Lucullus requested troops from him may not therefore have been due entirely to petty envy.^[89] Pompey's fame has entirely obscured Marcius's activities in Cilicia, but it is not unlikely that, like Pompey's own legates, Marcius laid much of the groundwork for the great man's success.^[90]

Likewise the significance of the return of Asia provincia to its normal praetorian status at the beginning of 68 has been distorted, following the lead, it is true, of Dio.^[91] It is hard to see how this affected Lucullus's

position in the war against Mithridates, when the assignment of Asia to praetors in subsequent years evidently in no way undermined Pompey's command under the Manilian law. Again, it is necessary to recall that Lucullus himself had advertised the return of peace in western Asia Minor with his victory celebration at Ephesus; and it was "hardly practicable for a general operating in Armenia to administer provinces to the west."^[92] Dio's presentation of the provincial assignments in Asia Minor of 69-68 as punishment for Lucullus's allegedly self-interested dilatoriness (36.2.1-2) is, therefore, probably no more than an inference based on hindsight. Both of these assignments were made by the Senate, not the comitia , and the Senate was hardly attempting to sabotage the war against Mithridates and Tigranes. The ground was not being cut from under the feet of the Roman imperator in an insidious popularis or Pompeian prelude to the lex Manilia of 66.

The change came not incrementally, but in one blow. A law proposed by A. Gabinius toward the end of 68 or early in 67 sent the consul M'. Acilius Glabrio to relieve Lucullus in the command of the bellum Mithridaticum —not merely, as it is usually represented, to provide an independent command over Bithynia and Pontus, thereby fragmenting the Roman command and chipping away further at Lucullus's position for Pompey's eventual benefit.^[93] Glabrio expected to finish off the war easily and snatch the prizes of victory.^[94] Since he was so sanguine, and Gabinius's law also provided for the discharge of the two Fimbrian legions that had been in Asia nearly twenty years,^[95] it is dear that the law was voted before

news came of the disaster at Zela in the same year. In Rome, the war was dearly thought to be virtually over, which makes it dear that this lex Gabinia was not part of a subtly orchestrated plan to put Pompey in charge of the war against Mithridates.^[96]

We can infer that the main public complaint against Lucullus was his needless prolonging of the war to satisfy his private greed.^[97] Lucullus later showed that he was not above gross self-indulgence, and his own huge share of the booty won in the East was dearly sharply contrasted by Gabinius in his contiones with the tight rein he kept on the soldiers under his command.^[98] Lucullus had taken a considerable risk, both military and political, with his attempt to bully Tigranes into relinquishing Mithridates while announcing that the war was at an end, and two years after his invasion of Armenia it was easy to conclude that that move had been a grave error. In fact, as his offer to Pompey in 66 showed, Tigranes was on the verge of succumbing to the pressure,^[99] but too late to benefit Lucullus. It is important to recognize that Gabinius's law replacing Lucullus, despite the overturning of the Senate's determination of consular provinces, inspired no opposition worthy of commemoration in our sources: with the war dragging on inconclusively more than two years after Lucullus announced its conclusion, his powerful friends in the Senate could do nothing more to help him.^[100]

The more famous Gabinian law of 67 dealt derisively with the problem of piracy. As in 74, piracy was above all an explosive and "popular" issue because of the havoc it was still playing with the grain supply to the city of Rome.^[101] This was above all a Western matter; but the failure of Antonius's expedition to have any lasting effect and the swift return of the

pirates to the coasts of Italy despite Metellus's operations on Crete made it clearer than ever that a truly extraordinary effort would have to be mounted against all of their strongholds at once. Now, eight years after the severe grain shortage that had precipitated Antonius's command and despite repeated attempts by the Senate to control the problem, it was if anything even more acute. We can hardly wonder that the urban populace reacted violently against all resistance to Gabinius's proposal, which effectively tapped popular resentment against the Senate's failure to secure the grain supply against the pirates.^[102] But the resilience and tenacity of the pirates in the face of the Senate's best efforts of the last seven years in particular made the issue something bigger than one concerning the subsistence of the urban populace. The glory of the empire was now at stake: the arrogant depredations of the pirates, who had even attacked a Roman fleet in Ostia, sacked Caietae, and captured two Roman praetors, had at last come to appear a standing refutation of Rome's claim to imperium , above all in the East, where many notable cities had been captured and plundered, including Cnidus, Colophon, Samos, and Delos.^[103] "Or did you think this was imperium, " Cicero cried in his speech for the Manilian law the next year, "when legates, quaestors, and praetors of the Roman People were being seized, when we were cut off from public and private communication with all the provinces, when all the seas were so completely closed to us that we were unable either to undertake private Or public business abroad?"^[104] Only with the seas cleared of piracy, Cicero declared, did the Roman people "at last seem truly to command [imperare ] all peoples and races on land and sea."^[105] Cicero's emphasis in these two passages on the appearance of imperium and the recent failure of Rome to maintain it is striking and significant: he does not, be it noted, say "at last you command" but "at last you seem to command." Plutarch and Appian

similarly stress the symbolic importance of the problem.^[106] The problem of piracy had become, then, also a problem of image, in effect a standing refutation of Rome's claim to imperium. Imperium was no longer simply a matter of holding supreme power, of commanding the obedience of organized states; the growth of piracy, at first largely ignored because of the limited conception of imperium , finally came to reveal an uncomfortable contradiction between Rome's ability to command the obedience of cities and kings and its inability to enforce the obedience of pirates, mere "brigands" (latrones ).

To deal with this problem Gabinius proposed that extraordinary resources be entrusted to the state's most successful general the double triumphator Cn. Pompeius Magnus and consul of three years before. As passed in its final form, Pompey was granted for three years a provincia that was not territorially but only functionally defined—the war against the pirates—and most likely with imperium superior to all others within fifty miles of the sea. Five hundred ships, twenty legions, and a sum of HS 144,000,000 were to be at his disposal, and he was given the right to nominate personally twenty-four legates to assist him.^[107] As under the law of ca. 100, all kings, chiefs, peoples, and cities were requested to cooperate in the effort (App. Mith . 94).

As it was for Antonius, Pompey's first and most important order of business was to dear the Western seas around Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia, the three chief sources of grain for the city.^[108] In the meantime operations in the eastern Mediterranean were left to his legates Cn. Lentulus Marcellinus (off North Africa), M. Terentius Varro (off western and southern Greece), the historian L. Cornelius Sisenna (in the Aegean), M. Pupius Piso, L. Lollius, Q. Metellus Nepos (on the coasts of Asia Minor, from the Propontis to Cilicia), and two Pompeii (off Egypt).^[109] Pompey accomplished

this most pressing, but on the whole simpler, task in a mere forty days.^[110] Pompey's legates had done their work well in the meantime: aided, no doubt, by the lack of a safe haven in Crete clue to Metellus's campaigns, they had managed to drive back to their strongholds in Cilicia those pirates whom they did not immediately destroy.^[111] Pompey could thus set out again from Brundisium, enjoy a trip to Athens and a meeting with Rhodes's main tourist attraction, the philosopher Posidonius, and still win a decisive victory at Coracesium in Cilicia only forty-nine days later.^[112] The victory at Coracesium finally secured Roman mastery—the imperium populi Romani —over Cilicia Trachea, whose rugged coast had been infested with pirates' bases for the better part of a century. But, as usual, it is necessary once again to stress that this need not imply any legal, organizational activity formally imposing Roman rule, for which, once again, there is no evidence. When Cicero says in the speech for the Manilian law that Pompey "on the forty-ninth day joined all Cilicia to the imperium of the Roman people" he is not talking of the imposition of a provincial structure and the creation of a legal entity—on the very day of Coracesium, the forty-ninth day out of Brundisium!—but simply of the significance of the victory over the pirates, the decisiveness of which is stressed in the immediately following clauses.^[113] On any account Cicero exaggerates, for Cilicia Pedias was almost certainly at this time still in the hands of Tigranes, whose conquests were not stripped away by Pompey until the settlement late in 66.

Pompey dealt with the captured pirates with unexpected leniency, and even resettled them in numerous colonies, one of which (a resettlement

of Soli) was to bear the name of the imperator himself (Pompeiopolis).^[114] He was in Pamphylia, probably in the midst of organizing this task, when those Cretans who were still holding out against Metellus in Cnossos and elsewhere in the central and eastern parts of the island, and being handled very roughly, heard of his enlightened policy and, suddenly eager to classify themselves as pirates, offered to capitulate to him rather than to Metellus.^[115] A famous dash of wills between the Roman commanders ensued. Pompey's legate L. Octavius was sent to accept the Cretans' surrender but found that his presence on the other side of the ramparts in no way deterred Metellus's siege operations against Eleutherna, Lappa, and Hierapytna. When another of Pompey's legates, Cornelius Sisenna, crossed from Greece to Crete with a military force and promptly died, Octavius took over his soldiers and nearly dashed openly with Metellus.

The crisis was finally averted, however, when in 66 news reached Pompey of the transfer to him of command of the Mithridatic War (Dio 36.45.1). Metellus was now left to complete the subjugation of Crete after a bitter three years' conflict.^[116] Metellus imposed terms on the Cretans that signified the end of their long-lived independence, doubtless including the payment of vectigalia to Rome.^[117] Crete was "ours," said Cicero in 63.^[118] Likely enough, after Metellus's return Crete and Cyrenaica were assigned as a single provincia to a quaestor.^[119] By 66, then, the seas were safe, and

while Pompey received most of the credit, Metellus Creticus deserved a nod as well (Cic. Flac . 30).

The tribune Gabinius's two plebiscites—the lex de bello Mithridatico , transferring command in the war to Acilius Glabrio, and the lex de piratis persequendis , which gave Pompey a special mission in the Mediterranean and enormous resources with which to perform it—were more than simply partisan maneuvers. The two Gabinian laws follow in the direction pointed by Lentulus Spinther's veto of peace with the Cretans and represent a strong assertion of the popular will for a more active, less restrained policy than that currently being followed in the Senate. The law on piracy is of particular importance: the problem of the security of the seas had at last developed from one chiefly affecting provincials and those Romans on public and private business in the provinces to one that directly impinged upon the voting urban populace. Hence, finally, the commitment to clearing the seas decisively—a momentous step that signifies a much broadened sense of the imperial mission. At last, Cicero commented in 66, the Roman people achieved the appearance of universal dominion.^[120] The Manilian law of the following year continues the trend, and the valuable glimpse we receive of the public debate on the measure from Cicero's speech on it gives an indication of some of its implications.