Lucius Cornelius Cinna

• 1. Introduction

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  Lucius Cornelius Cinna was killed by his own soldiers early in 84 BC. He died during a mutiny while trying to move his army across the Adriatic Sea near Ancona. By then he had already served as consul four times in a row, a feat the Roman republic rarely allowed one man. Historians describe the pattern of rule he set as a "crucial precedent" for the strongmen who came after him. He reached that position by leading an army against his own co-consul, Gnaeus Octavius, in a conflict known as the Bellum Octavianum. What carried him to four consecutive consulships, and who was he before any of it happened? What kind of ruler did he become once Rome's gates opened to him? And what finally went wrong on the shore of the Adriatic?

• 2. Family Ties And Uncertain Origins

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  Cinna was born sometime before 130 BC into a patrician family with no recent public distinction. The historian Theodor Mommsen classified the Cornelii Cinnae as plebeians, though most modern scholars consider them patrician. A consul from 127 BC has been tentatively identified as Cinna's father, though the link is not certain.

  His wife, a woman named Annia, bore him three children: two daughters and a son who shared his name. The elder daughter married Gaius Julius Caesar, the future dictator and consul of 59 BC, probably during Cinna's second consulship in 86 BC. His younger daughter married Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, who died in 81 BC.

  Cinna's son, also named Lucius Cornelius Cinna, escaped Sulla's retribution after his father's civil war by fleeing to Quintus Sertorius, one of Cinna's own legates. He later received amnesty under the lex Plautia and returned to Rome, going on to become praetor in 44 BC.

  Before 90 BC, Cinna had already served as praetor. During the Social War, the modern historian T.R.S. Broughton believed Cinna served as one of the legates who led a successful Roman offensive against the Marsi in 89 BC. Little else is known of his life before 88 BC, when he stood for the consulship and Roman politics turned toward crisis.

• 3. Two Questions, One Betrayal

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  Two disputes dominated Roman politics in 88 BC. The first concerned Rome's Italian allies, who had just been granted citizenship after the Social War. Publius Sulpicius Rufus, a plebeian tribune, wanted to enroll them equally across all thirty-five voting tribes. His opponents wanted them packed into a handful of existing tribes, or eight new ones. The second dispute concerned command of the war against Mithridates VI Eupator, the king of Pontus, who had invaded the Roman province of Asia.

  Sulpicius tried to link the two disputes, offering to back Italian enrollment in exchange for transferring Sulla's Mithridatic command to the aging general Gaius Marius. Once that transfer passed into law, Sulla turned his own army against the city, marching on Rome to reverse it. He invalidated Sulpicius' legislation and banished twelve men, including both Sulpicius and Marius, defending the purge as a consul's duty to remove dangerous demagogues. By the time voting began, his march had left much of the electorate deeply resentful.

  Cinna campaigned on holding Sulla legally accountable, promising to have him prosecuted once his consular term ended. Sulla, for his part, backed a different candidate, Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus, an ally who had recently celebrated a triumph. The voting assembly, still angry over Sulla's march and his treatment of Sulpicius and Marius, rejected Vatia and elected Cinna alongside Gnaeus Octavius instead. The two men may have been friends at the time of their election.

  Before declaring the results, Sulla realized the outcome would run against him personally. Rather than interfere with the vote directly, he sought a religious solution, making Cinna and Octavius swear an oath not to publicly overturn his arrangements. Both men agreed, since Sulla, as presiding consul, could have refused to announce the results at all. Octavius appears to have taken the oath seriously. Cinna did not, and Rome would soon learn just how loosely he interpreted it.

• 4. Rome Under Siege

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  As consul, Cinna's first act was to have a plebeian tribune bring formal prosecution against Sulla. The charge likely centered on Sulla's killing of Sulpicius, a sitting and sacrosanct tribune. It was meant to strip Sulla of his imperium and his Mithridatic command, and to stop him leaving Italy at the head of an army. The move proved unenforceable. Sulla simply ignored the tribunician summons and sailed for Greece.

  According to the historian Appian, Cinna accepted bribes to support equal enrollment of the new Italian citizens across all thirty-five tribes. Bribed or not, he declared his backing publicly, putting him on a collision course with his co-consul, Octavius. Both men's supporters armed themselves. When Cinna tried pushing the enrollment legislation through, tribunes loyal to Octavius vetoed it, and the standoff turned into a riot.

  A senatus consultum ultimum, an emergency decree, may have been passed against the rioters, and Octavius acted on it fast. He led armed supporters down the Via Sacra and killed the rioters outright. Cinna himself went unharmed and left the city with his closest allies. Among them were Quintus Sertorius, Gaius Milonius, Marcus Marius Gratidianus, and six of the ten plebeian tribunes.

  Once Cinna left to raise men and money from Italian towns, the Senate illegally stripped him of his consulship. It declared him a public enemy, a hostis. In his place, it unconstitutionally installed Lucius Cornelius Merula, who also held the priesthood of flamen Dialis. Because Merula's priestly duties and taboos barred him from many public acts, Octavius effectively ran the consulship alone.

  At Nola, an Italian town still resisting a Roman siege, Cinna appeared before the assembled army wearing his consular regalia. He described himself as a consul unjustly stripped of an office the people had given him. The soldiers raised him up in support and swore an oath of loyalty. He then traveled among Italian towns, presenting himself as a victim of his own advocacy for their citizenship.

  While Octavius and Merula worked to fortify Rome's defenses, Gaius Marius made his move. One of the men Sulla had exiled, Marius returned to Italy and pledged himself to Cinna's cause. Cinna offered him the title of proconsul, which Marius pointedly refused. Marius then raised roughly 6,000 Italian supporters of his own before rejoining Cinna's camp. The Senate, meanwhile, summoned Pompey Strabo, a commander from the Social War's northern front, to defend Rome. He stalled outside the city instead, weighing both sides. Cinna's combined forces then besieged Rome itself, with Cinna facing the Colline Gate while Sertorius and Marius held positions to the north and south.

  Strabo eventually committed to Octavius' side, so the Senate also recalled Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius from his campaign against the Samnites, ordering an immediate peace. When Metellus refused Samnite demands for citizenship, the release of war prisoners, and a non-reciprocal return of plunder, Cinna and Marius saw an opening. They offered those same terms and won the Samnites as allies instead. A defecting military tribune opened the Janiculum's gates to Cinna and Marius' troops, but six cohorts from Strabo's army drove them back. Strabo himself began secretly negotiating with Cinna, reportedly hoping for a second consulship, before dying of plague. With the siege tightening and Rome's food supply cut off, the Senate finally sent envoys to negotiate a truce. It agreed to address Cinna as consul only after Merula resigned his post.

  Merula's resignation cleared the way for Cinna to walk back through the gates of Rome.

• 5. A Consul's Head

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  The Senate's envoys had secured one promise from Cinna: that he would not willingly kill anyone. His ally Marius, however, stood silently behind Cinna's chair throughout the negotiations, saying nothing. Cinna entered the city and promptly passed a law recalling Marius and the other exiles Sulla had banished.

  A squadron of Cinna's cavalry, commanded by Gaius Marcius Censorinus, killed the consul Octavius, who had refused to flee the city. Censorinus then brought Octavius' severed head to Cinna, the first time a Roman consul's head had been displayed as a trophy to another Roman.

  Political opponents fell next: Gaius and Lucius Julius Caesar, killed without trial alongside Publius Licinius Crassus and Marcus Antonius. Merula, the recently abdicated consul, and Quintus Lutatius Catulus, an old rival of Marius, were brought before the people on formal charges. These may have included usurping the consulship and perduellio. Both men killed themselves before a verdict was reached.

  The purge was not broad, and the victims were not linked to Sulla, suggesting it reflected Marius' personal grudges more than any wider campaign. There is no evidence that Cinna and Marius targeted the families of those they killed. Later writers, including Dio, Velleius, Livy, Diodorus, and Plutarch, describe five days of butchery across the city. Historians now trace that picture to Sullan propaganda passed down through Sulla's own memoirs.

  Cicero, writing closer to the events and to men who had actually lived through Cinna's regime, offers a different account. He indicates that Cinna and Marius targeted only their political enemies, never threatening the wider population or sacking the city. That narrower picture would matter little to the man planning his return from the war against Pontus.

• 6. Four Consulships Running

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  Back inside Rome, Cinna set about dismantling everything Sulla had built. The Senate declared Sulla a hostis and stripped him of his priesthood, confiscated his property, and tore down his house. His legislation was repealed, and his wife and children fled the city for the safety of Sulla's army in Greece.

  At elections held late in 87 BC, Cinna had himself and Marius elected as consuls for the following year. The two men were apparently the only candidates on the ballot, contrary to what some ancient sources later claimed. Marius, though, died just thirteen days into his seventh consulship, possibly of pneumonia. Cinna elevated Lucius Valerius Flaccus to take his place.

  During 86 BC, censors Lucius Marcius Philippus and Marcus Perperna carried out a formal count of Roman citizens. It registered just 463,000 people. That number showed most of the newly enfranchised Italians had still not been added to the rolls, despite Cinna's support for their citizenship. Flaccus, his co-consul, also passed legislation that cut all outstanding debts by three quarters.

  At the close of 86 BC, Flaccus left for Greece, ostensibly to take command of an army that Sulla's outlawing had left leaderless. One of his own legates, Gaius Flavius Fimbria, assassinated him instead and seized command. By 85 BC, Sulla had driven Mithridates out of Asia and secured a peace, the Treaty of Dardanos, with generous terms for Pontus. He then suborned Fimbria's army as well, driving Fimbria to suicide.

  Fimbria's suicide left the eastern army entirely in Sulla's hands, just as Cinna began choosing a new consular colleague for the year ahead.

• 7. The Storm At Ancona

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  For the year 85 BC, Cinna chose Gnaeus Papirius Carbo as his consular colleague. Sulla's peace with Pontus was widely seen as generous, a deal meant to leave him a free hand against his enemies back in Italy. Everyone expected he would return in arms.

  Cinna and Carbo answered by stockpiling money and provisions from across Italy and levying troops for the fight to come. They warned that a victorious Sulla would overturn Italian citizenship entirely, a claim that carried weight given Sulla's earlier violence against Sulpicius in 88 BC.

  Late in 85 BC, Sulla wrote to the Senate, listing his achievements against Mithridates and complaining bitterly about the regime running Rome. He promised to avenge himself on his enemies in the name of his murdered friends, his exiled family, and Rome itself. Against Cinna's warnings, he insisted he had no intention of overturning Italian enfranchisement.

  The Senate sent its own embassy to try reconciling Sulla with his political opponents, and it ordered Cinna and Carbo to halt their military preparations. Both men agreed publicly and then ignored the order, continuing to recruit and arm for a campaign meant to carry the fight east into Greece.

  Of the ships bound for Liburnia, the first wave crossed the Adriatic safely, but the second ran into a storm. Some ships sank, and many soldiers deserted rather than fight fellow Romans. The men still waiting to embark at Ancona simply refused to board. According to Appian, Cinna called an assembly to restore discipline, and the confrontation ended with his own men killing him. Plutarch tells a different story, claiming the soldiers feared Cinna had ordered the assassination of a young Pompey, though historians consider that account unreliable.

  Carbo, Cinna's surviving co-consul, was recalled to Rome to hold elections for a replacement. Two separate attempts were called off after bad omens, so the elections were postponed indefinitely, and Carbo finished the year as sole consul.

  When the Senate's envoys reached Sulla with news of Cinna's death, he rejected their offers outright. He refused to disband his army and instead demanded the Senate restore his legal status, his property, and his offices. His terms were received badly, and in 83 BC Sulla invaded Italy, opening a civil war he would win the following year.

• 8. A Precedent For Strongmen

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  Robin Seager, writing in the Cambridge Ancient History, called any clear assessment of Cinna's rule difficult. He wrote that "our scrappy sources are pervaded by the insidious influence of Sulla's own version of events, diffused without competition after his victory." Few periods of the era survive in as thin a record as Cinna's own years in power.

  Cinna's dominatio lasted just three years, and its short, partial nature makes his politics and character hard to pin down. Older scholarship treated him as little more than an appendage to Marius, a view most historians now reject. He was skilled at popularis-style argument, yet he offered no real solutions to the republic's deeper structural problems.

  After the initial wave of killings alongside Marius in 86 BC, no further extra-legal persecutions appear in the record. His support for Italian enfranchisement looks opportunistic in hindsight, and he only haltingly followed through once he held power securely. Politics under his rule stayed relatively traditional, with the consul and Senate largely operating on separate tracks, each willing to ignore the other. Resentment simmered over his repeated hold on the consulship, yet Rome's political class was, for the most part, left alone.

  Cinna and his faction were the first in the Roman republic to turn armed force directly into lasting political domination. Their methods broke sharply with republican tradition, but the approach did not end with him. Sulla followed a similar path, then Caesar, and finally Octavian, each building on the precedent Cinna had set.