Marcus Marius Gratidianus ( 125 – 82 BC) was a Roman praetor and supporter of Gaius Marius during the civil war between the followers of Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. As praetor, Gratidianus is known for his policy of currency reform during the economic crisis of the 80s BC.
Although this period of Roman history is marked by the extreme violence and cruelty practiced by partisans on each side, Gratidianus suffered a particularly vicious death during Sulla's proscription; in the most sensational accounts, he was tortured and dismembered by Catiline at the tomb of Quintus Lutatius Catulus, in a manner that evoked human sacrifice, and his severed head was carried through the streets of Rome on a pike.
Family and career Gratidianus was the son of Marcus Gratidius, of the gens Gratidia from Arpinum, and Maria, the sister of Gaius Marius. After his father's death, he was adopted by his uncle, Marcus Marius, whose name he then assumed according to Roman custom, becoming Marcus Marius Gratidianus. Gratidianus' aunt married Marcus Tullius Cicero, grandfather of the celebrated orator.; . Gratidianus was a close friend of his cousin, the young Cicero. He may also have had a particularly pungent relationship with his brother-in-law; there is reason to believe that his sister, Gratidia, was the first wife of Lucius Sergius Catilina, or "Catiline", who was later accused by Cicero of Gratidianus' torture and murder.Evidence of the marriage from a fragment from Sallust's Historiae (1.37, with the commentary on the passage by P. McGushin, Sallust: the Histories, 1992); : if they were married, "it can be taken that Catilina promptly discarded her". The existence of a marriage between Gratidianus' sister and Catiline is a subject of debate and often doubted.
Gratidius, his natural father, was a close friend of Marcus Antonius the orator and consul of 99 BC. He was killed circa 102 BC, while serving as a prefect under Antonius in Cilicia.Cicero, De legibus 36 and Brutus 168. In 92 BC, Antonius deployed his famed oratorical skills in defending his friend's son when Gratidianus was sued by the oyster-breeder and real-estate speculator Sergius Orata in a civil case involving the sale of a property on the Lucrine Lake.Cicero, De oratore 1.178 and De officiis 3.67; E. Badian, "Caepio and Norbanus: Notes on the Decade 100–90 BC", Historia 6 (1957), 332; John H. D'Arms, "The Campanian Villas of C. Marius and the Sullan Confiscation", Classical Quarterly 18 (1968), p. 185, note 6. Orata was not without his own high-powered speaker, in the person of Lucius Licinius Crassus. Cicero says Orata was trying to force Gratidianus to buy back the property when Orata's business plan for farm-raised oysters fell through, perhaps because of unforeseen complications arising from water rights or fishing rights.The legal grounds for the suit was easement (servitude), which Orata claimed (wrongly, according to Cicero) that Gratidianus had failed to disclose. For further discussion of the case, see Cynthia J. Bannon, "Servitudes for Water Use in the Roman Suburbium", Historia 50 (2001), pp. 47–50. Sometime before 91 BC, a claim, probably also a civil suit, was filed against Gratidianus by Gaius Visellius Aculeo, supported again by Crassus. A Lucius Aelius Lamia spoke on behalf of Gratidianus, but the grounds for the suit are unknown.Cicero, De oratore 2.262, 269; Erich S. Gruen, "Political Prosecutions in the 90's BC", Historia 15 (1966), p. 52, note 121; .
Gratidianus was probably tribune of the plebs in 87 BC;Unless otherwise noted, offices and dates are from T.R.S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, vol. 2, 99 BC–31 BC (New York: American Philological Association, 1952), pp. 50, 52 (note 8), 57, 59 (note 1), 60, 589. Some slight question exists as to whether Gratidianus was a tribune this year. if so, then he was among the six tribunes who left the city to take up arms when Lucius Cornelius Cinna, one of his uncle's allies, was banished. He was a legate that same year, probably the commander named MariusGranius Licinianus 35.20; there is some uncertainty as to which Marius this was. He was probably not the son of Gaius Marius, who seems to have been with his father at the time. who was sent north by Cinna with the objective of seizing Ariminum and cutting off any reinforcements that might be sent to Sulla from Cisalpine Gaul. This Marius defeated Publius Servilius Vatia and took control of his army.
By the end of 87, Gratidianus had returned to Rome with Cinna and Gaius Marius. He took on the prosecution of Quintus Lutatius Catulus, a move that was later to prove fateful. Catulus had been the colleague of Marius during his consulship in 102 BC, and had shared his triumph over the Cimbri, but had later broken with him. Rather than face the inevitable guilty verdict, Catulus committed suicide.; ; Erich Gruen, Roman Politics and the Criminal Courts, 149–78 BC (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 232–234. The charge was probably perduellio, submitted to the judgment of the people (iudicium populi), for which the punishment was death by scourging at the stake..
Currency reform and cult following
As praetor in 85, Gratidianus was among those officials who attempted to address Rome's economic crisis. A number of praetors and tribunes drafted a currency reform measure to reassert the former official exchange rate of silver (the denarius) and the bronze as, which had been allowed to fluctuate and destabilize. Gratidianus seized the opportunity to attach his name to the edict and claim credit for publishing it first. The currency measure pleased the equites, or business class, more than did the debt reform legislation of Lucius Valerius Flaccus, which had permitted the repayment of loans at one-quarter of the amount owed,H.H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68 (Routledge, 5th edition 1988), p. 73 online. and it was enormously popular with the plebs.
An alternative view of the reform, based mainly on a "hopelessly confused"Michael H. Crawford, Coinage and Money under the Roman Republic (University of California Press, 1985), p. 191 online. statement by Pliny, is that Gratidianus introduced a method for detecting counterfeit money. The two reforms are not incompatible,Pliny, Natural History 33.46. The gratitude of the plebs is consistent even when specific accounts of Gratidianus' reforms differs; see David Bruce Hollander, Money in the Late Roman Republic (Brill, 2007), p. 29 online. but historian and numismatist Michael Crawford finds no widespread evidence of silver-plated or counterfeit denarii in surviving coin hoards from the period leading up to the edict. Since the measures taken by Gratidianus cannot be shown to address a problem of counterfeit money, the edict is best understood as part of the Cinnan government's efforts to restore and create a perception of stability in the wake of the civil war.Crawford, Coinage and Money under the Roman Republic, pp. 190–192, repeating an argument he first made in "The edict of M. Marius Gratidianus", Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 14 (1968) 1–4.
Cicero says the people expressed their gratitude by offering wine and incense before images of Gratidianus at street-corner shrines (compita, singular compitum). Each neighborhood (vicus) had a compitum within which its guardian spirits, or Lares, were thought to reside. During the Compitalia, a new year festival, the cult images were displayed in procession. Festus and Macrobius thought that the "dolls" were ritual replacements for human sacrifices to the spirits of the dead. The sources express no surprise or disapproval toward tending cult for a living man, which may have been a tradition otherwise little evidenced; the theological basis of the homage paid to Gratidianus is unclear.The cult of Gratidianus may thus be part of precedent in the connection made later between the cult of Augustus and the neighborhood altars of the Lares in 12 BC; see Stefan Weinstock, Divus Julius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 295, and further discussion under Imperial cult. In historical times, the Compitalia included a purification (lustratio) and the sacrifice of a pig who was first paraded around the city. Street theater, including farces that satirized current political events, was a feature. Because it encouraged the people to assemble and possibly foment insurrection, there were sporadic efforts among the elite to regulate or suppress the Compitalia.John Bert Lott, The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 14 online, 34–38 et passim. "The associated games, which as neither state-sponsored ludi nor private benefactions had an ambiguous status, were aimed solely at the urban plebs, arose out of the mood of holiday abandon, and evidently offered — or could be manipulated to provide — a release for subversive sentiment": Richard C. Beacham, Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 55–56 online. A ban on guild associations referred to by Cicero (In Pisonem 8) was extended to suppress the Compitalia.
The political aspect suggests why the display of Gratidianus' image would be viewed as dangerous in the rivalry between the populares and the optimates, the faction of Sulla. Cicero uses his cousin's subsequent fall as a cautionary tale about relying on popular support.Cicero, De officiis 3.80. This form of devotion toward a living man has also been pointed to as a precedent for so-called "emperor worship" in the Imperial era.Ittai Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 51 online.
Seneca, following Cicero's lead, criticizes Gratidianus for compromising his integrity in claiming credit for the legislation, by which he had hoped to garner support for his candidacy as consul.Seneca, De ira 3.18. In the event, his party failed to support his bid, and the honor paid to him by the people probably contributed to the viciousness of the actions taken against him later by the supporters of Sulla.; Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 94–95 online: "Gratidianus' death seems connected to the special honors he had received during his lifetime".
Twice praetor Gratidianus had an unusual second praetorship, possibly as a "consolation prize" granted him when the Cinnans decided to back the younger Marius and Gnaeus Papirius Carbo for the consulship of 82. Although his ambitions were known and his qualifications far exceeded those of his cousin, Gratidianus probably never made a formal announcement of his candidacy for the consulship, and is assumed to have stepped aside for the sake of the Cinnans' unity. The more likely candidates from their party would have been Gratidianus and Quintus Sertorius; the political snub evidently contributed to the latter's secession in Spain. The dates for Gratidianus' praetorships are arguable; T.R.S. Broughton gives 86 and 84, but the timing of the currency reform makes 85 a more secure date, with the second term in 84, 83, or 82.C.F. Conrad, "Notes on Roman Also-Rans", in Imperium sine fine: T. Robert S. Broughton and the Roman Republic (Franz Steiner, 1996), pp. 104–105 online, citing also G. V. Sumner, The Orators in Cicero's Brutus (Toronto, 1973), pp. 118–119.
Sacrificial death During the closing violence of the civil war, Gratidianus was tortured and killed. A death, if Sulla were victorious, was likely never in doubt.. Details vary and proliferate in their brutality over time. Cicero and Sallust offer the earliest accounts, but the works in which these survive are fragmentary.