Jugurthine War - Revelations

Revelations

The Jugurthine War clearly revealed the problems of the Republic at that time. The fact that a man such as Jugurtha could rise to power by buying Roman military and civil officials reflected a Roman moral and ethical decline. Romans now sought individual power often at the expense of the state, also displayed by Marius's rise to power by ignoring Roman traditions. These events were also observed by Marius's quaestor, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who later came to rival Marius in the first of the great civil wars of the Late Republic. The beginning of this rivalry, according to Plutarch, was purportedly Sulla's crucial role in the negotiations for and eventual capture of Jugurtha, which led to Sulla wearing a ring portraying the capture despite Marius being awarded the victory for it.

The Roman historian Sallust wrote a monograph, Bellum Jugurthinum, on the Jugurthine War emphasising this decline of Roman ethics and placed it, along with his work on the Conspiracy of Catiline, in the timeline of the degeneration of Rome that began with the Fall of Carthage and ended with that of the Republic. He is one of our most valuable sources on the war, along with Plutarch's biographies of Sulla and Marius.