Marcus Marius Gratidianus - Sacrificial Death

Sacrificial Death

See also Sulla: Second March on Rome.

During the closing violence of the civil war, Gratidianus was tortured and killed. His fate under Sulla's dictatorship was never in doubt; his death was non-negotiable. 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.

Cicero gave his version of events in a speech on his candidacy for the consulship in 64 BC, nearly two decades after the fact. He had been a young man in his twenties at the time of the killing, possibly an eye witness. What is known of this speech and thus Cicero's version depends on notes provided by the 1st-century grammarian Asconius. By chance, the surviving quotations from Cicero name neither the victim nor the executioner; these are supplied by Asconius. One of Cicero's purposes in the speech was to smear his rivals, among them Sergius Catilina, whose participation in the crime Cicero asserted repeatedly throughout. The orator claimed that Catilina cut off Gratidianus's head, carried it by hand through the city from the Janiculum to the Temple of Apollo, and delivered it to Sulla "full of soul and breath."

A fragment from Sallust's Histories omits mention of Catilina in describing the death: Gratidianus "had his life drained out of him piece by piece, in effect: his legs and arms were first broken, and his eyes gouged out." A more telling omission is that the execution of Gratidianus is not among Sallust's allegations against Catilina in his Bellum Catilinae ("Catilina's War"). Sallust's description of the death, however, influenced that of Livy, Valerius Maximus, Seneca, Lucan, and Florus, with the torture and mutilation varied and amplified. Although B.A. Marshall argued that the versions of Cicero and Sallust constituted two different traditions, and that only Cicero implicated Catilina, other scholars have found no details in the two Late Republican accounts that are mutually exclusive or that exculpate Catilina.

Later sources add the detail that Gratidianus was tortured at the tomb of the gens Lutatia, because his prosecution had prompted the suicide of Q. Lutatius Catulus. Despite the strength and persistence of the tradition that Catilina took the lead role in the execution, the instigator would have been the son of Catulus (consul 78 BC), exhibiting pietas towards his father by seeking revenge as an alternative to justice. The dutiful son may not have wanted to bloody his own hands with the deed: "One would not expect the polished Catulus actually to preside over the torture, and carry the head to Sulla," observes Elizabeth Rawson, noting that Catulus is later known as a friend and protector of Catilina. The site of the family tomb, otherwise unknown, is mentioned only in connection with this incident and identified vaguely as "across the Tiber," which accords with Cicero's statement that the head was carried from the Janiculum to the Temple of Apollo.

Sallust himself may indirectly site the killing at the tomb in a speech in which Aemilius Lepidus, the consular colleague of Catulus in 78 who eventually confronted him on the battlefield, addressed the Roman people in opposition to Sulla: "In just this way have you seen human sacrifices and tombs stained with citizens' blood." Blood shed at a tomb implies that the killing amounted to a sacrifice, in appeasement for an ancestor's Manes. Human sacrifices in Rome were documented in historical times — "their savagery was closely connected with religion" — and had been banned by law only fifteen years before the death of Gratidianus.