Granius Licinianus35.20; 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.
Orosius 5.21.7 (Latin text): "Marcus Marius was dragged from a goat-pen and bound on orders of Sulla; after he was led across the Tiber to the tomb of the Lutatii, his eyes were gouged out, his body parts were cut off bit by bit or even broken, and he was slaughtered". Livy's account survives only in Periocha 88: "Sulla polluted (inquinavit) a most glorious victory by cruelty such as no man had ever shown before. He slaughtered 8,000 men, who had surrendered, in the Villa Publica; ...and had Marius, a man of senatorial rank, killed after having his legs and arms broken, his ears cut off and his eyes gouged out".
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); Syme, Ronald (1964), Sallust, University of California Press, pp. 85–86, ISBN978-0-520-92910-4: 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.
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.
Michael H. Crawford, Coinage and Money under the Roman Republic (University of California Press, 1985), p. 191 online.
Pliny, Natural History33.46. 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.
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.
Ittai Gradel, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 51 online.
Seager 1994, pp. 180–181; 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".
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.
Lovano 2002, pp. 132 n. 81, 134. "Sulla had given... Mithridates, the opportunity to negotiate peace... he gave his fellow Romans and all Italians a similar chance on his return to Italy. Had his negotiations been fully successful, Sulla probably would have only eliminated the most undoubted Cinnans, such as Carbo and Gratidianus". Lovano, Michael (2002). The age of Cinna: crucible of late republican Rome. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN978-3-515-07948-8.
Plenum animae et spiritus: Asconius 69 (Stangl); Wiseman 1994, p. 348 n. 106 for citations of ancient sources. Wiseman, T P. "Caesar, Pompey, and Rome, 59–50 BC". In CAH2 9 (1994), pp. 368–423.
Jane W. Crawford, M. Tullius Cicero. The Fragmentary Speeches (American Philological Association, 1994), p. 185 online. Cicero is also inconsistent in blaming Catiline.
Matthew Dillon and Lynda Garland, Ancient Rome: From the Early Republic to the Assassination of Julius Caesar (Taylor & Francis, 2005), p. 523 online; Seager, Cambridge Ancient History, p. 195.
"Here it must be recognized that there was no question of Marcus needing his brother's advice on electoral campaigning", notes Andrew Lintott; for a discussion of the Commentariolum in relation to the elder Cicero's speech In Toga Candida, see Cicero as Evidence: A Historian's Companion (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 130ff. online.
Vitibus: grape vines, but here staffs made from the tree-like stalks, which were carried by centurions as a symbol of rank and sometimes used to administer corporal punishment to soldiers; see Sara Elise Phang, Roman Military Service: Ideologies of Discipline in the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 116 online, 125 and 129: "Beating with the tough and gnarled vitis was severe enough to leave... scars and wounds".
Hic aures, alius spiramina naris aduncae / amputat; ille cavis evolvit sedibus orbes, / ultimaque effodit spectatis lumina membris; see Elaine Fantham, Lucan. Be Bello Civili. Book II (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 112 online.
Compare, for instance, the careful mitigation of Melissa Barden Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 50–51 online, to the harder-eyed view of Arthur Keaveney, The Army in the Roman Revolution (Routledge, 2007), p. 15 online.
The ancient sources can be oblique; for instance, Seneca, De clementia 1.11.2, refers to "Perugian altars" in listing evidence for the harshness of Augustus in youth, tempered by age, without explanation. In Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998, 2001), Donald G. Kyle reviews this and related incidents and points out that 300 is a "conventional number" (p. 58 online).
William Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People from the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus (London, 1922), p. 44 online.
David Rohrbacher, The Historians of Late Antiquity (Routledge, 2002), p. 138 Orosius online.
Orosius 5.21.7 (Latin text): "Marcus Marius was dragged from a goat-pen and bound on orders of Sulla; after he was led across the Tiber to the tomb of the Lutatii, his eyes were gouged out, his body parts were cut off bit by bit or even broken, and he was slaughtered". Livy's account survives only in Periocha 88: "Sulla polluted (inquinavit) a most glorious victory by cruelty such as no man had ever shown before. He slaughtered 8,000 men, who had surrendered, in the Villa Publica; ...and had Marius, a man of senatorial rank, killed after having his legs and arms broken, his ears cut off and his eyes gouged out".
Cicero says, possibly but not necessarily with exaggeration, that Gratidianus' statues were in every neighborhood (De officiis 3.80); Gradel, Emperor worship and Roman religion, p. 125 online.
William Warde Fowler, The Festivals of the Roman Republic: An Introduction to the Study of the Religion of the Romans (London, 1908), pp. 44–50, full text downloadable.
Pliny, Natural History33.46. 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.
Presumably bound to a stake, given his broken limbs; implied also by Lucan's use of the verb pendet, "hang suspended", Bellum civile 2.176. The traditional punishment for perduellio, the charge for which Gratidianus probably prosecuted the elder Catulus, was death by scourging. The convicted man was tied to a furca or palus, originally a dead tree, arbor infelix. Those bound to an arbor infelix were considered consecrated to the chthonic gods; see Anne Weis, "The Motif of the adligatus and Tree", American Journal of Archaeology 86 (1982), p. 27. Catulus had preferred suicide to this fate, the threat of which may have shaped his son's revenge. There are also a few indications that crucifixion might have been used, contrary to custom, on citizens during the civil war. See Rawson, "Sallust on the Eighties?", pp. 175–176, and discussion at Q. Valerius Soranus: Execution. The word stanti has been emended in some editions to spiranti, parallel with Cicero's phrase plenum animae et spiritus, so that the passage means Gratidianus was still "alive and breathing" when his head was lopped off; see Damon, "Com. Pet. 10", passim.
Cassius Dio 43.24 is the unique source for the incident.
Suetonius, Life of Augustus15, attributing multiple but unnamed sources: "Certain sources write that three hundred men of both orders were chosen from those who surrendered, and slaughtered in the manner of sacrificial victims (more hostiarum) at the altar built for the Divine Julius on the Ides of March".
Cassius Dio48.14.2.: "And the story goes that they did not merely suffer death in an ordinary form, but were led to the altar consecrated to the former Caesar and were there sacrificed".
