What is the Sertorian war in Spain, c. 80-72 BC?

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How stable was the Republic that Sulla left behind at his death in 78 BC, and how far had his settlement been undone by the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BC?

The aftermath of Sulla and the 70s BC, the fragility of the Sullan constitution (the strengthened Senate and the crippled tribunate), the revolt of Lepidus in 78-77 BC, the long war against Sertorius in Spain and Pompey's command, the war against Spartacus and the slave revolt of 73-71 BC, the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BC and their dismantling of the Sullan settlement through the restoration of the tribunate, and the emergence of Pompey and Crassus as the great men standing outside the normal cursus honorum

The Roman Republic after Sulla's death in 78 BC, the fragile Sullan constitution and its unravelling through the revolt of Lepidus, the Sertorian war in Spain and the Spartacus revolt, to the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BC that restored the tribunate and left both men as dynasts outside the normal cursus honorum.

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Quick answer

Sulla died in 78 BC leaving a settlement that strengthened the Senate and crippled the tribunate, but it depended on the very army-backed strongmen it could not control. Within a year Lepidus revolted (78-77 BC) to overturn it; the decade was then dominated by the Sertorian war in Spain (c. 80-72 BC), ended by treachery and Pompey, and the Spartacus revolt (73-71 BC), crushed by Crassus while Pompey claimed a share of the credit. In 70 BC Pompey and Crassus, as consuls, restored the tribunate's powers, reformed the courts by the lex Aurelia and revised the Senate, dismantling the core of the Sullan settlement, while both men, especially Pompey with no prior magistracy, confirmed that real power now lay with dynasts outside the normal cursus honorum. Syme sees the triumph of personal power, Gruen a workable adjustment, and Seager reads Pompey's rise as a symptom of the settlement's failure.

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to analyse the Republic in the decade after Sulla's death in 78 BC as a study in fragility and unravelling: to explain why the Sullan constitution (a strengthened Senate, a crippled tribunate) was unstable, how the revolt of Lepidus, the long Sertorian war in Spain and the Spartacus slave revolt exposed that instability, and how the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BC dismantled the core of Sulla's settlement while confirming both men as dynasts operating outside the normal cursus honorum. You are writing narrative-analytical history, weighing causation, change and continuity, and using the sources (Plutarch, Appian, Sallust) critically.

In plain English

Picture a strict headmaster who takes over a rowdy school, writes tough new rules to put the senior staff back in charge, strips the student council of any real power, then retires and dies. Within a year one deputy tries to tear up the rulebook, and the school is rocked by three long crises at once - two of them fires the staff can barely put out. To fight the fires the school has to hand huge, unofficial powers to two ambitious young teachers. When those two finally get the top jobs, the first thing they do is give the student council its powers back, quietly undoing the headmaster's whole scheme - because they, not the rulebook, now hold the real power. That is Rome from 78 to 70 BC: Sulla's settlement looked solid but leaned on the very strongmen it was meant to restrain, and once Pompey and Crassus found it convenient, they dismantled it.

The answer

The Sullan settlement and why it was fragile

Sulla laid down his dictatorship and died in 78 BC, leaving behind a constitution meant to entrench senatorial government. He had enlarged the Senate to around 600 members, restored its control of the law-court juries, and above all gutted the tribunate of the plebs: tribunes lost the power to initiate legislation, their veto was curtailed, and holding the tribunate barred a man from further office, making it a career dead end that no ambitious politician would want.

The weakness of this design was that it depended on things Sulla could not guarantee. It relied on senatorial self-restraint, it left a crippled tribunate as an obvious rallying cause for anyone wanting popular support, and, most dangerously, it did nothing to control the army-backed commanders whose loyalty ran to their generals rather than the state. The settlement needed strongmen to defend it, yet those same strongmen could unmake it.

The revolt of Lepidus, 78-77 BC

The fragility showed at once. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, elected consul for 78 BC, turned against the settlement, campaigning to restore the tribunes, recall exiles and reverse Sulla's land confiscations, and drawing support from Etruscan communities Sulla had dispossessed. Refusing to disband his forces, he marched on Rome in 77 BC. The Senate passed the senatus consultum ultimum and sent the other consul, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, supported by the young Pompey, against him. Lepidus was defeated near Rome and in Etruria, fled to Sardinia and died there in 77 BC. His lieutenant Perperna led the survivors to Spain to join Sertorius, linking the two crises.

The Sertorian war in Spain, c. 80-72 BC

Quintus Sertorius, a survivor of the Marian side, had built a formidable power base in Spain from about 80 BC, winning over provincial communities and running a rival administration, even a counter-senate of Roman exiles. A gifted commander, he tied down Metellus Pius and then Pompey for years. Pompey, still holding no regular magistracy, was granted a proconsular command from about 77 BC to reinforce the effort, and at one point wrote to the Senate warning that without money and reinforcements the war might spill into Italy.

The war was ended not on the battlefield but by treachery: Sertorius was assassinated by his own officer Perperna (in 73/72 BC), whom Pompey then defeated easily in 72 BC. The episode proved that Sulla's settlement had not truly ended the civil wars; a province had become a base for a Roman civil conflict, and the campaign further advanced Pompey's irregular career.

The war against Spartacus, 73-71 BC

Simultaneously, Italy itself was convulsed. In 73 BC a band of gladiators led by Spartacus broke out of a training school at Capua and gathered a following of escaped slaves that swelled into the tens of thousands. The rebels defeated several Roman armies, including forces led by both consuls of 72 BC. The Senate then gave a special command to Marcus Licinius Crassus, then praetor, who rebuilt discipline (our sources report he revived the punishment of decimation), penned the rebels into the south, and crushed the main force in 71 BC, crucifying thousands of captives along the Appian Way.

Crucially, Pompey, returning from Spain, intercepted and destroyed a fleeing remnant and then claimed a share of the credit for ending the war, boasting that Crassus had won the battles but he had finished the conflict. Crassus, who had done the hard fighting, deeply resented this, and the rivalry between the two men shaped the politics of the next year.

The consulship of Pompey and Crassus, 70 BC

Fresh from their commands, Pompey and Crassus stood for the consulship of 70 BC together, uneasy allies as much as rivals. Their year in office dismantled the heart of the Sullan settlement:

They fully restored the powers of the tribunate, undoing Sulla's central reform and reopening the office as a vehicle for popular politics.
The lex Aurelia reformed the law courts, sharing juries between senators, equites and tribuni aerarii rather than reserving them to the Senate.
The censors of 70 BC revised the senatorial roll, expelling a reported 64 senators.

Contemporary evidence for the mood of the year survives in Cicero's speeches against Verres (the Verrines, 70 BC), which attack senatorial corruption in the courts just as the jury reform was being debated. In a single year the pro-senatorial core of Sulla's constitution was unpicked, and it was unpicked not by a popular uprising but by the two dynasts the settlement had been designed to restrain.

Pompey, Crassus and the great men outside the cursus

The decade's deeper significance is that it made Pompey and Crassus the arbiters of the state while both stood outside the normal rules. Pompey reached the consulship of 70 BC having held no prior magistracy at all, no quaestorship, no praetorship, and while under the customary age; he needed a special dispensation, and had already been hailed Magnus and granted triumphs as a private commander. Crassus had followed the cursus more closely, having held the praetorship, and resented Pompey's shortcut even as he shared the consulship with him. Between them they showed that Rome's real power now lay with men whose armies, wealth and extraordinary commands outweighed the ordinary magistracies, the pattern that would produce the First Triumvirate a decade later.

How to read a source on this topic

Section IV items on this period usually offer an extract from a narrative historian (Plutarch, Appian) or a described inscription touching Lepidus, Sertorius, Spartacus or the year 70 BC. Three reading habits.

First, identify who is speaking and when. Sallust wrote within living memory of the events and had access to lost material, but he composed his set-piece speeches himself; Plutarch and Appian wrote generations later, drawing on earlier sources but shaped by their own moralising and imperial-era outlook. A speech placed in Lepidus's mouth is not a transcript.

Second, separate content from spin, especially with anything touching Pompey. Pompey and his admirers were relentless self-promoters, so a source praising his role against Spartacus tells you about his image-making before it tells you about the campaign.

Third, use the source alongside dated events. A described inscription about Pompey's "war of the fugitive slaves" is only useful if you can place it against 71 BC, set it beside Crassus's actual command, and explain what the claim reveals about the rivalry of 70 BC.

Model exam responses

1. Source-analysis response (using a described Pompeian dedication). "The reconstructed dedication in the stimulus is useful evidence for Pompey's self-promotion rather than for the military facts of the slave war. Its content, Pompey claiming to have 'ended the war of the fugitive slaves and freed Italy,' folds his minor interception of fugitives into a war-winning role that properly belonged to Crassus. Its usefulness is therefore high for how Pompey fashioned his public image, but limited for the campaign itself, since a self-commissioned monument advertises a claim, not a verified outcome. Set against Plutarch's Lives of Crassus and Pompey, which record Crassus's resentment, the source is best read as evidence of the rivalry that shaped the consulship of 70 BC."

Marker's note: markers reward the move from content to usefulness to corroboration with a named source, not a description of the inscription alone.

2. Essay paragraph (using the year 70 BC as evidence of the settlement's fragility). "The dismantling of Sulla's settlement in 70 BC is the clearest proof that it had always depended on the goodwill of the dynasts it was meant to restrain. Sulla had crippled the tribunate to keep power inside a restored Senate; yet within eight years of his death it was Pompey, who had held no magistracy, and Crassus, fresh from the Spartacus command, who as consuls restored the tribunes' powers in full and reformed the courts by the lex Aurelia. The settlement was not overthrown by a popular movement but conceded by the strongmen it could not control, which is precisely why its collapse and its deeper vindication fell in the same year."

Marker's note: this paragraph scores because it turns a dated event into an argument about causation, rather than narrating 70 BC as background.

Command words and how to use a source

Outline/describe wants a small number of clearly separated points; explain wants a point, evidence and why it matters; assess/evaluate/to what extent wants a sustained argument reaching a supported judgement.

Using a source properly means four things every time: (1) content, what it actually states; (2) reliability, who produced it, when, and why; (3) usefulness, what specific question it can answer and how far; (4) perspective, whose viewpoint it represents and what it omits. For this period, always ask whether a favourable notice of Pompey is a fact or a piece of his self-fashioning.

Weaving in historiography means using a historian's named position to drive your argument, for example deploying Gruen's caution that the reforms of 70 BC were a workable adjustment to complicate a claim that the settlement simply collapsed, rather than listing him at the end.

Historiography

Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution, 1939) reads the fall of the Republic as an oligarchic struggle in which constitutional forms masked a contest for personal domination; on this view the events of the 70s and the consulship of 70 BC mark the ascendancy of dynasts, not a healthy restoration of the tribunate.

Erich Gruen (The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, 1974) cautions against reading the period as steady decline, arguing that the reforms of 70 BC were a workable, widely accepted adjustment rather than a revolutionary break, and that contemporaries did not experience the decade as the Republic's doom.

Robin Seager (Pompey the Great, 2002) stresses how far Pompey's irregular rise depended on exploiting exactly the instability the Sullan settlement failed to contain, from the command against Lepidus to Spain and the slave war, so that by 70 BC his career was itself a symptom of the settlement's failure.

Arthur Keaveney (Sulla: The Last Republican, 2nd edn 2005) reads Sulla's own aims sympathetically, which sharpens the irony that the settlement was undone so quickly, and helps a candidate weigh whether the collapse was designed-in weakness or contingent politics.

Common exam traps

Starting the story with the First Triumvirate: This dot point is the 70s BC; the decisive events are Lepidus (78-77), the Sertorian and Spartacus wars (to 71) and the consulship of 70 BC, well before 60 BC.
Calling the tribunate "abolished" by Sulla: Sulla did not abolish the office; he crippled its powers and barred ex-tribunes from higher office. Precision matters, since 70 BC restored powers rather than an office.
Giving Pompey the credit for Spartacus: Crassus won the war in 71 BC; Pompey destroyed a remnant and claimed a share. Repeating Pompey's own boast as fact is exactly the source-handling error markers punish.
Treating a set-piece speech as a transcript: The speech of Lepidus in Sallust is the historian's composition, useful for issues and rhetoric, not a verbatim record.
Listing historians instead of using them: Naming Syme or Gruen without tying their position to your point earns little; deploy Gruen's caution to qualify a claim of collapse.

Practice questions

Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.

foundation3 marksOutline the main features of the Sullan constitution that made it fragile after Sulla's death in 78 BC.

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A 3-mark "outline" wants several features stated with brief development, roughly one mark each.

A strengthened Senate: Sulla enlarged the Senate to about 600 members and made it the dominant organ of state, giving control of the law courts and the setting of policy back to the senatorial order (1 mark).
A crippled tribunate: He stripped the tribunes of the plebs of their power to initiate legislation, restricted their veto, and barred former tribunes from holding higher office, so the office was gutted of its populist force (1 mark).
Why this was fragile: The settlement rested on senatorial self-restraint and left a resented, crippled tribunate that ambitious men could offer to restore; it also did nothing to control the army-backed commanders it depended on to defend it (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the two structural features (Senate up, tribunate down) plus one reason the arrangement was unstable, not just a description of Sulla.

foundation4 marksOutline the revolt of Lepidus in 78-77 BC.

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A 4-mark "outline" wants the who, the aim, the course and the outcome, about one mark each.

Who: Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was elected consul for 78 BC, the year Sulla died, despite Sulla's own misgivings (1 mark).
Aim: Lepidus turned against the Sullan settlement, agitating to restore the tribunes' powers, recall exiles and reverse land confiscations, and stirring discontent in Etruria where Sulla had dispossessed communities (1 mark).
Course: Refusing to disband, he raised troops and marched on Rome in 77 BC; the Senate passed the senatus consultum ultimum and sent the consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus, supported by the young Pompey, against him (1 mark).
Outcome: Lepidus was defeated near Rome and in Etruria, fled to Sardinia and died there in 77 BC; his lieutenant Perperna took the survivors to join Sertorius in Spain (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the aim (undoing Sulla's settlement) kept distinct from the military outcome, and the link forward to Sertorius.

foundation4 marksOutline the war against Spartacus and the slave revolt of 73-71 BC.

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A 4-mark "outline" wants the outbreak, the scale, the Roman response and the end, about one mark each.

Outbreak: In 73 BC a band of gladiators led by Spartacus broke out of a training school at Capua and armed a growing following of escaped slaves (1 mark).
Scale: The revolt swelled to tens of thousands and defeated several Roman armies, including forces led by both consuls of 72 BC, as it ranged up and down Italy (1 mark).
Roman response: In 72 BC Marcus Licinius Crassus, then praetor, was given a special command, rebuilt discipline (our sources report he revived decimation), and penned Spartacus into the south (1 mark).
End: Crassus crushed the main force in 71 BC and crucified thousands of captives along the Appian Way; Pompey, returning from Spain, destroyed a fleeing remnant and claimed a share of the credit (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the Crassus-Pompey credit dispute at the end, not just a narrative of battles.

core6 marksSource A: a reconstructed extract of this type, composed in the manner of a speech that a Roman historian might place in the mouth of the consul Lepidus in 78 BC, has him declare, "They call Sulla's peace a settled Republic, but it is the peace of a master over slaves; give back to the plebs their tribunes and you give back Rome her liberty." Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain why set-piece speeches in ancient historians are a valuable but limited source for the politics of the 70s BC.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs the source used as evidence, its value, and its limitation.

Use of the source: Source A frames the central grievance of the post-Sullan decade, that Sulla's constitution had bought stability at the cost of the tribunate and popular liberty, and shows how that grievance was voiced as a call to restore the tribunes (1-2 marks for accurate use).
Value: Speeches of this kind, such as the speech of Lepidus preserved in the fragments of Sallust's Histories, are valuable because they capture the political language, slogans and lines of division of the period, and a historian close to the tradition could draw on genuine issues and rhetoric (2 marks).
Limitation: Ancient historians composed such speeches themselves to suit their narrative and to characterise the speaker, so the words are the author's reconstruction rather than a transcript; they show what was plausibly argued, not what was actually said, and must be checked against other evidence (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward the distinction between "plausible political content" and "not a verbatim record," rather than treating the speech as a direct quotation.

core5 marksExplain how the war against Sertorius in Spain challenged the post-Sullan Republic.

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A 5-mark "explain" needs the nature of the war, why it was dangerous, and its wider significance.

A Marian holdout: Quintus Sertorius, a survivor of the Marian side, built a power base among the Spanish provincials from about 80 BC, running a rival administration and even a counter-senate of Roman exiles (1-2 marks).
A serious military threat: Sertorius was a gifted commander who tied down Metellus Pius and then Pompey for years; the war dragged on from about 80 to 72 BC and at times went badly enough for Pompey to warn the Senate he needed money and reinforcements or the war would spill into Italy (1-2 marks).
Significance: The war showed that the Sullan settlement had not truly ended the civil wars, that provinces could become bases for domestic Roman conflict, and it gave the young Pompey an extraordinary proconsular command that advanced his irregular career (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the point that Sertorius was a Roman civil-war problem, not merely a provincial rebellion, and the link to Pompey's rise.

core6 marksExplain the significance of the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BC.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs what they did, how it undid Sulla, and why it mattered.

What they did: As consuls in 70 BC, Pompey and Crassus fully restored the legislative and office-holding powers of the tribunate that Sulla had stripped away, the centrepiece of the year (1-2 marks).
Dismantling the Sullan settlement: The same year saw the courts reformed by the lex Aurelia, sharing juries between senators, equites and tribuni aerarii rather than reserving them to the Senate, and the censors expelled a reported 64 senators; together these unpicked key parts of Sulla's pro-senatorial order (2 marks).
Why it mattered: The reversal showed that the Sullan constitution depended on the goodwill of the very dynasts it needed to defend it; when Pompey and Crassus found it useful to court popular favour, the settlement was dismantled within a decade, confirming that individual power now outweighed constitutional design (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward naming the specific measures (tribunate, lex Aurelia, censorship) and the argument about dynasts outweighing the constitution, not a vague "they were popular."

exam8 marksSource B: a reconstructed commemorative inscription of this type, in the style of a dedication set up for Pompey after 71 BC, records that "the imperator Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus, having ended the war of the fugitive slaves and freed Italy of the servile enemy, dedicates this from the spoils." Using Source B and your own knowledge, assess the usefulness and reliability of the sources for Pompey's self-promotion in the 70s BC.

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An 8-mark "assess usefulness and reliability" answer needs content, usefulness, reliability and a judgement.

Content: Source B has Pompey claim to have ended the slave war and freed Italy, taking public credit for a victory that was largely Crassus's; it advertises the title Magnus and the role of imperator (2 marks).
Usefulness: A dedication of this kind is useful evidence for how Pompey fashioned his own image, staking a public claim to glory and folding a minor mopping-up action into a war-winning role; it matches the pattern our literary sources describe, in which Pompey pressed for recognition beyond his actual share (2 marks).
Reliability and limitation: As self-commissioned commemoration, an inscription of this type is reliable evidence for Pompey's claims and self-presentation, but not for the military reality; for that it must be set against Plutarch's Lives of Crassus and Pompey, which record Crassus's resentment that Pompey took the credit (2 marks).
Judgement: Such a source is most reliable as evidence of Pompey's self-promotion and the rivalry it fuelled, and only cautiously useful for the facts of the campaign; it needs corroboration from the narrative sources, read with their own biases in mind (2 marks).

Marker's note: markers reward separating "what the source proves about Pompey's image-making" from "what actually happened in the field," and citing a named source used to correct it.

exam25 marksTo what extent had the settlement of Sulla been dismantled by 70 BC? In your response, refer to relevant sources and historians' interpretations.

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A Band-6 response needs a clear thesis, argument lines tied to dated evidence, engagement with historiography, a model paragraph, and a judgement on "to what extent."

Thesis. By 70 BC the most visible and resented parts of Sulla's settlement, above all the crippling of the tribunate, had been undone, and the decade had exposed the settlement's dependence on the very army commanders it could not control; but Sulla's deeper legacy, a politics driven by dynasts and armies, was strengthened rather than dismantled.

Argument line 1 - the settlement was under pressure from the start. Sulla died in 78 BC and within a year the consul Lepidus was in arms to restore the tribunes and reverse confiscations. Although Lepidus was defeated in 77 BC, his revolt showed the settlement rested on grievances that would not stay buried.

Argument line 2 - the wars of the 70s showed the settlement could not deliver stability. The Sertorian war in Spain (about 80-72 BC) and the Spartacus revolt (73-71 BC) tied down Rome's armies for a decade, and both were ended by commanders, Pompey and Crassus, whose personal armies and irregular commands were exactly what Sulla's Senate-centred order was meant to prevent.

Argument line 3 - the formal dismantling in 70 BC: As consuls, Pompey and Crassus restored the tribunate's powers in full; the lex Aurelia reformed the courts by sharing juries among senators, equites and tribuni aerarii; and the censors expelled a reported 64 senators. The pro-senatorial core of Sulla's constitution was unpicked in a single year.
Argument line 4 - the counter-view, what survived: Much of Sulla's administrative framework endured, and Erich Gruen argues the changes of 70 were less a revolution than a consensual adjustment that the Senate could live with. More importantly, the deeper Sullan lesson, that a general with a loyal army could dictate to the state, was not undone at all; Pompey embodied it.
Historiography: Ronald Syme (The Roman Revolution, 1939) reads the whole period as an oligarchic struggle in which constitutional forms masked the rise of personal power, so 70 BC marks the triumph of dynasts, not a healthy restoration. Erich Gruen (The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, 1974) cautions against seeing steady collapse, stressing that the reforms of 70 were workable and widely accepted. Robin Seager (Pompey the Great, 2002) emphasises how far Pompey's irregular rise depended on exploiting exactly the instability the settlement failed to contain.
Model paragraph: "The clearest measure of how far Sulla's work had been undone is that the two men who dismantled it were themselves the proof of its failure. Sulla's settlement was designed to keep power inside a restored Senate and out of the hands of army-backed individuals; yet by 70 BC it was Pompey, who had never held a magistracy, and Crassus, fresh from the Spartacus command, who as consuls restored the tribunate and reformed the courts. The settlement was not overturned by a popular movement but conceded by the dynasts it had been built to restrain, which is why its formal dismantling and its deeper vindication happened in the same year."
Judgement: To a large extent the visible Sullan settlement, especially the crippled tribunate and the senatorial monopoly of the courts, had been dismantled by 70 BC; but Sulla's more dangerous legacy, government by army-backed dynasts, was confirmed rather than removed, so the Republic emerged from the decade less Sullan in form but more fragile in substance.

Marker's note: markers reward a sustained answer to "to what extent," precise dated evidence (78, 77, 73-71, 70 BC), at least two named historians used to build the case, and explicit engagement with the counter-view (Gruen) that 70 BC was less radical than it looks.