can anyone tell me how costly the marian reforms were? opening

Know a bit about this.

Basically, the Roman system before the Marian reform was that the upper classes were able to, for lack of a better phrase, create and finance their own private armies. This is how shit like Crassus's army in the desert happened. Anyway, so the Marian reforms eliminated two key money sinks in the Roman Army: privatization, and the need for several slaves to tend to every soldier, which was something basically inherited from Sparta.

Marius had his men carry everything on their backs (hence the expression "Marius's Mules"), which was what the slaves had initially been for. The fact that the government was enlisting and outfitting soldiers using its own money, rather than that of the private citizens basically meant that the revenue from wars that wasn't pocketed by the soldiers went into the government's coffers, rather than the pockets of the Patrician Class.

As you mentioned, this reform earned Marius a lot of bad blood in the upper classes, which meant that guys like Pompey were all too happy to side with Sulla when he decided he couldn't cope Marius's egotism and megalomania anymore.

So, the short and long of it is basically that Marius modernized a system that was a thousand or so years out of date, and managed to make war profitable for the government, rather than private citizens who bankrolled their own private armies.

>Basically, the Roman system before the Marian reform was that the upper classes were able to, for lack of a better phrase, create and finance their own private armies. This is how shit like Crassus's army in the desert happened.
Wasn't that army in the desert 30 years after Marius died

>>3142017
>seems incredibly costly to me
Still far less costly than letting half a million fucking germs rampage through Italy unchecked anon.
Still less costly than utterly annihilating the agricultural workpool of a predominantly agrarian economy.
Still less costly than having to deal with fucking constant immigration to cities from the countryside creating nothing but urban unemployment and an ever larger dole bill for grain plus constant rioting at the drop of a hat.
In the end, it's a matter of picking the lesser of two evils, and even the senate had to accept it.

Not to mention that a great deal of the opposition wasn't even about the expenses (like the average senator cared about the public budget, the roman senate basically ran on public fraud) as much as it was about the pointlessness of fielding an army considered absolutely inferior because muh traditions, no roman military upbringing, them cowardly plebs fighting for coin and not homeland aren't trustworthy, etc.
I mean Marius easily proved them wrong on most points (after forcing through a good 8 to 15 months of basic training and some low intensity experience in North Africa), the only worthwhile gripe was the last one. But even then it's not like the marian legions just broke and fled rather than risk their life, they just started obeying their general above their (putative, since often enough the general was more involved in actually paying for the legions than the republic) employer. A bit hard to accuse them of treachery when they never actually fought for foreigners.