When Metellus again took the field in 647, Jugurtha nowhere held

his ground against him; he appeared now at one point, now at another

far distant; it seemed as if they would as easily get the better of

the lions as of these horsemen of the desert. A battle was fought,

a victory was won; but it was difficult to say what had been

gained by the victory. The king had vanished out of sight in

the distance. In the interior of the modern beylik of Tunis,

close on the edge of the great desert, there lay on an oasis

provided with springs the strong place Thala;(14) thither Jugurtha

had retired with his children, his treasures, and the flower of his

troops, there to await better times. Metellus ventured to follow the

king through a desert, in which his troops had to carry water along

with them in skins forty-five miles; Thala was reached and fell after

a forty days' siege; but the Roman deserters destroyed the most

valuable part of the booty along with the building in which they

burnt themselves after the capture of the town, and--what was of more

consequence--king Jugurtha escaped with his children and his chest.

Numidia was no doubt virtually in the hands of the Romans; but,

instead of their object being thereby gained, the war seemed only

to extend over a field wider and wider. In the south the free

Gaetulian tribes of the desert began at the call of Jugurtha a

national war against the Romans. In the west Bocchus king of

Mauretania, whose friendship the Romans had in earlier times

despised, seemed now not indisposed to make common cause with his

son-in-law against them; he not only received him in his court, but,

uniting to Jugurtha's followers his own numberless swarms of horsemen,

he marched into the region of Cirta, where Metellus was in winter

quarters. They began to negotiate: it was clear that in the

person of Jugurtha he held in his hands the real prize of the

struggle for Rome. But what were his intentions--whether to sell

his son-in-law dear to the Romans, or to take up the national war

in concert with that son-in-law--neither the Romans nor Jugurtha

nor perhaps even the king himself knew; and he was in no hurry

to abandon his ambiguous position.

Marius Commander-in-Chief

Thereupon Metellus left the province, which he had been compelled by

decree of the people to give up to his former lieutenant Marius who

was now consul; and the latter assumed the supreme command for the

next campaign in 648. He was indebted for it in some degree to a

revolution. Relying on the services which he had rendered and at

the same time on oracles which had been communicated to him, he had

resolved to come forward as a candidate for the consulship. If the

aristocracy had supported the constitutional, and in other respects

quite justifiable, candidature of this able man, who was not at all

inclined to take part with the opposition, nothing would have come

of the matter but the enrolment of a new family in the consular

Fasti. Instead of this the man of non-noble birth, who aspired to

the highest public dignity, was reviled by the whole governing caste

as a daring innovator and revolutionist; just as the plebeian

candidate had been formerly treated by the patricians, but now

without any formal ground in law. The brave officer was sneered at

in sharp language by Metellus--Marius was told that he might wait with

his candidature till Metellus' son, a beardless boy, could be his

colleague--and he was with the worst grace suffered to leave almost

at the last moment, that he might appear in the capital as a candidate

for the consulship of 647. There he amply retaliated on his

general the wrong which he had suffered, by criticising before the

gaping multitude the conduct of the war and the administration of

Metellus in Africa in a manner as unmilitary as it was disgracefully

unfair; and he did not even disdain to serve up to the darling

populace--always whispering about secret conspiracies equally

unprecedented and indubitable on the part of their noble masters--

the silly story, that Metellus was designedly protracting the war

in order to remain as long as possible commander-in-chief. To the

idlers of the streets this was quite clear: numerous persons

unfriendly for reasons good or bad to the government, and especially

the justly-indignant mercantile order, desired nothing better than such

an opportunity of annoying the aristocracy in its most sensitive point:

he was elected to the consulship by an enormous majority, and not only

so, but, while in other cases by the law of Gaius Gracchus the

decision as to the respective functions to be assigned to the consuls

lay with the senate (p. 355), the arrangement made by the senate

which left Metellus at his post was overthrown, and by decree of

the sovereign comitia the supreme command in the African war

was committed to Marius.

Conflicts without Result

Accordingly he took the place of Metellus in the course of 647;

and held the command in the campaign of the following year; but his

confident promise to do better than his predecessor and to deliver

Jugurtha bound hand and foot with all speed at Rome was more easily

given than fulfilled. Marius carried on a desultory warfare with

the Gaetulians; he reduced several towns that had not previously been

occupied; he undertook an expedition to Capsa (Gafsa) in the extreme

south-east of the kingdom, which surpassed even that of Thala in

difficulty, took the town by capitulation, and in spite of the

convention caused all the adult men in it to be slain--the only

means, no doubt, of preventing the renewed revolt of that remote city

of the desert; he attacked a mountain-stronghold--situated on the

river Molochath, which separated the Numidian territory from the

Mauretanian--whither Jugurtha had conveyed his treasure-chest, and,

just as he was about to desist from the siege in despair of success,

fortunately gained possession of the impregnable fastness through

the coup de main of some daring climbers. Had his object merely

been to harden the army by bold razzias and to procure booty for the

soldiers, or even to eclipse the march of Metellus into the desert

by an expedition going still farther, this method of warfare might

be allowed to pass unchallenged; but the main object to be aimed at,

and which Metellus had steadfastly and perseveringly kept in view--

the capture of Jugurtha--was in this way utterly set aside.

The expedition of Marius to Capsa was a venture as aimless, as

that of Metellus to Thala had been judicious; but the expedition

to the Molochath, which passed along the border of, if not into,

the Mauretanian territory, was directly repugnant to sound policy.

King Bocchus, in whose power it lay to bring the war to an issue

favourable for the Romans or endlessly to prolong it, now concluded

with Jugurtha a treaty, in which the latter ceded to him a part of

his kingdom and Bocchus promised actively to support his son-in-law

against Rome. The Roman army, which was returning from the river

Molochath, found itself one evening suddenly surrounded by immense

masses of Mauretanian and Numidian cavalry; they were obliged to fight

just as the divisions stood without forming in a proper order of battle

or carrying out any leading command, and had to deem themselves

fortunate when their sadly-thinned troops were brought into temporary

safety for the night on two hills not far remote from each other.

But the culpable negligence of the Africans intoxicated with victory

wrested from them its consequences; they allowed themselves to be

surprised in a deep sleep during the morning twilight by the Roman

troops which had been in some measure reorganized during the night,

and were fortunately dispersed. Thereupon the Roman army continued

its retreat in better order and with greater caution; but it was

yet again assailed simultaneously on ail the four sides and was in

great danger, till the cavalry officer Lucius Cornelius Sulla first

dispersed the squadrons opposed to him and then, rapidly returning

from their pursuit, threw himself also on Jugurtha and Bocchus at

the point where they in person pressed hard on the rear of the

Roman infantry. Thus this attack also was successfully repelled;

Marius brought his army back to Cirta, and took up his winter

quarters there (648-9).

Negotiations with Bocchus

Strange as it may seem, we can yet understand why the Romans now,

after king Bocchus had commenced the war, began to make most zealous

exertions to secure his friendship, which they had at first slighted

and thereafter had at least not specially sought; by doing so they

gained this advantage, that no formal declaration of war took place

on the part of Mauretania. King Bocchus was not unwilling to return

to his old ambiguous position: without dissolving his agreement with

Jugurtha or dismissing him, he entered into negotiations with the

Roman general respecting the terms of an alliance with Rome. When

they were agreed or seemed to be so, the king requested that, for

the purpose of concluding the treaty and receiving the royal captive,

Marius would send to him Lucius Sulla, who was known and acceptable

to the king partly from his having formerly appeared as envoy of

the senate at the Mauretanian court, partly from the commendations of

the Mauretanian envoys destined for Rome to whom Sulla had rendered

services on their way. Marius was in an awkward position.

His declining the suggestion would probably lead to a breach; his

accepting it would throw his most aristocratic and bravest officer

into the hands of a man more than untrustworthy, who, as every one

knew, played a double game with the Romans and with Jugurtha, and

who seemed almost to have contrived the scheme for the purpose of

obtaining for himself provisional hostages from both sides in the

persons of Jugurtha and Sulla. But the wish to terminate the war

outweighed every other consideration, and Sulla agreed to undertake

the perilous task which Marius suggested to him. He boldly departed

under the guidance of Volux the son of king Bocchus, nor did his

resolution waver even when his guide led him through the midst of

Jugurtha's camp. He rejected the pusillanimous proposals of flight

that came from his attendants, and marched, with the king's son at

his side, uninjured through the enemy. The daring officer evinced

the same decision in the discussions with the sultan, and induced

him at length seriously to make his choice.

Surrender and Execution of Jugurtha

Jugurtha was sacrificed. Under the pretext that all his requests were

to be granted, he was allured by his own father-in-law into an ambush,

his attendants were killed, and he himself was taken prisoner.

The great traitor thus fell by the treachery of his nearest relatives.

Lucius Sulla brought the crafty and restless African in chains along

with his children to the Roman headquarters; and the war which had

lasted for seven years was at an end. The victory was primarily

associated with the name of Marius. King Jugurtha in royal robes

and in chains, along with his two sons, preceded the triumphal chariot

of the victor, when he entered Rome on the 1st of January 650: by

his orders the son of the desert perished a few days afterwards in

the subterranean city-prison, the old -tullianum- at the Capitol--

the "bath of ice," as the African called it, when he crossed the

threshold in order either to be strangled or to perish from cold and

hunger there. But it could not be denied that Marius had the least

important share in the actual successes: the conquest of Numidia up

to the edge of the desert was the work of Metellus, the capture of

Jugurtha was the work of Sulla, and between the two Marius played a

part somewhat compromising the dignity of an ambitious upstart.

Marius reluctantly tolerated the assumption by his predecessor of the

name of conqueror of Numidia; he flew into a violent rage when king

Bocchus afterwards consecrated a golden effigy at the Capitol, which

represented the surrender of Jugurtha to Sulla; and yet in the eyes

of unprejudiced judges the services of these two threw the generalship

of Marius very much into the shade--more especially Sulla's brilliant

expedition to the desert, which had made his courage, his presence of

mind, his acuteness, his power over men to be recognized by the

general himself and by the whole army. In themselves these military

rivalries would have been of little moment, if they had not been mixed

up with the conflict of political parties, if the opposition had not

supplanted the senatorial general by Marius, and if the party of the

government had not, with the deliberate intention of exasperating,

praised Metellus and still more Sulla as the military celebrities

and preferred them to the nominal victor. We shall have to return

to the fatal consequences of these animosities when narrating

the internal history.

Reorganization of Numidia

Otherwise, this insurrection of the Numidian client-state passed

away without producing any noticeable change either in political

relations generally or even in those of the African province.

By a deviation from the policy elsewhere followed at this period

Numidia was not converted into a Roman province; evidently because

the country could not be held without an army to protect the frontier

against the barbarians of the desert, and the Romans were by no

means disposed to maintain a standing army in Africa. They

contented themselves accordingly with annexing the most westerly

district of Numidia, probably the tract from the river Molochath to

the harbour of Saldae (Bougie)--the later Mauretania Caesariensis

(province of Algiers)--to the kingdom of Bocchus, and with handing

over the kingdom of Numidia thus diminished to the last legitimate

grandson of Massinissa still surviving, Gauda the half-brother of

Jugurtha, feeble in body and mind, who had already in 646 at the

suggestion of Marius asserted his claims before the senate.(15)

At the same time the Gaetulian tribes in the interior of Africa were

received as free allies into the number of the independent nations

that had treaties with Rome.

Political Issues

Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were

the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the

Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated

too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein

brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely

notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the

governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty

of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and

the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple

truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he

had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself.

But the whole external and internal government of this period bore

the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact,

that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better

accounts than the other contemporary military and political events,

shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these

revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every

intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts.

The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh,

still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of

the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its

incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition

and a public opinion with which the government would have found

it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the

corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter

nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than

the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible

to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman

senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to

say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the

constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt

to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the

political question was converted into a personal one, the generals

were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were

banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party

as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of

government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an

oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently

well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of

the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual

oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon

as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the

rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius

was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted.

If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of

Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but

after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing

more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the

commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious

officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older

Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for

himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly-

expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in

the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible

weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say

that Marius intended to play the pretender, at least at the time when

he canvassed the people for the supreme command in Africa; but,

whether he did or did not understand what he was doing, there was

evidently an end of the restored aristocratic government when the

comitial machine began to make generals, or, which was nearly the

same thing, when every popular officer was able in legal fashion to

nominate himself as general. Only one new element emerged in these

preliminary crises; this was the introduction of military men and of

military power into the political revolution. Whether the coming

forward of Marius would be the immediate prelude of a new attempt

to supersede the oligarchy by the -tyrannis-, or whether it would,

as in various similar cases, pass away without further consequence

as an isolated encroachment on the prerogative of the government,

could not yet be determined; but it could well be foreseen that, if

these rudiments of a second -tyrannis- should attain any development,

it was not a statesman like Gaius Gracchus, but an officer that would

become its head. The contemporary reorganization of the military

system--which Marius introduced when, in forming his army destined

for Africa, he disregarded the property-qualification hitherto

required, and allowed even the poorest burgess, if he was otherwise

serviceable, to enter the legion as a volunteer--may have been

projected by its author on purely military grounds; but it was none

the less on that account a momentous political event, that the army

was no longer, as formerly, composed of those who had much, no

longer even, as in the most recent times, composed of those who had

something, to lose, but became gradually converted into a host of

people who had nothing but their arms and what the general bestowed

on them. The aristocracy ruled in 650 just as absolutely as in 620;

but the signs of the impending catastrophe had multiplied, and on

the political horizon the sword had begun to appear by the side

of the crown.

CHAPTER V

The Peoples of the North

Relations of Rome to the North

The Country between the Alps and the Pyrenees

Conflicts with the Ligurians and the Salassi

From the close of the sixth century the Roman community ruled over

the three great peninsulas projecting from the northern continent into

the Mediterranean, at least taken as a whole. Even there however--in

the north and west of Spain, in the valleys of the Ligurian Apennines

and the Alps, and in the mountains of Macedonia and Thrace--tribes

wholly or partially free continued to defy the lax Roman government.

Moreover the continental communication between Spain and Italy as

well as between Italy and Macedonia was very superficially provided

for, and the countries beyond the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkan

chain--the great river basins of the Rhone, the Rhine, and the Danube--

in the main lay beyond the political horizon of the Romans. We have

now to set forth what steps were taken on the part of Rome to secure

and to round off her empire in this direction, and how at the same

time the great masses of peoples, who were ever moving to and fro

behind that mighty mountain-screen, began to beat at the gates of the

northern mountains and rudely to remind the Graeco-Roman world that

it was mistaken in believing itself the sole possessor of the earth.

Let us first glance at the region between the western Alps and the

Pyrenees. The Romans had for long commanded this part of the coast

of the Mediterranean through their client city of Massilia, one of

the oldest, most faithful, and most powerful of the allied communities

dependent on Rome. Its maritime stations, Agatha (Agde) and Rhoda

(Rosas) to the westward, and Tauroentium (Ciotat), Olbia (Hyeres?),

Antipolis (Antibes), and Nicaea (Nice) on the east secured the

navigation of the coast as well as the land-route from the Pyrenees

to the Alps; and its mercantile and political connections reached far

into the interior. An expedition into the Alps above Nice and Antibes,

directed against the Ligurian Oxybii and Decietae, was undertaken by

the Romans in 600 partly at the request of the Massiliots, partly

in their own interest; and after hot conflicts, some of which were

attended with much loss, this district of the mountains was compelled

to furnish thenceforth standing hostages to the Massiliots and to pay

them a yearly tribute. It is not improbable that about this same

period the cultivation of the vine and olive, which flourished in this

quarter after the model set by the Massiliots, was in the interest

of the Italian landholders and merchants simultaneously prohibited

throughout the territory beyond the Alps dependent on Massilia.(1)

A similar character of financial speculation marks the war, which was

waged by the Romans under the consul Appius Claudius in 611 against the

Salassi respecting the gold mines and gold washings of Victumulae (in

the district of Vercelli and Bard and in the whole valley of the Dorea

Baltea). The great extent of these washings, which deprived the

inhabitants of the country lying lower down of water for their fields,

first gave rise to an attempt at mediation and then to the armed

intervention of the Romans. The war, although the Romans began it

like all the other wars of this period with a defeat, led at last to

the subjugation of the Salassi, and the cession of the gold district

to the Roman treasury. Some forty years afterwards (654) the colony of

Eporedia (Ivrea) was instituted on the territory thus gained, chiefly

doubtless with a view to command the western, as Aquileia commanded

the eastern, passage of the Alps.

Transalpine Relations of Rome

The Arverni

These Alpine wars first assumed a more serious character, when Marcus

Fulvius Flaccus, the faithful ally of Gaius Gracchus, took the chief

command in this quarter as consul in 629. He was the first to enter

on the career of Transalpine conquest. In the much-divided Celtic

nation at this period the canton of the Bituriges had lost its

real hegemony and retained merely an honorary presidency, and the

actually leading canton in the region from the Pyrenees to the Rhine

and from the Mediterranean to the Western Ocean was that of the

Arverni;(2) so that the statement seems not quite an exaggeration,

that it could bring into the field as many as 180,000 men. With

them the Haedui (about Autun) carried on an unequal rivalry for the

hegemony; while in north-eastern Gaul the kings of the Suessiones

(about Soissons) united under their protectorate the league of the

Belgic tribes extending as far as Britain. Greek travellers of

that period had much to tell of the magnificent state maintained by

Luerius, king of the Arvernians--how, surrounded by his brilliant train

of clansmen, his huntsmen with their pack of hounds in leash and his

band of wandering minstrels, he travelled in a silver-mounted chariot

through the towns of his kingdom, scattering the gold with a full

hand among the multitude, and gladdening above all the heart of the

minstrel with the glittering shower. The descriptions of the open

table which he kept in an enclosure of 1500 double paces square, and

to which every one who came in the way was invited, vividly remind us

of the marriage table of Camacho. In fact, the numerous Arvernian

gold coins of this period still extant show that the canton of the

Arvernians had attained to extraordinary wealth and a comparatively

high standard of civilization.

War with Allobroges and Arverni

The attack of Flaccus, however, fell in the first instance not on

the Arverni, but on the smaller tribes in the district between the Alps

and the Rhone, where the original Ligurian inhabitants had become mixed

with subsequent arrivals of Celtic bands, and there had arisen a

Celto-Ligurian population that may in this respect be compared to the

Celtiberian. He fought (629, 630) with success against the Salyes

or Salluvii in the region of Aix and in the valley of the Durance,

and against their northern neighbours the Vocontii (in the departments

of Vaucluse and Drome); and so did his successor Gaius Sextius Calvinus

(631, 632) against the Allobroges, a powerful Celtic clan in the rich

valley of the Isere, which had come at the request of the fugitive

king of the Salyes, Tutomotulus, to help him to reconquer his land, but

was defeated in the district of Aix. When the Allobroges nevertheless

refused to surrender the king of the Salyes, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus,

the successor of Calvinus, penetrated into their own territory (632).

Up to this period the leading Celtic tribe had been spectators of the

encroachments of their Italian neighbours; the Arvernian king Betuitus,

son of the Luerius already mentioned, seemed not much inclined to enter

on a dangerous war for the sake of the loose relation of clientship

in which the eastern cantons might stand to him. But when the Romans

showed signs of attacking the Allobroges in their own territory,

he offered his mediation, the rejection of which was followed by

his taking the field with all his forces to help the Allobroges;

whereas the Haedui embraced the side of the Romans. On receiving

accounts of the rising of the Arverni, the Romans sent the consul

of 633, Quintus Fabius Maximus, to meet in concert with Ahenobarbus

the impending attack. On the southern border of the canton of the

Allobroges at the confluence of the Isere with the Rhone, on the

8th of August 633, the battle was fought which decided the mastery

of southern Gaul. King Betuitus, when he saw the innumerable

hosts of the dependent clans marching over to him on the bridge

of boats thrown across the Rhone and the Romans who had not a

third of their numbers forming in array against them, is said to have

exclaimed that there were not enough of the latter to satisfy the dogs

of the Celtic army. Nevertheless Maximus, a grandson of the victor

of Pydna, achieved a decisive victory, which, as the bridge of boats

broke down under the mass of the fugitives, ended in the destruction

of the greater part of the Arvernian army. The Allobroges, to whom

the king of the Arverni declared himself unable to render further

assistance, and whom he advised to make their peace with Maximus,

submitted to the consul; whereupon the latter, thenceforth called

Allobrogicus, returned to Italy and left to Ahenobarbus the no longer

distant termination of the Arvernian war. Ahenobarbus, personally

exasperated at king Betuitus because he had induced the Allobroges

to surrender to Maximus and not to him, possessed himself

treacherously of the person of the king and sent him to Rome, where

the senate, although disapproving the breach of fidelity, not only kept

the men betrayed, but gave orders that his son, Congonnetiacus, should

likewise be sent to Rome. This seems to have been the reason why

the Arvernian war, already almost at an end, once more broke out, and

a second appeal to arms took place at Vindalium (above Avignon) at

the confluence of the Sorgue with the Rhone. The result was not

different from that of the first: on this occasion it was chiefly

the African elephants that scattered the Celtic army. Thereupon

the Arverni submitted to peace, and tranquillity was re-established

in the land of the Celts.(3)

Province of Narbo

The result of these military operations was the institution of a

new Roman province between the maritime Alps and the Pyrenees.

All the tribes between the Alps and the Rhone became dependent

on the Romans and, so far as they did not pay tribute to Massilia,

presumably became now tributary to Rome. In the country between

the Rhone and the Pyrenees the Arverni retained freedom and were not

bound to pay tribute to the Romans; but they had to cede to Rome

the most southerly portion of their direct or indirect territory-

the district to the south of the Cevennes as far as the Mediterranean,

and the upper course of the Garonne as far as Tolosa (Toulouse).

As the primary object of these occupations was the establishment of

a land communication between Italy and Spain, arrangements were made

immediately thereafter for the construction of the road along the

coast. For this purpose a belt of coast from the Alps to the Rhone,

from 1 to 1 3/4 of a mile in breadth, was handed over to the Massiliots,

who already had a series of maritime stations along this coast, with

the obligation of keeping the road in proper condition; while from

the Rhone to the Pyrenees the Romans themselves laid out a military

highway, which obtained from its originator Ahenobarbus the name

of the -Via Domitia-.

Roman Settlements in the Region of the Rhone

As usual, the formation of new fortresses was combined with

the construction of roads. In the eastern portion the Romans chose

the spot where Gaius Sextius had defeated the Celts, and where the

pleasantness and fertility of the region as well as the numerous hot

and cold springs invited them to settlement; a Roman township sprang

up there--the "baths of Sextius," Aquae Sextiae (Aix). To the west

of the Rhone the Romans settled in Narbo, an ancient Celtic town on the

navigable river Atax (Aude) at a small distance from the sea, which is

already mentioned by Hecataeus, and which even before its occupation

by the Romans vied with Massilia as a place of stirring commerce, and

as sharing the trade in British tin. Aquae did not obtain civic rights,

but remained a standing camp;(4) whereas Narbo, although in like

manner founded mainly as a watch and outpost against the Celts,

became as "Mars' town," a Roman burgess-colony and the usual seat

of the governor of the new Transalpine Celtic province or, as it

was more frequently called, the province of Narbo.

The Advance of the Romans Checked by the Policy of the Restoration

The Gracchan party, which suggested these extensions of territory

beyond the Alps, evidently wished to open up there a new and

immeasurable field for their plans of colonization,--a field which

offered the same advantages as Sicily and Africa, and could be more

easily wrested from the natives than he Sicilian and Libyan estates

from the Italian capitalists. The fall of Gaius Gracchus, no doubt,

made itself felt here also in the restriction of acquisitions of

territory and still more of the founding of towns; but, if the design

was not carried out in its full extent, it was at any rate not wholly

frustrated. The territory acquired and, still more, the foundation of

Narbo--a settlement for which the senate vainly endeavoured to prepare

the fate of that at Carthage--remained standing as parts of an

unfinished structure, exhorting the future successor of Gracchus

to continue the building. It is evident that the Roman mercantile

class, which was able to compete with Massilia in the Gallo-Britannic

traffic at Narbo alone, protected that settlement from the assaults

of the Optimates.

Illyria

Dalmatians

Their Subjugation

A problem similar to that in the north-west had to be dealt

with in the north-east of Italy; it was in like manner not wholly

neglected, but was solved still more imperfectly than the former.

With the foundation of Aquileia (571) the Istrian peninsula came

into possession of the Romans;(5) in part of Epirus and the former

territory of the lords of Scodra they had already ruled for some

considerable time previously. But nowhere did their dominion reach

into the interior; and even on the coast they exercised scarcely a

nominal sway over the inhospitable shore-belt between Istria and

Epirus, which, with its wild series of mountain-caldrons broken neither

by river-valleys nor by coast-plains and arranged like scales one above

another, and with its chain of rocky islands stretching along the

shore, separates more than it connects Italy and Greece. Around the

town of Delminium (on the Cettina near Trigl) clustered the confederacy

of the Delmatians or Dalmatians, whose manners were rough as their

mountains. While the neighbouring peoples had already attained a

high degree of culture, the Dalmatians were as yet unacquainted with

money, and divided their land, without recognizing any special right

of property in it, afresh every eight years among the members of

the community. Brigandage and piracy were the only native trades.

These tribes had in earlier times stood in a loose relation of

dependence on the rulers of Scodra, and had so far shared in the

chastisement inflicted by the Roman expeditions against queen

Teuta(6) and Demetrius of Pharos;(7) but on the accession of king

Genthius they had revolted and had thus escaped the fate which involved

southern Illyria in the fall of the Macedonian empire and rendered it

permanently dependent on Rome.(8) The Romans were glad to leave the

far from attractive region to itself. But the complaints of the Roman

Illyrians, particularly of the Daorsi, who dwelt on the Narenta to

the south of the Dalmatians, and of the inhabitants of the islands of

Issa (Lissa), whose continental stations Tragyrium (Trau) and Epetium

(near Spalato) suffered severely from the natives, compelled the Roman

government to despatch an embassy to the latter, and on receiving the

reply that the Dalmatians had neither troubled themselves hitherto

about the Romans nor would do so in future, to send thither an army

in 598 under the consul Gaius Marcius Figulus. He penetrated into

Dalmatia, but was again driven back as far as the Roman territory.

It was not till his successor Publius Scipio Nasica took the large

and strong town of Delminium in 599, that the confederacy conformed

and professed itself subject to the Romans. But the poor and only

superficially subdued country was not sufficiently important to be

erected into a distinct province: the Romans contented themselves, as

they had already done in the case of the more important possessions in

Epirus, with having it administered from Italy along with Cisalpine

Gaul; an arrangement which was, at least as a rule, retained even

when the province of Macedonia had been erected in 608 and its north

western frontier had been fixed to the northward of Scodra.(9)

The Romans in Macedonia and Thrace

But this very conversion of Macedonia into a province directly

dependent on Rome gave to the relations of Rome with the peoples

on the north-east greater importance, by imposing on the Romans

the obligation of defending the everywhere exposed frontier on

the north and east against the adjacent barbarian tribes; and in

a similar way not long afterwards (621) the acquisition by Rome of

the Thracian Chersonese (peninsula of Gallipoli) previously belonging

to the kingdom of the Attalids devolved on the Romans the obligation

hitherto resting on the kings of Pergamus to protect the Hellenes here

against the Thracians. From the double basis furnished by the valley

of the Po and the province of Macedonia the Romans could now advance

in earnest towards the region of the headwaters of the Rhine and towards

the Danube, and possess themselves of the northern mountains at least

so far as was requisite for the security of the lands to the south.

The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and along the Danube

Helvetii

Boii

Taurisci

Cerni

Raeti, Euganei, Veneti

In these regions the most powerful nation at that time was the great

Celtic people, which according to the native tradition(10) had issued

from its settlements on the Western Ocean and poured itself about the

same time into the valley of the Po on the south of the main chain of

the Alps and into the regions on the Upper Rhine and on the Danube to

the north of that chain. Among their various tribes, both banks of

the Upper Rhine were occupied by the powerful and rich Helvetii, who

nowhere came into immediate contact with the Romans and so lived in

peace and in treaty with them: at this time they seem to have stretched

from the lake of Geneva to the river Main, and to have occupied the

modern Switzerland, Suabia, and Franconia Adjacent to them dwelt

the Boii, whose settlements were probably in the modern Bavaria and

Bohemia.(11) To the south-east of these we meet with another Celtic

stock, which made its appearance in Styria and Carinthia under the

name of the Taurisci and afterwards of the Norici, in Friuli, Carniola,

and Istria under that of the Carni. Their city Noreia (not far from

St. Veit to the north of Klagenfurt) was flourishing and widely known

from the iron mines that were even at that time zealously worked

in those regions; still more were the Italians at this very period

allured thither by the rich seams of gold brought to light, till the

natives excluded them and took this California of that day wholly into

their own hands. These Celtic hordes streaming along on both sides of

the Alps had after their fashion occupied chiefly the flat and hill

country; the Alpine regions proper and likewise the districts along

the Adige and the Lower Po were not occupied by them, and remained

in the hands of the earlier indigenous population. Nothing certain

has yet been ascertained as to the nationality of the latter; but they

appear under the name of the Raeti in the mountains of East Switzerland

and the Tyrol, and under that of the Euganei and Veneti about Padua

and Venice; so that at this last point the two great Celtic streams

almost touched each other, and only a narrow belt of native population

separated the Celtic Cenomani about Brescia from the Celtic Carnians

in Friuli. The Euganei and Veneti had long been peaceful subjects of

the Romans; whereas the peoples of the Alps proper were not only still

free, but made regular forays down from their mountains into the

plain between the Alps and the Po, where they were not content with

levying contributions, but conducted themselves with fearful cruelty

in the townships which they captured, not unfrequently slaughtering

the whole male population down to the infant in the cradle--the practical

answer, it may be presumed, to the Roman razzias in the Alpine valleys.

How dangerous these Raetian inroads were, appears from the fact that

one of them about 660 destroyed the considerable township of Comum.

Illyrian Peoples

Japydes

Scordisci

If these Celtic and non-Celtic tribes having their settlements upon and

beyond the Alpine chain were already variously intermingled, there was,

as may easily be conceived, a still more comprehensive intermixture

of peoples in the countries on the Lower Danube, where there were no

high mountain ranges, as in the more western regions, to serve as

natural walls of partition. The original Illyrian population, of

which the modern Albanians seem to be the last pure survivors, was

throughout, at least in the interior, largely mixed with Celtic

elements, and the Celtic armour and Celtic method of warfare were

probably everywhere introduced in that quarter. Next to the Taurisci

came the Japydes, who had their settlements on the Julian Alps in the

modern Croatia as far down as Fiume and Zeng,--a tribe originally

doubtless Illyrian, but largely mixed with Celts. Bordering with these

along the coast were the already-mentioned Dalmatians, into whose rugged

mountains the Celts do not seem to have penetrated; whereas in the

interior the Celtic Scordisci, to whom the tribe of the Triballi

formerly especially powerful in that quarter had succumbed, and who

had played a principal part in the Celtic expeditions to Delphi,

were about this time the leading nation along the Lower Save as far

as the Morava in the modern Bosnia and Servia. They roamed far and

wide towards Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia, and fearful tales were

told of their savage valour and cruel customs. Their chief place of

arms was the strong Segestica or Siscia at the point where the Kulpa

falls into the Save. The peoples who were at that time settled in

Hungary, Transylvania, Roumania, and Bulgaria still remained for the

present beyond the horizon of the Romans; the latter came into contact

only with the Thracians on the eastern frontier of Macedonia in

the Rhodope mountains.

Conflicts on the Frontier

In the Alps

It would have been no easy task for a government more energetic than was

the Roman government of that day to establish an organized and adequate

defence of the frontier against these wide domains of barbarism; what

was done for this important object under the auspices of the government

ment of the restoration, did not come up to even the most moderate

requirements. There seems to have been no want of expeditions against

the inhabitants of the Alps: in 636 there was a triumph over the Stoeni,

who were probably settled in the mountains above Verona; in 659 the consul

Lucius Crassus caused the Alpine valleys far and wide to De ransacked

and the inhabitants to be put to death, and yet he did not succeed in

killing enough of them to enable him to celebrate a village triumph and

to couple the laurels of the victor with his oratorical fame. But as

the Romans remained satisfied with razzias of this sort which merely

exasperated the natives without rendering them harmless, and, apparently,

withdrew the troops again after every such inroad, the state of matters

in the region beyond the Po remained substantially the same as before.

In Thrace

On the opposite Thracian frontier they appear to have given themselves

little concern about their neighbours; except that there is mention

made in 651 of conflicts with the Thracians, and in 657 of others with

the Maedi in the border mountains between Macedonia and Thrace.

In Illyria

More serious conflicts took place in the Illyrian land, where complaints

were constantly made as to the turbulent Dalmatians by their neighbours

and those who navigated the Adriatic; and along the wholly exposed

northern frontier of Macedonia, which, according to the significant

expression of a Roman, extended as far as the Roman swords and spears

reached, the conflicts with the barbarians never ceased. In 619 an

expedition was undertaken against the Ardyaei or Vardaei and the Pleraei

or Paralii, a Dalmatian tribe on the coast to the north of the mouth

of the Narenta, which was incessantly perpetrating outrages on the sea

and on the opposite coast: by order of the Romans they removed from

the coast and settled in the interior, the modern Herzegovina, where

they began to cultivate the soil, but, unused to their new calling,

pined away in that inclement region. At the same time an attack was

directed from Macedonia against the Scordisci, who had, it may be

presumed, made common cause with the assailed inhabitants of the coast.

Soon afterwards (625) the consul Tuditanus in connection with the able

Decimus Brutus, the conqueror of the Spanish Callaeci, humbled

the Japydes, and, after sustaining a defeat at the outset, at length

carried the Roman arms into the heart of Dalmatia as far as the river

Kerka, 115 miles distant from Aquileia; the Japydes thenceforth appear

as a nation at peace and on friendly terms with Rome. But ten years

later (635) the Dalmatians rose afresh, once more in concert with

the Scordisci. While the consul Lucius Cotta fought against the latter

and in doing so advanced apparently as far as Segestica, his colleague

Lucius Metellus afterwards named Dalmaticus, the elder brother of the

conqueror of Numidia, marched against the Dalmatians, conquered them

and passed the winter in Salona (Spalato), which town henceforth

appears as the chief stronghold of the Romans in that region. It is

not improbable that the construction of the Via Gabinia, which led

from Salona in an easterly direction to Andetrium (near Much)

and thence farther into the interior, falls within this period.

The Romans Cross the Eastern Alps and Reach the Danube

The expedition of the consul of 639, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, against

the Taurisci(12) presented more the character of a war of conquest.

He was the first of the Romans to cross the chain of the eastern Alps

where it falls lowest between Trieste and Laybach, and contracted

hospitable relations with the Taurisci; which secured a not

unimportant commercial intercourse without involving the Romans,

as a formal subjugation would have involved them, in the movements

of the peoples to the north of the Alps. Of the conflicts with the

Scordisci, which have passed almost wholly into oblivion, a page,

which speaks clearly even in its isolation, has recently been brought

to light through a memorial stone from the year 636 lately discovered

in the neighbourhood of Thessalonica. According to it, in this year

the governor of Macedonia Sextus Pompeius fell near Argos (not far from

Stobi on the upper Axius or Vardar) in a battle fought with these

Celts; and, after his quaestor Marcus Annius had come up with his

troops and in some measure mastered the enemy, these same Celts in

connection with Tipas the king of the Maedi (on the upper Strymon)

soon made a fresh irruption in still larger masses, and it was with

difficulty that the Romans defended themselves against the onset of

the barbarians.(13) Things soon assumed so threatening a shape that

it became necessary to despatch consular armies to Macedonia.(14)

A few years afterwards the consul of 640 Gaius Porcius Cato was

surprised in the Servian mountains by the same Scordisci, and his

army completely destroyed, while he himself with a few attendants

disgracefully fled; with difficulty the praetor Marcus Didius

protected the Roman frontier. His successors fought with better

fortune, Gaius Metellus Caprarius (641-642), Marcus Livius Drusus

(642-643), the first Roman general to reach the Danube, and Quintus

Minucius Rufus (644-647) who carried his arms along the Morava(15) and

thoroughly defeated the Scordisci. Nevertheless they soon afterwards

in league with the Maedi and the Dardani invaded the Roman territory

and plundered even the sanctuary at Delphi; it was not till then

that Lucius Scipio put an end to the thirty-two years' warfare with

the Scordisci and drove the remnant over to the left bank of the

Danube.(16) Thenceforth in their stead the just-named Dardani

(in Servia) begin to play the first part in the territory between

the northern frontier of Macedonia and the Danube.

The Cimbri

But these victories had an effect which the victors did not

anticipate. For a considerable period an "unsettled people" had

been wandering along the northern verge of the country occupied by

the Celts on both sides of the Danube. They called themselves the

Cimbri, that is, the Chempho, the champions or, as their enemies

translated it, the robbers; a designation, however, which to all

appearance had become the name of the people even before their

migration. They came from the north, and the first Celtic people

with whom they came in contact were, so far as is known, the Boii,

probably in Bohemia. More exact details as to the cause and

the direction of their migration have not been recorded by

contemporaries,(17) and cannot be supplied by conjecture, since the

state of things in those times to the north of Bohemia and the Main

and to the east of the Lower Rhine lies wholly beyond our knowledge.

But the hypothesis that the Cimbri, as well as the similar horde of

the Teutones which afterwards joined them, belonged essentially not

to the Celtic nation, to which the Romans at first assigned them,

but to the Germanic, is supported by the most definite facts: viz.,

by the appearance of two small tribes of the same name--remnants

apparently left behind in their primitive seats--the Cimbri in

the modern Denmark, the Teutones in the north-east of Germany in

the neighbourhood of the Baltic, where Pytheas, a contemporary of

Alexander the Great, makes mention of them thus early in connection

with the amber trade; by the insertion of the Cimbri and Teutones in

the list of the Germanic peoples among the Ingaevones alongside of

the Chauci; by the judgment of Caesar, who first made the Romans

acquainted with the distinction betweenthe Ge rmans and the Celts,

and who includes the Cimbri, many of whom he must himself have seen,

among the Germans; and lastly, by the very names of the peoples and

the statements as to their physical appearance and habits in other

respects, which, while applying to the men of the north generally,

are especially applicable to the Germans. On the other hand it is

conceivable enough that such a horde, after having been engaged in

wandering perhaps for many years and having in its movements near to

or within the land of the Celts doubtless welcomed every brother-in-arms

who joined it, would include a certain amount of Celtic elements; so

that it is not surprising that men of Celtic name should be at

the head of the Cimbri, or that the Romans should employ spies

speaking the Celtic tongue to gain information among them. It was

a marvellous movement, the like of which the Romans had not yet seen;

not a predatory expedition of men equipped for the purpose, nor

a "-ver sacrum-" of young men migrating to a foreign land, but a

migratory people that had set out with their women and children, with

their goods and chattels, to seek a new home. The waggon, which had

everywhere among the still not fully settled peoples of the north a

different importance from what it had among the Hellenes and the

Italians, and which universally accompanied the Celts also in their

encampments, was among the Cimbri as it were their house, where,

beneath the leather covering stretched over it, a place was found for

the wife and children and even for the house-dog as well as for the

furniture. The men of the south beheld with astonishment those tall

lank figures with the fair locks and bright blue eyes, the hardy and

stately women who were little inferior in size and strength to the

men, and the children with old men's hair, as the amazed Italians

called the flaxen-haired youths of the north. Their system of warfare

was substantially that of the Celts of this period, who no longer

fought, as the Italian Celts had formerly done, bareheaded and with

merely sword and dagger, but with copper helmets often richly adorned

and with a peculiar missile weapon, the -materis-; the large sword was

retained and the long narrow shield, along with which they probably

wore also a coat of mail. They were not destitute of cavalry; but

the Romans were superior to them in that arm. Their order of battle

was as formerly a rude phalanx professedly drawn up with just as many

ranks in depth as in breadth, the first rank of which in dangerous

combats not unfrequently tied together their metallic girdles with

cords. Their manners were rude. Flesh was frequently devoured raw.

The bravest and, if possible, the tallest man was king of the host.

Not unfrequently, after the manner of the Celts and of barbarians

generally, the time and place of the combat were previously arranged

with the enemy, and sometimes also, before the battle began, an individual

opponent was challenged to single combat. The conflict was ushered

in by their insulting the enemy with unseemly gestures, and by a

horrible noise--the men raising their battle-shout, and the women

and children increasing the din by drumming on the leathern covers

of the waggons. The Cimbrian fought bravely--death on the bed of

honour was deemed by him the only death worthy of a free man--but

after the victory he indemnified himself by the most savage brutality,

and sometimes promised beforehand to present to the gods of

battle whatever victory should place in the power of the victor.

The effects of the enemy were broken in pieces, the horses were killed,

the prisoners were hanged or preserved only to be sacrificed to the gods.

It was the priestesses--grey-haired women in white linen dresses and

unshod--who, like Iphigenia in Scythia, offered these sacrifices, and

prophesied the future from the streaming blood of the prisoner of war

or the criminal who formed the victim. How much in these customs was

the universal usage of the northern barbarians, how much was borrowed

from the Celts, and how much was peculiar to the Germans, cannot

be ascertained; but the practice of having the army accompanied

and directed not by priests, but by priestesses, may be pronounced

an undoubtedly Germanic custom. Thus marched the Cimbri into

the unknown land--an immense multitude of various origin which had

congregated round a nucleus of Germanic emigrants from the Baltic--

not without resemblance to the great bodies of emigrants, that in our

own times cross the ocean similarly burdened and similarly mingled, and

with aims not much less vague; carrying their lumbering waggon-castle,

with the dexterity which a long migratory life imparts, over streams

and mountains; dangerous to more civilized nations like the sea-wave

and the hurricane, and like these capricious and unaccountable, now

rapidly advancing, now suddenly pausing, turning aside, or receding.

They came and struck like lightning; like lightning they vanished;

and unhappily, in the dull age in which they appeared, there was

no observer who deemed it worth while accurately to describe the

marvellous meteor. When men afterwards began to trace the chain,

of which this emigration, the first Germanic movement which touched

the orbit of ancient civilization, was a link, the direct and living

knowledge of it had long passed away.

Cimbrian Movements and Conflicts

Defeat of Carbo

This homeless people of the Cimbri, which hitherto had been

prevented from advancing to the south by the Celts on the Danube,

more especially by the Boii, broke through that barrier in consequence

of the attacks directed by the Romans against the Danubian Celts;

either because the latter invoked the aid of their Cimbrian

antagonists against the advancing legions, or because the Roman attack

prevented them from protecting as hitherto their northern frontiers.

Advancing through the territory of the Scordisci into the Tauriscan

country, they approached in 641 the passes of the Carnian Alps, to

protect which the consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo took up a position

on the heights not far from Aquileia. Here, seventy years before,

Celtic tribes had attempted to settle on the south of the Alps, but

at the bidding of the Romans had evacuated without resistance the

ground which they had already occupied;(18) even now the dread of

the Transalpine peoples at the Roman name showed itself strongly.

The Cimbri did not attack; indeed, when Carbo ordered them to evacuate

the territory of the Taurisci who were in relations of hospitality

with Rome--an order which the treaty with the latter by no means bound

him to make--they complied and followed the guides whom Carbo had

assigned to them to escort them over the frontier. But these guides

were in fact instructed to lure the Cimbri into an ambush, where the

consul awaited them. Accordingly an engagement took place not far

from Noreia in the modern Carinthia, in which the betrayed gained

the victory over the betrayer and inflicted on him considerable loss;

a storm, which separated the combatants, alone prevented the complete

annihilation of the Roman army. The Cimbri might have immediately

directed their attack towards Italy; they preferred to turn to the

westward. By treaty with the Helvetii and the Sequani rather than by

force of arms they made their way to the left bank of the Rhine and

over the Jura, and there some years after the defeat of Carbo once

more threatened the Roman territory by their immediate vicinity.

Defeat of Silanus

With a view to cover the frontier of the Rhine and the immediately

threatened territory of the Allobroges, a Roman army under Marcus

Junius Silanus appeared in 645 in Southern Gaul. The Cimbri

requested that land might be assigned to them where they might

peacefully settle--a request which certainly could not be granted.

The consul instead of replying attacked them; he was utterly defeated

and the Roman camp was taken. The new levies which were occasioned

by this misfortune were already attended with so much difficulty, that

the senate procured the abolition of the laws--presumably proceeding

from Gaius Gracchus--which limited the obligation to military service

in point of time.(19) But the Cimbri, instead of following up their

victory over the Romans, sent to the senate at Rome to repeat their

request for the assignment of land, and meanwhile employed themselves,

apparently, in the subjugation of the surrounding Celtic cantons.

Inroad of the Helvetii into Southern Gaul

Defeat of Longinus

Thus the Roman province and the new Roman army were left for the

moment undisturbed by the Germans; but a new enemy arose in Gaul

itself. The Helvetii, who had suffered much in the constant conflicts

with their north-eastern neighbours, felt themselves stimulated by

the example of the Cimbri to seek in their turn for more quiet and

fertile settlements in western Gaul, and had perhaps, even when the

Cimbrian hosts marched through their land, formed an alliance with

them for that purpose. Now under the leadership of Divico the forces

of the Tougeni (position unknown) and of the Tigorini (on the lake

of Murten) crossed the Jura,(20) and reached the territory of the

Nitiobroges (about Agen on the Garonne). The Roman army under the

consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, which they here encountered, allowed

itself to be decoyed by the Helvetii into an ambush, in which the

general himself and his legate, the consular Lucius Piso, along with

the greater portion of the soldiers met their death; Gaius Popillius,

the interim commander-in-chief of the force which had escaped to

the camp, was allowed to withdraw under the yoke on condition of

surrendering half the property which the troops carried with them

and furnishing hostages (647). So perilous was the state of things

for the Romans, that one of the most important towns in their

own province, Tolosa, rose against them and placed the Roman

garrison in chains.

But, as the Cimbri continued to employ themselves elsewhere, and

the Helvetii did not further molest for the moment the Roman province,

the new Roman commander-in-chief, Quintus Servilius Caepio, had full

time to recover possession of the town of Tolosa by treachery and to

empty at leisure the immense treasures accumulated in the old and

famous sanctuary of the Celtic Apollo. It was a desirable gain for

the embarrassed exchequer, but unfortunately the gold and silver vessels

on the way from Tolosa to Massilia were taken from the weak escort by

a band of robbers, and totally disappeared: the consul himself and

his staff were, it was alleged, the instigators of this onset (648).

Meanwhile they confined themselves to the strictest defensive

as regarded the chief enemy, and guarded the Roman province

with three strong armies, till it should please the Cimbri

to repeat their attack.

Defeat of Arausio

They came in 649 under their king Boiorix, on this occasion seriously

meditating an inroad into Italy. They were opposed on the right bank

of the Rhone by the proconsul Caepio, on the left by the consul Gnaeus

Mallius Maximus and by his legate, the consular Marcus Aurelius

Scaurus, under him at the head of a detached corps. The first onset

fell on the latter; he was totally defeated and brought in person as

a prisoner to the enemy's head-quarters, where the Cimbrian king,

indignant at the proud warning given to him by the captive Roman

not to venture with his army into Italy, put him to death. Maximus

thereupon ordered his colleague to bring his army over the Rhone:

the latter complying with reluctance at length appeared at Arausio

(Orange) on the left bank of the river, where the whole Roman force

now stood confronting the Cimbrian army, and is alleged to have made

such an impression by its considerable numbers that the Cimbri began

to negotiate. But the two leaders lived in the most vehement discord.

Maximus, an insignificant and incapable man, was as consul the legal

superior of his prouder and better born, but not better qualified,

proconsular colleague Caepio; but the latter refused to occupy a

common camp and to devise operations in concert with him, and still,

as formerly, maintained his independent command. In vain deputies from

the Roman senate endeavoured to effect a reconciliation; a personal

conference between the generals, on which the officers insisted, only

widened the breach. When Caepio saw Maximus negotiating with the

envoys of the Cimbri, he fancied that the latter wished to gain the

sole credit of their subjugation, and threw himself with his portion of

the army alone in all haste on the enemy. He was utterly annihilated,

so that even his camp fell into the hands of the enemy (6 Oct. 649);

and his destruction was followed by the no less complete defeat

of the second Roman army. It is asserted that 80,000 Roman soldiers

and half as many of the immense and helpless body of camp-followers

perished, and that only ten men escaped: this much is certain, that only

a few out of the two armies succeeded in escaping, for the Romans had

fought with the river in their rear. It was a calamity which materially

and morally far surpassed the day of Cannae. The defeats of Carbo,

of Silanus, and of Longinus had passed without producing any permanent

impression on the Italians. They were accustomed to open every war

with disasters; the invincibleness of the Roman arms was so firmly

established, that it seemed superfluous to attend to the pretty numerous

exceptions. But the battle of Arausio, the alarming proximity of

the victorious Cimbrian army to the undefended passes of the Alps,

the insurrections breaking out afresh and with increased force both

in the Roman territory beyond the Alps and among the Lusitanians,

the defenceless condition of Italy, produced a sudden and fearful

awakening from these dreams. Men recalled the never wholly forgotten

Celtic inroads of the fourth century, the day on the Allia and

the burning of Rome: with the double force at once of the oldest

remembrance and of the freshest alarm the terror of the Gauls came

upon Italy; through all the west people seemed to be aware that

the Roman empire was beginning to totter. As after the battle

of Cannae, the period of mourning was shortened by decree of

the senate.(21) The new enlistments brought out the most painful

scarcity of men. All Italians capable of bearing arms had to swear

that they would not leave Italy; the captains of the vessels lying

in the Italian ports were instructed not to take on board any man fit

for service. It is impossible to tell what might have happened, had

the Cimbri immediately after their double victory advanced through

the gates of the Alps into Italy. But they first overran the territory

of the Arverni, who with difficulty defended themselves in their

fortresses against the enemy; and soon, weary of sieges, set out

from thence, not to Italy, but westward to the Pyrenees.

The Roman Opposition

Warfare of Prosecutions

If the torpid organism of the Roman polity could still of itself reach

a crisis of wholesome reaction, that reaction could not but set in

now, when, by one of the marvellous pieces of good fortune, in which

the history of Rome is so rich, the danger was sufficiently imminent

to rouse all the energy and all the patriotism of the burgesses, and

yet did not burst upon them so suddenly as to leave no space for the

development of their resources. But the very same phenomena, which

had occurred four years previously after the African defeats, presented

themselves afresh. In fact the African and Gallic disasters were

essentially of the same kind. It may be that primarily the blame

of the former fell more on the oligarchy as a whole, that of the

latter more on individual magistrates; but public opinion justly

recognized in both, above all things, the bankruptcy of the government,

which in its progressive development imperilled first the honour and

now the very existence of the state. People just as little deceived

themselves then as now regarding the true seat of the evil, but

as little now as then did they make even an attempt to apply the

remedy at the proper point. They saw well that the system was

to blame; but on this occasion also they adhered to the method

of calling individuals to account--only no doubt this second storm

discharged itself on the heads of the oligarchy so much the more

heavily, as the calamity of 649 exceeded in extent and peril that of

645. The sure instinctive feeling of the public, that there was no

resource against the oligarchy except the -tyrannis-, was once more

apparent in their readily entering into every attempt by officers

of note to force the hand of the government and, under one form

or another, to overturn the oligarchic rule by a dictatorship.

It was against Quintus Caepio that their attacks were first

directed; and justly, in so far as he had primarily occasioned the

defeat of Arausio by his insubordination, even apart from the probably

well-founded but not proved charge of embezzling the Tolosan booty;

but the fury which the opposition displayed against him was essentially

augmented by the fact, that he had as consul ventured on an attempt

to wrest the posts of jurymen from the capitalists.(22) On his account

the old venerable principle, that the sacredness of the magistracy

should be respected even in the person of its worst occupant, was

violated; and, while the censure due to the author of the calamitous

day of Cannae had been silently repressed within the breast, the author

of the defeat of Arausio was by decree of the people unconstitutionally

deprived of his proconsulship, and--what had not occurred since

the crisis in which the monarchy had perished--his property was

confiscated to the state-chest (649?). Not long afterwards he was

by a second decree of the burgesses expelled from the senate (650).

But this was not enough; more victims were desired, and above all

Caepio's blood. A number of tribunes of the people favourable to the

opposition, with Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Gaius Norbanus at their

head, proposed in 651 to appoint an extraordinary judicial commission in

reference to the embezzlement and treason perpetrated in Gaul; in spite

of the de facto abolition of arrest during investigation and of the

punishment of death for political offences, Caepio was arrested and

the intention of pronouncing and executing in his case sentence of

death was openly expressed. The government party attempted to get

rid of the proposal by tribunician intervention; but the interceding

tribunes were violently driven from the assembly, and in the furious

tumult the first men of the senate were assailed with stones.

The investigation could not be prevented, and the warfare of

prosecutions pursued its course in 651 as it had done six years

before; Caepio himself, his colleague in the supreme command Gnaeus

Mallius Maximus, and numerous other men of note were condemned: a

tribune of the people, who was a friend of Caepio, with difficulty

succeeded by the sacrifice of his own civic existence in saving at

least the life of the chief persons accused.(23)

Marius Commander-in-Chief

Of more importance than this measure of revenge was the question how

the dangerous war beyond the Alps was to be further carried on, and

first of all to whom the supreme command in it was to be committed.

With an unprejudiced treatment of the matter it was not difficult to

make a fitting choice. Rome was doubtless, in comparison with earlier

times, not rich in military notabilities; yet Quintus Maximus had

commanded with distinction in Gaul, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and

Quintus Minucius in the regions of the Danube, Quintus Metellus,

Publius Rutilius Rufus, Gaius Marius in Africa; and the object

proposed was not to defeat a Pyrrhus or a Hannibal, but again

to make good the often-tried superiority of Roman arms and Roman

tactics in opposition to the barbarians of the north--an object which

required no genius, but merely a stern and capable soldier. But it

was precisely a time when nothing was so difficult as the unprejudiced

settlement of a question of administration. The government was, as

it could not but be and as the Jugurthine war had already shown, so

utterly bankrupt in public opinion, that its ablest generals had to

retire in the full career of victory, whenever it occurred to an

officer of mark to revile them before the people and to get himself as

the candidate of the opposition appointed by the latter to the head of

affairs. It was no wonder that what took place after the victories of

Metellus was repeated on a greater scale after the defeats of Gnaeus

Mallius and Quintus Caepio. Once more Gaius Marius came forward, in

spite of the law which prohibited the holding of the consulship more

than once, as a candidate for the supreme magistracy; and not only was

he nominated as consul and charged with the chief command in the Gallic

war, while he was still in Africa at the head of the army there, but

he was reinvested with the consulship for five years in succession

(650-654)--in a way, which looked like an intentional mockery of

the exclusive spirit that the nobility had exhibited in reference

to this very man in all its folly and shortsightedness, but was also

unparalleled in the annals of the republic, and in fact absolutely

incompatible with the spirit of the free constitution of Rome.

In the Roman military system in particular--the transformation of which

from a burgess-militia into a body of mercenaries, begun in the African

war, was continued and completed by Marius during his five years of a

supreme command unlimited through the exigencies of the time still more

than through the terms of his appointment--the profound traces of this

unconstitutional commandership-in-chief of the first democratic general

remained visible for all time.

Roman Defensive

The new commander-in-chief, Gaius Marius, appeared in 650 beyond the

Alps, followed by a number of experienced officers--among whom the

bold captor of Jugurtha, Lucius Sulla, soon acquired fresh distinction--

and by a numerous host of Italian and allied soldiers. At first he

did not find the enemy against whom he was sent. The singular people,

who had conquered at Arausio, had in the meantime (as we have

already mentioned), after plundering the country to the west of

the Rhone, crossed the Pyrenees and were carrying on a desultory

warfare in Spain with the brave inhabitants of the northern coast

and of the interior; it seemed as if the Germans wished at their very

first appearance in the field of history to display their lack of

persistent grasp. So Marius found ample time on the one hand to

reduce the revolted Tectosages to obedience, to confirm afresh the

wavering fidelity of the subject Gallic and Ligurian cantons, and to

obtain support and contingents within and without the Roman province

from the allies who were equally with the Romans placed in peril by

the Cimbri, such as the Massiliots, the Allobroges, and the Sequani;

and on the other hand, to discipline the army entrusted to him by

strict training and impartial justice towards all whether high or

humble, and to prepare the soldiers for the more serious labours of

war by marches and extensive works of entrenching--particularly the

construction of a canal of the Rhone, afterwards handed over to the

Massiliots, for facilitating the transit of the supplies sent from

Italy to the army. He maintained a strictly defensive attitude,

and did not cross the bounds of the Roman province.

The Cimbri, Teutones, and Helvetii Unite

Expedition to Italy Resolved on

Teutones in the Province of Gaul

At length, apparently in the course of 651, the wave of the Cimbri,

after having broken itself in Spain on the brave resistance of the

native tribes and especially of the Celtiberians, flowed back again

over the Pyrenees and thence, as it appears, passed along the shore

of the Atlantic Ocean, where everything from the Pyrenees to the

Seine submitted to the terrible invaders. There, on the confines

of the brave confederacy of the Belgae, they first encountered serious

resistance; but there also, while they were in the territory of the

Vellocassi (near Rouen), considerable reinforcements reached them.

Not only three cantons of the Helvetii, including the Tigorini

and Tougeni who had formerly fought against the Romans at the Garonne,

associated themselves, apparently about this period, with the Cimbri,

but these were also joined by the kindred Teutones under their king

Teutobod, who had been driven by events which tradition has not

recorded from their home on the Baltic sea to appear now on the

Seine.(24) But even the united hordes were unable to overcome the

brave resistance of the Belgae. The leaders accordingly resolved,

now that their numbers were thus swelled, to enter in all earnest on

the expedition to Italy which they had several times contemplated.

In order not to encumber themselves with the spoil which they had

heretofore collected, they left it behind under the protection of a

division of 6000 men, which after many wanderings subsequently gave

rise to the tribe of the Aduatuci on the Sambre. But, whether from

the difficulty of finding supplies on the Alpine routes or from other

reasons, the mass again broke up into two hosts, one of which,

composed of the Cimbri and Tigorini, was to recross the Rhine

and to invade Italy through the passes of the eastern Alps already

reconnoitred in 641, and the other, composed of the newly-arrived

Teutones, the Tougeni, and the Ambrones--the flower of the Cimbrian

host already tried in the battle of Arausio--was to invade Italy

through Roman Gaul and the western passes. It was this second

division, which in the summer of 652 once more crossed the Rhone

without hindrance, and on its left bank resumed, after a pause of

nearly three years, the struggle with the Romans. Marius awaited them

in a well-chosen and well-provisioned camp at the confluence of the

Isere with the Rhone, in which position he intercepted the passage

of the barbarians by either of the only two military routes to Italy

then practicable, that over the Little St. Bernard, and that along

the coast. The Teutones attacked the camp which obstructed their

passage; for three consecutive days the assault of the barbarians

raged around the Roman entrenchments, but their wild courage was

thwarted by the superiority of the Romans in fortress-warfare and by

the prudence of the general. After severe loss the bold associates

resolved to give up the assault, and to march onward to Italy past

the camp. For six successive days they continued to defile--a proof

of the cumbrousness of their baggage still more than of the immensity

of their numbers. The general permitted the march to proceed without

attacking them. We can easily understand why he did not allow himself

to be led astray by the insulting inquiries of the enemy whether the

Romans had no commissions for their wives at home; but the fact, that

he did not take advantage of this audacious defiling of the hostile

columns in front of the concentrated Roman troops for the purpose of

attack, shows how little he trusted his unpractised soldiers.

Battle of Aquae Sextiae

When the march was over, he broke up his encampment and followed

in the steps of the enemy, preserving rigorous order and carefully

entrenching himself night after night. The Teutones, who were striving

to gain the coast road, marching down the banks of the Rhone reached

the district of Aquae Sextiae, followed by the Romans. The light

Ligurian troops of the Romans, as they were drawing water, here came

into collision with the Celtic rear-guard, the Ambrones; the conflict

soon became general; after a hot struggle the Romans conquered and

pursued the retreating enemy up to their waggon-stronghold. This first

successful collision elevated the spirits of the general as well as of

the soldiers; on the third day after it Marius drew up his array for

a decisive battle on the hill, the summit of which bore the Roman

camp. The Teutones, long impatient to measure themselves against

their antagonists, immediately rushed up the hill and began the

conflict. It was severe and protracted: up to midday the Germans

stood like walls; but the unwonted heat of the Provengal sun

relaxed their energies, and a false alarm in their rear, where a

band of Roman camp-boys ran forth from a wooded ambuscade with loud

shouts, utterly decided the breaking up of the wavering ranks.

The whole horde was scattered, and, as was to be expected in a foreign

land, either put to death or taken prisoners. Among the captives

was king Teutobod; among the killed a multitude of women, who, not

unacquainted with the treatment which awaited them as slaves, had

caused themselves to be slain in desperate resistance at their

waggons, or had put themselves to death in captivity, after having

vainly requested to be dedicated to the service of the gods and of

the sacred virgins of Vesta (summer of 652).

Cimbrians in Italy

Thus Gaul was relieved from the Germans; and it was time, for

their brothers-in-arms were already on the south side of the Alps.

In alliance with the Helvetii, the Cimbri had without difficulty passed

from the Seine to the upper valley of the Rhine, had crossed the chain

of the Alps by the Brenner pass, and had descended thence through

the valleys of the Eisach and Adige into the Italian plain. Here

the consul Quintus Lutatius Catulus was to guard the passes; but

not fully acquainted with the country and afraid of having his flank

turned, he had not ventured to advance into the Alps themselves, but

had posted himself below Trent on the left bank of the Adige, and had

secured in any event his retreat to the right bank by the construction

of a bridge. When the Cimbri, however, pushed forward in dense

masses from the mountains, a panic seized the Roman army, and

legionaries and horsemen ran off, the latter straight for the capital,

the former to the nearest height which seemed to afford security.

With great difficulty Catulus brought at least the greater portion of

his army by a stratagem back to the river and over the bridge, before

the enemy, who commanded the upper course of the Adige and were

already floating down trees and beams against the bridge, succeeded

in destroying it and thereby cutting off the retreat of the army.

But the general had to leave behind a legion on the other bank, and

the cowardly tribune who led it was already disposed to capitulate,

when the centurion Gnaeus Petreius of Atina, struck him down and cut

his way through the midst of the enemy to the main army on the right

bank of the Adige. Thus the army, and in some degree even the

honour of their arms, was saved; but the consequences of the neglect

to occupy the passes and of the too hasty retreat were yet very

seriously felt Catulus was obliged to withdraw to the right bank of

the Po and to leave the whole plain between the Po and the Alps in

the power of the Cimbri, so that communication was maintained with

Aquileia only by sea. This took place in the summer of 652, about

the same time when the decisive battle between the Teutones and the

Romans occurred at Aquae Sextiae. Had the Cimbri continued their

attack without interruption, Rome might have been greatly embarrassed;

but on this occasion also they remained faithful to their custom of

resting in winter, and all the more, because the rich country, the

unwonted quarters under the shelter of a roof, the warm baths, and

the new and abundant supplies for eating and drinking invited them

to make themselves comfortable for the moment. Thereby the Romans

gained time to encounter them with united forces in Italy. It was

no season to resume--as the democratic general would perhaps otherwise

have done--the interrupted scheme of conquest in Gaul, such as Gaius

Gracchus had probably projected. From the battle-field of Aix the

victorious army was conducted to the Po; and after a brief stay in

the capital, where Marius refused the triumph offered to him until

he had utterly subdued the barbarians, he arrived in person at the

united armies. In the spring of 653 they again crossed the Po,

50,000 strong, under the consul Marius and the proconsul Catulus,

and marched against the Cimbri, who on their part seem to have marched

up the river with a view to cross the mighty stream at its source.

Battle on the Raudine Plain

The two armies met below Vercellae not far from the confluence of

the Sesia with the Po,(25) just at the spot where Hannibal had fought

his first battle on Italian soil. The Cimbri desired battle, and

according to their custom sent to the Romans to settle the time and

place for it; Marius gratified them and named the next day--it was

the 30th July 653--and the Raudine plain, a wide level space, which

the superior Roman cavalry found advantageous for their movements.

Here they fell upon the enemy expecting them and yet taken by

surprise; for in the dense morning mist the Cimbrian cavalry found

itself in hand-to-hand conflict with the stronger cavalry of the

Romans before it anticipated attack, and was thereby thrown back

upon the infantry which was just making its dispositions for battle.

A complete victory was gained with slight loss, and the Cimbri were

annihilated. Those might be deemed fortunate who met death in the

battle, as most did, including the brave king Boiorix; more fortunate

at least than those who afterwards in despair laid hands on themselves,

or were obliged to seek in the slave-market of Rome the master who

might retaliate on the individual Northman for the audacity of having

coveted the beauteous south before it was time. The Tigorini, who had

remained behind in the passes of the Alps with the view of subsequently

following the Cimbri, ran off on the news of the defeat to their native

land. The human avalanche, which for thirteen years had alarmed the

nations from the Danube to the Ebro, from the Seine to the Po, rested

beneath the sod or toiled under the yoke of slavery; the forlorn hope

of the German migrations had performed its duty; the homeless people

of the Cimbri and their comrades were no more.

The Victory and the Parties

The political parties of Rome continued their pitiful quarrels over

the carcase, without troubling themselves about the great chapter in

the world's history the first page of which was thus opened, without

even giving way to the pure feeling that on this day Rome's aristocrats

as well as Rome's democrats had done their duty. The rivalry of

the two generals--who were not only political antagonists, but were

also set at variance in a military point of view by the so different

results of the two campaigns of the previous year--broke out immediately

after the battle in the most offensive form. Catulus might with

justice assert that the centre division which he commanded had

decided the victory, and that his troops had captured thirty-one

standards, while those of Marius had brought in only two, his

soldiers led even the deputies of the town of Parma through the heaps

of the dead to show to them that Marius had slain his thousand, but

Catulus his ten thousand. Nevertheless Marius was regarded as the real

conqueror of the Cimbri, and justly; not merely because by virtue of

his higher rank he had held the chief command on the decisive day,

and was in military gifts and experience beyond doubt far superior to

his colleague, but especially because the second victory at Vercellae

had in fact been rendered possible only by the first victory at Aquae

Sextiae. But at that period it was considerations of political

partisanship rather than of military merit which attached the glory

of having saved Rome from the Cimbri and Teutones entirely to the name

of Marius. Catulus was a polished and clever man, so graceful a

speaker that his euphonious language sounded almost like eloquence,

a tolerable writer of memoirs and occasional poems, and an excellent

connoisseur and critic of art; but he was anything but a man of the

people, and his victory was a victory of the aristocracy. The battles

of the rough farmer on the other hand, who had been raised to honour

by the common people and had led the common people to victory, were

not merely defeats of the Cimbri and Teutones, but also defeats of the

government: there were associated with them hopes far different from

that of being able once more to carry on mercantile transactions on

the one side of the Alps or to cultivate the fields without molestation

on the other. Twenty years had elapsed since the bloody corpse of

Gaius Gracchus had been flung into the Tiber; for twenty years the

government of the restored oligarchy had been endured and cursed;

still there had risen no avenger for Gracchus, no second master to

prosecute the building which he had begun. There were many who

hated and hoped, many of the worst and many of the best citizens

of the state: was the man, who knew how to accomplish this vengeance

and these wishes, found at last in the son of the day-labourer of

Arpinum? Were they really on the threshold of the new much-dreaded

and much-desired second revolution?

CHAPTER VI

The Attempt of Marius at Revolution and the Attempt of Drusus at Reform

Marius

Gaius Marius, the son of a poor day-labourer, was born in 599 at the

village of Cereatae then belonging to Arpinum, which afterwards obtained

municipal rights as Cereatae Marianae and still at the present day bears

the name of "Marius' home" (Casamare). He was reared at the plough,

in circumstances so humble that they seemed to preclude him from access

even to the municipal offices of Arpinum: he learned early--what he

practised afterwards even when a general--to bear hunger and thirst,

the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and to sleep on the hard

ground. As soon as his age allowed him, he had entered the army and

through service in the severe school of the Spanish wars had rapidly

risen to be an officer. In Scipio's Numantine war he, at that time

twenty-three years of age, attracted the notice of the stern general

by the neatness with which he kept his horse and his accoutrements,

as well as by his bravery in combat and his decorous demeanour in camp.

He had returned home with honourable scars and warlike distinctions,

and with the ardent wish to make himself a name in the career on which

he had gloriously entered; but, as matters then stood, a man of even the

highest merit could not attain those political offices, which alone led

to the higher military posts, without wealth and without connections.

The young officer acquired both by fortunate commercial speculations and

by his union with a maiden of the ancient patrician clan of the Julii.

So by dint of great efforts and after various miscarriages he succeeded,

in 639, in attaining the praetorship, in which he found opportunity of

displaying afresh his military ability as governor of Further Spain.

How he thereafter in spite of the aristocracy received the consulship in

647 and, as proconsul (648, 649), terminated the African war; and how,

called after the calamitous day of Arausio to the superintendence of

the war against the Germans, he had his consulship renewed for four

successive years from 650 to 653 (a thing unexampled in the annals of

the republic) and vanquished and annihilated the Cimbri in Cisalpine,

and the Teutones in Transalpine, Gaul--has been already related. In his

military position he had shown himself a brave and upright man, who

administered justice impartially, disposed of the spoil with rare

honesty and disinterestedness, and was thoroughly incorruptible; a

skilful organizer, who had brought the somewhat rusty machinery of the

Roman military system once more into a state of efficiency; an able

general, who kept the soldier under discipline and withal in good humour

and at the same time won his affections in comrade-like intercourse, but

looked the enemy boldly in the face and joined issue with him at the

proper time. He was not, as far as we can judge, a man of eminent

military capacity; but the very respectable qualities which he possessed

were quite sufficient under the existing circumstances to procure for

him the reputation of such capacity, and by virtue of it he had taken

his place in a fashion of unparalleled honour among the consulars and

the triumphators. But he was none the better fitted on that account for

the brilliant circle. His voice remained harsh and loud, and his look

wild, as if he still saw before him Libyans or Cimbrians, and not well-

bred and perfumed colleagues. That he was superstitious like a genuine

soldier of fortune; that he was induced to become a candidate for his

first consulship, not by the impulse of his talents, but primarily by

the utterances of an Etruscan -haruspex-; and that in the campaign with

the Teutones a Syrian prophetess Martha lent the aid of her oracles

to the council of war,--these things were not, in the strict sense,

unaristocratic: in such matters, then as at all times, the highest and

lowest strata of society met. But the want of political culture was

unpardonable; it was commendable, no doubt, that he had the skill to

defeat the barbarians, but what was to be thought of a consul who was so

ignorant of constitutional etiquette as to appear in triumphal costume

in the senate! In other respects too the plebeian character clung to

him. He was not merely--according to aristocratic phraseology--a poor

man, but, what was worse, frugal and a declared enemy of all bribery and

corruption. After the manner of soldiers he was not nice, but was fond

of his cups, especially in his later years; he knew not the art of

giving feasts, and kept a bad cook. It was likewise awkward that the

consular understood nothing but Latin and had to decline conversing

in Greek; that he felt the Greek plays wearisome might pass--he was

presumably not the only one who did so--but to confess to the feeling of

weariness was naive. Thus he remained throughout life a countryman cast

adrift among aristocrats, and annoyed by the keenly-felt sarcasms and

still more keenly--felt commiseration of his colleagues, which he

had not the self-command to despise as he despised themselves.

Political Position of Marius

Marius stood aloof from the parties not much less than from society.

The measures which he carried in his tribunate of the people (635)--a

better control over the delivery of the voting-tablets with a view to

do away with the scandalous frauds that were therein practised, and the

prevention of extravagant proposals for largesses to the people(1)--do

not bear the stamp of a party, least of all that of the democratic, but

merely show that he hated what was unjust and irrational; and how could

a man like this, a farmer by birth and a soldier by inclination, have

been from the first a revolutionist? The hostile attacks of the

aristocracy had no doubt driven him subsequently into the camp of

the opponents of the government; and there he speedily found himself

elevated in the first instance to be general of the opposition, and

destined perhaps for still higher things hereafter. But this was far

more the effect of the stringent force of circumstances and of the

general need which the opposition had for a chief, than his own work;

he had at any rate since his departure for Africa in 647-8 hardly

tarried, in passing, for a brief period in the capital. It was not till

the latter half of 653 that he returned to Rome, victor over the Teutones

as over the Cimbri, to celebrate his postponed triumph now with double

honours--decidedly the first man in Rome, and yet at the same time a

novice in politics. It was certain beyond dispute, not only that Marius

had saved Rome, but that he was the only man who could have saved it;

his name was on every one's lips; the men of quality acknowledged his

services; with the people he was more popular than any one before or

after him, popular alike by his virtues and by his faults, by his

unaristocratic disinterestedness no less than by his boorish roughness;

he was called by the multitude a third Romulus and a second Camillus;

libations were poured forth to him like the gods. It was no wonder that

the head of the peasant's son grew giddy at times with all this glory;

that he compared his march from Africa to Gaul to the victorious

processions of Dionysus from continent to continent, and had a cup--none

of the smallest--manufactured for his use after the model of that of

Bacchus. There was just as much of hope as of gratitude in this

delirious enthusiasm of the people, which might well have led astray

a man of colder blood and more mature political experience. The work

of Marius seemed to his admirers by no means finished. The wretched

government oppressed the land more heavily than did the barbarians: on

him, the first man of Rome, the favourite of the people, the head of the

opposition, devolved the task of once more delivering Rome. It is true

that to one who was a rustic and a soldier the political proceedings

of the capital were strange and incongruous: he spoke as ill as he

commanded well, and displayed a far firmer bearing in presence of

the lances and swords of the enemy than in presence of the applause

or hisses of the multitude; but his inclinations were of little moment.

The hopes of which he was the object constrained him. His military

and political position was such that, if he would not break with the

glorious past, if he would not deceive the expectations of his party and

in fact of the nation, if he would not be unfaithful to his own sense of

duty, he must check the maladministration of public affairs and put an

end to the government of the restoration; and if he only possessed the

internal qualities of a head of the people, he might certainly dispense

with those which he lacked as a popular leader.

The New Military Organization

He held in his hand a formidable weapon in the newly organized army.

Previously to his time the fundamental principle of the Servian

constitution--by which the levy was limited entirely to the burgesses

possessed of property, and the distinctions as to armour were regulated

solely by the property qualification(2)--had necessarily been in various

respects relaxed. The minimum census of 11,000 -asses- (43 pounds),

which bound its possessor to enter the burgess-army, had been lowered to

4000 (17 pounds;(3)). The older six property-classes, distinguished by

their respective kinds of armour, had been restricted to three; for,

while in accordance with the Servian organization they selected the

cavalry from the wealthiest, and the light-armed from the poorest,

of those liable to serve, they arranged the middle class, the proper

infantry of the line, no longer according to property but according to

age of service, in the three divisions of -hastati-, -principes-, and

-triarii-. They had, moreover, long ago brought in the Italian allies

to share to a very great extent in war-service; but in their case too,

just as among the Roman burgesses, military duty was chiefly imposed

on the propertied classes. Nevertheless the Roman military system down

to the time of Marius rested in the main on that primitive organization

of the burgess-militia. But it was no longer suited for the altered

circumstances. The better classes of society kept aloof more and more

from service in the army, and the Roman and Italic middle class in

general was disappearing; while on the other hand the considerable

military resources of the extra-Italian allies and subjects had become

available, and the Italian proletariate also, properly applied, afforded

at least a very useful material for military objects. The burgess-

cavalry,(4) which was meant to be formed from the class of the wealthy,

had practically ceased from service in the field even before the time of

Marius. It is last mentioned as an actual corps d'armee in the Spanish

campaign of 614, when it drove the general to despair by its insolent

arrogance and its insubordination, and a war broke out between

the troopers and the general, waged on both sides with equal

unscrupulousness. In the Jugurthine war it continues to appear merely

as a sort of guard of honour for the general and foreign princes;

thenceforth it wholly disappears. In like manner the filling up of the

complement of the legions with properly qualified persons bound to serve

proved in the ordinary course of things difficult; so that exertions,

such as were necessary after the battle of Arausio, would have been in

all probability really impracticable with the retention of the existing

rules as to the obligation of service. On the other hand even before

the time of Marius, especially in the cavalry and the light infantry,

extra-Italian subjects--the heavy mounted troopers of Thrace, the light

African cavalry, the excellent light infantry of the nimble Ligurians,

the slingers from the Baleares--were employed in ever-increasing numbers

even beyond their own provinces for the Roman armies; and at the same

time, while there was a want of qualified burgess-recruits, the non-

qualified poorer burgesses pressed forward unbidden to enter the army;

in fact, from the mass of the civic rabble without work or averse

to it, and from the considerable advantages which the Roman war-service

yielded, the enlistment of volunteers could not be difficult. It was

therefore simply a necessary consequence of the political and social

changes in the state, that its military arrangements should exhibit

a transition from the system of the burgess-levy to the system of

contingents and enlisting; that the cavalry and light troops should

be essentially formed out of the contingents of the subjects--in the

Cimbrian campaign, for instance, contingents were summoned from as far

as Bithynia; and that in the case of the infantry of the line, while

the former arrangement of obligation to service was not abolished,

every free-born burgess should at the same time be permitted voluntarily

to enter the army as was first done by Marius in 647.

To this was added the reducing the infantry of the line to a level,

which is likewise to be referred to Marius. The Roman method of

aristocratic classification had hitherto prevailed also within the

legion. Each of the four divisions of the -velites-, the -hastati-,

the -principes-, and the -triarii---or, as we may say, the vanguard,

the first, second, and third line--had hitherto possessed its special

qualification for service, as respected property or age, and in great

part also its distinctive equipment; each had its definite place once

for all assigned in the order of battle; each had its definite military

rank and its own standard. All these distinctions were now superseded.

Any one admitted as a legionary at all needed no further qualification

in order to serve in any division; the discretion of the officers alone

decided as to his place. All distinctions of armour were set aside, and

consequently all recruits were uniformly trained. Connected, doubtless,

with this change were the various improvements which Marius introduced

in the armament, the carrying of the baggage, and similar matters, and

which furnish an honourable evidence of his insight into the practical

details of the business of war and of his care for his soldiers; and

more especially the new method of drill devised by Publius Rutilius

Rufus (consul 649) the comrade of Marius in the African war. It is a

significant fact, that this method considerably increased the military

culture of the individual soldier, and was essentially based upon the

training of the future gladiators which was usual in the fighting-

schools of the time. The arrangement of the legion became totally

different. The thirty companies (-manipuli-) of heavy infantry, which--

each in two sections (-centuriae-) composed respectively of 60 men in

the first two, and of 30 men in the third, division--had hitherto formed

the tactical unit, were replaced by 10 cohorts (-cohortes-) each with

its own standard and each of 6, or often only of 5, sections of 100

men apiece; so that, although at the same time 1200 men were saved by

the suppression of the light infantry of the legion, yet the total

numbers of the legion were raised from 4200 to from 5000 to 6000 men.

The custom of fighting in three divisions was retained, but, while

previously each division had formed a distinct corps, it was in future

left to the general to distribute the cohorts, of which he had the

disposal, in the three lines as he thought best. Military rank was

determined solely by the numerical order of the soldiers and of the

divisions. The four standards of the several parts of the legion--the

wolf, the ox with a man's head, the horse, the boar--which had hitherto

probably been carried before the cavalry and the three divisions of

heavy infantry, disappeared; there came instead the ensigns of the new

cohorts, and the new standard which Marius gave to the legion as a

whole--the silver eagle. While within the legion every trace of the

previous civic and aristocratic classification thus disappeared, and the

only distinctions henceforth occurring among the legionaries were purely

military, accidental circumstances had some decades earlier given

rise to a privileged division of the army alongside of the legions--

the bodyguard of the general. Hitherto selected men from the allied

contingents had formed the personal escort of the general; the

employment of Roman legionaries, or even men voluntarily offering

themselves, for personal service with him was at variance with the

stern disciplinary obligations of the mighty commonwealth. But when the

Numantine war had reared an army demoralized beyond parallel, and Scipio

Aemilianus, who was called to check the wild disorder, had not been able

to prevail on the government to call entirely new troops under arms, he

was at least allowed to form, in addition to a number of men whom the

dependent kings and free cities outside of the Roman bounds placed at

his disposal, a personal escort of 500 men composed of volunteer Roman

burgesses (p. 230). This cohort drawn partly from the better classes,

partly from the humbler personal clients of the general, and hence

called sometimes that of the friends, sometimes that of the headquarters

(-praetoriani-), had the duty of serving in the latter (-praetorium-)

in return for which it was exempt from camp and entrenching service

and enjoyed higher pay and greater repute.

Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform

This complete revolution in the constitution of the Roman army seems

certainly in substance to have originated from purely military motives;

and on the whole to have been not so much the work of an individual,

least of all of a man of calculating ambition, as the remodelling which

the force of circumstances enjoined in arrangements which had become

untenable. It is probable that the introduction of the system of inland

enlistment by Marius saved the state in a military point of view from

destruction, just as several centuries afterwards Arbogast and Stilicho

prolonged its existence for a time by the introduction of foreign

enlistment. Nevertheless, it involved a complete--although not yet

developed--political revolution. The republican constitution was

essentially based on the view that the citizen was at the same time

a soldier, and that the soldier was above all a citizen; there was an

end of it, so soon as a soldier-class was formed. To this issue the

new system of drill, with its routine borrowed from the professional

gladiator, could not but lead; the military service became gradually

a profession. Far more rapid was the effect of the admission--though

but limited--of the proletariate to participate in military service;

especially in connection with the primitive maxims, which conceded to

the general an arbitrary right of rewarding his soldiers compatible only

with very solid republican institutions, and gave to the capable and

successful soldier a sort of title to demand from the general a share

of the moveable spoil and from the stale a portion of the soil that had

been won. While the burgess or farmer called out under the levy saw in

military service nothing but a burden to be undertaken for the public

good, and in the gains of war nothing but a slight compensation for the

far more considerable loss brought upon him by serving, it was otherwise

with the enlisted proletarian. Not only was he for the moment solely

dependent upon his pay, but, as there was no Hotel des Invalides nor

even a poorhouse to receive him after his discharge, for the future

also he could not but wish to abide by his standard, and not to leave

it otherwise than with the establishment of his civic status, His only

home was the camp, his only science war, his only hope the general--what

this implied, is clear. When Marius after the engagement on the Raudine

plain unconstitutionally gave Roman citizenship on the very field

of battle to two cohorts of Italian allies en masse for their brave

conduct, he justified himself afterwards by saying that amidst the noise

of battle he had not been able to distinguish the voice of the laws.

If once in more important questions the interest of the army and that

of the general should concur to produce unconstitutional demands,

who could be security that then other laws also would not cease to

be heard amid the clashing of swords? They had now the standing army,

the soldier-class, the bodyguard; as in the civil constitution, so also

in the military, all the pillars of the future monarchy were already

in existence: the monarch alone was wanting. When the twelve eagles

circled round the Palatine hill, they ushered in the reign of the Kings;

the new eagle which Gaius Marius bestowed on the legions proclaimed

the near advent of the Emperors.

Political Projects of Marius

There is hardly any doubt that Marius entered into the brilliant

prospects which his military and political position opened up to him.

It was a sad and troubled time. Men had peace, but they were not glad

of having it; the state of things was not now such as it had formerly

been after the first mighty onset of the men of the north on Rome, when,

so soon as the crisis was over, all energies were roused anew in the

fresh consciousness of recovered health, and had by their vigorous

development rapidly and amply made up for what was lost. Every one felt

that, though able generals might still once and again avert immediate

destruction, the commonwealth was only the more surely on the way to

ruin under the government of the restored oligarchy; but every one felt

also that the time was past when in such cases the burgess-body came to

its own help, and that there was no amendment so long as the place of

Gaius Gracchus remained empty. How deeply the multitude felt the blank

that was left after the disappearance of those two illustrious youths

who had opened the gates to revolution, and how childishly in fact it

grasped at any shadow of a substitute, was shown by the case of the

pretended son of Tiberius Gracchus, who, although the very sister of

the two Gracchi charged him with fraud in the open Forum, was yet chosen

by the people in 655 as tribune solely on account of his usurped name.

In the same spirit the multitude exulted in the presence of Gaius

Marius; how should it not? He, if any one, seemed the right man--he

was at any rate the first general and the most popular name of his time,

confessedly brave and upright, and recommended as regenerator of the

state by his very position aloof from the proceedings of party--how

should not the people, how should not he himself, have held that he was

so! Public opinion as decidedly as possible favoured the opposition.

It was a significant indication of this, that the proposal to have the

vacant stalls in the chief priestly colleges filled up by the burgesses

instead of the colleges themselves--which the government had frustrated

in the comitia in 609 by the suggestion of religious scruples--was

carried in 650 by Gnaeus Domitius without the senate having been able

even to venture a serious resistance. On the whole it seemed as if

nothing was wanted but a chief, who should give to the opposition a firm

rallying point and a practical aim; and this was now found in Marius.

For the execution of his task two methods of operation offered

themselves; Marius might attempt to overthrow the oligarchy either as

-imperator- at the head of the army, or in the mode prescribed by the

constitution for constitutional changes: his own past career pointed to

the former course, the precedent of Gracchus to the latter. It is easy

to understand why he did not adopt the former plan, perhaps did not even

think of the possibility of adopting it The senate was or seemed so

powerless and helpless, so hated and despised, that Marius conceived

himself scarcely to need any other support in opposing it than his

immense popularity, but hoped in case of necessity to find such a

support, notwithstanding the dissolution of the army, in the soldiers

discharged and waiting for their rewards. It is probable that Marius,

looking to Gracchus' easy and apparently almost complete victory and to

his own resources far surpassing those of Gracchus, deemed the overthrow

of a constitution four hundred years old, and intimately bound up with

the manifold habits and interests of the body-politic arranged in a

complicated hierarchy, a far easier task than it was. But any one, who

looked more deeply into the difficulties of the enterprise than Marius

probably did, might reflect that the army, although in the course of

transition from a militia to a body of mercenaries, was still during

this state of transition by no means adapted for the blind instrument of

a coup d'etat, and that an attempt to set aside the resisting elements

by military means would have probably augmented the power of resistance

in his antagonists. To mix up the organized armed force in the struggle

could not but appear at the first glance superfluous and at the second

hazardous; they were just at the beginning of the crisis, and the

antagonistic elements were still far from having reached their last,

shortest, and simplest expression.

The Popular Party

Marius therefore discharged the army after his triumph in accordance

with the existing regulation, and entered on the course traced out by

Gaius Gracchus for procuring to himself supremacy in the state by

undertaking its constitutional magistracies. In this enterprise he

found himself dependent for support on what was called the popular

party, and sought his allies in its leaders for the time being all

the more, that the victorious general by no means possessed the gifts

and experiences requisite for the command of the streets. Thus the

democratic party after long insignificance suddenly regained political

importance. It had, in the long interval from Gaius Gracchus to Marius,

materially deteriorated. Perhaps the dissatisfaction with the

senatorial government was not now less than it was then; but several

of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful

adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there

had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation

tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented

were by no means willing to follow it. In fact, amidst the chase and

turmoil of twenty years there had been rubbed off and worn away very

much of the fresh enthusiasm, the steadfast faith, the moral purity

of effort, which mark the early stages of revolutions. But, if the

democratic party was no longer what it had been under Gaius Gracchus,

the leaders of the intervening period were now as far beneath their

party as Gaius Gracchus had been exalted above it. This was implied

in the nature of the case. Until there should emerge a man having

the boldness like Gaius Gracchus to grasp at the supremacy of the state,

the leaders could only be stopgaps: either political novices, who gave

furious vent to their youthful love of opposition and then, when duly

accredited as fiery declaimers and favourite speakers, effected with

more or less dexterity their retreat to the camp of the government

party; or people who had nothing to lose in respect of property and

influence, and usually not even anything to gain in respect of honour,

and who made it their business to obstruct and annoy the government

from personal exasperation or even from the mere pleasure of creating a

noise. To the former sort belonged, for instance, Gaius Memmius(5) and

the well-known orator Lucius Crassus, who turned the oratorical laurels

which they had won in the ranks of the opposition to account in the

sequel as zealous partisans of the government.

Glaucia

Saturninus

But the most notable leaders of the popular party about this time were

men of the second sort. Such were Gaius Servilius Glaucia, called by

Cicero the Roman Hyperbolus, a vulgar fellow of the lowest origin and of

the most shameless street-eloquence, but effective and even dreaded by

reason of his pungent wit; and his better and abler associate, Lucius

Appuleius Saturninus, who even according to the accounts of his enemies

was a fiery and impressive speaker, and was at least not guided by

motives of vulgar selfishness. When he was quaestor, the charge of the

importation of corn, which had fallen to him in the usual way, had been

withdrawn from him by decree of the senate, not so much perhaps on

account of maladministration, as in order to confer this--just at that

time popular--office on one of the heads of the government party, Marcus

Scaurus, rather than upon an unknown young man belonging to none of

the ruling families. This mortification had driven the aspiring and

sensitive man into the ranks of the opposition; and as tribune of

the people in 651 he repaid what he had received with interest.

One scandalous affair had at that time followed hard upon another.

He had spoken in the open market of the briberies practised in Rome

by the envoys of king Mithradates--these revelations, compromising in

the highest degree the senate, had wellnigh cost the bold tribune his

life. He had excited a tumult against the conqueror of Numidia, Quintus

Metellus, when he was a candidate for the censorship in 652, and kept

him besieged in the Capitol till the equites liberated him not without

bloodshed; the retaliatory measure of the censor Metellus--the expulsion

with infamy of Saturninus and of Glaucia from the senate on occasion of

the revision of the senatorial roll--had only miscarried through the

remissness of the colleague assigned to Metellus. Saturninus mainly had

carried that exceptional commission against Caepio and his associates(6)

in spite of the most vehement resistance by the government party; and in

opposition to the same he had carried the keenly-contested re-election

of Marius as consul for 652. Saturninus was decidedly the most

energetic enemy of the senate and the most active and eloquent leader

of the popular party since Gaius Gracchus; but he was also violent

and unscrupulous beyond any of his predecessors, always ready to

descend into the street and to refute his antagonist with blows

instead of words.

Such were the two leaders of the so-called popular party, who now made

common cause with the victorious general. It was natural that they

should do so; their interests and aims coincided, and even in the

earlier candidatures of Marius Saturninus at least had most decidedly

and most effectively taken his side. It was agreed between them that

for 654 Marius should become a candidate for a sixth consulship,

Saturninus for a second tribunate, Glaucia for the praetorship, in order

that, possessed of these offices, they might carry out the intended

revolution in the state. The senate acquiesced in the nomination of

the less dangerous Glaucia, but did what it could to hinder the election

of Marius and Saturninus, or at least to associate with the former a

determined antagonist in the person of Quintus Metellus as his colleague

in the consulship. All appliances, lawful and unlawful, were put in

motion by both parties; but the senate was not successful in arresting

the dangerous conspiracy in the bud. Marius did not disdain in person

to solicit votes and, it was said, even to purchase them; in fact, at

the tribunician elections when nine men from the list of the government

party were proclaimed, and the tenth place seemed already secured for a

respectable man of the same complexion Quintus Nunnius, the latter was

set upon and slain by a savage band, which is said to have been mainly

composed of discharged soldiers of Marius. Thus the conspirators gained

their object, although by the most violent means. Marius was chosen as

consul, Glaucia as praetor, Saturninus as tribune of the people for 654;

the second consular place was obtained not by Quintus Metellus, but by

an insignificant man, Lucius Valerius Flaccus: the confederates might

proceed to put into execution the further schemes which they

contemplated and to complete the work broken off in 633.

The Appuleian Laws

Let us recall the objects which Gaius Gracchus pursued, and the means

by which he pursued them. His object was to break down the oligarchy

within and without. He aimed, on the one hand, to restore the power of

the magistrates, which had become completely dependent on the senate, to

its original sovereign rights, and to re-convert the senatorial assembly

from a governing into a deliberative board; and, on the other hand, to

put an end to the aristocratic division of the state into the three

classes of the ruling burgesses, the Italian allies, and the subjects,

by the gradual equalization of those distinctions which were

incompatible with a government not oligarchical. These ideas the three

confederates revived in the colonial laws, which Saturninus as tribune

of the people had partly introduced already (651), partly now introduced

(654).(7) As early as the former year the interrupted distribution of

the Carthaginian territory had been resumed primarily for the benefit of

the soldiers of Marius--not the burgesses only but, as it would seem,

also the Italian allies--and each of these veterans had been promised an

allotment of 100 -jugera-, or about five times the size of an ordinary

Italian farm, in the province of Africa. Now not only was the

provincial land already available claimed in its widest extent for

the Romano-Italian emigration, but also all the land of the still

independent Celtic tribes beyond the Alps, by virtue of the legal

fiction that through the conquest of the Cimbri all the territory

occupied by these had been acquired de jure by the Romans. Gaius Marius

was called to conduct the assignations of land and the farther measures

that might appear necessary in this behalf; and the temple-treasures of

Tolosa, which had been embezzled but were refunded or had still to be

refunded by the guilty aristocrats, were destined for the outfit of the

new receivers of land. This law therefore not only revived the plans of

conquest beyond the Alps and the projects of Transalpine and transmarine

colonization, which Gaius Gracchus and Flaccus had sketched, on the most

extensive scale; but, by admitting the Italians along with the Romans

to emigration and yet undoubtedly prescribing the erection of all the

new communities as burgess-colonies, it formed a first step towards

satisfying the claims--to which it was so difficult to give effect, and

which yet could not be in the long run refused--of the Italians to be

placed on an equality with the Romans. First of all, however, if the

law passed and Marius was called to the independent carrying out of

these immense schemes of conquest and assignation, he would become

practically--until those plans should be realized or rather, considering

their indefinite and unlimited character, for his lifetime--monarch of

Rome; with which view it may be presumed that Marius intended to have

his consulship annually renewed, like the tribunate of Gracchus. But,

amidst the agreement of the political positions marked out for the

younger Gracchus and for Marius in all other essential particulars,

there was yet a very material distinction between the land-assigning

tribune and the land-assigning consul in the fact, that the former was

to occupy a purely civil position, the latter a military position as

well; a distinction, which partly but by no means solely arose out of

the personal circumstances under which the two men had risen to the head

of the state. While such was the nature of the aim which Marius and his

comrades had proposed to themselves, the next question related to the

means by which they purposed to break down the resistance--which might

be anticipated to be obstinate--of the government party. Gaius Gracchus

had fought his battles with the aid of the capitalist class and the

proletariate. His successors did not neglect to make advances likewise

to these. The equites were not only left in possession of the

tribunals, but their power as jurymen was considerably increased, partly

by a stricter ordinance regarding the standing commission--especially

important to the merchants--as to extortions on the part of the public

magistrates in the provinces, which Glaucia carried probably in this

year, partly by the special tribunal, appointed doubtless as early as

651 on the proposal of Saturninus, respecting the embezzlements and

other official malversations that had occurred during the Cimbrian

movement in Gaul. For the benefit, moreover, of the proletariate of

the capital the sum below cost price, which hitherto had to be paid on

occasion of the distributions of grain for the -modius-, was lowered

from 6 1/3 -asses- to a mere nominal charge of 5/6 of an -as-.

But although they did not despise the alliance with the equites and

the proletariate of the capital, the real power by which the confederates

enforced their measures lay not in these, but in the discharged soldiers

of the Marian army, who for that very reason had been provided for in

the colonial laws themselves after so extravagant a fashion. In this

also was evinced the predominating military character, which forms

the chief distinction between this attempt at revolution and that

which preceded it.

Violent Proceedings in the Voting