The Jugurthine war ended in the year 106 B.C. At the same Arpinum which
had produced Marius another actor in the approaching drama was in that
year ushered into the world, Marcus Tullius Cicero. The Ciceros had
made their names, and perhaps their fortunes, by their skill in raising
_cicer_, or vetches. The present representative of the family was a
country gentleman in good circumstances given to literature, residing
habitually at his estate on the Liris and paying occasional visits to
Rome. In that household was born Rome's most eloquent master of the art
of using words, who was to carry that art as far, and to do as much
with it, as any man who has ever appeared on the world's stage.
Rome, however, was for the present in the face of enemies who had to be
encountered with more material weapons. Marius had formed an army
barely in time to save Italy from being totally overwhelmed. A vast
migratory wave of population had been set in motion behind the Rhine
and the Danube. The German forests were uncultivated. The hunting and
pasture grounds were too strait for the numbers crowded into them, and
two enormous hordes were rolling westward and southward in search of
some new abiding-place. The Teutons came from the Baltic down across
the Rhine into Luxemburg. The Cimbri crossed the Danube near its
sources into Illyria. Both Teutons and Cimbri were Germans, and both
were making for Gaul by different routes. The Celts of Gaul had had
their day. In past generations they had held the German invaders at
bay, and had even followed them into their own territories. But they
had split among themselves. They no longer offered a common front to
the enemy. They were ceasing to be able to maintain their own
independence, and the question of the future was whether Gaul was to be
the prey of Germany or to be a province of Rome.
Events appeared already to have decided. The invasion of the Teutons
and the Cimbri was like the pouring in of two great rivers. Each
division consisted of hundreds of thousands. They travelled with their
wives and children, their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians and
with the modern South African Dutch, being at once their conveyance and
their home. Gray-haired priestesses tramped along among them,
barefooted, in white linen dresses, the knife at their girdle; northern
Iphigenias, sacrificing prisoners as they were taken to the gods of
Valhalla. On they swept, eating up the country, and the people flying
before them. In 113 B.C. the skirts of the Cimbri had encountered a
small Roman force near Trieste, and destroyed it. Four years later
another attempt was made to stop them, but the Roman army was beaten
and its camp taken. The Cimbrian host did not, however, turn at that
time upon Italy. Their aim was the south of France. They made their way
through the Alps into Switzerland, where the Helvetii joined them, and
the united mass rolled over the Jura and down the bank of the Rhone.
Roused at last into exertion, the Senate sent into Gaul the largest
force which the Romans had ever brought into the field. They met the
Cimbri at Orange, and were simply annihilated. Eighty thousand Romans
and forty thousand camp-followers were said to have fallen. The numbers
in such cases are generally exaggerated, but the extravagance of the
report is a witness to the greatness of the overthrow. The Romans had
received a worse blow than at Cannae. They were brave enough, but they
were commanded by persons whose recommendations for command were birth
or fortune; "preposterous men," as Marius termed them, who had waited
for their appointment to open the military manuals.
Had the Cimbri chosen at this moment to recross the Alps into Italy,
they had only to go and take possession, and Alaric would have been
antedated by five centuries. In great danger it was the Senate's
business to suspend the constitution. The constitution was set aside
now, but it was set aside by the people themselves, not by the Senate.
One man only could save the country, and that man was Marius. His
consulship was over, and custom forbade his re-election. The Senate
might have appointed him dictator, but would not. The people, custom or
no custom, chose him consul a second time--a significant acknowledgment
that the Empire, which had been won by the sword, must be held by the
sword, and that the sword itself must be held by the hand that was best
fitted to use it. Marius first triumphed for his African victory, and,
as an intimation to the Senate that the power for the moment was his
and not theirs, he entered the Curia in his triumphal dress. He then
prepared for the barbarians who, to the alarmed imagination of the
city, were already knocking at its gates. Time was the important
element in the matter. Had the Cimbri come at once after their victory
at Orange, Italy had been theirs. But they did not come. With the
unguided movements of some wild force of nature they swerved away
through Aquitaine to the Pyrenees. They swept across the mountains into
Spain. Thence, turning north, they passed up the Atlantic coast and
round to the Seine, the Gauls flying before them; thence on to the
Rhine, where the vast body of the Teutons joined them and fresh
detachments of the Helvetii. It was as if some vast tide-wave had
surged over the country and rolled through it, searching out the
easiest passages. At length, in two divisions, the invaders moved
definitely toward Italy, the Cimbri following their old tracks by the
eastern Alps toward Aquileia and the Adriatic, the Teutons passing down
through Provence and making for the road along the Mediterranean. Two
years had been consumed in these wanderings, and Marius was by this
time ready for them. The Senate had dropped the reins, and no longer
governed or misgoverned; the popular party, represented by the army,
was supreme. Marius was continued in office, and was a fourth time
consul. He had completed his military reforms, and the army was now a
professional service, with regular pay. Trained corps of engineers were
attached to each legion. The campaigns of the Romans were thenceforward
to be conducted with spade and pickaxe as much as with sword and
javelin, and the soldiers learnt the use of tools as well as arms.
Moral discipline was not forgotten. The foulest of human vices was
growing fashionable in high society in the capital. It was not allowed
to make its way into the army. An officer in one of the legions, a near
relative of Marius, made filthy overtures to one of his men. The man
replied with a thrust of his sword, and Marius publicly thanked and
decorated him.
The effect of the change was like enchantment. The delay of the Germans
made it unnecessary to wait for them in Italy. Leaving Catulus, his
colleague in the consulship, to check the Cimbri in Venetia, Marius
went himself, taking Sylla with him, into the south of France. As the
barbarian host came on, he occupied a fortified camp near Aix. He
allowed the enormous procession to roll past him in their wagons toward
the Alps. Then, following cautiously, he watched his opportunity to
fall on them. The Teutons were brave, but they had no longer mere
legionaries to fight with, but a powerful machine, and the entire mass
of them, men, women, and children, in numbers which however uncertain
were rather those of a nation than an army, were swept out of existence.
The Teutons were destroyed on the 20th of July, 102. In the year
following the same fate overtook their comrades. The Cimbri had forced
the passes through the mountains. They had beaten the unscientific
patrician Catulus, and had driven him back on the Po. But Marius came
to his rescue. The Cimbri were cut to pieces near Mantua, in the summer
of 101, and Italy was saved.
The victories of Marius mark a new epoch in Roman history. The legions
were no longer the levy of the citizens in arms, who were themselves
the State for which they fought. The legionaries were citizens still.
They had votes, and they used them; but they were professional soldiers
with the modes of thought which belong to soldiers, and beside the
power of the hustings was now the power of the sword. The constitution
remained to appearance intact, and means were devised sufficient to
encounter, it might be supposed, the new danger. Standing armies were
prohibited in Italy. Victorious generals returning from campaigns
abroad were required to disband their legions on entering the sacred
soil. But the materials of these legions remained a distinct order from
the rest of the population, capable of instant combination, and in
combination irresistible save by opposing combinations of the same
kind. The Senate might continue to debate, the Comitia might elect the
annual magistrates. The established institutions preserved the form and
something of the reality of power in a people governed so much by habit
as the Romans. There is a long twilight between the time when a god is
first suspected to be an idol and his final overthrow. But the
aristocracy had made the first inroad on the constitution by
interfering at the elections with their armed followers and killing
their antagonists. The example once set could not fail to be repeated,
and the rule of an organized force was becoming the only possible
protection against the rule of mobs, patrician or plebeian.
The danger from the Germans was no sooner gone than political anarchy
broke loose again. Marius, the man of the people, was the saviour of
his country. He was made consul a fifth time and a sixth. The party
which had given him his command shared, of course, in his pre-eminence.
The elections could be no longer interfered with or the voters
intimidated. The public offices were filled with the most violent
agitators, who believed that the time had come to revenge the Gracchi
and carry out the democratic revolution, to establish the ideal
Republic and the direct rule of the citizen assembly. This, too, was a
chimera. If the Roman Senate could not govern, far less could the Roman
mob govern. Marius stood aside and let the voices rage. He could not be
expected to support a system which had brought the country so near to
ruin. He had no belief in the visions of the demagogues, but the time
was not ripe to make an end of it all. Had he tried, the army would not
have gone with him, so he sat still till faction had done its work. The
popular heroes of the hour were the tribune Saturninus and the praetor
Glaucia. They carried corn laws and land laws--whatever laws they
pleased to propose. The administration remaining with the Senate, they
carried a vote that every senator should take an oath to execute their
laws under penalty of fine and expulsion. Marius did not like it, and
even opposed it, but let it pass at last. The senators, cowed and
humiliated, consented to take the oath, all but one, Marius's old
friend and commander in Africa, Caecilius Metellus. No stain had ever
rested on the name of Metellus. He had accepted no bribes. He had half
beaten Jugurtha, for Marius to finish; and Marius himself stood in a
semi-feudal relation to him. It was unlucky for the democrats that they
had found so honorable an opponent. Metellus persisted in refusal.
Saturninus sent a guard to the senate-house, dragged him out, and
expelled him from the city. Aristocrats and their partisans were
hustled and killed in the street. The patricians had spilt the first
blood in the massacre in 121: now it was the turn of the mob.
Marius was an indifferent politician. He perceived as well as any one
that violence must not go on, but he hesitated to put it down. He knew
that the aristocracy feared and hated him. Between them and the
people's consul no alliance was possible. He did not care to alienate
his friends, and there may have been other difficulties which we do not
know in his way. The army itself was perhaps divided. On the popular
side there were two parties: a moderate one, represented by Memmius,
who, as tribune, had impeached the senators for the Jugurthine
infamies; the other, the advanced radicals, led by Glaucia and
Saturninus. Memmius and Glaucia were both candidates for the
consulship; and as Memmius was likely to succeed, he was murdered.
Revolutions proceed like the acts of a drama, and each act is divided
into scenes which follow one another with singular uniformity. Ruling
powers make themselves hated by tyranny and incapacity. An opposition
is formed against them, composed of all sorts, lovers of order and
lovers of disorder, reasonable men and fanatics, business-like men and
men of theory. The opposition succeeds; the government is overthrown;
the victors divide into a moderate party and an advanced party. The
advanced party go to the front, till they discredit themselves with
crime or folly. The wheel has then gone round, and the reaction sets
in. The murder of Memmius alienated fatally the respectable citizens.
Saturninus and Glaucia were declared public enemies. They seized the
Capitol, and blockaded it. Patrician Rome turned out and besieged them,
and Marius had to interfere. The demagogues and their friends
surrendered, and were confined in the Curia Hostilia till they could be
tried. The noble lords could not allow such detested enemies the chance
of an acquittal. To them a radical was a foe of mankind, to be hunted
down like a wolf, when a chance was offered to destroy him. By the law
of Caius Gracchus no citizen could be put to death without a trial. The
persons of Saturninus and Glaucia were doubly sacred, for one was
tribune and the other praetor. But the patricians were satisfied that
they deserved to be executed, and in such a frame of mind it seemed but
virtue to execute them. They tore off the roof of the senate house, and
pelted the miserable wretches to death with stones and tiles.