It was Rome herself that soon crossed that barrier of the Alps which she
had pronounced fixed by nature and insurmountable. Scarcely was she
mistress of Cisalpine Gaul when she entered upon a quarrel with the
tribes which occupied the mountain-passes. With an unsettled frontier,
and between neighbors of whom one is ambitious and the other barbarian,
pretexts and even causes are never wanting. It is likely that the Gallic
mountaineers were not careful to abstain, they and their flocks, from
descending upon the territory that had become Roman. The Romans, in
turn, penetrated into the hamlets, carried off flocks and people, and
sold them in the public markets at Cremona, at Placentia, and in all
their colonies.
The Gauls of the Alps demanded succor of the Transalpine Gauls, applying
to a powerful chieftain, named Cincibil, whose influence extended
throughout the mountains. But the terror of the Roman name had reached
across. Cincibil sent to Rome a deputation, with his brother at their
head, to set forth the grievances of the mountaineers, and especially to
complain of the consul Cassius, who had carried off and sold several
thousands of Gauls. Without making any concession, the Senate was
gracious. Cassius was away; he must be waited for. Meanwhile the Gauls
were well treated; Cincibil and his brother received as presents two
golden collars, five silver vases, two horses fully caparisoned, and
Roman dresses for all their suite. Still nothing was done.
Another, a greater and more decisive opportunity offered itself.
Marseilles was an ally of the Romans. As the rival of Carthage, and with
the Gauls forever at her gates, she had need of Rome by sea and land.
She pretended, also, to the most eminent and intimate friendship with
Rome. Her founder, the Phocean Euxenes, had gone to Rome, it was said,
and concluded a treaty with Tarquinius Priscus. She had gone into
mourning when Rome was burned by the Gauls; she had ordered a public levy
to aid towards the ransom of the Capitol. Rome did not dispute these
claims to remembrance. The friendship of Marseilles was of great use to
her. In the whole course of her struggle with Carthage, and but lately,
at the passage of Hannibal through Gaul, Rome had met with the best of
treatment there. She granted the Massilians a place amongst her senators
at the festivals of the Republic, and exemption from all duty in her
ports. Towards the middle of the second century B.C. Marseilles was at
war with certain Gallic tribes, her neighbors, whose territory she
coveted. Two of her colonies, Nice and Antibes, were threatened. She
called on Rome for help. A Roman deputation went to decide the quarrel;
but the Gauls refused to obey its summons, and treated it with insolence.
The deputation returned with an army, succeeded in beating the refractory
tribes, and gave their land to the Massilians. The same thing occurred
repeatedly with the same result. Within the space of thirty years nearly
all the tribes between the Rhone and the Var, in the country which was
afterwards Provence, were subdued and driven back amongst the mountains,
with notice not to approach within a mile of the coast in general, and a
mile and a half of the places of disembarkation. But the Romans did not
stop there. They did not mean to conquer for Marseilles alone. In the
year 123 B.C., at some leagues to the north of the Greek city, near a
little river, then called the Coenus and nowadays the Arc, the consul
C. Sextius Calvinus had noticed, during his campaign, an abundance of
thermal springs, agreeably situated amidst wood-covered hills. There he
constructed an enclosure, aqueducts, baths, houses, a town in fact, which
he called after himself, Aquae Sextice, the modern Aix, the first Roman
establishment in Transalpine Gaul. As in the case of Cisalpine Gaul,
with Roman colonies came Roman intrigue and dissensions got up and
fomented amongst the Gauls. And herein Marseilles was a powerful
seconder; for she kept up communications with all the neighboring tribes,
and fanned the spirit of faction. After his victories, the consul
C. Sextius, seated at his tribunal, was selling his prisoners by auction,
when one of them came up to him and said, “I have always liked and served
the Romans; and for that reason I have often incurred outrage and danger
at the hands of my countrymen.” The consul had him set free,--him and
his family,--and even gave him leave to point out amongst the captives
any for whom he would like to procure the same kindness. At his request
nine hundred were released. The man’s name was Crato, a Greek name,
which points to a connection with Marseilles or one of her colonies. The
Gauls, moreover, ran of themselves into the Roman trap. Two of their
confederations, the AEduans, of whom mention has already been made, and
the Allobrogians, who were settled between the Alps, the Isere, and the
Rhone, were at war. A third confederation, the most powerful in Gaul at
this time, the Arvernians, who were rivals of the AEduans, gave their
countenance to the Allobrogians. The AEduans, with whom the Massilians
had commercial dealings, solicited through these latter the assistance of
Rome. A treaty was easily concluded. The AEduans obtained from the
Romans the title of friends and allies; and the Romans received from the
AEduans that of brothers, which amongst the Gauls implied a sacred tie.
The consul Domitius forthwith commanded the Allobrogians to respect the
territory of the allies of Rome. The Allobrogians rose up in arms and
claimed the aid of the Arvernians. But even amongst them, in the very
heart of Gaul, Rome was much dreaded; she was not to be encountered
without hesitation. So Bituitus, King of the Arvernians, was for trying
accommodation. He was a powerful and wealthy chieftain. His father
Luern used to give amongst the mountains magnificent entertainments; he
had a space of twelve square furlongs enclosed, and dispensed wine, mead,
and beer from cisterns made within the enclosure; and all the Arvernians
crowded to his feasts. Bituitus displayed before the Romans his barbaric
splendor. A numerous escort, superbly clad, surrounded his ambassador;
in attendance were packs of enormous hounds; and in front; went a bard,
or poet, who sang, with rotte or harp in hand, the glory of Bituitus and
of the Arvernian people. Disdainfully the consul received and sent back
the embassy. War broke out; the Allobrogians, with the usual confidence
and hastiness of all barbarians, attacked alone, without waiting for the
Arvernians, and were beaten at the confluence of the Rhone and the
Sorgue, a little above Avignon. The next year, 121 B.C., the Arvernians
in their turn descended from the mountains, and crossed the Rhone with
all their tribes, diversely armed and clad, and ranged each about its own
chieftain. In his barbaric vanity, Bituitus marched to war with the same
pomp that he had in vain displayed to obtain peace. He sat upon a car
glittering with silver; he wore a plaid of striking colors; and he
brought in his train a pack of war-hounds. At the sight of the Roman
legions, few in number, iron-clad, in serried ranks that took up little
space, he contemptuously cried, “There is not a meal for my hounds.”
The Arvernians were beaten, as the Allobrogians had been. The hounds of
Bituitus were of little use to him against the elephants which the Romans
had borrowed from Asiatic usage, and which spread consternation amongst
the Gauls. The Roman historians say that the Arvernian army was two
hundred thousand strong, and that one hundred and twenty thousand were
slain; but the figures are absurd, like most of those found in ancient
chronicles. We know nowadays, thanks to modern civilization, which shows
everything in broad daylight, and measures everything with proper
caution, that only the most populous and powerful nations, and that at
great expenditure of trouble and time, can succeed in moving armies of
two hundred thousand men, and that no battle, however murderous it may
be, ever costs one hundred and twenty thousand lives.
Rome treated the Arvernians with consideration; but the Allobrogians lost
their existence as a nation. The Senate declared them subject to the
Roman people; and all the country comprised between the Alps, the Rhone
from its entry into the Lake of Geneva to its mouth, and the
Mediterranean, was made a Roman consular province, which means that every
year a consul must march thither with his army. In the three following
years, indeed, the consuls extended the boundaries of the new province,
on the right bank of the Rhone, to the frontier of the Pyrenees
southward. In the year 115 B.C. a colony of Roman citizens was conducted
to Narbonne, a town even then of importance, in spite of the objections
made by certain senators who were unwilling, say the historians, so to
expose Roman citizens “to the waves of barbarism.” This was the second
colony which went and established itself out of Italy; the first had been
founded on the ruins of Carthage.
Having thus completed their conquest, the Senate, to render possession
safe and sure, decreed the occupation of the passes of the Alps which
opened Gaul to Italy. There was up to that time no communication with
Gaul save along the Mediterranean, by a narrow and difficult path, which
has become in our time the beautiful route called the Corniche. The
mountain tribes defended their independence with desperation; when that
of the Stumians, who occupied the pass of the maritime Alps, saw their
inability to hold their own, they cut the throats of their wives and
children, set fire to their houses, and threw themselves into the flames.
But the Senate pursued its course imperturbably. All the chief defiles
of the Alps fell into its hands. The old Phoenician road, restored by
the consul Domitius, bore thenceforth his name (Via Donaitia), and less
than sixty years after Cisalpine Gaul had been reduced to a Roman
province, Rome possessed, in Transalpine Gaul, a second province, whither
she sent her armies, and where she established her citizens without
obstruction. But Providence seldom allows men, even in the midst of
their successes, to forget for long how precarious they are; and when He
is pleased to remind them, it is not by words, as the Persians reminded
their king, but by fearful events that He gives His warnings. At the
very moment when Rome believed herself set free from Gallic invasions,
and on the point of avenging herself by a course of conquest, a new
invasion, more extensive and more barbarous, came bursting upon Rome and
upon Gaul at the same time, and plunged them together in the same
troubles and the same perils.
In the year 113 B.C. there appeared to the north of the Adriatic, on the
right bank of the Danube, an immense multitude of barbarians, ravaging
Noricum and threatening Italy. Two nations predominated; the Kymrians or
Cimbrians, and the Teutons, the national name of the Germans. They came
from afar, northward, from the Cimbrian peninsula, nowadays Jutland, and
from the countries bordering on the Baltic which nowadays form the
duchies of Holstein and Schleswig. A violent shock of earthquake, a
terrible inundation, had driven them, they said, from their homes; and
those countries do indeed show traces of such events. And Cimbrians and
Teutons had been for some time roaming over Germany.
The consul Papirius Carbo, despatched in all haste to defend the
frontier, bade them, in the name of the Roman people, to withdraw. The
barbarians modestly replied that they had no intention of settling in
Noricum, and if the Romans had rights over the country, they would carry
their arms elsewhere. The consul, who had found haughtiness succeed,
thought he might also employ perfidy against the barbarians. He offered
guides to conduct them out of Noricum; and the guides misled them. The
consul attacked them unexpectedly during the night, and was beaten.
However, the barbarians, still fearful, did not venture into Italy.
They roamed for three years along the Danube, as far as the mountains of
Macedonia and Thrace. Then retracing their steps, and marching eastward,
they inundated the valleys of the Helvetic Alps, now Switzerland, having
their numbers swelled by other tribes, Gallic or German, who preferred
joining in pillage to undergoing it. The Ambrons, among others, a Gallic
peoplet that had taken refuge in Helvetia after the expulsion of the
Umbrians by the Etruscans from Italy, joined the Cimbrians and Teutons;
and in the year 110 B.C. all together entered Gaul, at first by way of
Belgica, and then, continuing their wanderings and ravages in central
Gaul, they at last reached the Rhone, on the frontiers of the Roman
province.
There the name of Rome again arrested their progress; they applied to her
anew for lands, with the offer of their services. “Rome,” answered
M. Silanus, who commanded in the province, “has neither lands to give you
nor services to accept from you.” He attacked them in their camp, and
was beaten.
Three consuls, L. Cassius, C. Servilius Omepio, and Cu. Manlius,
successively experienced the same fate. With the barbarians victory bred
presumption. Their chieftains met and deliberated whether they should
not forthwith cross into Italy, to exterminate or enslave the Romans,
and make Kymrian spoken at Rome. Scaurus, a prisoner, was in the tent,
loaded with fetters, during the deliberation. He was questioned about
the resources of his country. “Cross not the Alps,” said he; “go not
into Italy: the Romans are invincible.” In a transport of fury the
chieftain of the Kymrians, Boiorix by name, fell upon the Roman, and ran
him through. Howbeit the advice of Scaurus was followed. The barbarians
did not as yet dare to decide upon invading Italy; but they freely
scoured the Roman province, meeting here with repulse, and there with
re-enforcement from the peoplets who formed the inhabitants. The
Tectosagian Voles, Hymrian in origin and maltreated by Rome, joined them.
Then, on a sudden, whilst the Teutons and Ambrons remained in Gaul, the
Kymrians passed over to Spain without apparent motive, and probably as an
overswollen torrent divides, and disperses its waters in all directions.
The commotion at Rome was extreme; never had so many or such wild
barbarians threatened the Republic; never had so many or such large Roman
armies been beaten in succession. There was but one man, it was said,
who could avert the danger, and give Rome the ascendency. It was Marius,
low-born, but already illustrious; esteemed by the Senate for his genius
as a commander and for his victories; swaying at his will the people, who
saw in him one of themselves, and admired without envying him; beloved
and feared by the army for his bravery, his rigorous discipline, and his
readiness to share their toils and dangers; stern and rugged; without
education, eloquence, or riches; ill-suited for shining in public
assemblies, but resolute and dexterous in action; verily made to dominate
the vigorous but unrefined multitude, whether in camp or city, partly by
participating their feelings, partly by giving them in his own person a
specimen of the deserts and sometimes of the virtues which they esteem
but do not possess.
He was consul in Africa, where he was putting an end to the war with
Jugurtha. He was elected a second time consul, without interval and in
his absence, contrary to all the laws of the Republic. Scarcely had he
returned, when, on descending from the Capitol, where he had just
received a triumph for having conquered and captured Jugurtha, he set out
for Gaul. On his arrival, instead of proceeding, as his predecessors,
to attack the barbarians at once, he confined himself to organizing and
inuring his troops, subjecting them to frequent marches, all kinds of
military exercises, and long and hard labor. To insure supplies he made
them dig, towards the mouths of the Rhone, a large canal which formed a
junction with the river a little above Arles, and which, at its entrance
into the sea, offered good harborage for vessels. This canal, which
existed for a long while under the name of Rossae Mariance (the dikes of
Marius), is filled up nowadays; but at its southern extremity the village
of Foz still preserves a remembrance of it. Trained in this severe
school, the soldiers acquired such a reputation for sobriety and
laborious assiduity, that they were proverbially called Marius’s mules.
He was as careful for their moral state as for their physical fitness,
and labored to exalt their imaginations as well as to harden their
bodies. In that camp, and amidst those toils in which he kept them
strictly engaged, frequent sacrifices, and scrupulous care in consulting
the oracles, kept superstition at a white heat. A Syrian prophetess,
named Martha, who had been sent to Marius by his wife Julia, the aunt of
Julius Caesar, was ever with him, and accompanied him at the sacred
ceremonies and on the march, being treated with the greatest respect, and
having vast influence over the minds of the soldiers.
Two years rolled on in this fashion; and yet Marius would not move. The
increasing devastation of the country, fire, and famine, the despair and
complaints of the inhabitants, did not shake his resolution. Nor was the
confidence he inspired both in the camp and at Rome a whit shaken: he was
twice re-elected consul, once while he was still absent, and once during
a visit he paid to Rome to give directions to his party in person.
It was at Rome, in the year 102 B.C., that he learned how the Kymrians,
weary of Spain, had recrossed the Pyrenees, rejoined their old comrades,
and had at last resolved, in concert, to invade Italy; the Kymrians from
the north, by way of Helvetia and Noricum, the Teutons and Ambrons from
the south, by way of the maritime Alps. They were to form a junction on
the banks of the Po, and thence march together on Rome. At this news
Marius returned forthwith to Gaul, and, without troubling himself about
the Kymrians, who had really put themselves in motion towards the
north-east, he placed his camp so as to cover at one and the same time
the two Roman roads which crossed at Arles, and by one of which the
Ambro-Teutons must necessarily pass to enter Italy on the south.
They soon appeared “in immense numbers,” say the historians, “with their
hideous looks and their wild cries,” drawing up their chariots and
planting their tents in front of the Roman camp. They showered upon
Marius and his soldiers continual insult and defiance. The Romans, in
their irritation, would fain have rushed out of their camp, but Marius
restrained them. “It is no question,” said he, with his simple and
convincing common sense, “of gaining triumphs and trophies; it is a
question of averting this storm of war and of saving Italy.” A Teutonic
chieftain came one day up to the very gates of the camp, and challenged
him to fight. Marius had him informed that if he were tired of life he
could go and hang himself. As the barbarian still persisted, Marius sent
him a gladiator.
However, he made his soldiers, in regular succession, mount the ramparts,
to get them familiarized with the cries, looks, arms, and movements of
the barbarians. The most distinguished of his officers, young Sertorius,
who understood and spoke Gallic well, penetrated, in the disguise of a
Gaul, into the camp of the Ambrons, and informed Marius of what was going
on there.
At last the barbarians, in their impatience, having vainly attempted to
storm the Roman camp, struck their own, and put themselves in motion
towards the Alps. For six whole days, it is said, their bands were
defiling beneath the ramparts of the Romans, and crying, “Have you any
message for your wives? We shall soon be with them.”
Marius, too, struck his camp, and followed them. They halted, both of
them, near Aix, on the borders of the Coenus, the barbarians in the
valley, Marius on a hill which commanded it. The ardor of the Romans was
at its height; it was warm weather; there was a want of water on the
hill, and the soldiers murmured. “You are men,” said Marius, pointing to
the river below, “and there is water to be bought with blood.” “Why
don’t you lead us against them at once, then,” said a soldier, “whilst we
still have blood in our veins?” “We must first fortify our camp,”
answered Marius quietly.
The soldiers obeyed: but the hour of battle had come, and well did Marius
know it. It commenced on the brink of the Coenus, between some Ambrons
who were bathing and some Roman slaves gone down to draw water. When the
whole horde of the Ambrons advanced to the battle, shouting their war-cry
of Ambra! Ambra! a body of Gallic auxiliaries in the Roman army, and in
the first rank, heard them with great amazement; for it was their own
name and their own cry; there were tribes of Ambrons in the Alps
subjected to Rome as well as in the Helvetic Alps; and Ambra! Ambra!
resounded on both sides.
The battle lasted two days, the first against the Ambrons, the second
against the Teutons. Both were beaten, in spite of their savage bravery,
and the equal bravery of their women, who defended, with indomitable
obstinacy, the cars with which they had remained almost alone, in charge
of the children and the booty. After the women, it was necessary to
exterminate the hounds who defended their masters’ bodies. Here again
the figures of the historians are absurd, although they differ; the most
extravagant raise the number of barbarians slain to two hundred thousand,
and that of the prisoners to eighty thousand; the most moderate stop at
one hundred thousand. In any case, the carnage was great, for the
battle-field, where all these corpses rested without burial, rotting in
the sun and rain, got the name of Campi Putridi, or Fields of
Putrefaction, a name traceable even nowadays in that of Pourrires, a
neighboring village.
[Illustration: The Women defending the Cars----58]
As to the booty, the Roman army with one voice made a free gift of it to
Marius; but he, remembering, perhaps, what had been lately done by the
barbarians after the defeat of the consuls Manlius and Czepio, determined
to have it all burned in honor of the gods. He had a great sacrifice
prepared. The soldiers, crowned with laurel, were ranged about the pyre;
their general, holding on high a blazing torch, was about to apply the
light with his own hand, when suddenly, on the very spot, whether by
design or accident, came from Rome the news that Marius had just been for
the fifth time elected consul. In the midst of acclamations from his
army, and with a fresh chaplet bound upon his brow, he applied the torch
in person, and completed the sacrifice.
Were we travelling in Provence, in the neighborhood of Aix, we should
encounter, peradventure, some peasant who, whilst pointing out to us the
summit of a lull whereon, in all probability, Marius offered, nineteen
hundred and forty years ago, that glorious sacrifice, would say to us in
his native dialect, “Aqui es lou deloubre do la Vittoria:” “There is the
temple of victory.” There, indeed, was built, not far from a pyramid
erected in honor of Marius, a little temple dedicated to Victory.
Thither, every year, in the month of May, the population used to come and
celebrate a festival and light a bonfire, answered by other bonfires on
the neighboring heights. When Gaul became Christian, neither monument
nor festival perished; a saint took the place of the goddess, and the
temple of Victory became the church of St. Victoire. There are still
ruins of it to this day; the religious procession which succeeded the
pagan festival ceased only at the first outburst of the Revolution; and
the vague memory of a great national event still mingles in popular
tradition with the legends of the saint.
The Ambrons and Teutons beaten, there remained the Kymrians, who,
according to agreement, had repassed the Helvetic Alps and entered Italy
on the north-east, by way of the Adige. Marius marched against them in
July of the following year, 101 B.C. Ignorant of what had occurred in
Gaul, and possessed, as ever, with the desire of a settlement, they again
sent to him a deputation, saying, “Give us lands and towns for us and our
brethren.” “What brethren?” asked Marius. “The Teutons.” The Romans
who were about Marius began to laugh. “Let your brethren be,” said
Marius; “they have land, and will always have it; they received it from
us.” The Kymrians, perceiving the irony of his tone, burst out into
threats, telling Marius that he should suffer for it at their hands
first, and afterwards at those of the Teutons when they arrived. “They
are here,” rejoined Marius; “you must not depart without saluting your
brethren;” and he had Teutobod, King of the Teutons, brought out with
other captive chieftains. The envoys reported the sad news in their own
camp, and three days afterwards, July 30, a great battle took place
between the Kymrians and the Romans in the Raudine Plains, a large tract
near Verceil.
It were unnecessary to dwell on the details of the battle, which
resembled that of Aix; besides, fought as it was in Italy and by none but
Romans, it has but little to do with a history of Gaul. It has been
mentioned only to make known the issue of that famous invasion, of which
Gaul was the principal theatre. For a moment it threatened the very
existence of the Roman Republic. The victories of Marius arrested the
torrent, but did not dry up its source. The great movement which drove
from Asia to Europe, and from eastern to western Europe, masses of roving
populations, followed its course, bringing incessantly upon the Roman
frontiers new comers and new perils. A greater man than Marius, Julius
Caesar in fact, saw that to effectually resist these clouds of barbaric
assailants, the country into which they poured must be conquered and made
Roman. The conquest of Gaul was the accomplishment of that idea, and the
decisive step towards the transformation of the Roman republic into a
Roman empire.