But if there was one thing the Romans had never done, and would never do, it was give up a fight. They certainly did not give back territory they had already won. So even though they seemed to lose every army they sent north, in 106 the Senate dispatched the consul Quintus Servilius Caepio to do something—anything—to salvage the situation. Caepio had long been connected to the Metelli faction through the patronage of the influential optimates Scaurus and Crassus. In most ways Caepio was everything that was wrong with the Senate at the time. He was arrogant, greedy, self-glorifying, and singularly unable to put the Republic’s interests above his own. And at his feet would be laid one of the greatest defeats in the history of the Roman Republic.
Before he left for the north, Caepio took care of some business on the optimates’ behalf. Likely with support from Scaurus, Caepio carried a bill through the Assembly to roll back the power of the Equestrians. Ever since the experience with the Mamilian Commission, the nobles wanted to regain some control over the courts. Caepio’s bill did not return the jury pool exclusively to the Senate but instead split it between senators and Equestrians. Speaking in defense of the bill, Crassus gave one of his most famous addresses, one that Cicero himself studied throughout his life. In it, Crassus called for the Assembly to “deliver us from the jaws of those whose cruelty cannot be satiated even with blood; suffer us not to be slaves to any but yourselves as a people, whom we both can and ought to serve.” The bill passed.17
Arriving in Gaul for a campaign in 106, Caepio finally delivered some good news when he captured the city of Tolosa (modern Toulouse, in southwestern France). We might not know anything about Caepio’s activities were it not for a famous scandal that soon passed into legend. Upon taking the city, Caepio’s men stumbled across an incredible find: 50,000 bars of gold and 10,000 bars of silver. The fortune was soon identified as the missing treasure from a famous Gallic invasion of Greece way back in 279 that, much like the more recent incursions by the Scordisci, ended with the plunder of the Oracle of Delphi. But the sacred treasure had apparently carried with it a curse: “whoever touched a piece of gold from that sack died a wretched and agonizing death.” As the Gauls were driven out of Greece they came to suspect that the tainted treasure was a part of their problem. According to legend, the Gauls dumped most of it in the lakes around Tolosa, but some of it wound up in a temple inside the city. This was the stash that Caepio’s men discovered.18
But this is only half the story. Caepio ordered the sacred treasure boxed up and carried down south to the Massilia, where it could be shipped by sea to Rome, displayed in Caepio’s inevitable triumph, and then deposited in the Temple of Saturn. But that’s not what happened. While the treasure was being delivered, the convoy was set upon by a group of bandits and the gold was stolen. Few believed this was random chance—the common assumption was that Caepio had hired the bandits himself to steal the gold for him. If true, Caepio’s double crime of plundering cursed gold from a sacred temple, and then conspiring to steal it all for himself, goes a long way toward explaining his unhappy fate. The historian Justin agreed that “this sacrilegious act subsequently proved a cause of ruin to Caepio and his army. The rising of the Cimbrian war, too, seemed to pursue the Romans as if to avenge the removal of that devoted treasure.” But it could just have easily been that Caepio was a fool who provoked his own misfortunes without help from the gods.19
DOWN IN NORTH Africa, it did not take long after the battles at Cirta for King Bocchus to reverse course again and beg Marius for peace. Just five days after the dust had cleared, envoys from the Mauretanian king arrived in Cirta requesting Marius send trusted ambassadors to meet in person with Bocchus. Marius selected Lucius Cornelius Sulla to lead the embassy. Though he had only recently arrived, Sulla had already proven himself both eloquent and cool under pressure.20
Sulla made it clear to Bocchus the Romans were open to friendship with the Mauretanians. Though the king had joined Jugurtha’s war, the Romans were a practical people. The last thing they needed was for the war in Numidia to keep expanding until it covered all of North Africa. Sulla told Bocchus that “we already have more than enough subjects, while neither we nor anyone else ever had friends enough.” But he also reminded the king that while the Romans have “never been outdone in kindness; their prowess in war you know by experience.” Bocchus took the hint. He asked permission to send an embassy directly to Marius to work out the preliminaries of a permanent peace. Sulla agreed and returned to Cirta to make his report.21
On their way to meet Marius, however, the small party of Mauretanian ambassadors was jumped by a gang of brigands. Taking a hasty flight and leaving all their baggage and papers behind, the envoys arrived at Cirta looking like refugee peasants rather than royal agents of a great king. But Sulla secured further a diplomatic trust between the two powers by graciously welcoming them into the city and refusing to doubt for a minute their pitiful story. The ambassadors were apparently surprised to discover that the corrupt and treacherous Romans were in fact quite civilized and generous.22
After hearing the ambassadors out, Marius called a war council in early 105 that voted to send the Mauretanian ambassadors on to Rome with a recommendation that the Senate conclude a peace. The Senate concurred and decreed: “The Senate and People of Rome are wont to remember both a benefit and an injury. But since Bocchus repents, they forgive his offence; he shall have a treaty of friendship when he has earned it.” The king was delighted to find the Romans so amenable to a peace. He sent a message back to Marius requesting that Sulla—who had displayed generous wisdom thus far—serve as Roman representative. With Sulla’s help the king could begin the practical process of aligning Mauretanian and Roman interests. Marius agreed.23
Escorted by Bocchus’s son to ensure safe passage, Sulla and his bodyguards were not sure whether they were being led into a trap. Their fears peaked when scouts suddenly arrived and alerted the party that Jugurtha himself was camped just two miles ahead. Sulla and his companions braced for treachery, but Bocchus’s son swore his father’s good intentions. The prince promised to march side by side with Sulla the whole way. Jugurtha could not risk the prince’s life, as it would permanently sever any chance he had at reforming the alliance with Bocchus. So in dramatic fashion the party continued riding past Jugurtha’s camp. Though the tension in the air must have been impossibly thick, the Numidian king simply watched them pass.24
The final act of the Jugurthine War played out as a game of high stakes negotiations between Sulla and Bocchus on the one hand, and Bocchus and Jugurtha on the other. Bocchus and Sulla met openly in the Mauretanian court, where the king told Sulla that he had not made up his mind how to proceed. He requested Sulla give him ten days to compose a final answer. But this was merely a trick played on Jugurtha’s spies, who dutifully raced to the Numidian camp and reported that Jugurtha had ten days to change Bocchus’s mind.25
But in the middle of that same night, Bocchus summoned Sulla for the real meeting. Bocchus told Sulla that he would never cross the Muluccha River that marked the border with Numidia, and that all that he had—soldiers, ships, and money—was at Rome’s disposal. Sulla accepted all of this with calculated regard. He told Bocchus that the Romans felt no gratitude for the king’s pledges, as they had already defeated the Mauretanians in battle. If Bocchus wanted to earn his treaty of friendship there was only one way to do it: hand over Jugurtha.26
The next day Bocchus summoned a courtier he knew to be in touch with Jugurtha and passed along a message for the Numidian king. Bocchus said he was about to make a peace with Rome—what could Jugurtha offer to make him change his mind? A reply came back quickly from Jugurtha. The Numidian king promised Bocchus anything he wanted to restore the alliance; for starters, Jugurtha would hand over nearly a third of Numidian territory. Jugurtha also proposed that Bocchus kidnap Sulla, and then together they could ransom him to the Senate and force the legions to withdraw from Africa entirely. Bocchus agreed to meet Jugurtha at a secluded location ou
tside of the city.27
With both sides having made their pitches, Bocchus found himself with an ulcer-inducing decision to make: betray his fellow king to the Romans and possibly risk the wrath of his subjects, or seize Sulla and risk the wrath of the legions. The king stayed up the whole night before the rendezvous with Jugurtha deciding what to do.28
The next day Bocchus, Sulla, and a small party of retainers rode out toward the secluded spot. Bocchus was about to double-cross either Sulla or Jugurtha, and to Sulla’s satisfaction, Jugurtha drew the short straw. Bocchus’s men surrounded the clearing and when Jugurtha appeared the men sprang out of the ambush. Jugurtha’s few remaining retainers were killed and the king himself was seized and handed over to Sulla. Sulla dutifully delivered Jugurtha in chains to Marius. Twelve years after Jugurtha had begun all this by assassinating Hiempsal, and seven years after the Senate had been forced to declare war following the massacre at Cirta, the war with Jugurtha was over.29
BUT THIS HAPPY news was about to be blotted out by an unfathomable disaster in the north. The Cimbri had first arrived in 113, defeated the Romans at Noreia, and then moved on. After a four-year hiatus, they had come down the Rhône river in 109 and defeated the Romans again. Now, after yet another four-year cycle, the Cimbri came back around in 105, once again migrating down the Rhône toward the Mediterranean coast. The Senate was understandably spooked by the return of this enemy that had bested them twice.30
Though now widely suspected of playing a role in the disappearance of the Tolosa gold, the Senate extended Caepio’s command in the north and kept his army intact—two full Roman legions plus twice as many Italian allies and Gallic auxiliary forces—bringing his combined numbers up to somewhere around thirty-five thousand. To double the number on the northern front the Senate instructed one of the consuls for 105, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, to gather an army of equal strength. This time the Cimbri must be destroyed. It was a good thing the property requirements had been dropped or Rome might not have been able to muster the strength to put the sixty to eighty thousand men through the Alps while simultaneously maintaining the legions in Numidia.31
Gnaeus Mallius was not just any newly elected consul, though. He was, like Marius, a novus homo. Between 191 and 107 only three confirmed novus homo had been elected consul. But in the rising tide of populare agitation, the Senate could not stop a string of novus homo from entering office. In the fourteen years between 107 and 94, five novus homo would be elected consul, and Gaius Marius himself would become far and away the most dominant leader in Rome. When Mallius drew Gaul as his province, the Senate was once again forced to trust a new man with the safety of Rome.32
In the Roman military hierarchy, no one outranked a consul, so when Mallius arrived in Gaul it was his right to supplant Caepio as commander in chief. But Caepio, being the arrogant noble that he was, greeted the novus homo Mallius with nothing but dismissive insolence. He claimed to be operating in a separate geographic province on the other side of the Rhône and insisted on maintaining autonomy on his side of the river. This lack of unity between the two senior commanders—which all the sources lay squarely at Caepio’s feet—was the principal cause of their shared demise. There was not one 60,000-strong Roman army. There were two 30,000-man armies—and the Cimbri would fatally exploit the difference.33
In early October 105, a forward patrol from Mallius’s legions scouting the approach of the Cimbri unexpectedly ran right into the main body. The patrol was surrounded and destroyed. Realizing the Cimbri would be arriving any minute, Mallius begged Caepio to cross the Rhône and join their armies together. Caepio mocked Mallius, saying that he would be happy to cross the river and help the frightened novus homo consul, who was obviously quaking in his boots over nothing. The two Roman armies converged near Arausio on the east bank of the Rhône, but out of a mixture of hubris and spite, Caepio still refused to join his army to Mallius’s. Caepio even blew off envoys from the Senate who begged him to submit. Caepio not only refused, he camped with his army situated between his colleague Mallius and the Cimbri. The long-held suspicion is that Caepio’s grand plan was to bring the Cimbri to battle first and force Mallius to play a supporting role, embarrassing the new man and capturing all the glory for himself. When ambassadors from the Cimbri came to make their request for land, Caepio roundly abused them and sent them packing.34
We do not know whether Caepio then marched out to instigate battle or whether he waited for the Cimbri to come to him, but it’s clear he provoked the disaster to come. He never once seemed to realize that the Romans were about to face hundreds of thousands of Cimbric warriors and that even combined, the Romans would be outnumbered. When the battle began, it is likely that Caepio’s forward army was overwhelmed by the first wave. Pushed backward, Caepio’s forces would have run into Mallius’s army and created a confused tangle without form, direction, or unity of purpose. This frustrated mob of confused legionaries was then surrounded by the Cimbri and pinned against the Rhône. With nowhere to go and all order lost, the Cimbri consumed the trapped legions like acid eating through flesh.35
By nightfall, the Romans were not just defeated, they were annihilated. The sources place the total dead at somewhere between 60,000 to 80,000 legionaries plus another 40,000 camp followers. Everyone agrees that almost no one made it out alive. There were some survivors who got away—both Caepio and Mallius made it back to Rome, as did a young officer named Quintus Sertorius, who was able to swim across the river to safety (he would go on to become one of the greatest generals in Roman history). Many more Romans were presumably taken as slaves. But, taken together, it is clear that the Battle of Arausio was one of the single greatest disasters in the history of Rome from its founding in 753 BC to the fall of the west in AD 476. All now seemed lost in Gaul.36
But a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon—the Cimbri again withdrew. The ancient historians never spend much time trying to explain the motives and actions of the Cimbri, so it’s left to modern historians to speculate that in all likelihood the Cimbri were never interested in invading Italy, but instead simply wanted to keep the violent and aggressive Romans bottled up on the Italian peninsula. So after demonstrating to the Romans three times in a row that they best not mess with the Cimbri, the tribe withdrew again and migrated west toward Spain.37
The panic in Rome must have been severe. With the elections for next year’s consulship approaching, there was no question who the people thought could stave off the end of Roman civilization, which appeared to be the stakes. The Assembly did not want another incompetent Carbo, or overmatched Silanus, or fatally arrogant Caepio. The people wanted Gaius Marius. The Assembly tossed aside two more pieces of mos maiorum to get their wish. Roman law still forbade a man from serving a second consulship within ten years of his first election, and a candidate had to be physically present in Rome to stand for election. The Assembly ignored both rules and elected Marius in absentia to his second consulship in three years. Marius settled loose ends in Numidia and prepared to return to Rome.38
ON JANUARY 1, 104, Gaius Marius celebrated the beginning of his second consulship with a triumph. Not since the glory days of the conquest of Carthage and Greece had a triumph been this spectacular. Aemilianus’s parade after Numantia (a parade Marius himself would have marched in) was a famous disappointment. Since then it had been a string of victories against various Gallic and Thracian tribes whose spoils paled in comparison to the treasures Roman consuls had once returned from campaign with. But Marius’s triumph was of “great magnificence.” Treasure, slaves, and wondrous ornaments of the exotic African kingdom paraded to wild cheering from a population still reeling from the disaster at Arausio just three months earlier.39
The crown jewel of Marius’s triumph was King Jugurtha himself. The last time Jugurtha was in Rome he had bribed senators, defied the Assembly, and ordered an assassination. He managed to upend domestic Roman politics and stay one step ahead of the legions for a decade. Now he was bound in chains like a
common criminal and forced to march alongside his two sons, facing the humiliation of being the object not of awe and fear, but mockery and ridicule. At the end of the triumphal parade, Jugurtha was tossed into a prison cell so roughly that the gold earring he wore—the last piece of gold he had to his name—was ripped clean out of his ear. There was no more bribery. No more cunning plans. The Romans left him to die in a dungeon pit naked and starving: “He himself, too, conquered and in chains, saw the city of which he had vainly prophesied that it could be bought and would one day perish if it could find a purchaser. In Jugurtha it had a purchaser—if it had been for sale; but once it had escaped his hands, it was certain that it was not doomed to perish.” After six days of defiant resistance, Jugurtha finally dropped dead on the floor.40
But Marius was not able to enjoy his triumph in peace. Men who disdained the usurping novus homo praised the young noble Sulla as the real captor of Jugurtha. According to military and political tradition, the man who held imperium over a province received all credit and all blame for the fortunes of war. It was how it had always been done. It was mos maiorum. But enemies of Marius encouraged Sulla to tell his story. The proud and ambitious Sulla was all too happy to play the game and went so far as to cast as his personal seal an image depicting the capture of Jugurtha. Marius was not amused. “This was the first seed of that bitter and incurable hatred between Marius and Sulla, which nearly brought Rome to ruin.”41
The Storm Before the Storm Page 15