Consequences of the war. The corruptibility and incapacity, combined with an utter lack of public responsibility, displayed by the senators in this war contributed to further weaken the already diminished prestige of their order. Besides it had again been demonstrated that a coalition of the equestrians and the city populace could control the public policy, and in the person of Marius, the war had produced a leader upon whom they could unite.
IV. The Invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons
The movements of the Cimbri and Teutons. The fear of a barbarian invasion of Italy which caused Marius to be elected to his second consulship was occasioned by the wanderings of a group of Germanic and Celtic peoples, chief of which were the Cimbri and the Teutons. In 113 B. C. the former, a Germanic tribe, invaded the country of the Taurisci, allies of Rome, who dwelt north of the Alps. A Roman army sent to the rescue was defeated. The Cimbri then moved westwards to the Rhine, where they were joined by the Teutons (Toygeni), who were probably a branch of the Celtic Helvetii, by the Tigurini, another division of the same people, and by the Ambrones, a tribe of uncertain origin. In 111, the united peoples crossed the Rhine into Gaul and came into conflict with the Romans in the new province. Two years later the consul Julius Silanus was defeated by the Cimbri, who demanded lands for settlement within Roman territory. Their demand was refused and hostilities continued. In 107 another consul, Lucius Cassius, was defeated and slain by the Tigurini. In 106 Quintus Servilius Caepio recovered the town of Tolosa, which had deserted the Roman cause, and carried off its immense temple treasures. Three years later he was tried and condemned for defrauding the state of this booty. In 105, two Roman armies were destroyed by the united tribes in a battle at Arausio (Orange), in which 60,000 Romans were said to have fallen. This disaster, the greatest suffered by Rome since Cannae, was largely brought about by friction between the two Roman commanders. The way to Italy lay open but the barbarians failed to take advantage of their opportunity. The Cimbri invaded Spain and the rest remained in Gaul.
The army reforms of Marius. In this crisis Marius was appointed to the command against the Cimbri and their allies, and at [pg 136]once set to work to create an army for the defence of Italy. The increasing luxury and refinements of civilization in Italy had begun to undermine the military spirit among the Romans, especially the propertied classes, and this had led to a decline of discipline and efficiency in the Roman armies. Furthermore, the universal obligation to military service was no longer rigidly enforced, partly because of the residence abroad of so many citizens. Appeals to volunteers became more and more frequent. No longer were recruits enrolled for one year only, but took the oath of service for sixteen years. In building up his new army Marius recognized these new tendencies. He relied mainly upon voluntary enlistments, admitting to the ranks, as he had done already in the Jugurthine War, those whose lack of property had previously disqualified them for service in the legions. The soldiers now became recognized professionals, who upon their discharge looked to their commanders to provide for their future. Among the troops loyalty to the state was supplanted by devotion to a successful general, and the latter could rely upon his veterans to support him in his political career. Marius also introduced changes in the arms and equipment of the soldiers, and he is also credited, although with less certainty, with the increase in the size of the legion to 6000 men and its division into ten cohorts as tactical units.
Marius in Gaul. During the years 104 and 103 Marius kept his army in Gaul guarding the passage to Italy, while he completed the training of his troops and dug a new channel at the mouth of the Rhone to facilitate the passage of his transports into the river. He was re-elected to the consulship for 103 and again for 102 since the danger from the barbarians was not over. In 102 the Cimbri returned from Spain and, joining the other tribes, prepared to invade Italy. The Teutons and Ambrones followed the direct route from southern Gaul, while the Cimbri and Tigurini moved to the north of the Alps to enter Italy by the eastern Alpine passes. Marius permitted the Teutons and Ambrones to march by him, then he overtook and annihilated them at Aquae Sextiae. In the meantime, the Cimbri had forced the other consul, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, to abandon the defence of the eastern passes and had crossed the Adige into the Po Valley, where they wintered. Marius returned to Italy to join his colleague and face the new peril. In the next year, while consul for the fifth time, he met and destroyed the Cimbri on the Raudine plains near Vercellae. Thus Italy was saved from a repetition of [pg 137]the Gallic invasion of the fourth century B. C.
The vitality of the Roman state was by no means exhausted as the defeat of the barbarians shows, and men of energy and ability were not lacking, but under the existing régime it required a crisis to bring them to the front.
The Second Sicilian Slave War, 104–101 B. C. While the barbarians were knocking at the gates of Italy, Rome was called upon to suppress a series of disorders in other parts of her empire, some of which were only quelled after considerable effort. In 104 B. C. occurred a serious rebellion of the slaves in Sicily, headed by two leaders Salvius and Anthenion, the former of whom took the title of King Typhon. The rebels became masters of the open country, defeated the forces sent against them, reduced the Sicilian cities to the verge of starvation, and were only subdued by a consular army under Manius Aquillius in 101 B. C.
War with the Pirates. Before the slave war in Sicily had been brought to a close the Romans were forced to make an effort to suppress piracy in the Mediterranean. Piracy had been on the increase ever since the decline of the Rhodian sea power, following the Second Macedonian War, for as there were no longer any rival maritime powers Rome had neglected to maintain a navy adequate even for policing the seas. The pirates were at the same time slave traders, who made a business of kidnapping all over the Mediterranean but particularly in the east to supply the slave mart at Delos. In 104 B. C. the king of Bithynia complained to the Senate that one-half of his ablebodied men had been carried into slavery. This traffic was winked at by the Romans, since they needed slaves in great numbers for their plantations, and their business interests profited by the trade. However the depredations of the pirates at length became too serious to be ignored, and in 102 B. C. the praetor Marcus Antonius was given a special command against them. They had their chief strongholds on the Cilician coast and the island of Crete, and Antonius proceeded to Cilicia, where he destroyed several of their towns and annexed some territory, which became the province of Cilicia.
Besides these troubles the Romans had to face revolts in Spain which broke out spasmodically down to 95 B. C., as well as continual inroads of barbarians from Thrace into the provinces of Macedonia and Illyricum.