Of greater importance and benefit to Rome were the great victories won by Marius over those terrible invaders, the Teutones and the Cimbrians, who had been threatening Rome and harassing northern Italy for a number of years. In 102 B.C. the Teutones were defeated by Marius at the battle of Aquæ Sextiæ, where the number of the vanquished who were killed is variously estimated at from one hundred twenty thousand to two hundred thousand. The following year, during the fifth consulship of Marius, the Cimbrians were practically annihilated, sixty thousand being captured and sold as slaves and the remainder of the vast host, with few exceptions, killed.
The second century before Christ thus closed with brilliant foreign victories for the Roman arms. This close likewise saw the beginning of another period of slave insurrections and civil war. As before, the principal resistance by the slaves occurred in the island of Sicily. The immediate cause of this insurrection was the neglect or refusal of the Roman prætor in Sicily to obey a decree of the Senate. So great a scandal had arisen from the continued actions of the Roman tax collectors in the East in seizing and selling into slavery persons who failed to pay the exorbitant taxes demanded from them that the Senate passed a decree providing that all persons illegally held as slaves should be immediately released. This decree would have affected so many slaves in the island of Sicily that the prætor suspended its operation. The slaves, rendered desperate by seeing this promised liberty snatched from them, once more rose in rebellion.
Again the slaves were commanded by able leaders, and again they won a number of victories over Roman armies before they were finally put down.
"The revolt was thus apparently suppressed, yet many years the disturbances continued, and there were innumerable local insurrections, causing great carnage and unspeakable misery. A Roman knight, Titus Minucius, harassed by debt, and annoyed by the importunities of his creditors, through revenge incited an insurrection, and placed himself at the head of three thousand slaves. A bloody battle ensued before he was put down. Soon after this, two very able slaves, Sabrius and Athenio, headed revolts. Their forces were marshaled in well-disciplined bands, and for some time they successfully repelled all the power Rome could bring against them. Several Roman armies were defeated with great loss, and the whole island was surrendered to blood and violence. The poorer class of the free inhabitants availed themselves of the general confusion to indulge in unrestrained license and devastation. This insurrection became so formidable, that again Rome was compelled to rouse her energies. A consular army was sent, which drove the insurgents into their strongholds and then subdued them by the slow process of siege. The carnage and misery resulting from these servile wars no tongue can tell. The whole power of the Roman empire was pledged to put down insurrections; and though the captives could avenge their wrongs and sell their lives dearly, it was in vain for them to hope for ultimate success.
"A law was passed prohibiting any slave from carrying a warlike weapon. Rigorously was this law enforced. At one time a boar of remarkable size was sent as a present to L. Domicius, then prætor of the island. He inquired who had killed it. On being informed that it was a slave, who was employed as a shepherd, he summoned the man before him, and asked how he had contrived to kill so powerful an animal. The shepherd replied that he had killed it with a boar spear. The merciless Domicius ordered him immediately to be crucified for having used a weapon in violation of the law. This rigor was pursued so unrelentingly, that, for a long period, there were no more revolts!" (Abbott's History of Italy.)
The victories of Marius over the Teutones and Cimbrians had been followed by his sixth election to the consulship. This election, however, had not been secured without great difficulty and tumult. The aristocratic party had been consistently the opponents and enemies of Marius throughout his whole career. The great victories which he had won for Rome, instead of reconciling this class to him, had made them only the more jealous and fearful of him.
By this time Marius had in addition, to a great extent, alienated the lower classes of the Roman citizens. The enmity between the proletariat at Rome and the Italians, which had commenced at the time of the younger Gracchus, had been constantly increasing. Marius had inclined more and more toward the side of the Italians. Like most generals, his thoughts and affections were for his soldiers rather than for the state which he served; and the soldiers over whom Marius had command and with whom he had won his great victories were mainly Italians. The degenerate city mob at Rome no longer desired or was fit for military life, and the safety of Rome and the extension of her territories now rested mainly upon those to whom the rights of her citizenship were denied.
The Italians, probably appreciating both the strength of their position and the injustice of their treatment, were demanding the rights of Roman citizenship, and in this demand they found a sympathizer in the consul Marius. Immediately after his victories in the north of Italy, Marius, in direct violation of the law, had granted Roman citizenship to one thousand soldiers in his army who had distinguished themselves in the campaign. His excuse was characteristic of the existing conditions and prophetic of the course of Roman history during the succeeding century: "Amid the din of arms, I could not hear the voice of the laws."
During his sixth consulship Marius endeavored to secure the Roman franchise for certain of his soldiers in a more regular manner. The tribunes, Apuleius Saturninus and Servilius Glaucia, secured the passage of a law by which Marius was authorized to grant the rights of Roman citizenship to three persons in every colony which enjoyed the Latin franchise.
The career of the tribune Saturninus is illustrative of the condition of anarchy into which Rome was rapidly drifting. Saturninus was the first of the Roman politicians to rely as a regular practice upon "strong-arm methods" to carry elections. In his first race for the tribuneship he had brazenly murdered one of the opposing candidates; he had been the principal campaign manager for Marius at the time of his sixth election to the consulship, when the disbanded army of Marius had been distributed among the Roman citizens in the meetings of the comitia tributa in such numbers as to overawe all opposition. Finally, when C. Memmius, a bitter political enemy of his, seemed about to be elected to the consulship, he caused him to be stabbed in the Forum by one of the thugs who constituted his own bodyguard. Saturninus, however, had now reached the point where he stood almost alone. The senatorial party were his natural enemies; the Roman mob had, in the main, fallen away from his support on account of his friendly feeling toward the Italians, and his extreme methods had compelled even Marius to withdraw his support.
Seeing his political power almost gone, Saturninus, in company with his fellow-tribune Glaucia and a band of the ruffians with which Rome was so badly infested at this time, seized the citadel on the capitol and attempted to raise an insurrection against the republic. The citadel was considered to be impregnable to an attack, but Saturninus and his followers were soon forced into submission by the cutting off of their water supply. The insurgents had surrendered upon the condition that their lives should be spared. Marius, in order to protect their safety, imprisoned them in a large building, known as the Curia Hostilia. The mob, however, climbed to the top of the building, tore off the roof, and murdered all the prisoners by dropping rocks upon them.