The triumphant aristocracy devoted its subtlest intelligence to undoing the constructive, rather than the demagogic, elements in Caius’ legislation. It did not dare eject the business class from the juries, or the contractors and publicans from their happy hunting ground in Asia; and it allowed the corn dole to stand as insurance against revolution. Into an otherwise attractive measure it inserted a clause permitting the recipients of the new lands to sell them; soon thousands of holders sold to the great slaveowners, and the latifundia resumed their growth. In 118 the land board was abolished. The masses in the capital raised no objection; they had decided that to eat state corn in the city was better than to sweat on the land or toil in pioneer colonies. Sloth combined with superstition (for the soil of Carthage had been cursed) to frustrate till Caesar the attempt to mitigate urban poverty by emigration. Wealth mounted, but it did not spread; in 104 B.C.. a moderate democrat reckoned that only 2000 Roman citizens owned property.11 “The condition of the poor,” says Appian, “became even worse than before. . . . The plebeians lost everything. . . . The number of citizens and soldiers continued to decline.”12 More and more the legions had to be filled out with conscripts from the Italian states; but these men had no stomach for fighting or no love for Rome. Desertions multiplied, discipline deteriorated, and the defense of the Republic sank to its lowest ebb.
Consequently it was soon attacked, almost at the same time, on north and south. In 113 two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, as if to give Rome a foretaste of its final fate, rolled down through Germany in a frightening avalanche of covered wagons—300,000 fighting men, with their wives, children, and animals. Perhaps the word had gone up over the Alps that Rome was in love with wealth and weary of war. The newcomers were tall and strong and fearless, so blond that the Italians described the children as having the white hair of old men. They met a Roman army at Noreia (now Neumarkt, in Carinthia) and destroyed it. They crossed the Rhine and defeated another Roman army; they poured west into southern Gaul and overcame a third, fourth, and fifth Roman army; at Arausio (Orange) 80,000 legionnaires and 40,000 camp followers were left dead on the field.13 All Italy lay open to the invaders; and a terror rose in Rome such as it had not known since Hannibal.
Almost at the same time war broke out in Numidia. When Jugurtha, grandson of Masinissa, tortured his brother to death, and tried to deprive his cousins of their share in the kingdom, the Senate declared war upon him (III), with a view to making Numidia a province and opening it to Roman commerce and capital. Jugurtha bought patricians to defend his cause and crimes before the Senate, and bribed the generals sent against him into harmless activities or a favorable peace. Summoned to Rome, he opened his royal purse more lavishly, and was able to return unhindered to his capital.14
Only one officer emerged from these campaigns with credit. Gaius Marius, born like Cicero at Arpinum, son of a day laborer, had enlisted in the army at an early age, had won his scars at Numantia, had married an aunt of Caesar, and despite, or because of, his lack of education or manners, had been chosen a tribune of the plebs. In the fall of 108 he returned from his services as lieutenant to the incompetent Quintus Metellus in Africa, and ran for the consulate on a platform proposing that he should replace Metellus and bring the Jugurthine War to a successful end. He was elected, took command, and forced Jugurtha’s surrender (106). The people did not learn at this time that the chief agent of this victory was a reckless young aristocrat, Lucius Sulla; they would hear from him later. Marius enjoyed a splendid triumph, and was so loved that the Assembly, ignoring a dying constitution, elected him consul year after year (104-100). The business classes supported him partly because his victories opened new fields for their enterprises, partly because he was clearly the only man who could repel the Celtic hordes. Rome already recognized in Caesar’s uncle the uses of Caesarism; the dictatorship of a popular leader backed by a devoted army seemed to many weary Romans the only alternative to the oligarchic abuses of liberty.
After their victory at Arausio, the Cimbri had reprieved Rome by crossing the Pyrenees and ravaging Spain. But in 102 they returned to Gaul, greater in number than before, and entered into an agreement with the Teutones for a simultaneous assault by separate routes upon the rich plains of northern Italy. To meet the peril Marius resorted to a new form of military enrollment, which revolutionized first the army and then the state. He invited the enlistment of any citizen, property owner or not; offered attractive pay, and promised to release volunteers, and give them lands, after a completed campaign. The army now formed was composed chiefly of the city proletariat; its sentiments were hostile to the patrician Republic; it fought not for its country, but for its general and for booty; in this way, probably without knowing it, Marius laid the military basis of the Caesarian revolution. He was a soldier, not a statesman; he had no time to weigh distant political consequences. He led his recruits over the Alps, hardened their bodies with marches and drills, and developed their courage with attacks upon objectives that could be easily won; until they were trained he could not risk an engagement. The Teutones marched unhindered by his camp, asking the Romans derisively if they had messages for their wives in Rome, with whom the invaders proposed soon to refresh themselves; the number of the Teutones could be judged from the six days they took to pass the Roman camp. When they had all filed by, Marius ordered his army to fall upon their rear. In the great battle that ensued at Aquae Sextiae (Aix in Provence), the new legions slew or captured 100,000 men (102). “They say,” Plutarch reports, “that the inhabitants of Marseilles made fences round their vineyards with the bones, and that the soil, after the bodies had rotted and the winter rains had fallen, was so fertilized with the putrefied matter which sank into it, that in the following season it yielded an unprecedented crop.”15 After resting his army for several months, Marius led it back into Italy, and met the Cimbri at Vercellae, near the Po (101), on the very field where Hannibal had won his first battle against Rome. The barbarians, to show their strength and courage, went naked in the snow, climbed over ice and through deep drifts to summits from which they tobogganed gaily along steep descents, using their shields as sleds.16 In the battle that followed they were nearly all slain.
Marius was received in the rejoicing capital as a “second Camillus” who had turned back a Celtic invasion, and another Romulus who had refounded Rome. Part of the spoils he brought was bestowed upon him as a personal reward; thereby he became a rich man, with estates big “enough for a kingdom.” In 100 he was elected consul for the sixth time. The tribune was Lucius Saturninus, a fiery radical who was resolved to achieve the goals of the Gracchi by law if possible, otherwise by force. He pleased Marius with a bill that bestowed colonial lands upon the veterans of the recent campaign, and Marius raised no objection when he lowered the price of state-doled corn from six and one third asses (thirty-nine cents) to five sixths of an as (five cents) per modius, or peck. The Senate sought to protect the Treasury and itself by having a tribune forbid the submission of these measures to a vote, but Saturninus proceeded with the voting nevertheless. Violence flared up on both sides. When Saturninus’ bands killed Caius Memmius, one of the most respected of the aristocracy, the Senate took its final resort and, by a senatusconsultum de re publica defendenda, ordered Marius, as consul, to suppress the revolt.
Marius faced the bitterest choice of his life. It seemed a miserable end to his long career of service to the common people of Rome that he should now attack their leaders and his former friends. And yet he too distrusted the appeal to violence, and saw in revolution more ills than it could cure. He led a force against the rebels, let Saturninus be stoned to death, and then fled to a gloomy retirement, despised alike by the people he had championed and the aristocracy he had saved.