701. Roman Civil War: Rise of the General (Part 1)

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1:54This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked. Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the West? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there, and it is, of course, the Americas.

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2:55And keep thinking.

Teutons and Cimbri migration

3:07And now it was. The news began to reach Rome of the Teutons and the Cimbri. Initially, the reports detailing the numbers and strength of these invaders seemed fantastical. But it soon became clear that all the rumours were in reality underestimates of the truth. 300,000 warriors were on the march, accompanied by even larger numbers of women and children, all of them looking for lands and cities in which to settle.

3:37Who were these people? From what distant part of the world had they emigrated? It was unclear. For prior to their descent on Gaul and Italy, no one had ever heard of them. The best guess? They were Germans, and had travelled from the lands that border the northern ocean. This supposition derived from various clues. Firstly, their enormous size. Next, the light blue colour of their eyes.

4:08And finally, the fact that Cimbri is a word which in the language of the Germans means plunderer. That was the Greek historian Plutarch. And he's describing in very chilling and spine-tingling terms one of the most terrifying moments in Roman history. A migration of barbarians, which by the year 113 BC had arrived at the gates of Roman Italy.

4:39And these people, the Teutons and the Cimbri. Tom, am I stretching a point to say that effectively they're the Danes? Yeah. Plutarch says that they come from the lands that border the northern ocean. And the general thinking is that this was probably Jutland and the regions north of it. I mean, it's a kind of proto-Viking invasion, if you like. And it would have taken them a long time to get from Jutland down to the Alps. So it could well have taken the Teutons and the Cimbri, anything up to a decade, to get there.

5:13And if so, for most of that decade, obviously the Romans and the people of Italy had no idea what was approaching them. And it always kind of makes me think of those kind of Hollywood dramas where there's an asteroid hurtling towards planet Earth. Or there are scientists experimenting with some zombie mutation in a lab. And people are going about their everyday lives just waiting for this kind of appalling apocalypse to hit them. Yeah. It's December 2019 and you're hearing the first reports from Wuhan.

5:46Yes. Of people with unusual colds. And around the breakfast table, people are discussing their summer holidays. Exactly. And so in today's episode, we are going to be looking at what is going on in Rome as this migrationary apocalypse is hurtling towards them.

Gaius Marius and the Roman Republic

6:04And just to give people a sense of where we are in the history of Rome, we are a century before the age of Augustus. So before the establishment of the rule of the Caesars. And Rome at this point is still a republic. It is not ruled by an autocrat. And the star of this episode, the star of the show, is the dominant figure of this period in the kind of the 110s, the 100s BC. And he is a brilliant soldier. He is a superb political operator.

6:38And he has emerged seemingly from nowhere to become the city's great popular hero. And this is a man called Gaius Marius. And he is a man whose achievements, whose ambitions over the course of the 110s and the 100s have increasingly put the whole of Rome in his shadow and will continue to do so for several decades after he is a titanic figure in the history of the Roman Republic.

7:09Yeah, and we'll be tracing his story, won't we? So he has this great confrontation, doesn't he, with the Teutons and the Cimbri. But that's merely the beginning of his extraordinary career. I mean, spoiler alert, he is the guy who is going to see off this apocalyptic threat. He is the kind of the Bruce Willis seeing off the asteroid. Then in 91 BC, when he's considerably older, he plays an important role in one of the most desperate wars that the Romans ever fight. And it's not very well known, but it brought Rome almost to the brink.

7:40And this was a war that was fought against the Sochi, they called them, their comrades in arms. And these were the Italian allies who had been by the side of the Romans for centuries by this point. And suddenly they erupt and there's this terrible war that rages across Italy. And then most faithfully of all, and escalating gradually throughout the series to an incredibly bloody climax, we have the bitter rivalry between Marius and a younger man who had once been Marius's deputy.

8:11And this is a man called Lucius Cornelius Sulla. So I've been looking forward to this since we started The Rest is History, because when I was a teenager, I read a series of books by Colleen McCulloch, I think, who wrote The Thorn Birds. And she wrote this Roman sequence in which the Marius-Sulla rivalry played a huge part. It was a brilliant, if you're a teenage boy interested in Rome, you know, this is absolute catnip. And the great thing about them is they seem such archetypes. So Marius, the representation, this is how she portrayed it anyway.

8:42Marius was ordinary, kind of rough-hewn. He was sort of unpolished. He's the representative of the ordinary people. And Sulla is decadent and he's golden-haired and he's cosmopolitan and sophisticated. And he's the representative of the upper classes. And I'm looking forward to finding out if this is absolute tosh or if this is actually true. And you can tell from their names. So Gaius Marius, he just has the two names. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, if you have three, that's a giveaway. You are from a kind of a higher class background.

9:13And Sulla is actually a patrician, which is the kind of the grandest of the grand in Rome. So there is definitely a class animus there. But the two of them, in lots of ways, are not entirely dissimilar. So both of them are intensely ambitious. And both of them are kind of dazzlingly ruthless opportunists. So they are completely worthy rivals. And Dominic, this rivalry, as you were implying, between the self-made man and the patrician, the one-time commander and the one-time subordinate, the guy with the two names and the guy with the three names.

9:52This is going to end up shaking the very foundations of Rome's Republic, because it's going to result for the first time ever in a Roman army marching on Rome itself. Then there will be a murder, a civil war. Prescription lists will be posted in the heart of the city. And Rome will end up being ruled by a military dictatorship. And this is a crucial turning point in the history of Rome. And it is a massive way step on the road that will lead to the final collapse of the Republic and the establishment of the autocracy of the Caesars.

10:28So in some ways, it anticipates, doesn't it, the civil wars between, you know, I don't know, Brutus and Cassius on one hand and Antony and Octavian on the other. And as you said, it's the first step in this process that leads to the empire. Well, I think more saliently between Pompey and Julius Caesar and Pompey. We are going to see the young Pompey towards the end of the series. And Marius, as we see, is going to develop links with the family of Julius Caesar. And so it's a kind of preface to that great Titanic struggle.

Roman geopolitics and conquest

10:57But it's more than just a story about Rome, isn't it? About Rome as a city, because we're at a point in Rome's history where Rome is a real geopolitical player. And so what happens here matters across the Mediterranean. Yes, absolutely. And this has been signalled in incredibly brutal fashion. A few decades previously in 146 BC, when the Romans had wiped out two of the oldest and most celebrated cities in the whole of the Mediterranean. And the first of these was a city called Carthage.

11:29We did three whole series on the terrible wars that Rome fought against the Carthaginians. It was their old enemy. It was the kind of the great rival superpower in the Western Mediterranean. And those three wars had culminated in the complete annihilation of Carthage. And then in the same year, the Romans wipe out the Greek city of Corinth, which, again, I mean, it's one of the most famous cities in Greece. It's a place rich in mythology and culture and history.

12:00Absolutely obliterated. And this obviously serves as a devastating warning to the Greeks that there's very much a new sheriff in town. You do not want to mess with the Romans. And to be honest, the destruction of these two cities is a shock that reverberates across the Mediterranean. But there are plenty of people in Rome itself that feel a bit queasy about it, that there are Romans who start saying, well, you know, are we actually the baddies here? And this worries them because the conceit of the Romans throughout their rise to superpower status has always been that they are the most moral of people and that everything they do is in self-defense.

12:37And if it's not in self-defense, then the gods won't back them. And so the fact that they have this great empire is proof that the gods have been backing them. So in a way, they kind of conquer the world in self-defense. And so they don't want to think that they're bad people. They don't want to think that the gods are against them. You talk about them conquering the world. But actually, have they conquered the world? I mean, their empire, territorially, it's not enormous at this point, is it? So just give us a sense of the panorama of Roman power. They have a kind of informal hegemony, I guess, over much of the Mediterranean.

13:10But you're right that the formal empire, the sense in which they have provinces, it is at this point still relatively small. So if you think of Rome in the center of Italy and you go clockwise around the western Mediterranean. So Sicily, that was Rome's first province they had instituted as a province in 241 BC as a result of the first great war that they'd fought against Carthage. So Sicily had been the kind of the prize that they'd taken in that war. Then across the sea from Sicily, you have what's now Tunisia, what the Romans call Africa.

13:42This is where Carthage had stood and the Romans have annexed the hinterland of what had been the Carthage's territory in North Africa. Then southern and central Spain. Again, the Romans had taken that from Carthage in the second war, the war that featured Hannibal. And at this point, the Romans are advancing northwards into the kind of the northern reaches of Spain. And then you have the southern strip of Gaul, what the Romans called the provincia, the province. And this is the Latin word that ultimately gives us the word Provence.

14:16So it's, you know, what's now southern France. And so there's no question with Carthage gone, with all these former provinces of Carthage absorbed or new territories conquered, that Rome is undisputed as the great hegemon of the western Mediterranean. But what is ominous, I think, for people in the eastern Mediterranean is that Rome, by this point, it also has a couple of provinces in the eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea. And this, of course, is these are lands that previously had been ruled by Macedonian kings.

14:48So the heirs of Alexander the Great. So one of these provinces had been the former kingdom of Alexander the Great. It's become the Roman province of Macedon in that fateful year, 146, that had seen Corinth and Carthage destroyed as well. And across the Aegean from Greece. So what is now the Aegean seaboard of Turkey? There is another province which the Romans call Asia. And this had been the kind of the Greek ruled kingdom of Pergamum.

15:23Pergamum is a Greek city that controlled the kind of, you know, the western half of what's now Turkey. And in 133 BC, its last king, a man called Attalus, he didn't really have an obvious successor. He was nervous at the Romans of what the Romans might do. And so basically he thought, well, maybe the obvious solution is just to give it to the Romans in my will. And so that's what he does. And it's it's one of the most spectacular bequests in the whole of history because Pergamum is fabulously rich, quite apart from giving the Romans a toehold in Asia.

15:55And it is it offers the Romans all kinds of decadent pleasures that they had barely even realized existed until that moment. So everything from celebrity chefs to sex manuals, they're all brought back to Rome, where the elites, of course, think secretly they're brilliant, but lots of them pretend to be very disapproving. And lots of Roman moralists are genuinely disapproving. And I think it's I guess the closest parallel in modern history would be Puritan American tourists in the Gilded Age going to Paris.

16:32Right. Yeah. The fleshpots of Europe. The fleshpots of Europe. And of course, bringing them back to the East Coast. Going to the Folly Berger with Toulouse-Lautrec or something. Yes, exactly. And so Pliny the Elder, very much friend of the show when he's writing about this, he sees this whole period from the conquest of Macedon to the granting by Attalus of his kingdom of Pergamum to the Romans as a period that is disastrous for Rome's moral character. So Pliny wrote that the Romans were becoming a people who didn't just admire foreign opulence, but had learned to covet it.

17:07And Pliny identifies the appropriation of Asia as a province as having been a particularly disastrous blow to Roman morals. And it is a feature of the way the Romans think about geopolitics and the functioning of their own state that morals are incredibly important because, as we've said, if they're not a moral people, then the gods won't favor them and their empire will collapse. That's a tiny bit like the British with India in the 18th century and the sort of anxiety that great wealth and expansion would bring corruption, you know, which kind of wrapped up with people like Warren Hastings and all these people who came back and built great palaces.

17:48And I think it's there with Jefferson and that kind of tradition in America as well, isn't it? The anxiety about wealth and power, about empire. So, yes, absolutely. This sense that the very greatness that Rome is winning threatens the moral foundations on which that greatness has been raised. And also, of course, the influx of enormous wealth into Rome contributes to a kind of a growing sense of resentment in the slums of the city that the rich are getting richer and the poor is getting poorer.

18:18And again, this is something with which subsequent periods of history, I mean, people will be completely familiar with it, that influxes of wealth tends to heighten class divisions, divisions of in living standards. And the poor in Rome, you know, they're all citizens of a republic. They're meant to be part of a kind of, you know, a common project. Raise publica means kind of things that are shared in common, things that are public. The poor in Rome are increasingly suspicious that the aristocratic class, the nobiles, as they're called in Latin, that they no longer care anything for the mass of their poorer fellow citizens.

19:00Metropolitan elite are out of touch. Exactly. And so this is generating a pretty febrile mood in Rome. And it's the kind of mood, again, perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the present day, in which an outsider, if he has luck, if he has talent, if he has boldness on his side, you know, he might be able to prosper. He might, you know, people from not the obvious backgrounds might be able to get to the top of the tree, might be able to make themselves the masters of the republic.

Marius early life and omen

19:32And this brings us very neatly, doesn't it, to our protagonist, to Gaius Marius. So Marius is born in 157 BC in Arpenum, which is about 80 miles outside Rome. And is there a British town that would be a nice equivalent for Arpenum, Tom? I guess it's kind of Swindon, basically. Wow. Roundabouts. Roundabouts and warehouses. I mean, having said that, Arpenum is actually a kind of very old city, so perhaps the parallel doesn't exactly hold.

20:04But I guess that the people in Rome would view Arpenum as, I don't know, people in W1 might view Swindon. Right. Yeah. As being not exactly the obvious breeding ground of great dominant figures in the state. And actually, Arpenum is a classic example of how the kind of the immediate hinterland around Rome, so Latium as it's called, has come to be knitted into the fabric of the republic and basically kind of turned into the people of Latium have been turned into Romans. So Arpenum had been conquered back in 305 BC and its people initially had been given a slightly inferior form of Roman citizenship.

20:42So the Romans called it civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without, well, without suffrage, without the vote. They have lots of rights, but they don't have the right to vote for magistrates. But then in 188 BC, Arpenum finally gets the full deal. So citizenship with the right to vote. And that means that the parents of Marius, who belong to the local aristocracy in Arpenum, they basically belong to the first generation in the town who can take this for granted, who can feel that they are part of not just the local politics of their own small town, but of the great city 80 miles to the west.

21:20This, of course, means that the young Marius growing up in Arpenum, he he's aware of himself as a Roman, but he is also still very much aware of himself as a provincial, that he's in a city where people have not been able to vote for magistrates in Rome, let alone run as magistrates in Rome for very long, only a few decades. And so probably as a boy, he doesn't hold out much prospect for himself, you know, as a future political star, because there is a very deep vein of snobbery in the Roman people.

21:55And they may resent the nobileys, the aristocracy, for their wealth and their sense of superiority. But they do simultaneously love families with strong brand recognition. And I guess, again, if you want an American parallel, it would be like, you know, the way people keep voting for Clintons or Bushes or whatever. Yeah. But unlike, let's say, Bill Clinton, or indeed, I think any of the Bushes, Marius is the recipient of an extraordinary omen. Well, he's the subject of an extraordinary omen when he's a little boy.

22:25And Plutarch recorded this, didn't he? Something to do with an eagle. Plutarch, it has to be said, will always prioritise a fun story over a likely story. He'd be a very good history podcaster. Yeah, he absolutely would. So this is Plutarch. When Marius was still a boy and living out in the country, he caught an eagle's nest in his cloak as it fell from a tree. This nest contained seven baby eagles. His parents were so surprised by this freak occurrence that they asked a local soothsayer what it portended. And the soothsayer replied that Marius would become the greatest man in the world and was destined to hold the consulship no less than seven times.

23:05Wow. And of course, Plutarch is writing this sometime after the events, after he knew what happened to Marius. A sceptic might say that Plutarch was making this up, but I choose to believe it. I choose to believe that this happened. Well, just to say that there is, as we will see in due course, evidence that Marius did believe something like this. He did believe that he was destined to have seven consulships. But seven consulships. Now, I know that that is an absolutely extraordinary prediction. And maybe you should explain to the listeners precisely why it's such a mad prediction.

23:38It's completely implausible because of the significance that the consulship plays in Rome's Republic. So every year, two consuls are elected and they wield the powers of the monarchy that had been expelled from Rome back in 509 BC. So the consuls are the magistrates who lead Rome's armies into war, who preside over the Senate and over the elections that are held in the city, and who crucially mediate between the Roman people and the gods.

24:12And these powers, of course, are potentially very, very intoxicating. And this is why there are two consuls, so that each one can keep a watch on the other. And it's why their term of office is limited to a single year, so that they won't have time to entrench their power. And for a century now, so as Marius is growing up, it's been a no-no for someone to have more than one consulship. That hadn't always been the case, but it's become kind of institutionalized. And whether this is an official law or whether it's just the pressure of custom is, I think, unknowable.

24:48But it's clearly the case that you're not supposed to have more than one consulship as Marius is growing up. And what makes it even more of a challenge for Marius, you know, any prospect of seven consulships, just having one consulship seems an almost impossible dream. Because he is what the Romans called a novice homo, a new man, someone who has no tradition of holding magistracies in his family, and particularly consulships. And it's obvious why this would be the case, because Marius is from Arpenham, and Arpenham has only just been given the vote.

25:19So, of course, you know, his family haven't had time to get loads of consulships. And just to emphasize how mad it is even to dream of having seven consulships, no Roman in history has held seven consulships. The record is six. Seven just seems impossible. Well, all right, well, we'll see whether he gets there. But let's kick off with Marius' first steps on the ladder.

Military service in Spain

25:43And I guess if you're an ambitious and talented young man from nowhere, from a provincial town, the obvious way to get ahead is through proving yourself in the one thing that the Romans prize more than any other, which is the kind of, you know, the military arena. Because, you know, this is the bedrock of Roman power, isn't it? The army, and this is where Marius is really intending to make his name. Yeah, so if you want to make a name for yourself, what you ideally want is some desperate and hard-fought war in which you can go off and be a hero. And fortunately for Marius, in 134 BC, exactly such a war is being fought in the northeast reaches of Spain.

26:20So remember, we said that the Romans are pushing northwards into the Iberian Peninsula. And they have come up against the people of a city called Numantia. And this war has been grinding on for two decades. And the Senate have got absolutely fed up with it. So the Senate is the assembly of the nobles, the kind of the movers and shakers in Rome. And so accordingly, they say, we need our top man to go and sort this out. And there's no question who the top man in Rome at this point is. It's a guy called Scipio Aemilianus.

26:51And people who listened to our episode on the destruction of Carthage may remember that he is the general who brings that war, final war against Carthage to a close and wipes the city out. And it's a measure of how desperate the Senate is to have Scipio take over this command that they allow him to have a second consulship. So we said, this is very, very irregular. They really, really need Scipio at the front, though. So they say they kind of turn a blind eye to the irregularity of it. And so Scipio travels to Spain in command of a vast army.

27:24He has 20,000 men, which is roughly four legions. So a very sizable fighting force of Roman citizens. He also has lots of Sochii, these Italian allies who fight alongside the Romans. And also he has auxiliaries. And the Sochii and these auxiliaries come to 40,000 in all. And among the auxiliaries, there are some particularly glamorous and celebrated fighters. And these are horsemen from a region in North Africa, basically it's Algeria now, called Numidia.

27:59And the Numidians have been allies of the Romans for almost a century. The alliance had been forged in the war against Hannibal. Originally, the Numidians had been on the side of Hannibal and then they had switched sides. And when Carthage falls, the Numidians had been given a lot of Carthaginian territory as a kind of reward and to cement their status as allies of the Roman people. And the particular contingent of horsemen at Numantia is led by a very charismatic young Numidian prince called Jugurtha.

28:29And he has brought not only cavalry, but also 12 war elephants. And there is a kind of ancestral relationship between the Numidian royal family and the families of the Scipios. Because Scipio Africanus, the guy who had defeated Hannibal, he'd been great mates with this Numidian king. So, there's a kind of sense that, you know, this is a family business. Now, when Scipio travels to Numantia, he takes with him, as a junior officer, the young Marius.

29:02And Marius does really, really well there. Just a quick question about Marius. So, do we have any sense of his appearance, personality, sort of, I don't know, his bearing, his vibe at this point? I think he's like, if you imagine Channing Tatum. Wow. He's big. Okay. He's brave. He's physically tough. He loves fighting. He's, in other words, he's a natural soldier. And he's a soldier in the kind of traditional old school way that the Romans love. So, he despises fancy cooking.

29:34He's not interested in celebrity chefs. Okay. He despises snooty manners. He doesn't have a, you know, a kind of expensive education. He loves sleeping on hard ground with his men with only his cloak to cover him. You know, it's all that kind of thing. Right. So, he's very Roman. A Roman in the way that the Romans like to imagine themselves. Yeah. You know, he hasn't been spoiled by all these snooty manners and things. And by great, great learning and stuff. He's not a man for a sex manual. Well, we'll maybe come to that in due course.

30:04I think at this point, he's not a man for a sex manual. He is, he's rough and tough and hardy. And he loves fighting barbarians. And this is, this is everything the Romans want in a kind of a young, upwardly mobile officer. He's also a very strict disciplinarian. And to be honest, the Romans love a strict disciplinarian. They love being whipped into shape. And this is what Maris is very good at. And he fights and kills one of the commanders of the Numantians in hand-to-hand combat.

30:34And Scipio, Emilianus, is watching this and thinks it's absolutely brilliant. And later that evening, Scipio is with all his officers. And one of them asks him, you know, who do you see as being the coming man? Who among the younger generation is someone to watch? And Scipio turns to Marius and he touches him on the shoulder very fondly. And he says, perhaps this is the man. And this is a massive thing for Marius. You know, a commendation from the great war hero, Scipio Emilianus.

31:10And it marks him out as a man who, you know, deserves well of the Roman people. It's something that can launch a political career. He's a future England captain. That's exactly what he is, isn't he? He's the batsman who has been anointed by the team captain as the man who's going to carry the fortunes of the nation in the next 10 years. I think that's a very fair comparison. So in 133 BC, Numantia falls. It's all great. Scipio goes back and Marius goes back as well. There is one problem, which is that Scipio dies very shortly afterwards.

31:43Had Scipio stuck around, then he would have been the perfect patron. So it is a bit of a blow, but Marius doesn't give up because he's got his battle scars. He does have this commendation from Scipio, which is a big deal because all of these really matter when it comes to elections, particularly if you're an unknown. You know, you need a story to tell. And Marius has a story to tell. And fortunately, he does also have an alternative source of patronage to Scipio. And this is one of the very grandest of the noble families, a family that has been serving as the patrons of Marius's family in Arpenham for several generations.

32:21And these are the Caicilli Metelli. And they are at this period, probably the top aristocratic dynasty in Rome. They are madly efficient as a dynasty in hoovering up consulships, for instance. So between 123 and 98 BC, no less than seven of them will hold the consulship. I mean, that's an unprecedented success rate for a single family. And they have been the great rivals of the Scipio family. But when Scipio Aemilianus dies, the great patriarch of the Metelli behaves very, very well in exactly the kind of way, again, that the Romans like to think that their great men should.

33:01So he runs out into the streets, sobbing, tearing his clothes, crying out, the great buttress of the city has fallen, the man who was our bulwark. And he orders his sons to help carry the funeral buyer of Scipio. So in death, there is reconciliation between these two great families. And how is it that Marius can ride both horses? How can he have the patronage of both if they're rivals? Or is that not a problem? Because the Metelli are his political patrons and Scipio had been his military patron.

33:35And basically, if you're not a threat to either of them, you can have both of them, I think. So Marius is a, I mean, although we've portrayed him as Channing Tatum, as kind of rough-hewn, he's a smart political operator to line up both of these. Yeah. And the fact that you play the simple rough-hewn soldier doesn't mean you're stupid. I mean, you may well be playing that part because you know that it appeals. I mean, there's obviously, you can't do it unless there's a strong element of truth to it.

34:07But it doesn't imply that there's not an element of calculation in projecting that image. And again, you know, people will be able to think of people in their own politics, perhaps, who, you know, you can draw comparisons with. Yeah. So in Britain, we would talk about the greasy pole, wouldn't we, about climbing the greasy pole, which Marius clearly is now hoping, with their backing, with his war record, that he can do. They don't have the same expression, do they? Obviously. What's the expression the Romans have? So they call it the cursus honorum. So it's literally the kind of the racetrack of honours, of magistracies.

34:43And the racetrack is obviously derived from the Circus Maximus, which is this great public space where all the people of Rome gather. And this racetrack leads from magistracy to magistracy. And the finishing line, of course, is the consulship, which is the top magistracy. But as we've said, this for a novice homo like Marius, a new man, I mean, it's a big ask. That finishing tape of the consulship is a very long way. So in the immediate present, he has to focus on kind of more junior magistracies.

35:14Unfortunately, there is one magistracy in particular which really seems to suit his skill set, because this is a magistracy which requires the man who holds it to defend the interests of the people against the senatorial elites. And this is perfectly suited to Marius.

Tribunate of the plebs

35:36The problem is that in 119 BC, when Marius decides to run for it, even though that this office is a very potent one, it is also quite a dangerous one to hold. And this office is the tribune of the plebs, of the plebeians, of the people. And it comes with incredible powers. So the tribune has the veto, very famous. A tribune can veto any bill that he thinks threatens the interests of the plebs, of the people.

36:07He has a right to convene public assemblies. So not the Senate, but gatherings of the general citizenship and get them to pass bills of his own, so plebiscites. His own person is absolutely inviolate. It is completely forbidden to lay hands on him. And the reason why that's important is obviously is that, you know, if the tribune is passing measures or blocking legislation that is supported by the mass of the aristocracy, you know, he has to be respected. But is he respected? This is the question. So this is the question. So Marius decides that he's going to run for the tribunate in 119.

36:39And we've said it's a very potent magistracy. But at this time, it is also a very dangerous one for anyone to have. Marius has been elected tribune just two years after one of his predecessors had been murdered. And this, of course, had been a terrible sacrilege. We've said that, you know, the person of a tribune is inviolate. And the death squad that killed this tribune had been led by a consul and the corpse of the tribune had been systematically insulted.

37:11The body had been decapitated and the head, the skull had been filled with lead to serve as a trophy. So in other words, class war, as Marius is looking to make his way, you know, the first kind of lengths of the Curse of Sonorum, has come to Rome. And for someone like Marius, who is a man of the people, no real pedigree or background, but very ambitious, this means that the tightrope he's going to have to tread is incredibly treacherous and potentially fatal.

37:46So Marius is setting out on this potentially fatal tightrope and the stakes are very high. And we'll find out what happens after the break.

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Political fallout and reforms

41:03Welcome back, everybody, to the Rest is History of the Year. It's 119 BC and the ambitious provincial self-made man Gaius Marius, who is now already in his late 30s, so he's only two years short of his 40th birthday, he has won his first major political office, his first major magistracy. He has become, as he intended, a tribune of the plebs.

41:33And as we were saying before the break, Tom, although it's meant supposedly inviolate, this is an increasingly dangerous role in the febrile politics of Rome at this point for a man like Marius to hold. Now, why specifically at this point is this so politically febrile? What makes this so contentious? Because the previous decade and a half, the tribunate had been used to foster what, in the opinion of conservatives in the Senate, are very radical, very dangerous, and in the opinion

42:10of conservatives, very un-Roman reforms and policies. And these have been pushed by two brothers. The eldest of these is Tiberius Gracchus. He had become tribune in 133 BC. His younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, he had become tribune 10 years later. And both these brothers had used their tribunates to push for reforms that were very overtly in favour of the poor. So the measures that they pushed for included having publicly held land, state-held land,

42:42being divided up and given as allotments to those who had no land in the city. So the bottom of the bottom, the most impoverished layers of Roman society. They had pressed for corn to be sold below the market rate, so subsidised food. And they pushed for the poorer citizens when they got levied into the army to be given their own clothes, their own kind of kit and equipment. And this was seen by the Senate as monstrously left-wing, to be anachronistic about it.

43:14Militant class war politics. Yeah, and particularly Gaius Gracchus, the younger, the Tony Ben of Republican Rome, because he had far more than his elder brother, a very self-consciously revolutionary vision. So basically, he wanted to turn the Republic into a kind of version of the democracy that the Athenians had. He wanted very deliberately to alter the balance of power between the nobles, between the senatorial and the elite and the mass of the people.

43:45And I suppose, ultimately, he wanted to enshrine the populace, the people, as the arbiters of Rome, rather than the Sonatus, the Senate. So it would be, I guess, the people in the Senate of Rome, rather than the other way around. That's his kind of ambition. And to conservatives in the Senate, I mean, this is beyond the pale. This is monstrous. And they see Tiberius Gracchus, and particularly Gaius Gracchus, as potential tyrants. Why else would they be pushing these reforms? It could only be because they want absolute power. And something that confirms the senatorial conservatives in this opinion is a very sinister trend.

44:22So Tiberius Gracchus, when he'd finished his one year as Tribune, he'd immediately sought re-election. And Gaius Gracchus, in 122 BC, he'd finished his term, stood again, and actually been elected. And this is really sinister, because it is pretty fundamental to the way that the Romans understand politics, that you shouldn't hold a magistracy for more than one year. Because if you do, then you have the chance to entrench your own powers, your own support.

44:52And so the enemy of the Gracchi in the Senate feel themselves entirely justified in imagining that it is an ambition for tyranny that is motivating the Gracchi, and that the office of the Tribune may be inviolate, but it's not as inviolate as maintaining the integrity of the Republic. And so twice this great cry had gone up that the Republic needs defending, the Constitution is in peril, and twice this cry had been answered.

45:24So in 133, Tiberius Gracchus had been clubbed to death with the leg of a stool. He'd been cornered and had his head smashed to pieces. And then in 121, Gaius Gracchus, as we heard before the break, he'd been murdered, his corpse decapitated, the skull filled with lead, and 3,000 of his followers had been rounded up and executed without trial by the consuls. And these executions had been justified in terms of a national emergency. To stress, if people think, well, this is probably part of the run of the mill, you know, Roman

45:56politics is very violent. That's not right at all, right? This is a massive rupture with the previous traditions of Roman politics. Completely. These are the first eruptions of civil violence on the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the monarchy back in 509 BC. It's that big a deal. Wow. So for 400 years or so. For 400 years. And it is experienced as something completely shocking. So what's the significance of these atrocities?

46:27I think both more and less than they seem. So more because it's a fatal precedent. I guess if you're being florid, you would say that a fatal toxin has been injected into the body politic. And we're never florid. If a consul can justify putting an elected tribune to death and completely ignoring his inviolability simply by referencing a national emergency, then what's to stop magistrates

46:57in the future doing exactly the same? I mean, it's a kind of Weimar process, isn't it? It leads to bad places. If you can kill a tribune, then why can't you? You can kill anybody. I mean, one consul could kill another consul and say they're a threat to the survival of the republic. Because when you break a taboo, the taboo is never as strong as it had been before it was broken. Exactly so. So it's very pregnant with menace for the future. At the same time, I think it's kind of less than it seems because the instincts of the

47:29Romans remain across the board incredibly conservative. There isn't actually a threat of open class warfare of the kind that was always tearing Greek cities apart. And this is because, as we've said, the Romans, the mass of the Romans are just inherently very, very conservative. They may feel resentful of the elites, but they simultaneously feel very respectful of them. Again, I think there's something of the way that maybe, I mean, American listeners may disagree with this, but from this side of the Atlantic, people seem to really hate billionaires

48:03in America, but also simultaneously respect them. And I think there's something of that in the kind of the Roman attitude to the senatorial elite.

48:13It's part of the tradition that the Senate and the people should work together. And the people feel that tradition to be as precious as the Senate do. So it's not like actually Rome is going to collapse into, as I say, into class conflict. And so this, for someone like Marius, you know, here is an opportunity because he is perfectly suited to play the part of the people's friend, a popularis in Latin. You could translate that perhaps as a populist. People are very nervous, you know, among the tribunes. They're very nervous of pushing legislation that might offend the elites because they've

48:46seen what's happened. But Marius is bold enough to do this. So he passes a bill that restricts the ability of the nobles to influence voters in the voting pens. It's kind of like, it's not exactly introducing a secret bannet, but it's kind of something along those lines. And this is the first overtly populist gesture since the death of Gaius Gracchus. And to quote Plutarch, this won him a reputation as a person of great courage, a formidable opponent of the conservatives in the Senate, and someone who could be relied upon to stick

49:17up for the common man. And Plutarch isn't exaggerating there. Marius was, I think, being brave because it is a period of massive reaction. So the historian Sallust, writing a few decades later, he described it as a kind of a faction of the few, ruled by the few.

49:38And these few consist of just the top, the grandest, the snootiest nobles. And among these nobles are the Metelli. So obviously, you were asking previously, you know, is there a risk for Marius of running against the interests of the Metelli? There absolutely is, because the Metelli are furious with him for, you know, this law that he's introduced, and they withdraw their patronage. And this has a knock-on effect for Marius's prospects, because for several years after his

50:08tribunate, he struggles to get another magistracy. And in fact, in 116, massive embarrassment, he manages to lose two elections on the same day. Oh, my God. You know, he's clearly not doing well, but, you know, to pursue the sports analogy, he backs himself. Right. He's not going to be cast down by a few disappointments. Form is temporary, class is permanent. And he's got class. He's got class. And the evidence of that class is that he's able to keep the backing of the people, but

50:38in due course, he's able to win back the support of the Metelli. Because the Metelli can see he is actually someone it's worth having on side. And so relations between them are patched up.

African command against Jugurtha

50:49And so a decade on from his tribunate, Marius is back in the race. You know, the Curse of Sonorum is going well for him. He's secured admittedly by the skin of his teeth. But, you know, he's got it. A governorship in Spain. And this enables him to do what he does best, which is to demonstrate his talents as a commander. And he promotes himself as a kind of no-nonsense enthusiast for law and order. Common sense governorship. So again, to quote Plutarch, the province back then, that's Spain, was still very savage

51:22and uncivilized since the Spaniards thought banditry an honorable profession. And Marius is having none of that. Lots of crucifixions and scourgings and enslavements. As I say, common sense. So he's robust. He's robust in Spain. But also he, now we haven't mentioned his personal life at all, but actually his personal life has taken a very exciting turn because he is married into, well, the most single, most well-known family in all Roman history, hasn't he? He has. Yes. Although at the time it's very ancient, it's very patrician, but it's slightly down on its

51:56luck. It hasn't had a great success in elections for centuries and more. And this, of course, is the family of the Caesars. So, Marius marries Julia, who is the sister of the father of Julius Caesar. So, Marius is going to be the young Julius Caesar's marital uncle. And so, big part in Colin McCulloch's books, all of this.

52:27Yeah. So, Marius is being knitted into the, you know, a key aristocratic family. And he's got the Metelli back on side by this point. Yeah. So, brilliant. And this is crucial because he's got the backing of one Metellus in particular. And this is a guy called Quintus Caecilius Metellus, who is, he is an absolutely instinctive oligarch. I mean, he's very much politically not Marius's cup of tea. He's a person of great personal integrity, but in that kind of flinty, slightly off-putting

52:58manner that is characteristic of very moral, upstanding Romans. But crucially for Marius, this reputation as someone who is both very upstanding and a very effective soldier has won Metellus' election ship to the consulship for the year 109. And this is great for Marius because Metellus as consul has been appointed to the command of an exceedingly challenging war in Africa.

53:28And this in turn means that Metellus is going to need a trusted and competent legatus, a number two, a deputy. And Marius is the obvious candidate. He's a man of proven courage, of proven ability. And he is also a long-term client of the Metelli. And so Marius says yes, doesn't he? And he says yes, both because he's obviously very good at fighting wars, so it'd be mad for him to say no. But also, you know, the military sphere and the political sphere, you know, they're interconnected,

54:02aren't they, in Rome in this period? And Marius is thinking that, you know, proving himself on the battlefield is the perfect way to reboot his stalled political career. Well, I think more specifically, it might give him a chance to have a crack at the ultimate and go for the consulship. And Marius hasn't told Metellus this. It's like a kind of dream that he's hugging to himself. But his plan, I think, is to go to Africa to win a few dashing victories, to make a name

54:33for himself in Rome, to have his backers in Rome, of which he has quite a lot by this point, to kind of really hype him up, and then to go back, run for election. And, you know, he might be in with a chance. But obviously, this does require him to make a good fist of things in Africa. And things there have not been going well for the Romans at all. So it's not going to be easy. So the reason for this is because they are up against an enemy who knows them very, very well. And this is none other than an old comrade of arms of Marius.

55:04They'd served together at Numantia. And this is the Numidian prince Jugurtha, the guy who had brought the cavalry and the twelve elephants to Numantia. And I say prince, but in fact, by this point, he's killed his two cousins, who are the legitimate heirs to the Numidian throne, the legitimate princes, and made himself the king of Numidia. So he's a usurper sitting on the throne. And to oil the wheels of his rise to power, to get the approval of the powers that be in

55:36Rome, he has lavished massive bribes. He's just been spraying them around. And even Jugurtha had been surprised by the level of corruption that this had revealed in a city supposedly made up of stern, flinty, unyielding moralists. And he made a very famous comment on Rome, which Sallust recorded. He described it as a city for sale and bound for imminent destruction, should a buyer be found. And on top of this, the other reason that Jugurtha has really been pushing things too far is that

56:12he hasn't been behaving as the Romans think a kind of tame client king should. So in 112, in direct contravention of Roman instructions, he had attacked and killed the second of his two cousins, who'd kind of retreated and he's holed up in a town called Keirta. And in the course of this attack, which the Romans had told Jugurtha anyway not to do, Jugurtha's men had killed a number of Romans. And this is too much, really, for the Senate back in Rome, no matter how many bribes Jugurtha

56:44is shoveling their way. And so they think, OK, this has gone too far. We need to topple him. This, however, proves easier said than done. And the reasons for this are numerous. Firstly, Numidia is kind of flat and open. So it's perfect cavalry country. And the strength of the Romans, of course, is their legions, their heavy infantry. Also, the Roman forces in Africa are very flabby and out of shape. So they need a strict disciplinarian to turn up and whip them into shape. And a consul who had been sent out to fight Jugurtha had shown himself to be absolutely

57:15useless. And, you know, it resulted in a series of embarrassing defeats. So again, to pursue the sporting analogy, you know, the England manager has lost to Andorra.

57:27Yeah, to Iceland. Or Iceland, yes. And Metellus is the guy who's been appointed to go and whip them into shape. Yeah, basically, they've been messing around with wags. Yeah, exactly. They're barely training. And you've got a new manager who's a disciplinarian. And he's bringing in Marius, who is the number two. Yeah, who's the set piece coach or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Grim-faced set piece coach who will make them, like, train six times a day. Yes. So Salas describes Metellus as a formidable and unrelenting man.

57:58And so he is. He goes in, gets them onto the training ground, you know, practicing their corners, whatever, and whips them into shape. And then he gets them ready. They go on the offensive. They defeat Jugurtha in a pitched battle. All Jugurtha's war elephants are wiped out. And Metellus very cleverly then starts suborning Jugurtha's inner circle so that Jugurtha doesn't know who he can trust. Jugurtha inevitably opts for a guerrilla war. This is the classic thing. I mean, you know, this is where Numidia is the place where the French will end up fighting their war in Algeria.

58:31Right. And Metellus, rather like the French do, he responds by ravaging the countryside, taking vast numbers of prisoners, capturing settlements one by one, burning them if they resist. It's kind of calculated series of atrocities. And the Senate think this is brilliant. To quote Salus, they decreed supplications to the immortal gods in return for the successful deeds of Metellus. And really, the only fly in the ointment as Metellus' year as consul draws to a close is the fact that Jugurtha is still on the loose.

59:03But Metellus is assuming that's not really an issue. He's done so well that even though he's no longer consul, he's presuming that he will continue to be in charge of this war. And it is at this point that Marius makes his move. So in the summer of 108, he goes to Metellus and he says that he wants to head back to Rome and he wants to run for the consulship. And Metellus is stunned by this. You know, he responds with complete astonishment, then with contempt, and then he makes a joke of it.

59:34But Marius is absolutely obdurate. And Metellus, who thinks he hasn't got a hope, I mean, he's just a novice homo, what hope does he possibly have? He says, fine, okay, you can go back. But very pointedly, he keeps Marius with him in the field until the very last moment. So that Marius only gets back to Rome in the very nick of time to register himself for the consular election. And I think that Metellus is doing this to ensure that Marius won't have time to do any of the campaigning that, you know, is essential if you're going to be consul.

1:00:04But Metellus has badly underestimated Marius because we said that Marius has lots of agents back in Rome and unknown to Metellus. These have been doing a lot of campaigning while Marius has been away in Africa and they have been playing the popularist card. They've been saying, look, Metellus is stiff, arrogant, chilly, haughty. This isn't the kind of person that we want. What we want is a man of the people, a man like you.

1:00:34That's pretty sneaky. Marius is turning on his own patron. He completely is. That's poor. That has slightly messed with my sense of Gaius Marius, who I always thought was... It's like Rupert Lowe turning on Nigel Farage. That's not the... That is absolutely not the analogy that I would have picked. So I always thought that Marius would never have stooped to that. But I was wrong. Well, we said he gives the impression of being, I think, a bit of a meathead. Yeah. But that's the show.

1:01:04Marius is a very shrewd, calculating commander, but also a politician. He's very, very effective, and he knows that, you know, in politics, as in war, you have to prepare for success, and that's what he's been doing. And he knows that there is a huge constituency, and not just among the mass of the people, in the Senate as well, who are fed up with this kind of faction of the few, these guys who've been in control and hogging the consulship for year after year after year, and want them out of the way. And so he is the guy who dares to put his head above the parapet, and he duly reaps the

1:01:36reward. So not only is he elected consul for 107 BC, he gets Metellus' African command. My God, if you're Metellus, you are absolutely raging at this point. Oh, he's furious. He's absolutely livid. He's the guy who's basically defeated Goethe, and he's closing in on the kill, and just as he's doing that, suddenly he gets a message saying, you've got to hand over your command to your former deputy. But it is what it is. You know, Metellus has got to do what the Senate tells him. And so he goes back to Rome in a massive strop, and his mates in the Senate there try to make

1:02:09things up for him by voting him a splendid title, Numidicus, you know, the guy who's defeated the Numidians. And we've said how the number of names that you have in Rome is a marker of your status. He now has a fourth name. So that's some consolation, I guess. Meanwhile, Marius is in Africa. He takes control of the war against Jugurtha, and within a year, he has brought it to a successful conclusion. Jugurtha himself is driven out of Numidia and goes to Mauritania, the neighbouring kingdom what's now Morocco.

1:02:40But Marius is not going to leave him there to continue to stir up trouble. He wants a line drawn under the whole war with Jugurtha. And so accordingly, he has an eye for talent. He's got this general staff, and he picks out the shrewdest, the cleverest, the most diplomatically able, the bravest of all his lieutenants. Sends this officer to the king of Mauritania to negotiate the surrender of Jugurtha. And this officer, you know, proves himself to be everything that Marius had hoped.

1:03:12Incredibly subtle, incredibly fearless. He pulls the diplomatic mission off. Jugurtha falls into Roman hands. This lieutenant takes Jugurtha back to Marius, and Marius then heads back to Rome with Jugurtha in chains. Do you know, I've been massively looking forward to this. Well, actually dreading it, because I remember having to translate this, like some passage about Jugurtha's in chains. Yeah, in Sallust. It was Sallust. Yeah, we had to do this at school. I mean, I don't want to make listeners switch off. But the act of translating this was soul-destroying.

1:03:46It was so dull. But you're going to make it exciting, aren't you? I thought from your enthusiasm for Colleen McCulloch that you were going to say that you remember this moment as a particularly grim and terrifying moment.

Triumph and brewing rivalry

1:03:56So Marius has gone back, and it's the 1st of January, 104. So it's the New Year, the Roman New Year. And he's been given a triumph. It's a great kind of celebrated procession through the streets of Rome that gets given to victorious generals. And he's celebrating it on New Year's Day. His triumph involves him riding in a chariot, dressed in the robes of a triumphal general through Rome with his legions, all the loot that he's taken in Numidia, and his legions following him. And Jugurtha is led in chains before the cheering mass of the Roman people, being booed and spat

1:04:31at, and people throwing eggs and whatever at him. I mean, kind of moderately interesting and fun, I think. No, it's genuinely interesting. I think the key thing, looking at your notes, is that he probably didn't know the word for earlobes. And that was what threw me. Because at the end of the triumph, Jugurtha is taken to one side and taken to this hideous prison. And there, his earrings are pulled off. And they're yanked off so brutally that his entire earlobe comes away with the earrings.

1:05:01And surely any young Sandbrook would have enjoyed that if he'd got to translate it. And then he's thrown into this freezing cold dungeon. And I'll quote Plutarch. Jugurtha's wits unsettled by this and grinning horribly. He cried out, by Hercules, what cold baths you have here in Rome. Great banter. I don't think it's banter. I think he's gone mad by this point already. And so he's chained up down in the bottom of this hideous cell.

1:05:34And six days later, he dies of the cold and malnutrition. And that's the end of Jugurtha. And so for Marius, everything's turned out brilliantly. So he's got his consulship. He's gone to Africa. He's won his war. He's got a brilliant name for himself as Rome's greatest general. There are just two slight clouds on the horizon. And the first of these is that beyond the Alps, the Teutons and the Cimbri are reported to be moving on Italy.

1:06:05The asteroid is heading towards Earth. The zombie apocalypse is breaking out. Do you know what they are? They're the white walkers. They're the white walkers from Westeros. Yeah. And so in Rome, all eyes are fixed on Marius. He is the hero of the hour. He is Rome's greatest soldier. And so it's not surprising that it's on his shoulders that responsibility for saving the city is laid by a desperate and terrified people. Then there is a second cloud. And this is less obvious.

1:06:37It's more private. But I'd say that at this stage, it's just a kind of a little niggle. But it is one that threatens a good deal of trouble in the future, to put it mildly. So just as Metellus had been upstaged by Marius, so does Marius feel just a little bit upstaged by his own lieutenant. And this is, of course, the guy who had successfully negotiated the surrender of Jugurtha. And this lieutenant, like Marius himself, is a naturally ambitious man, a man with a hyper keen sense of his own worth, and a man with all kinds of military and political talents.

1:07:21And there are some in Rome, Marius's enemies in the Senate, prominent among them, who have begun to attribute the defeat of Jugurtha, not to Marius, but to this lieutenant. They're saying, oh, Marius is just showboating. The guy who really ended the war is this person. And this person, this lieutenant, you know, he doesn't disavow this perspective. And in fact, he's had a signet ring made for himself, which shows him negotiating the surrender of Jugurtha.

1:07:53And so he kind of flashes it around. And to quote Plutarch, by insisting on wearing this ring all the time, he greatly irritated Marius, who was incredibly sensitive when it came to his own honour, scorned to share his glory with anyone else, and was always ready to take offence. And Dominic, the name of this lieutenant, we are going to be hearing a lot about him in the episodes to come. It is Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In our next episode, we are going to be finding out who he is, what's his background, his upbringing, all of that.

1:08:27And we will also, of course, be following Marius to war with the Teutons and the Cimbri. Crikey, so exciting. So if you'd like to hear that episode right now, and if you'd like to hear the final two episodes of this absolutely thrilling, swashbuckling Roman series, and if you're not already a member of the Rest is History Club, because, of course, if you're in the club, you can listen to the next episode, well, if you want to hear it, join our own band of marauding barbarian cannibals, the Rest is History Club, at therestishistory.com.

1:09:00And you can, of course, always find out more about this series and about what's coming next on the Rest is History by subscribing to our newsletter. Now, if you don't want to join the Rest is History Club, first of all, you're insane. So I, you know, I have no time for you. I don't care what you do, frankly, because you've made poor life choices. However, you can actually, because we're kind, you can actually hear the first five minutes of the next episode right now. We are going to be playing the first five minutes of that episode now.

1:09:32So after that, you probably will want to join the club. Now, we're only doing it because we like you. We're not doing it to entice you to join the club. Anyway, here are the next five minutes. Goodbye, everybody. Enjoy them.

Barbarian threats and disasters

1:09:42Ave, acque vale.

1:09:46Even as Marius is riding through the streets of Rome and being cheered by the watching crowds, there is a mood of panic, maybe even desperation in the city, because Jugurtha may have been defeated. The dignity of the Roman name may have been upheld in Africa, but to the north, beyond the Alps, there is a much more terrifying threat than some African king massing on the frontiers of Rome's empire.

1:10:21And again, we mentioned this in the previous episode. Yeah. It's an immense migration of Germans, the Teutons and the Cimbri from Jutland to the frontiers of the Roman world. So it's almost a kind of proto-Viking invasion. Yeah. So in the last episode, to please people who online like to count how often we refer to either the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, I compared them with the White Walkers, the people who in the Game of Thrones TV series you see right at the beginning, they're massing all the time.

1:10:52You know, all the internal politics of Westeros is nothing compared with the existential apocalyptic threat that these blokes represent. And actually, I'm going to congratulate myself on my own comparison. I think it's an absolutely superb comparison. Yeah. Because, I mean, these people, the Teutons and the Cimbri, they're massive. They're terrifying. They look weird. They are an existential threat. They're reputed to be cannibals. Right. This is Plutarch on them. He said they were impervious to cold because they've been brought up in icebound countries full of forests.

1:11:24I mean, Tom, the parallels are stacking up. You're absolutely right. And also, I think, isn't this also the case with the White Walkers? The Teutons and the Cimbri are accompanied by women and children. Yeah, because some of them are women and children. Yeah. And in fact, actually, in Game of Thrones, the children are the most frightening. There's always something terrifying about a murderous, sinister child. And frankly, if you've ever met a German child, you know, it's the same story. Well, they're Danes, really, aren't they? Yeah. They're the worst. And the women also are very frightening because they're said to fight alongside the men.

1:11:58Of course. And it's an entire people on the move. So there are tens of thousands of them, according to the Roman sources. I mean, we don't know how accurate they are, but basically there are loads and loads of them. And they are experienced by the Romans less as an army than as some kind of force of nature. You know, a great flood, a tide, a tsunami, whatever you want to reach for. You know, the news had been brought to them that this monstrous tide of people is advancing towards you. And so they'd sent an army under a consul into a region called Noricum, which is basically Austria today in 113 BC.

1:12:33And the consul had set an ambush for these barbarians. And the barbarians had rumbled it and had outsmarted the consul and given him a serious mauling. And so he'd withdrawn. And he had assumed that the barbarians would pursue him and invade Italy. In fact, they don't. They swing westwards into Gaul, which is a big relief to the Romans. But I think it's also a little bit unsettling because it's clear that the Cimbri and the Teutons are unlike any enemy that they've come up against before.

1:13:03There's no predicting what they'll do. When you're fighting Carthaginians or Greeks or even Gauls, there's a sense in which the Romans understand what makes these people tick. But with these barbarians from the far north, and again, this is maybe the kind of White Walker comparison, the Romans don't understand what they want. They don't understand what's going to motivate them. They don't understand how they're going to behave. And so that means it's very difficult, I think, for the Romans to devise a strategy to cope with this onslaught.

1:13:34And this becomes manifest in a succession of disastrous Roman attempts to go and be proactive and meet the Teutons and Cimbri and wipe them out beyond the limits of Roman power. Because the barbarians, they're just roaming around Gaul, kind of looting and pillaging and killing and all that kind of stuff. And the Romans keep going and trying to attack them, and they keep being defeated. So first in 109 BC, and then two years later, near what today is Bordeaux.

1:14:06And one consul in that battle is killed, and the other one is cornered. And the only way that he can extract himself is to agree that he and his army will go beneath the yoke. Oh, my God. Yeah, ultimate humiliation. You put up two spears and put another spear across it, and everyone has to symbolically bend and crawl. Well, not symbolically. I mean, you literally do it, but it's obviously a symbol of humiliation. So that's very bad. And then I had forgotten the full details of this defeat.

1:14:36So it happens in 105, and it's a culminating disaster in the Roman attempts to stop the barbarians. It happens outside Arausio, which is the town in southern Gaul, which gives its name to Orange. So ultimately to the Orange Order. I mean, that's an amazing thought. And in this battle, the Romans, it said, lose over 100,000 men, which is more than they lose at Cannae. Is that plausible, really, that they lost that many? I mean, these figures are all made up, aren't they, really?

1:15:08I don't think they're made up. It's clearly a massive defeat, and yet it's barely remembered. And you think how much it's written about Cannae and the impact it had on the Romans. At the time, it must have just seemed overwhelming. It must have seemed a disaster on par with that. And when the news of it is brought to Rome, there is this terrible mood of panic. So thank you very much for listening to that. And if you liked it, and you would like to hear more, then you can find the full episode at theresidishistory.com.

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