Forget Julius Caesar. Forget Pompey And Crassus.
25 Roman Legions Held The World’s Armies At Bay For Over 600 Years Because Of A General You Have Never Heard Of.
The trade routes south of the Alps were exposed. North of Rome by less than 200 miles, armies of Germanic tribes filed into the area. It was sheer luck that the Germanic tribes that sat at their doorstep didn’t ride into Rome and sack it. They certainly could have taken it. And they almost did. In fact it took a series of Roman military disasters, and a single General with a vision to prepare Rome for the future.
Rome’s trajectory from 300 BC to 100 BC was the arc of a flaming star, hot, effulgent and governed by the ambitious, the sociopathic, the corrupt and the competent simultaneously. The days of Rome as a Republic would soon evanesce and civil war would forge a new monarchy again, bloody and saddled with rich oligarchs who grease the wheels of government with money and influence. The borders of Rome stretched from the French coast in the West to the Balkans in the East. By this time almost 30 million gallons of fresh water per day was flowing into the nation on a handful of aqueducts, engineered with extreme, unheard of precision into Rome’s population hovering around one million.
Romans washed and shaved, wore bright clean clothes, and enjoyed the habits of hygiene and a waste management infrastructure. They had a written and spoken language, massive sophisticated and artful architecture and engineering systems in place including labor. They created a transportation system second to none, and could move tremendous amounts of personnel and materials from place to place to trade, to build or to make war. Many of the roads built then are still in use. The entire Mediterranean Sea was surrounded by an almost complete ring of Roman occupation, from North Africa to Gibraltar to Central Asia.
The mysteries, however, the things that kept Romans up at night, the stuff of nightmares promised to badly behaved children were still rumbling around in the cold Northern European territories. People, unkempt, clothed in animal furs, dark and inarticulate, they were lumbering out of the mist into Roman territories in large numbers.
By the first century BCE, almost one in four people in Rome was a slave, so labor itself was often something done by lesser casts. The Roman doctrine of conquest was not so much annihilation as it was integrating people into its larger nation. By the second century the Romans comprised a different breed of people than the rest of the world. The Romans were so powerful and influential they were used to seeing Romans and slaves around them and heard the various accents and flavors of humanity that impinged upon them in centuries previously. Compared to the rest of civilization, the Romans were mostly successful, living life in full. In the midst were the slaves and artisans and traders, Parthians, Dacians, Gaul’s, Africans, the prisoners, the detritus of war, and bands of mercenaries fighting with Rome. So Romans had had contact with diverse people for a long time. But facing the rather cosmopolitan Romans now were people far different than the conquered assimilated tribes of Central Asia. These new invading people were the stuff of distant memories, redolent of their own violent past best described perhaps by Thomas Hobbes as a life “nasty brutish and short”.
In 113 BCE the Cimbri, the Teutones, and the Ambrones, tribes from Jutland in northern Europe were beginning a millennium long migration of people into Roman Territories. Their motivation for leaving is unknown. Suddenly they were on the move south and in large numbers. All the northerner’s most efficient route was through Transalpine Gaul and these three massive bands cooperated well as they fossicked around for new homelands. They showed up at Noricum, in current day Austria, it was a large community and trading outpost inhabited by the Taurisci, a pro Roman ally that traded and acted as the cork in the path of the Alpine trade routes.
These Germanic raiders were large. They smelled bad. They seemed dirty and they constantly trailed their squalid families and pack animals. They were fierce and unpredictable, suddenly erupting from a tree line in large numbers, screaming and chanting. They attacked the weak and the strong alike; they took few prisoners and cut down anyone who resisted. The Taurisci were overwhelmed by these raids and sent emissaries to beg Rome for aid. Then Taurisci were completely trusted by the Romans. Tauriscians had long since gone native and were fluent in Latin and many Germanic languages.
The Romans were not unfamiliar with Foreigners. They had for centuries rubbed up against the Celts and had long since warred against the Franks, Suevi, Avars, Numidians, Carthaginians and Samnites. They had heard of the blue Picts, painted nightmarish warriors in the British Isles. Many Roman auxiliary units were soldiered by Gauls and by Celts and many Celtic metal workers were smithing swords and horseshoes for the Legions. To most Romans who were enjoying a long period of growth and prosperity, the Barbarians were different from the foreigners they were familiar with. They were best described as filthy people; they smeared themselves with bear fat, as opposed to olive oil. They had tattoos everywhere over their bodies. Their languages and habits were arcane. Their weapons were modern, bronze and steel, most of them purloined from the fruits of war, or purchased in trading, or taken in raids of the border regions manned by Roman garrisons. From time to time Romans would be facing Roman weapons. Most Cimbri, Teutones and Ambrones warriors wore body armor and were organized into discreet military roles and militia. Their ways of war were still far less ordered than the Roman Legions, covering each other with scutum and pila and gladiei all protected by their shiny helmets, and led by signalers and blooded veterans. The Barbarian predilection for violence was terrifying. Many of these bands of Germanic tribes were themselves displaced by the paroxysms of violent raiders from Central Asia that were far more terrifying, like the tartars, the Huns and the Mongols. To the men in Roman lines, the Barbarians’ endless maniacal full frontal assaults panicked new recruits. Whatever their strategy, they seemed to fight the same, in large numbers, on foot or mounted, under the din of screaming, hooping and the skirl of swords slithering out scabbards. The Cimbri fought all out, as if nothing else mattered. To the Roman Legionnaire, who could read and write and knew some math and science and global geography, watching a man’s fury unfettered by any concern for his own life sent chills up his spine.
Gnaeus Papirius Carbo would have made a great United States senator. He was a rich man, who developed streams of income from other patricians because he conveyed favors from his office upon them in return for more power. He was ambitious and arrogant and died for both of these character flaws. At this time Consuls ran the Roman Legions, two of them were elected each year and they were in charge of the Legions. During battles the command changed back and forth each day. This was a prescription for disaster and often proved so. This is not to say the two Consuls didn’t cooperate, it was to say that a single man with an army under his purview could march on Rome itself. Carbo was an exception here. He had this command and the imprimatur to drive the Teutones and the Cimbri and the Ambrones out of the trade routes. He set his 40,000 Roman regulars on the high ground in a good defensive position and demanded that the Cimbri leave.
What is truly amazing is that despite the power of the epithet ‘Barbarian’, the Cimbri dealt with the Romans in honor. In the discussions with Carbo they asked for land in return for peace and in 113 BCE, he agreed to it. That said, they took the answer at face value and headed back their own tribal counsels at Noricum. But Carbo gained nothing from a compromise. He was looking for greatness on the battlefield. On the way back to their encampments, Carbo’s troops ambushed the emissaries, and slaughtered nearby encampments as well.
The Cimbris were furious and saw it as a reason to make an immediate counter attack, this time with a much larger force. Roman phalanxes could not operate on the uneven ground of the Alps and the thin defile like passes. In fury and swift retribution, the Romans under Carbo’s incompetent leadership were sent a flight in a rout that destroyed almost the whole Army. Carbo barely survived.
Having survived, he decided to kill himself out of the dishonor.
The Historian Plutarch wrote: “The Cimbri and Teutones moved with the speed of a raging fire.”
Roman blood pressure rose collectively now that Rome was unguarded. There were Barbarians at the gates, or so it seemed, and not for the first time. The Germanic tribesmen made some raids. For the most part they simply replevin land they felt they were owed in the talks with Carbo. For the first time since the Second Punic War what followed in the next five years were a series of major Roman losses to interlopers that burst through the northern Alps and settled on Roman land with impunity. The Germanic tribes put their women in easy to see posts in the communities they settled in. This was a way of demonstrating their determination to make this their home. Germanic women fought behind their men as well, and from letters home to families and Roman historians, the difference between Cimbri men and woman on the battlefield was very thin. Women chided their men to fight harder and apparently this worked quite well.
In 109 BCE the Barbarians invaded Gallia Narbonensis and crushed the army under Marcus Junius Silanus. Then they destroyed another Roman Army at Burdigala (Bordeaux). In 107, following the portend of serial defeats, the Tigurini abandoned the Romans allied themselves with the victorious Cimbri. Soon they defeated a large force under Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravalla, another pampered, rich, incompetent commander. This time the loss was numerically greater than Cannae where Hannibal handed another arrogant fool consul, Varus, his own ass in 215 BCE.
The Investiture of Gaius Marius (157 BC to 86 BC)
Now the Roman Senate was scared, like for their very lives. If successive Roman Armies can be destroyed, then soon Rome will be overrun. And so it fell on the Senate to raise the largest Roman army since Cannae. In 105 BCE Gnaeus Mallius Maximus and Quintus Servillo Caepio gathered an army 80,000 men strong at Aurasio, (today Orange, France) and tens of thousands of support personnel. Both decided to take half of the army and attack together. Except that they did not trust each other. Thusly on October 6th, 105 BCE Maximus, in search of the glory of a win, attacked the Ambrones without support of his flanking co-commander and was routed immediately. Then Caepio was next. Days afterwards Cimbri and Teutonic armies drove them back down the mountains, took thousands prisoners and purloined all the weapons.
Meanwhile in North Africa.
Consul Melletus had been bogged down in Numidia for years in a whack a mole game with these expert fighters. Marius was Consul Melletus’ lieutenant commander. Marius returned to Rome to run for and earned a seat as a Consul. He immediately returned to Numidia and decisively stopped Jugurtha’s Numidian forces.
While in Rome and Alpine Gaul, the Germanic tribes were deucedly smashing Roman Legions, but in Numidia, Rome was winning.
For the Roman Senate it was like Lincoln and his cabinet — they found their Ulysses S Grant. Finally, after a long series of defeats, the Romans had a commander they could trust to prevail. Marius did more than win; he helped protect the Roman Empire against the stupidity of the un-blooded, inexperienced Consuls. He enacted changes that fundamentally transformed the Roman Army from a force of the rich and affluent to a professional army. Once requiring pedigree to fight, now a peasant or a prisoner could choose to fight. This was the Be All That You Can Be moment for the Romans. After decades, a soldier could earn enough to retire, own land and make a living somewhere else. And like the America of the twentieth century, joining the Roman Army was a chance to get wine, women, song and money. It was a regular job, it was for the most powerful empire in the world and it was a reasonably good life.
Having previously populated the army from the propertied classes, the Roman Empire was stretched to the limit. Marius over night made the armies bigger and more diverse. Marius demanded that anyone could fight for the Romans, not just the landowners. It was time to allow other s to fight because current territorial defense requirements meant more men had to be recruited. He also made it a requirement that Consuls had to have ten years experience in or with the Roman Army. Marius also created the non-commissioned officer: the Centurions. These lifetime officers trained the Legions, taught them discipline, taught them proper weapon usage and care, the Centurions taught them combat engineering and kept the armies in shape. The Centurions taught them how to maintain a supply line and how to build siege engines. In a sense with the Centurions, Marius Consul-proofed the Roman Legions.
The rich patrician like legions’ commanding generals often became their soldiers leading advocates for favors and compensation from the Senate in the form of payment or land holdings. This gave rise to legions fanatically loyal to their commanders. Sulla actually marched on Rome with his Army and later Caesar did as well under the same quid pro quo model. While it was not optimal, at least now armies were fighting for something beyond money. They were fighting for their leaders.
By 104, having earned his first of seven consecutive Consulships, Marius set after the Cimbri and Teutones, and the Ambrones.
They were gone.
For almost two years, they disappeared into Hispania. No one really knows why. They were with either licking their own wounds from combat with the Romans they vanquished, or they saw bigger monetary opportunities there. Marius took advantage of this interval and he trained his Legions and turned them into a disciplined force. He taught them to carry what they needed and to march extremely quickly. He taught them the value of hard work and surprise.
Marius ate with his troops often. He would dig moats and put up walls and toil along with his soldiers. Marius also led his troops from the front. Marius was contemptuous of the rich Senate and once said, “I have no medals. I have scars. Those are my medals and those are all in the front.” Two years later, the thunder of hoof prints and wagon wheels rattled the ground of Southern Italy.
We’re Baaack…
In 102 BCE when the Germanic tribes returned in force to the Roman countryside, the Ambrones and the Teutones wanted to pitch battle in Narbonensis. They surrounded a fortification that Marius had built and housed them in. He forced his soldiers to look over the walls and face their attackers. Later Marius retreated to a small seaside community called Aque Sextiae, today Aix-en-Provence. The Ambrones followed and attacked without much of a plan, but Maruius placed 6000 Roman troops in the tree lines behind the tribe’s flank and lured them forward. At right moment, the Romans attacked from behind and the bewildered Germanic alliance on the battlefield was surrounded and wiped out to the tune of an estimated 100,000 men. While another Consul, Catalus, was winning as well, it was Marius who was credited with the victories.
Marius’ reign was not all wins and roses. He became a brutal and paranoid leader who offed his opposition and made his decisions in back rooms. He was the first consummate military planner. He did more than plan for battle; he built the army that would carry his nephew, Caesar into history. He was the Eisenhower of the Roman Army and the Patton all at the same time. The foot soldiers and the Senators alike loved him.
There are few commanders more overlooked than Marius. It was his formalization of Legion command and control that made the Roman army far more lethal than the one he was born into. He moved the Legions from maniple to the cohort system. It was more lethal and more flexible. Nothing breathed life into the Roman Empire more than the now inexhaustible Roman Legions that stood for opportunity, country and a future. Marius even inculcated unit pride when each Legion had its own silver eagle totem. Again, this was a psychological tool however it motivated troops and today people still fight for units. The lethal Roman War machine was at the heart of the very transformation that helped destroy the Roman Republic and create an Empire. It was Marius’s thinking and his policies that would keep Rome relevant for at least another 300 years. He was often called “the third founder of Rome”.
