031b - Marius

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 31b, Marius. Last week, we covered the life of Gaius Marius through his first consulship. Up to this point, his career was impressive but hardly unique. Yes, he was a new man and deserves extra credit for forging his way upward despite the institutional barriers he faced, but he was hardly the first novus homo to be elected consul and hardly the first Roman general to win the support of the Roman people by bringing an unpopular foreign war to an end. But Marius' ambition, and more importantly, his willingness to act on that ambition, definitely set him apart from his colleagues. There is a reason Gaius Marius deserves multi-episode treatment, and by the end of today, those reasons should be abundantly clear.

In 109 BC, the consul Metellus had been sent to Africa and took Marius along with him. But in that same year, Metellus' consular colleague, Marcus Solanus, was sent north to deal with the Cimbri, a Gallic army that had been growing in strength in the north. Solanus was supposed to put down the impertinent barbarians and restore Roman order, but instead was utterly defeated. Emboldened by the Cimbri's success, another Gallic tribe began making waves in 107 BC, the year of Marius' first consulship. Again the Roman legions were sent north to put down the marauding army, but again the legions were beaten. This time, the Roman officers left standing were only able to save their defeated troops by having them pass under the yoke, a humiliating ritual for the proud Romans. At this point, the most pressing matter was the war in North Africa, but it was fast becoming apparent that Rome faced a very real threat in the resurgent Gauls. In 106 BC, the Romans met with some success, as their consul for the year, Quintus Capio, pacified a rebellious town and reintroduced some semblance of Roman superiority. But he was to give it all away the next year, leading to the circumstances that allowed Marius' unprecedented run of consulships to commence.

In 105, Capio was made pro-consul in Gaul and the new consul for the year, Gnaeus Malleus, was sent north with an army to join him. Malleus, like Marius, was a new man and the noble Capio had little interest in serving with, let alone serving beneath, the new consul. The Cimbri were on the move again and had been joined by another of the migrating Germanic tribes, the Teutones, on the east side of the Rhone River. Malleus crossed over with his army, but when he engaged the tribes, Capio refused to come to his aid. Only after special pleading from the Senate did Capio agree to help the consular army. Even then, he refused to join his forces with Malleus' troops. As a result, the Cimbri and Teutones turned first on Capio's smaller force and drove him off, and then they swung back on Malleus, who was pushed back to the banks of the river. With nowhere to run and no reinforcements to speak of, the Romans were crushed, with casualties running upwards of 80,000. The entire debacle was chalked up in the Roman press as another example of the haughty oligarchs disrespecting anyone who did not come from their close caste. Capio would not have left a patrician cousin out in the cold like that. It was only because Malleus was novus homo that so many good Roman sons and husbands were dead on the banks of the Rhone. The popularity of the patricians was at an all-time low.

So in 105 B.C., the people turned back to another novus homo, a man who had proven his ability to succeed where the supposed elites had endlessly failed, Gaius Marius. The election itself was illegal, of course. There were at least two, and possibly three, different laws placing various restrictions on when a man could be consul, how many years must pass before he holds office again, and possibly whether holding office a second time was ever permissible. But the laws were flouted and the rule of law gave way to popular sentiment. Marius was stationed in Africa at the time of his election, and returned to take up a mantle he had just set down two years before. Upon his return, he celebrated a triumph for his victory in Africa with a change of girth at the head of his procession. The spectacle climaxed with the execution of the rebellious African prince. No bribe would save him this time.

Marius' first order of business was to whip the legions into shape. The army sent north had been sloppy and undisciplined, and Marius had no intention of repeating the mistakes of his predecessors. He again raised a levy without regard for property qualifications, but then took things one step further by reorganizing the basic structure of the army to meet his own specifications. It was this extra step that really secured Marius' place in history. Because in doing so, he would completely abandon the maniple system and the traditional three lines that had served the army so well over the past two hundred years in favor of a more robust and more mobile legion. The armies of Caesar, Pompey, and Octavius were all structured according to the Marian vision.

The first thing Marius did was abolish the maniple as the basic tactical unit. Too often, the checkerboard maniples had proved insufficient against a direct frontal assault. Plus, when not facing a lockdown phalanx, it was easy for a single maniple to be surrounded and cut off from the rest of the legions. So Marius took what had once been merely an administrative classification for three maniples, the cohort, and made it the basic tactical unit. Now, rather than 160 men marching off together, the tactical box was made 400 to 500 men strong.

While enlarging his tactical forces, Marius also made a decision to abandon the traditional three line formation. It really speaks volumes of Marius' self-assuredness that he would so casually shrug off an organizational structure that had conquered most of the known world. Some would call it outright arrogance, but all his alterations were made with an eye on the coming battle with the Gauls, a campaign that would involve a lot of headlong charges from a numerically superior force. There was no sense letting the drama of having the inexperienced first line push back only to have the waiting in the wings veterans step in to save the day. He eliminated the division of age and mixed old and young into his new cohorts. He then arrayed them in three lines, a nod to the past, but drilled his troops on rapidly cycling forward, not waiting for one to be pushed back before the other stepped up. The idea was to always keep the freshest troops on the front line, have them fight like mad for a few minutes, and then go to the back and let another line step in. Hockey coaches the world over are all heirs to the Marian legacy.

But Marius did not stop just with how his army fought. He also changed the entire outlook of what it meant to be a soldier. Marius' armies took seriously the responsibility of combat, but left the actual packing of equipment around the world to slaves and pack animals. The baggage trains had become unwieldy and the number of camp followers had grown to ridiculous proportions. With poor men serving year round at his disposal, Marius simply ordered that the troops themselves carry their own equipment. It's not like they were going to argue and go home to their farms if they didn't like it. He force marched them around Italy with 70 pound packs until they gained the strength and stamina to move quickly without worrying about a miles long donkey train. The nobility derisively referred to the soldiers as Marius' mules. But by a factor of 10, the marching and drilling with oversized packs left Marius' legions in the best shape of any Roman army in history. In sheer stamina, they could not be matched, and when it came time to fight, they could simply outlast an enemy who put all their energy into an initial charge.

Finally, Marius rebranded the army as a career choice, not just a temporary obligation for men with better things to do. He made statutory land grants to men who served their full 20 years of service, and regulated dispensations of food, clothing, armor, and weapons. Marius also began to actively promote from within, taking the best of his foot soldiers and making them officers when they displayed courage and initiative. These commissions, of course, came at the expense of the young nobles, who had long been accustomed to simply stepping into positions of leadership without any real battlefield experience. The move at once made the army better, made the men love Marius, and hacked off the old patrician order. But the hurt feelings of the nobility was of no consequence to Marius, and he was single-minded in his pursuit of recapturing the glory of the old Roman legions. They had been the best for years, but were dangerously close to letting it slip away out of complacent laziness of the patrician elites. The Gallic armies waiting in the north would not simply lay down their arms because some 10th generation claudii led the army, and to Marius that was all that mattered.

The Kimbri and Tutane, of course, made all of these reforms possible by simply cooling off their offensive for a few years. The Kimbri had decided to try their luck in Spain, while the Tutanes laid low in southern Gaul for a few years. Marius was returned for a third consulship in 103 BC to continue his reform efforts of the legions, and when that term expired he sought office again, not wanting all of his efforts at reshaping the legions to be wasted by some new consul who did not understand what Marius was trying to accomplish. Plus he had been preparing for a great showdown with the Gauls, and frankly they were not playing their part very well. Marius had put a lot of effort into building an army that could defeat them, and now he wanted the credit and glory he felt he deserved.

In 102 BC, in the midst of his fourth consulship and third in a row, the barbarian tribes finally obliged and set about planning an invasion of Italy. Though the Kimbri and Tutanes combined to form an army a staggering 200,000 men strong, they made a critical error and decided that instead of overwhelming the Romans in a single mass onslaught, they would divide and invade Italy on two fronts. It may have looked good on paper, but it let the outnumbered Romans off a rather large hook. With the barbarian army divided, Marius could focus on one, then the other, without ever facing the insurmountable odds that an army of 200,000 men presented. The Kimbri circled around and were set to come into Italy through the Alps from the northeast while the Tutane were to come in along the Mediterranean coast. Marius sent a force under his consular colleague's direction to delay the Kimbri's passage through the Alps while Marius himself took his new toy into France to head off the Tutanes before they ever got to the mountains.

Further tribal recklessness led to another piece of good luck for Marius. A contingent of 300,000 Germans broke out ahead of the main barbarian army as soon as they caught sight of the Romans. Marius was able to route this charge with ease and place half a legion behind some nearby hills before withdrawing. The rest of the Tutane army marched forward in pursuit and when they had passed the hidden cohorts Marius turned and attacked. All their attention forward, the barbarians never saw the 3,000 Romans emerge from their hiding place. Unsure of who or what was attacking them from behind, the barbarian army became a mass of confusion which Marius easily exploited. The Tutane army was annihilated.

Things did not go smoothly against the Kimbri however. The other consul for the year had been unable to hold them back and by the end of 102 BC Italy found itself playing the unwilling host to 100,000 barbarian invaders. In the elections that year, Marius was again returned as consul. No sense in getting off the horse in midstream. In the summer of 101, Marius led the horse safely to the other side of the river meeting and defeating the much larger barbarian army. All the drilling and marching proved the difference against the far larger but far less disciplined hordes. Marius returned to Rome and celebrated his second triumph. At this point only Scipio Africanus loomed larger in the Roman imagination than the great Gaius Marius who was now the hero of two separate wars against two completely different enemies. Sure there was grumbling in the upper classes about this commoner who seemed to be making himself king, but the danger was as real for them as it was for the lower classes and Marius proved himself more than up to the tasks for which he had been assigned. So they held their noses and cheered along with everyone else.

Out of gratitude for his success, Marius was made consul for the fifth time in a row in 100 BC. It may have been one consulship too many however as a bit of Marius' popular luster wore off. Grain prices were on the rise again and tribunes, taking a cue from the Gracchi, were agitating for relief. Unrest began to ripple through the city and the Senate ordered Marius to do something about it. Seeing the immediate expediency of restoring order to Rome, Marius complied, but it pitted him against the popular assemblies who had done so much to lend credibility to his never ending reign. At the end of the year, Marius decided that enough was enough and announced his retirement from public life.

If the story had ended there, Marius would have already secured his place in history as one of Rome's greatest and most famous leaders. But he was not done yet. Next week, the old man would be pulled out of retirement to deal with the inevitable result of Roman mistreatment of their Italian allies. In what would become known as the Social War, Marius would again fight alongside Sulla, his perennial lieutenant, now a general in his own right. The Social War would be the last time the two fought on the same side and the intense rivalry between the two men would soon erupt into a bloody back and forth of purging and counter-purging that shocks the conscience even today.