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

this is a paid advertisement from better help before the 1800s people very rarely use the word emotion they tended to talk much more of passions or affections and passions and affections were very plentiful in the middle ages when public weeping was deemed a sign of deep spiritual connection but that was not entirely the case of course in victorian britain the home of the stiff upper lip so things were very different then how people try to feel better was very different too tom the humans need for support hasn't changed even if the tools have that's where better help comes in with thousands of qualified therapists and millions of members worldwide better help matches you with the right support to meet your needs and if it's not the right fit you can switch therapists at any time feeling better looks different for everyone visit betterhelp.com rest is history and get 10 off that's betterhelp.com rest is history this episode is brought to you by the gates foundation we have touched on the fall of the roman empire a few times on this show haven't we but what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about it's not just barbarian invasions there's also talk of a disease which people call roman fever which i believe we know now as malaria for thousands of years humanity was defenseless against it but thankfully we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and american scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the gates foundation yes so they are creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90 percent of mosquitoes that leads to a 50 percent drop in malaria saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities the gates foundation partners of human potential search gatesfoundation.org mosquito to learn more this 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 and what is out there beyond the atlantic ocean and 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 realizes or rather everybody else realizes that there is a vast continent out there and it is of course the americas so you know anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why anthropic is founded on one hard question above all how can we ensure that the ai revolution really goes well for ordinary people so they asked over a hundred thousand people and what came back wasn't just fear there was hope as well people wanted to know will cancer ever be cured can kids have a better future it turns out that there is hope in hard questions ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking and now it was the news began to reach rome of the teutons and the kimberry initially the reports detailing the numbers and strength of these invaders seemed fantastical but it soon became clear that all the rumors 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 who were these people from what distant part of the world had they emigrated it was unclear who were these people and who were the ones who were on the march it was clear for prior to their descent on gaul and italy no one had ever heard of them the best guess they were germans and had traveled from the lands that border the northern ocean this supposition derived from various clues firstly their enormous size next the light blue color of their eyes and finally the fact that kimberry is a word which in the language of the german language is a word which is a word which is a word which is a word 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 and these people the teutons and the kimberry tom and my 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 down to the alps um so it could well have taken um the teutons and the kimberry anything up to a decade to get there and 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 one yes of people with 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 migration re-apocalypse is hurtling towards them and just to give people a sense of of where we are in the history of rome we are a century before the age of augustus so 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 um in the kind of the 110s the 100s bc and he is a brilliant soldier um he is a superb political operator and he has emerged seemingly from nowhere to become the great popular hero and this is a man called gaius marius and he is a man whose achievements whose ambitions over the course of um the uh the 110s and the 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 yeah and we'll be tracing his story won't we so he has a he has this great confrontation doesn't he with the teutons and the kimberry but that's merely the beginning of his extraordinary career i mean spoiler 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 it's not very well known but it brought rome almost to the brink and this was a war that was fought against the socky 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 fatefully 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 and 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 he 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 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 marius was ordinary kind of rough hewn he was uh sort of unpolished he's the representative of the of the 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 name so gaius marius he just has the two names lucius cornelius sulla if you have three names you can tell from their names so gaius marius he just has the two names lucius cornelius sulla if you have three names you can tell from their names so that's a giveaway you are from a kind of a higher class background and and 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 as you were in place of the in place of the dominic this rivalry as you were in place of the dominic this rivalry as you were in place of the between the self-made man and the patrician um the one-time commander and the one-time subordinate the guy with the two names and the guy with the three names this 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 so in some ways it anticipates the civil wars between you know i don't know brutus and cassius in one hand and anthony 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 but 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 signaled in incredibly bold ways and i think it's going to be a very important part of the 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 we did three whole series on the terrible wars that rome fought against the carthaginians it's their 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 you know a place rich in mythology and culture and history um absolutely 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 and 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 won't have been backing them so in a way they kind of conquer the world in self-defense um 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 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 uh instituted as a province in 241 bc as the 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 um across the sea from sicily you have what's now tunisia what the romans call africa and then you have rome and then you have carthage and then you have africa this is where carthage had stood and the romans have annexed the hinterland of what had 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 the latin word that ultimately gives us the word provence so 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 the rome is undisputed as the 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 also has a couple of provinces in the eastern half of the of the mediterranean sea and this of course is is these are lands that previously had been ruled by macedonian kings so 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 um in that 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 um and this had been the the kind of the greek ruled kingdom of pergamum pergamum 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 atalus 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 and 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 right yeah the flesh pots of europe the flesh pots of europe and of course bringing them back to the east coast going to the folly berger with toulouse trek or something yes exactly uh and so plinny 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 um the uh the granting by atlas of his kingdom of pergamum to the romans as a period that is disastrous for rome's moral character so plinny wrote that the romans were becoming a people who didn't just admire foreign opulence but had learned to covet it and plinny identifies um 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 uh 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 and i think it's there with jefferson and and that kind of tradition in america as well isn't it the the anxiety about wealth and power um 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 um 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 and 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 in in living standards and the poor in rome you know they are 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 that in that they no longer care anything for the the mass of their poorer fellow citizens metropolitan elites 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 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 and this brings us very neatly doesn't it to um our protagonist to go to the top of the tree and to go to the top of the gaius marius so marius is born in 157 bc in arpinum which is about uh 80 miles outside rome and is there a british town that would be a nice equivalent for arpinum tom i guess it's kind of swindon basically wow roundabouts roundabouts and warehouses i mean having said that arpinum is actually a kind of very old city so perhaps the the parallel doesn't exactly hold but i guess that the people in rome would view arpinum as i don't know people in w1 might view swindon right yeah as being not exactly the obvious breeding ground of um of great dominant figures in the state and actually arpinum is a classic example of how the kind of the immediate hinterland around rome so latium as it's called um 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 arpinum had been conquered back in 305 bc and its people initially had been given a slightly inferior form of roman citizenship so the romans called it kivitas 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 arpinum 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 arpinum they basically belong to the first generation in the town um who can take this for granted who can feel that they are part of not just the local politics but also the local politics of their own small town but of the great city 80 miles to the west this of course means that the young marius growing up in arpinum 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 result of that he's been able to vote for magistrates in rome and so 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 and they may resent the nobiles the aristocracy for their wealth and their 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'd be like you know the way people keep voting for clintons or bushes or whatever yeah but unlike let's say bill clinton's 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 um and plutarch recorded this didn't he something to do with an eagle plutarch has to be said will always prioritize 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 a tree and it was a tree that was named 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 wow and of course plutarch is writing this sometime after the events after he knew what happened to marius skeptic 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 that i know that that is an absolutely extraordinary prediction and and maybe you should explain to um the listeners precisely why it's such a mad prediction it'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 and 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 maris 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 is i think unknowable but 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 in his family and particularly and it's obvious why this would be the case because marius is from arpinum and arpinum has only just been given the vote so of course you know his family haven't had time to get loads of consulships and just to emphasize how how mad it is even to dream of having seven consulships no roman in history has held seven consulships the the record is six seven just seems impossible all right well we'll see whether he gets there but um let's kick off with maris's first steps on the ladder and i guess if you're an ambitious and talented person you're going to have to 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 yes 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 in one third of his life he's been a hero and he's been a hero for a long time he's been a hero and he's been a hero and he's been a hero and he's been a hero exactly such a war is being fought in the northeast reaches of spain so 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 the assembly of the noblets the the kind of the movers and shakers in rome and so accordingly they say we need our 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 emilianus and people who listen to our episode on the destruction of carthage may remember that he is the 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 he has 20 000 men which is roughly four legions so a very sizable fighting force of roman citizens he also has lots of socchi these italian allies um who who fight alongside the romans and also he has auxiliaries and the this the socchi and these auxiliaries come to forty thousand in all so he's got a lot of people and among the auxiliaries there is 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 and 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 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 jagurtha and he has brought not only cavalry but also 12 war elephants and there is a kind of a kind of ancestral relationship between the numidian royal family and the families of the scipios because um scipio africanus the guy who defeated hannibal he'd been great mates with this numidian king so that it's it's it's 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 and 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 he's like um 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 he despises fancy cooking he'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 and he's not interested in the 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 greek greek learning and stuff he's not a man for a sex manual well we'll come maybe come to that in due course i 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 the commanders of the numantians in hand-to-hand combat and scipio um amelianus is watching this and thinks it's brilliant and later that evening um scipio is with all his officers and one of them asks him you know who 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 amelianus and it marks him out as a man who you know deserves well of the roman people it's it's 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 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 and 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 had scipio stuck around then he would have been the one who would have 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 arpinum for several generations and these are the kikili 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 say 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 family and they have been the great rivals of of the scipio family but when scipio emilianus 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 that their great men should so 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 um the the metelli are his political patrons and scipio had been his military patron and basically i you know if you're if you're not a threat to either of them you you can uh you can 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 he's a smart political operator to line up both of these yeah and the fact that you play the simple rough human 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 but 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 you know you can draw comparisons with yeah so in britain we would talk about the greasy bowl 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 they call it the cursus honorum so it's literally the kind of the the race track of honors of of magistracies and the race track is obviously derived from the circus maximus which is this great public space where all the people of rome gather and this race track 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 unfortunately there is one of the most important 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 you know perfectly suited to marius the problem is that in 119 bc when marius decides to run for it even though that this office is 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 he 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 say 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 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 and 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 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 the 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 cursus honorum 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 the tightrope he's going to have to tread is incredibly treacherous and fatal so 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 this episode is brought to you by amazon tom throughout history change has often been driven by businesses and institutions that end up having a massive impact on society as a whole and there's probably no better example than the ford motor company henry ford and his managers revolutionized production through their pioneering assembly lines and they influenced factories and working practices in countries all over the world another example of a business driving technological and social change is amazon which is increasing the number of its electric vehicles used for deliveries in europe to over 10 000 by the end of this year 2026 now on top of that over 50 percent of amazon deliveries now come with less packaging or sometimes no added packaging at all it helps to avoid unnecessary waste and it makes recycling at home that much easier find out more at amazon.co.uk sustainability hi this is gary linica from gold hangers the rest is football this 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So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the WISE app today. Be smart, get WISE, T's and C's apply. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goalhangers The Rest Is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. When we talk about beating cancer, we often focus a lot on survival and that can mean overlooking impacts that last long after treatment ends. Yeah, for example, take cancers in children and young people. The treatments themselves can be incredibly harsh. They can cause lifelong side effects like infertility or hearing loss. And Cancer Research UK is working to change that because young people, they should be able to grow up hearing the voices of the people that they love and living their lives to the fullest. That's right. And one clinical trial led by Cancer Research UK showed that giving another drug alongside chemotherapy, nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing. And today, the treatment combination is being used by doctors across the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit CancerResearchUK.org slash Rest Is Science. Welcome back, everybody, to The Rest Is History. The year is 119 BC and the ambitious provincial government of the European Union. We'll be talking about what's going to happen in the next few days, but before we do that, let me tell you a little bit about what's going to happen. The first major political office, his first major magistracy, he has become, as he intended, a tribune of the plebs. And 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 him. And he's going to be a major political officer, and he's going to be a major political officer. And he's going to be a major political officer. 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 of 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, being 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 poorest 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. Militant clothes. Fast 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 he, 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 noblets, between the senatorial elite and the mass of the people. And I suppose, ultimately, he wanted to enshrine the populus, the people, as the arbiters of Rome, rather than the senatus, the Senate. So it would be, I guess, the people and 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 they're not going to be something that confirms the senatorial conservatives in this opinion is a very sinister trend. So 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. And 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 tribunal 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. So 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, Roman politics 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 experiencing something completely shocking. So what's the significance of these atrocities? I 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. And that's a fatal precedent. And that's a fatal 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 the stop magistrates in 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 you can kill anybody. I mean, one consul can kill anybody. Another 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. 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 Romans 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 in America, but also simultaneously respect them. Yeah. And I think there's something of that in the kind of the Roman attitude, which to the senatorial elite, it'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, here is an opportunity because he's 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. Among the tribunes, they're very nervous of pushing legislation that might offend the elites because they've seen what's happened. But Marius is bold enough to do this. So he passes a bill that restricts the ability of the nobiles 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, 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. And these few consist of just the top, the grandest, the snootiest nobiles. And among these nobiles are the Metelli. So what 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 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 tribunate, 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 in 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. And so a decade on from his tribunate, Marius is back in the race. You know, the Cursus 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. Right. Promotes himself as a kind of no-nonsense enthusiast for law and order. Common sense governorship. Right. So again, to quote Plutarch, The province back then, that Spain, was still very savage and 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. Obviously, 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 luck. 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. Yeah. 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. 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 manner that is characteristic of very moral, upstanding Romans. But crucially for Marius, this reputation as someone who is both very upstanding and a very. very effective soldier has won Metellus electionship 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. And 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. 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. 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 are. You know, they're interconnected, aren'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 for 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. They'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 Rome, he has lavished massive bribes. He's just been. 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. Right. 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 he 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 Certa. 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. This is too much for the Senate back in Rome, no matter how many bribes Jugurtha is 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 useless. 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. Yeah, or 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. 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. And 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 pitch. 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 centuries and centuries later. And Metellus, rather like the French do, he responds by ravaging the countryside, taking vast numbers. The prisoners capturing settlements one by one, burning them if they resist, kind of calculated series of atrocities. And the Senate think this is brilliant. To quote Salas, 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. But Metellus is assuming that's not really an issue. He's done so well that even though he's no longer consul, you know, he's presuming that he will continue. 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. But 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, OK, 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 but 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 a man like you that's pretty um sneaky of marius is turning on his own patron he completely is that's poor you 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 uh the analogy that i would have picked so i always thought that marius was would never have stooped to that but i was wrong well we said he he gives the impression of being i think a bit of a meathead yeah but that's the show marius 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 reward so not only is he elected consul for 107 bc he gets metellus's african command my god if you're metellus you are absolutely raging at this point he's furious he's absolutely livid he's he's the guy who's basically defeated girther and he's closing in on the kill and just as he's doing that suddenly he gets a message saying you've got hand over your command to your former deputy but it is what it is you know metellus has got to do and so he goes back to rome in a massive strop and his mates in the senate there try to make things up for him by boating 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 girther and within a year he has brought it to a successful conclusion girther himself is driven out of numidia and goes to mauritania the neighboring kingdom what's now but marius is not going to leave him there to um continue to stir up trouble he wants a line drawn under the whole war with girther and so accordingly he has an eye for talent um 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 um the king of mauritania to negotiate the war with girther he proves himself to be everything that marius had hoped incredibly subtle incredibly fearless he pulls the diplomatic mission off girther falls into roman hands this lieutenant takes girther back to marius and marius then heads back to rome with girther in chains 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 girther's in chains yeah in sallust as it was sallust yeah we had to do this at school you know 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 it was so dull but you're going to make it exciting aren't you i thought from your enthusiasm for colin mcculloch that you were going to say that you remember this moment as a particularly grim and terrifying moment so maris has gone back and um it's the first of january 104 so it's the new year the roman new year and he's been given a triumph you know this great kind of celebrated procession through the streets of rome that gets given to victorious generals and he's celebrating it on the on new year's day his triumph involves him riding in a chariot um 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 girther is led in chains before the cheering mass of the roman people being booed and spat at and people throwing eggs and whatever at him i mean kind of moderately interesting and fun i think no it's genuinely interesting i just don't i think the key thing looking at your notes is that it's a very interesting thing and i think it's a very interesting thing because they probably didn't know the word for earlobes and that and that that was that was what threw me because because at the end of the um triumph girther is taken to one side and taken to this hideous prison and there his his earrings are pulled off and they're yanked off so brutally that his entire earlobe comes away with the earrings and 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 girther'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 really and so he's chained up down in the bottom of this hideous cell and six days later he dies of the cold and malnutrition and that's the end of girther 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 the 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 it's more private 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 girther 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 and there are some in rome marius's enemies in the senate prominent among them who have begun to attribute the defeat of girther not to marius but to this lieutenant they're saying 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 girther and 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 honor scorned to share his glory with anyone else and was always ready to take offense 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 um and we will also of course be following marius to war with the teutons and the kimberi crikey so exciting so if you'd like to hear that episode right now and you'd like 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 the rest is history.com and 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 the rest is history channel and by clicking the bell icon so you don't miss any of the next episodes 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 um i don't 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 so after that you probably will want to join the club um then we're only doing it because we're going to be doing the first five minutes of the next episode 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 even as mario 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. And 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. You 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'd been brought up in ice-bound countries full of forests. I 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. Of 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. 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 sent an army under a consul into a region called Noricum, which is basically Austria today in 113 BC. And 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. There'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 the 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. And 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. And 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. So 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's 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? I 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. 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 therestishistory.com. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. fire radio.com Hank joined BJ's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork and BJ's knows savings. This is your home coach home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon. Limited time offer new members only. BJ's, home of the save.