1-Acest articol este copiat !
2-Istoria ramane pasiunea mea nr-1!
Rufus (who had served with Marius in Africa) chose to send his junior Consul Maximus north to face the returning Cimbri. It is uncertain why Rufus, who had military experience himself, chose not to go, though Maximus too was a decorated and accomplished general in his own right. Like Gaius Marius, however, he was also a “novus homo” – a new man, lacking an illustrious family lineage and only having recently joined the Senate and the Patricians. As such, when he arrived, Caepio – who as a former Consul was outranked by maximus – refused to demean himself to serving under him, despite the looming threat of the returning Cimbri.
Caepio’s haughtiness saw him set up camp with his army on the opposite bank of the Rhone. The panicking Senate sent member to persuade the Caepio to cross the river, though even when he did that, he insisted on setting up a separate camp, ten miles further north of the Consul’s. The initial skirmish saw a cavalry force sent my Maximus routed by the Cimbri, and when their general was brought before King Boiorix, he displayed the typical Roman arrogance in warning them to flee now before they were defeated by the legions. Laughing at his impudence, Boiorix had him burnt alive in front of the camp.
While Maximus sought to meet with the Cimbri and negotiate their departure, Caepio thought he would lose the opportunity for glory. He had his men burn (almost!) all of the boats they had crossed the river in, confident of Roman supremacy, and ordered an attack against the heavily fortified Cimbri camp. Unsurprisingly, the 40,000 legionaries struggled to break into the camp holding around 300,000 soldiers, and his men were soon completely routed. Caepio himself managed to escape with his son on one of the few remaining boats, keen to hurry back to Rome to avert blame for the disaster away from himself.
Buoyed by an easy victory, the barbarian army then marched south to surround Maximus’ force. The men were already thoroughly demoralised from having witnessed the annihilation of their comrades, and while Maximus did form them up for battle, they were simply overwhelmed. With their backs to the river, many more drowned trying to escape. It must have been a truly horrific day to be a Roman soldier, seeing an endless swarm of barbarians encompass your army, feeling the utter despair of defeat and praying to Jupitar and Mars to allow your escape.
The Battle of Arausio in 105 BC saw up to 80,000 Roman and allied soldiers dead on the field, and up to half that number of support staff too. Coupled with the decline in soldiers meeting the land requirements, and the two previous defeats, Rome was now left defenceless, with an alarming lack of manpower and an enemy army ready to cross the undefended Alps. Among the injured with Marcus Livisu Drusus, whose service there alongside the leader of the Italian Marsi tribe, Silo, would have huge implications for how he came to view Rome’s Italian allies.
The Roman public blamed the defeat on the arrogance of Caepio in refusing to cooperate with Maximus, rather than on the deficiency of the legions. Despite the horrified cries of “Hannibal is at the gates!”, fearing the imminent attack of the Cimbri following Rome’s worst defeat since Cannae, the Cimbri failed to head south into Italia. Instead they marched west again, making for the Pyranees and the fertile lands of Hispania, buying the Romans valuable time to prepare their defence.
The sheer scale of the loss meant that almost everybody in Rome would have lost a father, a son, a brother. Around 100,000 men dead in one day, at a time when population levels are far less than they are today. It’s hard to imagine such losses even today, a one day battle causing almost twice the number of dead as the USA suffered in the entire Vietnam War. Utter despair and grief swept over the city. The impact would be on far more than family loss though, with farms now to go untended, and a huge swathe of the aristocracy annihilated, leaving the Senate and the other government apparatus depleted.
Caepio’s arrogance had also stroked the flames of anguish against the aristocracy that the Brothers Gracchi has lit, and now the lower classes demanded better governance. They were fed up of seeing aristocrats appoint their incompetent brethren to military commands, only for them to be the ones who paid the price with their lives. The grief was also shared by the Italian allies, who had provided around half of the troops, but often got a raw deal from any campaign, with little recognition of loots, coupled with their lower status in not being granted Roman citizenship (I’ll explain this more thoroughly when we reach the Social War). The economic cost was also huge, with all of the arms and equipment of those men who had fallen at Arausio also lost.
How can a society recover from such a loss? Most did not. When Persia took the same number of heavy blows from Alexander, the two centuries-old Achaemenid Empire collapsed. When Rome delivered such punched to Carthage and Macedon, the independent civilisations fell. What made Rome remarkable in the ancient world was its ability to recover from seemingly fatal setbacks. The Eternal City did it after Cannae, and she would do it again after Arausio. In the face of such disaster and public unrest, the Senate acted swiftly. Desperate times call for desperate measures. With a lack of skilled generals, Rome turned to her one military genius who was still in the field. And so, despite having been Consul just three years prior, and not even being in the city (a requirement to stand for election), the Senate elected Gaius Marius as senior Consul, issuing him with the mandate to return from Numidia and save Rome from the destruction of the Cimbri.
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