resolved to pursue their march. For six days the Romans beheld from their entrenchments the vast host, with its long train of waggons, defiling past the camp with many an insulting enquiry, whether the soldiers had any message to their wives at home. Not till all had passed did Marius break up his position and follow with his army in perfect order, entrenching a camp at the close of each day's march, and waiting an opportunity for attack. It was in the neighbourhood of Aquæ Sextiæ (Aix),* where the Roman camp had been formed, as usual, upon the summit of a hill, that their light Ligurian troops came into conflict with the Ambrones, who formed the rear-guard of the barbarians. A successful skirmish raised the spirits of the soldiery to such a pitch, that Marius resolved to venture a decisive battle. He led out his army onto the slope of the hill, and awaited the attack which the Teutons had long been eager to deliver. Their impetuous charge up-hill was firmly sustained by the Romans, who in their turn long failed to break the front ranks of the phalanx, linked together after the Teuton fashion. But the soldiers of Marius had been trained to endure the summer sun of Provence, whose fierce heat began to tell upon the less nervous strength of the barbarians. At the critical moment of their exhaustion, they were alarmed by a cry in their rear, where Marius had placed an ambuscade of campfollowers under cover of a wood. A universal panic seized the host the legionaries were in the midst of their broken column plying their short two-edged swords: most of those who escaped the slaughter put themselves to death; and even the women ensured the fate which they preferred to slavery by a desperate resistance at the waggons. The nation of the Teutones was annihilated, with the exception of a few prisoners, among whom was the king Teutobod. The broken arms were collected into a vast heap for an offering to the gods, and Marius was in the act of setting fire to the pile, when a party of horsemen from Rome rode up to him with the news that he had been elected consul for the fifth time, to lead his victorious army against the Cimbri, who had accomplished their purpose of entering Italy (B.c. 102). Q. Lutatius Catulus, the colleague of Marius, had been sent to guard the passes of the eastern Alps. Not daring to lead his raw levies into the mountains, where his flank might have been turned, he took post on the left bank of the Adige below Trent, and threw a bridge across the river to secure his retreat. But

* The name Aqua, with its French abbreviation Aix, always indicates the warm or mineral springs which the Romans so eagerly turned to account for bathing.

when the multitudes of the Cimbri came pouring down from the Brenner pass, the Romans were seized with a panic, and the consul barely saved his army from being cut off by the breaking of the bridge. Unable to make head against the invaders in the plain, Catulus retired behind the Po, and Cisalpine Gaul was once more overrun by barbarian hosts. As on previous occasions, the Cimbri relaxed their efforts after this great success, and spent the winter in the unwonted enjoyment of the luxuries afforded by the great cities.

Marius, on his return to Rome, refused to accept a triumph while Northern Italy remained in the possession of an invader. With the early spring he joined the proconsul Catulus; and their united forces, numbering 50,000 men, recrossed the Po, up which the Cimbri had meanwhile marched in search of an easy passage. The armies met on the Raudine Plain, which is probably the great plain between Vercelli and Novara, bounded by the river Sesia on the west and the Agogna on the east. It was in the same region that Hannibal gained his first victory on the Ticinus, and that Charles Albert was defeated by Radetzky at the battle of Novara. The vast level was favourable to the strong cavalry of Marius, which came suddenly upon the enemy's horse under cover of the morning mist. The flight of the latter carried confusion among the Cimbric infantry, which was forming for the battle; and a far easier victory than that of Aix was followed by an equally complete annihilation of the barbarians. Once more the women found the death they courted; and the king Boiorix was esteemed more happy than Teutobod in being left upon the battlefield. The Helvetii, who had remained behind to guard the Alpine passes, hastened home. "The human avalanche, which for thirteen years had alarmed the nations from the Danube to the Ebro, from the Seine to the Po, rested beneath the sod, or toiled under the yoke of slavery: the forlorn hope of the German migrations had performed its duty: the homeless people of the Cimbri and their comrades were no more." (Mommsen.) (Mommsen.) Little did the Romans imagine that the two hosts which they had thus shattered were but the first broken waves of the inundation which was destined five centuries later to overwhelm their empire.

The triumph which Marius had before refused was now celebrated with double splendour for the double victory. More conspicuously even than when he led Jugurtha in chains, that triumph was over the aristocratic government as well as over the enemy; and the spirit of political faction was only embittered, in both

cases, by the share of an aristocrat in the victory. The merit claimed by Catulus in this case, as by Sulla in the former, irritated the one party more than it gratified the other. The proconsul boasted that the centre division, which he commanded, had decided the battle and captured thirty-one standards, while Marius had only taken two; the consul represented the share of Catulus in the triumph as a magnanimous concession of his own; and the people were indignant that another should divide the honours of their favourite. Marius, having in five consulships delivered the state from her foreign foes, was elected to his sixth, that he might perform the promise given from the year of his tribunate,-to succeed and avenge the Gracchi, and to redress the evils in attempting to cure which they had perished. Before showing how his attempt to effect a democratic revolution resulted for the time in civil war and aristocratic despotism, it will be well to glance at the social state of Rome and Italy at the beginning of the first century before Christ.

It was always the policy of the Roman aristocracy to expend a large portion of their wealth in magnificent public works. The frequent fires at Rome furnished opportunities for the restoration of the temples and other edifices. In the year 111 B.C., for example, a large portion of the city was destroyed by a fire, which consumed the temple built on the Palatine to enshrine the rude stone that Attalus I. had sent from Pessinus in Phrygia as the image of the Mother of the gods. The restored temple was again burnt down in A.D. 3, and on both occasions the statue of Claudia, probably one of the first priestesses, escaped injury! The censorship of M. Æmilius Scaurus (B.c. 109) was distinguished by great works of public utility, the building or restoration of the Milvian Bridge (Ponte Molle) over the Tiber, the rebuilding of the temples of Fidelity and Prudence, the draining of the marshes of the Po between Placentia and Parma by navigable canals, and the continuation of the coast road from Pisa to Vada Sabbata west of Genoa. The growing luxury and extravagance of private life are attested by the sumptuary legislation, which was the protest of the old Roman spirit against the evils it could not cure. Such laws, usually proceeding from the aristocratic party, may have been partly an attempt to avert political changes by a social reformation. A law of P. Licinius Crassus, surnamed the Rich, probably in B.C. 110, prescribed the amount that might be spent on eatables, both upon festal and common days. "It is not,"says Mr. Long-" an improbable conjecture that this and other

absurd laws prepared the way for the class of people named delatores (informers), who under the empire were the terror of every body." The political conflicts of the last ten years of the century were concerned, as we have seen, rather with foreign administration than constitutional reforms; but we have an example of the latter in the law carried by the tribune Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, that the priests should be elected by the people, instead of by their own colleges (B.c. 104).

Of the relapse of Italy into the social and agrarian evils which the Gracchi had tried in vain to cure, the most striking proof is furnished by the servile insurrections which broke out almost every year. It was a new feature of the social declension when the insurgents in the territory of Thurii found a leader in a Roman knight, Titus Vettius, who, overwhelmed with debt, manumitted his slaves in a body, and declared himself their king, and was only subdued by the urban prætor through treachery (B.c. 104). The sufferings of the provinces are well described in a few words by Dr. Mommsen :-"We shall have an idea of the condition of Sicily and Asia, if we endeavour to realize what would be the aspect of affairs in the East Indies, if the English aristocracy were like the Roman aristocracy of that day. The legislation which entrusted the commercial class with control over the magistrates compelled the latter to make common cause to a certain extent with the former, and to purchase for themselves unlimited liberty to plunder, and protection from impeachment, by unconditional indulgence towards the capitalists in the provinces." Nor could it be expected that a government so disorderly on the land should maintain an efficient control over the great sea of which Rome had now become the mistress, or that the provincial governors should care for the security of their coasts. It was only when piracy grew to such a height as to endanger all maritime commerce, that an effort was made to check it. The sheltered creeks and caves on the rocky southern shore of Asia Minor were a complete nest of corsairs; and in B.C. 102 the prætor M. Antonius was sent to Cilicia with a powerful fleet. It was found necessary to occupy the country itself; and it was probably at this time that Western Cilicia became a Roman province, while the great eastern plain remained a part of the Syrian kingdom.

In the provinces, too, the revolts of the slaves often assumed the dimensions of petty wars; and Sicily, in particular, was the scene of a second servile war scarcely less formidable than the first.*

* See Vol. II. p. 545.

On that occasion we have seen that the wretched state of the lowest class of freemen drove them to make common cause with the insurgents; and, in the reaction that ensued, the landholders and capitalists revenged themselves by claiming many freemen as their slaves. A decree of the Senate was directed against this outrage, and the governor of Sicily, P. Licinius Nerva, established a court of enquiry, which in a short time restored freedom to eight hundred persons, and new claims were pouring in every day (B.C. 104). The alarmed planters intimidated the proprætor into sending the applicants back to their masters. The slaves flew to arms; but the first body of revolters was put down by a strange league between the governor and a captain of banditti, who betrayed them for the price of his own pardon. Another band, however, gained a victory over the garrison of Henna; and being thus provided with weapons, they swelled to an army of 20,000 foot and 2000 horse, under a leader named Salvius. Like Eunoüs in the first insurrection, he was saluted king by his followers, who were for the most part Syrians, and he assumed the name of Tryphon, who had usurped the throne of Syria about forty years before. The slaves became masters of the open country about Henna and Leontini, and had laid siege to Morgantia, when the prætor hastened to its relief, with an army consisting of the island militia, which dispersed during the engagement. The city was saved by the fidelity of the slaves within it on the promise of their freedom, which Nerva immediately declared null and void, as having been made under compulsion.

The insurrection in the west of the island was headed by a far abler leader, Athenion. Like Cleon in the first revolt, he had been a leader of banditti in Cilicia, where he had been captured and sold as a slave into Sicily. Like Eunoüs, he gained ascendancy over the superstitious Greeks and Syrians by prophecies and conjuring tricks. But he was vastly superior to both, as well as to Tryphon, in ability and moderation. Of the numbers who flocked to him, he only armed as many as he could form into a compact force, in which he preserved the strictest discipline. He permitted no excesses against the peaceful inhabitants, and treated his prisoners with kindness. His crowning proof of capacity was given by his cheerful submission to the orders of Tryphon. The whole plain country of the island fell into the power of the insurgents; and its rich produce was cut off from the people of the towns, who had to be fed from Rome. The force at the disposal of the governor barely sufficed to protect these cities, where the in