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

Who was Gaius Marius, one of the two men who would shape the fate of Rome in the first century BC? Why was his road to fame, fortune, and political greatness, from total obscurity, so dangerous? And, would Marius be the man to face down the existential threat facing the empire during this period? Join Tom and Dominic as they launch into one of the greatest struggles in the history of Rome, as two titanic generals and politicians clash over hegemony of the empire, in an age of tumult. *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:04Speaker 00

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• 1:28Speaker 00

  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.

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  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 to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So 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?

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  So they asked over 100,000 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.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Ask yours at claude.ai/restishistory and keep thinking.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And now it was, the news began to reach Rome of the Teutons and the Cimbri. Initially, the reports detailing the numbers and strength of these invaders seemed fantastical. But it soon became clear that all the rumours 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, for prior to their descent on Gaul and Italy, no one had ever heard of them.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  The best guess, they were Germans and had travelled from the lands that border the Northern Ocean. This supposition derived from various clues. Firstly, their enormous size. Next, the light blue colour of their eyes. And finally, the fact that Cimbri is a word which in the language of the Germans means plunderer.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  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 B.C. had arrived at the gates of Roman Italy. And these people, the Teutons and the Cimbri, Tom, am I stretching a point to say that effectively they're the Danes?

• 4:21Speaker 00

  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 the Alps. So it could well have taken the Teutons and the Cimbri, 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,

• 5:04Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's December 2019 and you're hearing the first reports from Wuhan of people with unusual colds.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  And around the breakfast table, people are discussing their summer holidays.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  And so in today's episode, we are going to be looking at what is going on in Rome as this migrationary apocalypse is hurtling towards them. And just to give people a sense of where we are in the history of Rome, we are a century before the age of Augustus, so before the establishment of the rule of the Caesar's. 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 in the kind of the 110s, the 100s B.C. And he is a brilliant soldier.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  He is a superb political operator, and he has emerged seemingly from nowhere to become the city's great popular hero. And this is a man called Gaius Marius. And he is a man whose achievements, whose ambitions, over the course of the 110s 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.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we'll be tracing his story, won't we? So he has this great confrontation, doesn't he, with the Teutons and the Cimbri? But that's merely the beginning of his extraordinary career.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  I mean, spoiler alert, 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 B.C., 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 Soccii, 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 faithfully of all, and escalating gradually throughout the series

• 7:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  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, who wrote The Thornbirds. 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 Rome, 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 sort of unpolished. He's the representative 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.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And I'm looking forward to finding out if this is absolute tosh or if this is actually true.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  And you can tell from their names. So Gaius Marius, he just has the two names. Lucius Cornelius Sulla, if you have three, that's a giveaway. You are from a kind of a higher class background. 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 were implying, between the self-made man and the patrician, the one-time commander and the one-time subordinate,

• 9:23Speaker 00

  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 murderous 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.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  So in some ways, it anticipates, doesn't it, the civil wars between, you know, Brutus and Cassius on one hand, and Antony and Octavian on the other. And as you said, it's the first step in this process that leads to the empire.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. And this has been signaled in incredibly brutal fashion. A few decades previously in 146 B.C., 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 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,

• 11:26Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  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 have been backing them. So in a way, they kind of conquer the world in self-defense. 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.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  They have a kind of informal hegemony, I guess, over much of the Mediterranean. But you're right, that the formal empire, the sense in which they have provinces, it is at this point still relatively small. So if you think of Rome in the centre of Italy and you go clockwise around the Western Mediterranean. So Sicily, that was Rome's first province. They had instituted as a province in 241 B.C. as the result of the first great war that they'd fought against Carthage. Sicily had been the kind of the prize that they'd taken in that war. Then across the sea from Sicily, you have what's now Tunisia, what the Romans call Africa. This is where Carthage had stood and the Romans have annexed the hinterland of what

• 13:21Speaker 00

  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 Provinchia, the province. And this is 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, that Rome is undisputed as the great hegemon of the Western Mediterranean.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  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 Mediterranean Sea. And this, of course, 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 in 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.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  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 B.C., its last king, a man called Attalus, 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

• 15:36Speaker 00

  even realised 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.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. The fleshpots of Europe.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  The fleshpots of Europe. And of course, bringing them back to the east coast.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Going to the Folie Berger with Toulouse-Yretreck or something.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. And so Pliny 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 the granting by Attalus of his kingdom of Pergamum to the Romans as a period that is disastrous for Rome's moral character. So Pliny wrote that the Romans were becoming a people who didn't just admire foreign opulence, but had learnt to covet it. And Pliny identifies 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

• 16:56Speaker 00

  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 favour them and their empire will collapse.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  That's a tiny bit like the British with India in the 18th century and the sort of anxiety that great 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.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  And I think it's there with Jefferson and that kind of tradition in America as well, isn't it? The anxiety about wealth and power, 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 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 living standards.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  And the poor in Rome, you know, they're all citizens of a republic. They're meant to be part of a kind of, you know, a common project. Rais 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 nobles, as they're called in Latin, that they no longer care anything for the mass of their poorer fellow citizens.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Metropolitan elites are out of touch.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  And this brings us very neatly, doesn't it, to our protagonist, to Gaius Marius. So Marius is born in 157 B.C. in Arpenum, which is about 80 miles outside Rome. And is there a British town that would be a nice equivalent for Arpenum, Tom?

• 19:25Speaker 00

  I guess it's kind of Swindon, basically.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Wow, roundabouts, roundabouts and warehouses.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  I mean, having said that, Arpenum is actually a kind of very old city, so perhaps the parallel doesn't exactly hold. But I guess that the people in Rome would view Arpenum as, I don't know, people in W1 might view Swindon.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  As being not exactly the obvious breeding ground of, of great dominant figures in the state. And actually, Arpenum is a classic example of how the kind of the immediate hinterland around Rome, so Latium as it's called, 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 Arpenum had been conquered back in 305 B.C. And its people initially had been given a slightly inferior form of Roman citizenship. So the Romans called it civitas 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.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  But then in 188 B.C., Arpenum finally gets the full deal, so citizenship with the right to vote. And that means that the parents of Marius, who belonged to the local aristocracy in Arpenum.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  They basically belong to the first generation in the town who can take this for granted, who can feel that they are part of not just 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 Arpenum, 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 boy, he doesn't hold out much prospect for himself,

• 21:22Speaker 00

  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 nobles, the aristocracy, for their wealth and 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 would be like, you know, the way people keep voting for Clintons or Bushes or whatever.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but unlike, let's say, Bill Clinton, 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. And Plutarch recorded this, didn't he? Something to do with an eagle.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Plutarch, has to be said, will always prioritise a fun story over a likely story.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  He'd be a very good history podcaster.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  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 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."

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Wow. And of course, Plutarch is writing this sometime after the events, after he knew what happened to Marius. A skeptic might say that Plutarch was making this up, but I choose to believe it. I choose to believe that this happened.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  But seven consulships, now, I know that that is an absolutely extraordinary prediction. And maybe you should explain to the listeners precisely why it's such a mad prediction.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  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 B.C. 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.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  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 Marius 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 institutionalised. And whether this is an official law or whether it's just the pressure of custom 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 novus homo, a new man,

• 24:39Speaker 00

  someone who has no tradition of holding magistracies in his family, and particularly consulships. And it's obvious why this would be the case, because Marius is from Arpenum, and Arpenum 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 emphasise how mad it is even to dream of having seven consulships. No Roman in history has held seven consulships. The record is six, seven just seems impossible.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  All right, well, we'll see whether he gets there. But let's kick off with Marius's first steps on the ladder. And I guess if you're an ambitious and talented 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.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  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. Unfortunately for Marius, in 134 B.C., exactly such a war is being fought in the north-east 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 assembly of the nobles, the kind of the movers and shakers in Rome. And so accordingly, they say, we need our top man to go and sort this out. And there's no question who the top man in Rome at this point is.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  It's a guy called Scipio Emilianus. And people who listened to our episode on the destruction of Carthage may remember that he is 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 sizeable fighting force of Roman citizens.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  He also has lots of socie, these Italian allies who fight alongside the Romans. And also he has auxiliaries. And the socie and these auxiliaries come to 40,000 in all. And among the auxiliaries, there is 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 Carthaginian territory

• 27:49Speaker 00

  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 Jagerfa. And he has brought not only cavalry, but also 12 war elephants. And there is a kind of ancestral relationship between the Numidian royal family and the families of the Scipios. Because Scipio Africanus, the guy who had defeated Hannibal, he'd been great mates with this Numidian king. So there's a kind of sense that, you know, this is a family business. Now, when Scipio travels to Numantia,

• 28:31Speaker 00

  he takes with him as a junior officer the young Marius. And Marius does really, really well there.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  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?

• 28:47Speaker 00

  I think he's like, if you imagine Channing Tatum.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  He's big.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  He's brave, he's physically tough, he loves fighting. 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 despises fancy cooking, he's not interested in celebrity chefs.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  He despises snooty manners, he doesn't have a, you know, a kind of expensive education. He loves sleeping on hard ground with his men with only his cloak to cover him. You know, it's all that kind of thing.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Right. So he's very Roman?

• 29:24Speaker 00

  A Roman in the way that the Romans like to imagine themselves. You know, he hasn't been spoiled by all these snooty manners and things, and by great learning and stuff.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  He's not a man for a sex manual?

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Well, we'll 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 Marius is very good at. And he fights and kills one of the commanders of the Numantians in hand-to-hand combat. And Scipio Emilianus is watching this and thinks it's absolutely brilliant. And later that evening, Scipio is with all his officers.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  And one of them asks him, you know, 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 Emilianus. And it marks him out as a man who, you know, deserves well of the Roman people. It's something...

• 30:52Speaker 00

  That can launch a political career.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  He's a futureing the 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.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  I think that's a very fair comparison. So in 133 B.C., 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 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. Unfortunately, he does also have an alternative source of patronage to Scipio. And this is one of the very grandest of the noble families,

• 31:48Speaker 00

  a family that has been serving as the patrons of Marius's family in Arpenham for several generations. And these are the Caecili 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 B.C., no less than seven of them will hold the consulship. I mean, that's an unprecedented success rate for a single 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

• 32:33Speaker 00

  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 bower of Scipio. So in death, there is reconciliation between these two great families.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  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?

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Because the Metelli are his political patrons and Scipio had been his military patron. And basically, you know, if you're, if you're not a threat to either of them, you can, you can, you can have both of them, I think.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  So Marius is a, I mean, although we've portrayed him as Channing Tatum, as kind of rough-hewn, he's a smart political operator to line up both of these.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the fact that you play the simple, rough-hewn 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, of people in their own politics, perhaps who you, you know, you can draw comparisons with.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in, in Britain, we would talk about the greasy pole, 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?

• 34:09Speaker 00

  So they, they call it the cursus honorum. So it's literally the kind of the, the racetrack of honors of, of magistracies. And the racetrack is obviously derived from the Circus Maximus, which is this great public space where all the people of Rome gather. And this racetrack 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 magistracy in particular, which really seems to suit his skillset.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  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 B.C., 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,

• 35:39Speaker 00

  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, so 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.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  But is he respected? This is the question.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  So this is the question. So Marius decides that he's going to run for the tribune at 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, 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.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  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 that the tight rope he's going to have to tread is incredibly treacherous and potentially fatal.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  So Marius is setting out on this potentially fatal tight rope. And the stakes are very high and we'll find out what happens after the break.

• 37:32Speaker 01

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• 39:21Speaker 01

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• 40:23Speaker 01

  Welcome back everybody to the Rest is History of the Year is 119 B.C. And the ambitious provincial, self-made man Gaius Marius, who is now already in his late 30s, so he's only two years short of his 40th birthday. He has won his 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 Marius to hold. Now, why specifically at this point is this so politically febrile?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  What makes this so contentious?

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Because the previous decade and a half, the tribune 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 B.C. His younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, he had become Tribune 10 years later. And both these brothers had used their tribunes to push for reforms that were very overtly in favour of the poor.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  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'd 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.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Militant, class-war politics.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, and particularly Gaius Gracchus, the younger, the Tony Benn 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 nobles, between the senatorial elite and the mass of the people. And I suppose ultimately, he wanted to enshrine the populace, the people, as the arbiters of Rome, rather than the sonatus, the senate. So it would be, I guess, the people and the senate of Rome, rather than the other way around. That's his, that's his kind of ambition.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  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 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 reelection. And Gaius Gracchus in 122 B.C., 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

• 43:56Speaker 00

  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 Tribune 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.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Completely. These are the first eruptions of civil violence on the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the monarchy back in 509 B.C. It's that big a deal.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Wow, so for 400 years or so?

• 45:34Speaker 00

  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 politic.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And we're never florid.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  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 to 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.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  If you can kill a Tribune, then why can't you? You can kill anybody. I mean, one consul could kill another consul, and say they're a threat to the survival of the Republic.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Because when you break a taboo, the taboo is never as strong as it had been before it was broken.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  And I think there's something of that in the kind of the Roman attitude 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, you know, here is an opportunity. Because he is 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, you know, 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.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  So he passes a bill that restricts the ability of the nobles to influence voters in the voting pens. It's kind of like, it's not exactly introducing a secret banet, 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, "This won him a reputation as a person of great courage, a formidable opponent of the conservatives in the senate, and someone who could be relied upon to stick up for the common man." And Plutarch isn't exaggerating there. Marius was, I think, being brave, because it is a period of massive reaction. So the historian Salas, writing a few decades later, he described it as a kind of a faction of the few ruled by the few.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  Justice, and these few consist of just the top, the grandest, the snootiest noblesse. And among these noblesse are the Mattelli. So obviously, you were asking previously, is there a risk for Marius of running against the interests of the Mattelli? There absolutely is, because the Mattelli 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 tribune, he struggles to get another magistracy. And in fact, in 116, massive embarrassment, he manages to lose two elections on the same day.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  He's clearly not doing well. But to pursue the sports analogy, he backs himself.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  He's not going to be cast down by a few disappointments.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Form is temporary, class is permanent, and he's got class.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  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 Mattelli. Because the Mattelli 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 tribune, Marius is back in the race. The cursus honorum is going well for him. He's secured, admittedly by the skin of his teeth, but 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. And he promotes himself as a kind of no-nonsense enthusiast for law and order. Common sense governorship.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  So again, to quote Plutarch, "The province back then, that's 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.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  So he's robust. He is robust in Spain. But also, we haven't mentioned his personal life at all, but actually, 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?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  So Marius is being knitted into a key aristocratic family.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  And he's got the Mattelli back on side by this point.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  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 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 effective soldier, has won Metellus electionship to the consulship for the year 109.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  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 ability, and he is also a long-term client of the Mattelli.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And so Marius says yes, doesn't he? And he says yes, both because he's obviously very good at fighting wars, so it'd be mad for him to say no. But also, the military sphere and the political sphere, they're interconnected, aren't they, in Rome in this period? And Marius is thinking that proving himself on the battlefield is the perfect way to reboot his stalled political career.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  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 really hype him up. And then to go back, run for election, and 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.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  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 Jgurtha, the guy who had brought the cavalry and the 12 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 spraying them around.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  And even Jgurtha had been surprised by the level of corruption that this had revealed in a city supposedly made up of stern, flinty, unyielding moralists.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  And he made a very famous comment on Rome, which Salus 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 Jgurtha 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 retreated and he's holed up in a town called Ceta. And in the course of this attack, which the Romans had told Jgurtha anyway not to do, Jgurtha's men had killed a number of Romans.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  And this is too much, really, for the Senate back in Rome, no matter how many bribes Jgurtha is shoveling their way. And so, they think, okay, 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 Jgurtha had shown himself to be absolutely useless, and it resulted in a series of embarrassing defeats.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  So again, to pursue the sporting analogy, the England manager has lost to Andorra.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, to Iceland.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Or Iceland, yes. And Metellus is the guy who's been appointed to go and whip them into shape.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically, they've been messing around with wags.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  They're barely training. And you've got a new manager who's a disciplinarian, and he's bringing in Marius, who is the number two.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, who's the set-piece coach or whatever.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Grim-faced set-piece coach, who will make them train six times a day.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Yes. So Salus describes Metellus as "a formidable and unrelenting man," and so he is. He goes in, gets them onto the training ground, practising their corners, whatever, and whips them into shape. And then he gets them ready, they go on the offensive, they defeat Jgurtha in a pitched battle, all Jgurtha's war elephants are wiped out, and Metellus very cleverly then starts suborning Jgurtha's in a circle, so that Jgurtha doesn't know who he can trust. Jgurtha inevitably opts for a guerrilla war. This is the classic thing. I mean, 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

• 57:55Speaker 00

  vast numbers of 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 Salus. "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's year as consul draws to a close, is the fact that Jgurtha 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, he's presuming that 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

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Rome, and he wants to run for the consulship. And Metellus is stunned by this. 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, okay, 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 is essential if you're going to be consul.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  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 popularis 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 you.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  That's pretty...

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Sneaky of Marius is turning on his own patron.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  He completely is.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  That's poor. That has slightly messed with my sense of Gaius Marius, who I always thought was

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  It's like Rupert Lowe turning on Nigel Farage.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  That's not the, that is absolutely not the, the analogy that I would have picked. So I always thought that Marius was, would never have stooped to that, but I was wrong.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  Well, we said, he, he, he gives the impression of being, I think, a bit of a meathead.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  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 a reward. So not only is he elected consul for 107 B.C., he gets Metellus's African command.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  My God, if you're Metellus, you are absolutely raging at this point.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Oh, he's furious. He's absolutely livid. He's, he's the guy who's basically defeated Jaggera, and he's closing in on the kill. And just as he's doing that, suddenly he gets a message saying, you've got to hand over your command to your former deputy. But it is what it is, you know, Metellus has got to do what the senate tells him. And so he goes back to Rome in a massive strop. And his mates in the senate there tried to make things up for him by voting 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 Jaggera, and within a year, he has brought it to a successful conclusion.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  Jaggera himself is driven out of Numidia and goes to Mauritania, the neighbouring kingdom, what's now Morocco. But Marius is not going to leave him there to continue to stir up trouble. He wants a line drawn under the whole war with Jaggera. And so accordingly, he has an eye for talent. 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 the king of Mauritania to negotiate the surrender of Jaggera. And this officer, you know, proves himself to be everything that Marius had hoped. Incredibly subtle, incredibly fearless. He pulls the diplomatic mission off.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Jaggera falls into Roman hands. This lieutenant takes Jaggera back to Marius, and Marius then heads back to Rome with Jaggera in chains.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Do 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 Jaggera's in chains.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, in Celest.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Is it with Celest? Yeah, 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?

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  I thought from your enthusiasm for Colin McCullough that you were going to say that you remember this moment as a particularly grim and terrifying moment. So Marius has gone back and 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, 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 Jaggera 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.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  I mean, kind of moderately interesting and fun, I think.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  No, it's a genuine interesting. I just don't, I think the key thing, looking at your notes, is that I probably didn't know the word for earlobes. And that, and that that was, that was what threw me.

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  Because, because at the end of the triumph, Jaggera 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. Jaggera's wits unsettled by this and grinning horribly, he cried out by Hercules, what cold baths you have here in Rome.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Great banter.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  I don't think it's banter. I think he's gone mad by this point already.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  And so he's chained up down in the bottom of this hideous cell. And six days later, he, he dies of the cold and malnutrition. And that's the end of Jaggera. 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 Cambry are reported to be moving on Italy. The asteroid is heading towards Earth. The zombie apocalypse is breaking out.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Do you know what they are? They're the white walkers. They're the white walkers from Westeros.

• 1:05:30Speaker 00

  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 niggel. 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

• 1:06:11Speaker 00

  just a little bit upstaged by his own lieutenant. And this is, of course, the guy who had successfully negotiated the surrender of Jaggera. 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 Jaggera not to Marius, but to this lieutenant. They're saying, oh, Marius is just showboating. The guy who really ended the war is this person.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  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 Jaggera. 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 honour, scorned to share his glory with anyone else, and was always ready to take offence. 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 Sala. In our next episode, we are going to be finding out who he is, what's his background, his upbringing, all of that.

• 1:07:43Speaker 00

  And we will also, of course, be following Marius to war with the Teutons and the Cambry.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  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 thereistishistory.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 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.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  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. Now, 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.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Ave, aqua vale.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  Even as Marius 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 Jaggertha 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.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  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, you might, a kind of proto Viking invasion.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Because, I mean, these people, the Teutons and the Cimbri, they're massive, they're terrifying, they look weird, they, they are an existential threat.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  They're reputed to be cannibals.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Right. This is Plutarch on them. He said, "They were impervious to cold because they'd been brought up in icebound countries full of forests." I mean, Tom, the parallels are stacking up.

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  You're absolutely right. And also, I think, isn't this also the case with the white walkers? The Teutons and the Cimbri accompanied by women and children.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, because some of them are women and children, yeah.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  And in fact, actually, in Game of Thrones, the, the children are the most frightening. There's always something terrifying about a murderous, sinister child.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  And frankly, if you've ever met a German child, you know, it's the same story.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Well, they're Danes really, aren't they?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're the worst.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  And the women also are very frightening because they're said to fight alongside the men.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  And it's an entire people on the move. So there are tens of thousands of them, according to the, 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, that this monstrous tide of people is advancing towards you. And so they'd sent an army under a consul into a region called Noricum, which is basically Austria today, in 113 B.C. And the consul had set an ambush for these, these barbarians. And the barbarians had rumbled it and had outsmarted the consul and given him a serious mauling.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  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, to, to attack them and they keep being defeated. So first in 109 B.C. And then two years later, near what, what today is Bordeaux. And one consul in that battle is killed and the other one is cornered.

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  And the only way that he can extract himself is to agree that he and his army will go beneath the yoke.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Ultimate humiliation. You put up, you know, two spears and put another spear across it and everyone has to symbolically bend and crawl and, well, not symbolically, I mean, you, you literally do it, but it's obviously a symbol of, of humiliation. So that's very bad. And then, I, 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 Arrassio, 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

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  they lose in at Cannae.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Is that plausible, really, that they lost that many? I mean, these figures are all made up, aren't they, really?

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  But 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 is written about Cannae and, and the impact that it had on the Romans. 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.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  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.

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