Roman slaves drawing water from the river provoked the Ambrones to attack. The Germanic horde took six days to march by, and its troops taunted the Romans, shouting, “Do you have any messages for your wives? After all, we’ll soon be with them!” Marius broke camp and followed the enemy to Aquae Sextiae, where he built another fortified camp. The enemy then decided to bypass the camp and march into Italy. He kept his men in their fortified camp, where they repulsed a German attack. Marius was fortunate to catch the Teutones and the Ambrones after the Cimbri had departed, yet his army still faced great odds since the enemy force numbered 120,000 warriors. By then, the Cimbri had returned to Gaul and the two tribes decided to invade Italy from separate directions – the Teutones along the Mediterranean coast, and the Cimbri through the Alps’ Brenner Pass. In 102 B.C., Marius marched his army of six legions (40,000 men) into southern Gaul to confront the Teutones. Fortunately, the Germans’ failure to march immediately on Rome gave him the precious time he needed to train this new force. Marius, therefore, completely disregarded the property qualification and instead recruited poor and landless Romans to serve in his army. The slaughter at Arausio further decimated the shrunken manpower pool. However, the continuous wars against Carthage and Macedonia had kept Rome’s peasant soldiers in the field so long that an increasing number of them had to sell their farms to pay their debts. Heretofore, the right to serve in the Roman army had been based on land ownership. Yet such was the emergency that the Romans overrode their constitution and elected General Gaius Marius, famed for conquering Numidia, to an unprecedented five continuous years as consul beginning in 104 B.C., with the mandate to create a new army. But inexplicably, the Cimbri marched into Spain on a great plunder raid while the Teutones remained in Gaul. When the two consuls refused to combine their armies, the Romans were slaughtered at the Battle of Arausio on the Rhone River. – and this latter Roman force met an equally disastrous end. Totaling 80,000 men and half again as many camp followers, the two armies comprised the largest Roman force assembled since the one Hannibal had annihilated at the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.

decided to end the matter and dispatched two consuls, each leading an army.

When the interlopers encroached on Rome’s allies in southern Gaul, the Romans in 105 B.C. Yet Carbo barely escaped with his life, and his legions were destroyed.ĭeclining to invade Italy, the Germans then turned west into Gaul, gathering allies such as the Celtic Ambrones. The next year, the consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo marched a Roman army to drive away the intruders. The local tribe in Noricum, an ally of Rome, begged for help against the incursion. In 113 B.C., they arrived in Noricum, in present-day Austria. The Germanic Cimbri and Teutoni tribes abandoned their homes in Jutland and began a southward migration in 120-115 B.C. Yet a major challenge was stirring in far-off Jutland. For a third of a century after Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C., it faced no seriously threatening enemies in the Mediterranean region.

Cimbri battle of arausio