Gaius Marius laughed himself sore in the sides, then went out to deal with the Germans.
A quarter of a million Teutones crossed the Druentia River just east of the spot where it entered the Rhodanus, and began to stream toward the Roman fortress. The ragged column was spread out for miles, its flanks and vanguard made up of the warriors, one hundred and thirty thousand strong, its meandering tail a vast congregation of wagons and cattle and horses shepherded by the women and children; there were few old men, fewer still old women. In the foreground of the fighting men there strode the tribe called the Ambrones, fierce, proud, valorous. The very last group of wagons and animals were twenty-five miles to their rear. German scouts had found the Roman citadel, but Teutobod the King was confident. They would march to Massilia in spite of Rome, for in Massilia the biggest city aside from Rome any of them had ever heard of they would find women, slaves, food, luxuries. After the satisfaction of sacking and burning it, they would turn east along the coast for Italy, for though Teutobod had discovered the Via Domitia over the Mons Genava Pass was in excellent condition, he still believed the coastal route would get him to Italy faster. The harvest still stood in the fields, and so was trampled down by the passing of the host; to none of them, even Teutobod, did it seem to matter that a modicum of care might have preserved the grain for reaping and storing against the coming winter. The wagons were full of provisions plundered from all who had been in the German path; as for the crops in the field, what human foot had trodden down could still be chewed by bovine and equine mouths. Unharvested crops simply meant grazing fodder. When the Ambrones reached the foot of the hill upon which the Roman fortress perched, nothing happened. Marius didn't stir, nor did the Germans bother storming him. But he did present a mental barrier, so the Ambrones stopped and the rest of the warriors piled up behind until Germans milled like ants all about the hill, and Teutobod himself arrived. First they tried to tempt the Roman army out by catcalls, boos, jeers, and a parade of captured civilians who had all been put to the torture. No Roman answered; no Roman ventured out. Then the host attacked en masse, a simple frontal assault which broke and ebbed away fruitlessly against the magnificent fortifications of Marius's camp; the Romans hurled a few spears at easy targets, but did nothing else. Teutobod shrugged. His thanes shrugged. Let the Romans stay there, then! It didn't really matter. So the German host rolled around the base of the hill like a syrupy sea around a great rock and disappeared to the south, the thousands of wagons creaking in its wake for seven days, every German woman and child staring up at the apparently lifeless citadel as the cavalcade plodded on toward Massilia. But the last wagon had scarcely dipped below the horizon when Marius moved with all six overstrength legions, and moved at the double. Quiet, disciplined, overjoyed at the prospect of battle at last, the Roman column skirted the Germans undetected as they pushed and jostled along the road from Arelate to Aquae Sextiae, from which point Teutobod intended to lead his warriors down to the sea. Crossing the river Ars, Marius took up a perfect position on its south bank at the top of a strong, sloping ridge surrounded by gently rolling hills, and there dug himself in, looking down on the river. Still in the lead, thirty thousand Ambrone warriors came to the ford and looked up to find a Roman camp bristling with plumed helmets and spears. But this was an ordinary camp, easy meat; without waiting for reinforcements, the Ambrones took the shallow stream at a run and attacked. Uphill. The Roman legionaries simply stepped over their wall along its entire front length and moved downhill to meet a shrieking horde of undisciplined barbarians. First they cast their pila with devastating effect, then they drew their swords and swung their shields around and waded into battle like the intermeshed components of one gigantic machine. Hardly an Ambrone lived to stagger back across the ford; thirty thousand Ambrone dead sprawled along the sloping ridge. Of casualties, Marius suffered almost none. The action was over in less than half an hour; within an hour the Ambrone bodies had been piled into a denuded rampart swords, torcs, shields, bracelets, pectorals, daggers, and helmets were thrown into the Roman camp along the edge of the ford; the first obstacle the next wave of Germans would have to surmount was this rampart of their own dead. The far bank of the Ars was now a roiling mass of Teutones, gazing in confusion and anger at the huge wall of dead Ambrones, and the Roman camp atop the ridge beyond lined with thousands of jeering, whistling, singing, booing, hissing, whooping soldiers, lifted out of themselves in a victory euphoria; for this was the first time a Roman army had killed great numbers of German Enemy. It was, of course, only a preliminary engagement. The major action was yet to come. But it would come, nothing surer. To complete his plan, Marius peeled off three thousand of his best troops and sent them that evening under the command of Manius Aquillius way downstream to cross the river; they were to wait until the general engagement took place, then fall upon the Germans from behind when the battle was at its height. Hardly a legionary slept that night, so great was the elation; but when the next day brought no aggressive move on the part of the Germans, tiredness didn't matter. The barbarian inactivity worried Marius, who didn't want the outcome postponed because the Germans decided not to attack. He needed a decisive victory, and he was determined to have it. But on the far bank of the river the Teutones had camped in their myriad thousands, unfortified save by sheer numbers, while Teutobod so tall on his little Gallic horse that his dangling feet nearly brushed the ground prowled the ford accompanied by a dozen of his thanes. Up and down and back and forth he walked his miserably overloaded steed all that day, two great flaxen braids straying across his golden breastplate, the golden wings on his helmet above each ear glittering in the sun. Even at the distance, anxiety and indecision could be discerned upon his clean-shaven face. The following morning dawned as cloudless as the days before, promising a degree of heat which would turn the area into a seething mass of Ambrone putrefaction all too soon; it was no part of Marius's plan to remain where he was until disease became a greater threat than the Enemy. "All right," he said to Quintus Sertorius, "we'll risk it. If they won't attack, I'll induce the battle by coming out myself and moving to attack them. We'll lose the advantage of their charge uphill, but even so, our chances are better here than anywhere else, and Manius Aquillius is in position. Sound the bugles, marshal the troops, and I'll address them." That was standard practice; no Roman army ever went into a major action unharangued. For one thing, it gave everyone a good look at the general in his war gear; for another, it served as a morale booster; and finally, it was the general's only opportunity to inform even the least legionary how he intended to win. The battle never went strictly according to plan everyone understood that but the general's address did give the soldiers an idea of what the general wanted them to do; and if more confusion than normal reigned, it enabled the troops to think for themselves. Many a Roman army had won its battle because its soldiers knew what the general wanted of them, and did it without a tribune in earshot. The defeat of the Ambrones had acted like a tonic. The legions were out to win, in perfect physical condition down to the last man, arms and armor polished, equipment immaculate. Massed in the open space they called their assembly forum, the ranks stood in file to listen to Gaius Marius. They would have followed him into Tartarus, of course, for they adored him. "All right, you cunni, today's the day!" Marius shouted from his makeshift rostra. "We were too good, that's our trouble! Now they don't want to fight! So we're going to make them so hopping mad they'd fight the legions of the dragon's teeth! We're going across our wall and down the slope, and then we're going to start pushing dead bodies around! We're going to kick their dead, spit on their dead, piss on their dead if we have to! And make no mistake, they're going to come across that ford in more thousands than you ignorant mentulae can count in units! And we won't have the advantage of sitting up here like cocks on a fence; we're going to have to take them on eye to eye and that means looking up! Because they're bigger than us! They're giants! Does that worry us? Does it?" "No!" they roared with one voice. "No, no, no!" "No
!" echoed Marius. "And why? Because we're the legions of Rome! We're following the silver eagles to death or glory! Romans are the best soldiers the world has ever seen! And you Gaius Marius's own soldiers of the Head Count are the best soldiers Rome has ever seen!" They cheered him for what seemed an eternity, hysterical with pride, tears running down their faces, every fiber of their beings geared to an unbearable pitch of readiness. "All right, then! We're going over the wall and we're going into a slogging match! There's no other way to win this war than to beat those mad-eyed savages to their knees! It's fight, men! It's keep going until there's not one mad-eyed savage left on his gigantic feet!" He turned to where six men wrapped in lion skins fanged muzzles engulfing their helmets, empty clawed paws knotted across their mail-shirted chests stood with their hands clasped about the polished silver shafts of standards bearing six open-winged silver eagles. "There they are, your silver eagles! Emblems of courage! Emblems of Rome! Emblems of my legions! Follow the eagles for the glory of Rome!" Even in the midst of such exaltation there was no loss of discipline; ordered and unhurried, Marius's six legions moved out of the camp and down the slope, turning to protect their own flanks, as this was not a site for cavalry. Like a sickle they presented their ranks to the Germans, who made up King Teutobod's mind for him at the first demonstration of Roman contempt for the Ambrone dead. Through the ford they came, into the Roman front, which didn't even falter. Those in the German forefront fell to a volley of pila thrown with stunning accuracy; for Marius's troops had been practising for over two years against this day. The battle was long and grueling, but the Roman lines could not be broken, nor the silver eagles borne by their six aquiliferi be taken. The German dead piled up and up, joining their Ambrone fellows, and still more Germans kept coming across the ford to replace the fallen. Until Manius Aquillius and his three thousand soldiers descended upon the German rear, and slaughtered it. By the middle of the afternoon, the Teutones were no more. Fueled by the military tradition and glory of Rome and led by a superb general, thirty-seven thousand properly trained and properly equipped Roman legionaries made military history at Aquae Sextiae by defeating well over a hundred thousand German warriors in two engagements. Eighty thousand corpses joined the thirty thousand Ambrones along the river Ars; very few of the Teutones had elected to live, preferring to die with pride and honor intact. Among the fallen was Teutobod. And to the victors went the spoils, many thousands of Teutonic women and children, and seventeen thousand surviving warriors. When the slave traders swarmed up from Massilia to buy the spoils, Marius donated the proceeds to his soldiers and officers, though by tradition money from the sale of slave-prisoners belonged solely to the general. "I don't need the money, and they earned it," he said. He grinned, remembering the colossal sum the Massiliotes had charged Marcus Aurelius Cotta for a single ship to take him to Rome bearing the news of Arausio. "I see the magistrates of Massilia have sent us a vote of thanks for saving their fair city. I think I'll send them a bill for saving it." To Manius Aquillius he gave his report to the Senate, and sent him at the gallop for Rome. "You can bring the news, and stand for the consulship," he said. "Only don't delay!" Manius Aquillius didn't delay, reaching Rome by road in seven days. The letter was handed to the junior consul, Quintus Lutatius Catulus Caesar, to read out to the assembled Senate, a wooden Manius Aquillius having refused to say a word.
I, Gaius Marius, senior consul, find it my duty to report to the Senate and People of Rome that this day on the field of Aquae Sextiae in the Roman province of Gaul-across-the-Alps, the legions under my command have defeated the entire nation of the German Teutones. The German dead are numbered at one hundred and thirteen thousand, the German captives at seventeen thousand men, and one hundred and thirty thousand women and children. Of wagons there are thirty-two thousand, of horses forty-one thousand, of cattle two hundred thousand. I have decreed that all the spoils including those sold into slavery are to be divided up in the correct proportions among my men. Long live Rome!
The whole of Rome went mad with joy, its streets filled with weeping, dancing, cheering, embracing hordes of people, from slaves to the most august. And Gaius Marius was voted senior consul for the next year in absentia, with Manius Aquillius his junior colleague. The Senate voted him a thanksgiving of three days, and the People two days more. . "Sulla referred to it," Catulus Caesar remarked to Metellus Numidicus after the fuss died down. "Oho! You "don't like our Lucius Cornelius! 'Sulla,' eh? What did he refer to?" "He said something to the effect that the tallest tree in the world couldn't be cut down by anyone. He has all the luck, Gaius Marius. I couldn't persuade my army to fight, while he defeats a whole nation and hardly loses a man doing it," said Catulus Caesar gloomily. "He's always had the luck," said Metellus Numidicus. "Luck, nothing!" said the eavesdropping Publius Rutilius Rufus vigorously. "Give credit where credit's due!"
Which left them with little more to say [wrote Rutilius Rufus to Gaius Marius]. As you well know, I cannot condone all these consecutive consulships, nor some of your more wolfy friends. But I do confess to exasperated annoyance when I am faced with envy and spite from men who ought to be big enough to be magnanimous. Aesop summed them up nicely sour grapes, Gaius Marius. Did you ever hear such nonsense as attributing your success and their lack of success to luck? A man makes his luck, and that's the truth of it. I could spit when I hear them depreciating your wonderful victory. Enough about that, I'll give myself an apoplexy. Speaking of your more wolfy friends, Gaius Servilius Glaucia having entered into his tribunate of the plebs eight days ago is already stirring up a nice little storm in the Comitia. He has called his first contio to discuss a new law he proposes to promulgate, his intent being to undo the work of that hero of Tolosa, Quintus Servilius Caepio, may his exile in Smyrna last forever. I do not like that man; I never did like that man! Glaucia is going to give the extortion court back to the knights, with all sorts of frills attached to it too. From now on if the law is passed, which I suppose it will be the State will be able to recover damages or misappropriated property or peculated funds from their ultimate recipients as well as from the original culprits. So where before a rapacious governor could sign his ill-gotten gains over to his Auntie Liccy or his wife's tata Lucius Tiddlypuss or even someone as obvious as his son, under Glaucia's new law Auntie Liccy and Lucius Tiddlypuss and the son will have to cough up as well. I suppose there is some justice in it, but where does legislation like this lead, Gaius Marius? It gives the State too much power, not to mention too much money! It breeds demagogues and bureaucrats, that's what! There is something terribly reassuring about being in politics to enrich oneself. It's normal. It's human. It's forgivable. It's understandable. The ones to watch are the ones who are in politics to change the world. They do the real damage, the power-men and the altruists. It isn't healthy to think about other people ahead of oneself. Other people are not as deserving. Did I tell you I was a Skeptic? Well, I am. Though sometimes just sometimes! I wonder if I'm not becoming a little bit of a Cynic too. We hear that you'll be back in Rome briefly. I cannot wait! I want to see Piggle-wiggle's face at the instant he first sets eyes on you. Catulus Caesar has been made proconsul of Italian Gaul, as you might have expected, and has already gone to rejoin his army in Placentia. Watch him, he'll try to take the credit of the next victory off you if he can. I hope your Lucius Cornelius Sulla is as loyal as he used to be, now Julilla's dead. On the diplomatic front, Battaces and his priests have finally seen fit to go home, and the wails from various highborn ladies can be heard at least as far as Brundisium. Now we are playing host to a much less awesome and infinitely more ominous embassage. It's come from none other than that very dangerous young man who has managed to collar most of the territory around the Euxine Sea King Mithridates of Pontus. He's asking for a treaty of friendship and alliance. Scaurus is not in favor. I wonder why? Could it possibly have something to do with the fierce lobbying of the agents of King Nicomedes of our friendly allied Bithynia? Edepol, edepol, there goes that dreadful Skeptic strea
k again! No, Gaius Marius, it is not a Cynical streak! Not yet, anyway. To conclude, a little gossip and personal news. The Conscript Father Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus has a little son and heir, giving rise to great expressions of joy on the part of various Domitii Ahenobarbi and Servilii Caepiones, though I note the Calpurnii Pisones have managed to maintain their air of indifference. And while it may be the fate of some venerable elders to marry schoolgirls, it is a more usual fate to yield to the arms of Death. Our very own literary giant Gaius Lucilius is dead. I'm quite sorry about it, really. He was a horrible bore in the flesh, but oh he was witty on paper! I am also sorry and with deep sincerity this time that your old Syrian seer Martha is dead. No news to you, I know Julia wrote, but I shall miss the old harridan. Piggle-wiggle used to foam at the mouth whenever he saw her being toted around Rome in her lurid purple litter. Your dear wonderful Julia vows she'll miss Martha too. I hope you appreciate the treasure you married, by the way. It isn't every wife I know would grieve at the passing of a houseguest who came for a month and stayed for the duration, especially a houseguest who thought it etiquette to spit on the floor and piss in the fishpond. I close by echoing your own remark. How could you, Gaius Marius? "Long live Rome!" indeed! What a conceit!
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