By this time Marius was generally recognized as the ablest general of the day, and in face of the great peril now beginning to threaten Rome from the north of the Alps, where an immense multitude of Cimbri and Teutones were hanging on the borders of Italy, public opinion promptly summoned him to the chief command. Two armies had been utterly destroyed in the neighbourhood of the Lake of Geneva, and it seemed as if a repetition of the disaster of Allia in 390 b.c., and the capture of Rome itself, might be not impossible. Marius, out of unpromising materials and a demoralized soldiery, organized a well-disciplined army, with which he inflicted on the invading hordes two decisive defeats, the first in 102 b.c. at Aquae Sextiae (Aix in the department of Bouches du Rhone, some way north of Marseilles), and the second in the following year at Vercellae (Vercelli, about midway between Turin and Milan), the result being that for a period of some centuries Rome had nothing to fear from the northern barbarians. Deservedly indeed was Marius elected consul a fifth time, hailed as the “saviour of his country,” and honoured with a triumph of unprecedented splendour.

The really glorious part of his career was now over, and the remainder of his life is associated with the worst cruelties and horrors of civil war, revolution, and proscription. The hideous strifes of Marius and Sulla have passed into a proverb. It is indeed a dreadful and monotonous story of bloodshed, but it must be carefully studied if we are to understand the nature of the political changes which had their final development in imperialism. Marius was a plain, rough, though very able, soldier, without any of the intellectual culture which is indispensable to a statesman, and which the Gracchi, his political ancestors, possessed. As a politician he on the whole failed, though almost to the last he had the confidence of the popular party. But he unfortunately associated himself with low and vulgar demagogues, men probably more degraded than the worst of the senators and of the aristocracy, and thus, although perhaps he never quite sank to their level, he let himself be guilty of cruel and perfidious acts, which it is hard to reconcile with the character of a brave man and a hero. He was indeed appointed in 88 b.c., after a riot and partial revolution, to the command in the war in the East with Mithridates, but the triumph of Sulla and the aristocratical party almost immediately afterwards drove him as an outlaw from Rome, and he had to seek safety amid the marshes round Minturnae (Garigliano) in Latium. The Gallic trooper sent by the local authorities to strike off the old man’s head quailed, it is said, before the fire of his eye, and fled with the exclamation, “I cannot kill Caius Marius.” Meantime, in the absence of Sulla, who had left Italy for the Mithridatic war, Cinna’s sudden and violent revolution had put the senate at the mercy of the popular leaders, and Marius greedily caught at the opportunity of a bloody vengeance, which became in fact a reign of terror in which senators and nobles were slaughtered wholesale. He had himself elected consul, for the seventh time, in fulfilment of a prophecy given to him in early manhood. Thus, full of honours in one sense, but really hated and execrated, he closed his career, dying in the delirium of fever in 86 b.c., at seventy years of age.

Marius was not only a great and successful general, but also a great military reformer. A citizen militia was from his time exchanged for a professional soldiery, which had hitherto been as little liked by the Roman people as it was by our own ancestors. A standing army, their instincts told them, would be a ready tool of despotism; and indeed the changes of which Marius was the author paved the way for the subsequent military imperialism. The Roman soldier was henceforth a man who found his home in the camp, and wflιo had no trade but war. A great general could hardly fail to become the first and foremost man in the state. Marius, however, himself did not attempt to overturn the oligarchy, as Caesar afterwards did, by means of the army, but rather by such expedients as the constitution seemed to allow, though they had to be backed up by street riots and mob violence. He failed as a political reformer because the merchants and the moneyed classes, whom the more statesmanlike Gracchi tried to conciliate, feared that they would themselves be swept away by a revolution of which the mob and its leaders would be the ultimate controllers. The farmer’s son, the rough blunt soldier, the saviour of his country in middle life, and its curse and pest in his old age, had a decided tinge of fanaticism and that vein of superstition which is often allied to such natures. In matters so important as canvassing for the consulship he would be guided by the counsels of an Etruscan soothsayer, and would be accompanied in his campaigns by a Syrian prophetess. The fashionable accomplishments of the day, and the new Greek culture, were wholly alien to his taste, and he was thus really disqualified for the political life of his time. When his military career was once ended, failure and disgrace became a certainty for him.

For the life of Marius our original sources are a multitude of passages in Cicero’s works, Sallust’s Jugurthan War, the epitomes of the lost books of Livy, Plutarch’s Lives, &c. In Smith’s Biographical Dictionary the life is given at great length, and the details stated generally with great accuracy. In Mommsen’s History of Rome, bk. iv. chaps. 6, 7, 8, a clear picture of the whole period is presented to us; and Niebuhr’s Lectures on Roman History (Lectures 81-86) may be consulted with great advantage.