Of the military defeats inflicted upon the Roman Army, none brought such sudden destruction as the Battle of Arausio in early October 105 BC. Arausio was a local Celtic water god who gave his name to the town where Rome was to suffer one of their greatest ever military defeats in a single day
Two Roman armies were stationed near the town of Arausio (modern-day Orange) on the Rhône River, and were massacred in a single days fighting by a nomadic tribal force, mostly made up of the Cimbri and their allies, the Teutones. Thousands of soldiers, their officers, and the camp followers who managed the baggage train, died within hours.
The two tribal chieftans were named Boiorix and Teutobod, proud leaders who were fearless having ranged through Transalpine Gaul unimpeded by Rome, and spoiling for a fight.
Following reports of the movements of both the Cimbri and Teutones throughout northern Italy and southern Gaul, the Senate gave imperium to Quintus Servilius Caepio, and charged him with setting up defences in the province of Gallia Narbonensis (modern-day Provence in France).
However, conflict in Rome had created a dangerous problem in the chain of command. A vote in the senate had elected Gnaeus Mallius Maximus as consul and granted him imperium over the region, placing him above Caepio in command. But Maximus was from plebian stock, he did not come from a noble house, and his appointment enraged conservative senators who viewed him being given this rank as an insult to their patrician authority.
To add to the trouble, Caepio, because he was higher-born and agreed with the senators fury, undermined Maximus through displaying an intentional lack of cooperation and refused to acknowledge his authority. So before the enemy had even threatened Roman interests, the army had divided themselves into two distinctly separate camps.
The Cimbri, who were moving through Gaul in search of territory, became aware of this discord and the subsequent division of Roman forces, and waited for an opportunity to exploit it.
After reaching the Rhône river, the tribes offered to negotiate terms with Maximus. Caepio however, was unwilling to let his social inferior speak for Rome, and impulsively crossed the river with his army and launched a poorly coordinated attack on Boiorix’s camp, but the Roman soldiers lacked any real intelligence gleaned from scouting and made a hasty and weak attack that almost immediately failed. The Cimbri responded with a quick and powerful counterattack that drove Caepio’s fleeing troops back toward the river, with many drowning in the river or being cut down by the enemy and their calvary.
Quickly routing Caepio’s force, they turned their attention to Maximus’s camp, which had been positioned poorly with its back to the river, and it had little time to prepare for the sudden assault. Within hours, Maximus’s men had collapsed in the same fashion as Caepios. The slaughter quickly spread across the fields, and thousands of soldiers were savaged, trampled, surrounded and pulled down to their deaths as they attempted to break through the enemy lines, or in trying to escape they simply drowned in the river. By nightfall the massacre was complete, and both Caepio and Marius had already fled the battlefield to save their own skins.
When the fighting was finished, Rome had lost an estimated 80,000 soldiers and 40,000 non-combatants, according to figures preserved in Livy’s Periochae, although historians believe that to be too high a figure and would probably halve the numbers. Even so, it was an terrible defeat for Rome, leading to recruitment difficulties for years afterwards, due to lack of available manpower in Italy.
This military disaster left Rome without a protective shield and a both terrifying and formidable enemy camped on the other side of the now-undefended Alpine passes. The people in Rome widely thought the defeat was due to the Caepios’ arrogance rather than to a badly performing army.
Panic swept through the city as the Senate confronted its greatest fear, the collapse and ransacking of Rome by the enemy. The citizens demanded leadership and responsibility, with the Senate responding by stripping Caepio of his command, confiscating his property, and banishing him to Smyrna in Asia Minor, although some stories tell that he was taken to the Gemonian Stairs (Scalae Gemoniae), a flight of steps located in the city of Rome, and killed. Nicknamed the Stairs of Mourning, infamous in Roman history as a place of execution, his mangled body was left there as a warning to others. Maximus, although he did not suffer such a dreadful fate, retired in disgrace and left Rome for good.
In an unlikely story, written no doubt to emphasize the amount of dead, Plutarch, in his Life of Marius, says that the battlefield soil was made so fertile by human remains that it was able to produce “magna copia” (a great abundance) of crops for years afterwards.
In the weeks that followed, fear of a coming invasion hung over the Republic. Without an army on their western frontier and with no immediate reserves to replace the legions lost at Arausio, Rome faced the real possibility of collapse. The allied tribes however did not continue their advance with an attack on the city, but turned northwards, giving the Romans a crucial breathing space. This was a major error, had they pressed home their advantage, Rome almost certainly would have been theirs’ for the taking.
Senators who had once derided the army commander and politician Gaius Marius as a political outsider now demanded his return. Marius was born near Arpinum, a small town in Latium, in 157 BC. He came from a moderately wealthy family, and served as a commander in the legions. Having finally, after some difficulty, won the messy and protracted Jugurthine War in North Africa, he became a military legend among the ordinary people back in Rome and wallowed in the attention he was given.
So, fresh from his campaign in Numidia, and receiving unmatched senatorial support, he set about implementing reforms that would overhaul the Roman military, replacing it with a standardised format, opening up recruitment to the landless poor, implementing disciplined training, ensuring better equipment was made available, and most importantly, creating a more flexible, and fluid command system. In this way he tried to solve the problem that ultimately lay at the root of the defeat at Arausio.
His subsequent victories at Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC, where he defeated the Teutons and their allies the Ambrones, as they attempted to advance through the Alps into Italy, and at Vercellae in 101 BC, where the Celtic-Germanic confederation under the command of Boiorix was destroyed, at last restored control and brought stability to the area, ensuring the safety of the city of Rome.
The Romans were a skilled and warlike people, and although they were defeated on the battlefield many times, such as at the Battles of the Allia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae where Hannibal beat them resoundingly, and embarrasingly (for them) they lost more than once against Spartacus‘ slave army, and perhaps most famously, when three whole legions plus auxiliaries (some 29,000 men in total) were annihilated in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, they always learned from their mistakes and reformed in order to take to the field again. Arausio was the point which, under Marius, the true Roman legion were created as he helped transform the Roman Republic through his military reforms. Under him the legions became a more professional and effective fighting force, a force to be reckoned with, but he also inadvertently created a system where the rank and file became far more loyal to their generals than to the state, which ultimately helped lead the Roman Republic to it’s eventual collapse.
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