The work of the Mamilian Commission was one of the key reasons that Sallust decided to write on the Jugurthine War: it marked the aggressive return of the populare as a force in Roman politics. A decade after the fall of Gaius Gracchus, the populare were returning with a vengeance. The populare assault on the Senate also cleared space for the rise of a new generation of novus homo. Men who could run for office and make their case on explicitly antisenatorial terms, to turn being novus homo from a negative to a positive. The chief beneficiary of this new environment would be Gaius Marius.22
THE ROMANS WERE able to focus on the political drama swirling around Jugurtha in part because the northern border had remained relatively quiet. The Macedonian frontier was silent and the Cimbri had departed for parts unknown after the Battle of Noreia in 113. But four years after that last contact, the Cimbri reappeared. They had apparently failed to find a permanent home and were now descending south through the Rhône valley, ready to try their luck in southern Gaul again.23
With Metellus having departed for Numidia, the Senate ordered his colleague Marcus Junius Silanus to muster what forces remained in Italy. But with Metellus already requiring a special dispensation to raise recruits for Numidia, Silanus found himself drawing from an even thinner manpower pool. But the consul managed to dredge the last warm bodies out of that pool and march them through the Alps into Gaul. As the two sides squared off, a small party of Cimbric ambassadors traveled to Rome to say that “the people of Mars should give them some land by way of pay and use their hands and weapons for any purpose it wished.” The Senate refused to grant the Cimbris’ request—Rome made treaties with defeated enemies, not defiant tribes.24
After the Cimbri received their answer, Silanus encouraged the Cimbri to move along, but that provoked a battle. Details of the battle are nonexistent and all we really know is the outcome: once again the Cimbri crushed the legions. The casualties were staggering. It was said that “after so many men had been killed, some were crying for sons or brothers; others, orphaned by the death of their fathers, lamented the loss of their parents and the desolation of Italy; and a very large number of women, deprived of their husbands, were turned into poor widows.” But beyond the individual suffering, the Cimbric victory meant that the road to Italy was now clear.25
But, as before, the Cimbri showed no interest in pillaging Italy. Their new objective may have been to simply contain the Romans on the Italian peninsula as they set themselves up as the premier power in south-central Gaul. Their victories certainly upended the political situation in the region. Many of Rome’s allies in Gaul tore up their treaties now that a bigger bully had moved onto the block.
BACK IN ROME, the plebs urbana were horrified by the failure of Silanus, and there was little happening in Numidia to take their minds off the looming menace of the Cimbri. Metellus’s decision to seek a more methodical reduction of Numidia was militarily sound, but it fed the general belief that the only thing the nobles did in Numidia was drag their feet. Though Metellus was not actually dragging his feet, his image still took a hit back in Rome.26
In late 109, Metellus broke his army into smaller units and sent them out to ravage communities that remained loyal to Jugurtha. After he made a few brutal examples, communities started surrendering the minute the Romans arrived. To combat this war of intimidation, Jugurtha turned to guerrilla tactics. Allowing his peasant conscripts to go home, Jugurtha and his best cavalry units shadowed the legions wherever they went, harassing Roman communication and supply lines and picking off individual units if they ever strayed too far from the main force. They also rode ahead of the Romans to likely campsites, spoiling fields that might be used to feed Roman horses and poisoning any freshwater springs.27
But as weeks turned into months, the inhabitants of Numidia tired of the crisscrossing armies and blamed Jugurtha for provoking the Romans to war. Metellus attempted to exploit that resentment. He opened clandestine talks with Jugurtha’s loyal lieutenant Bomilcar, who was last seen in Rome orchestrating the assassination of Massiva. After a mix of bribes and threats Bomilcar agreed to convince Jugurtha to surrender. Returning from the secret rendezvous, Bomilcar painted a dismal picture for Jugurtha: The Romans are going to win. The country is in ruins. The people are unhappy. It is time to give up for the good of all Numidia. Coming from such a close friend, Jugurtha relented and resigned himself to defeat. He sent an envoy to Metellus asking for terms of surrender.28
