The Storm Before the Storm полностью

But in the middle of that same night, Bocchus summoned Sulla for the real meeting. Bocchus told Sulla that he would never cross the Muluccha River that marked the border with Numidia, and that all that he had—soldiers, ships, and money—was at Rome’s disposal. Sulla accepted all of this with calculated regard. He told Bocchus that the Romans felt no gratitude for the king’s pledges, as they had already defeated the Mauretanians in battle. If Bocchus wanted to earn his treaty of friendship there was only one way to do it: hand over Jugurtha.²⁶

The next day Bocchus summoned a courtier he knew to be in touch with Jugurtha and passed along a message for the Numidian king. Bocchus said he was about to make a peace with Rome—what could Jugurtha offer to make him change his mind? A reply came back quickly from Jugurtha. The Numidian king promised Bocchus anything he wanted to restore the alliance; for starters, Jugurtha would hand over nearly a third of Numidian territory. Jugurtha also proposed that Bocchus kidnap Sulla, and then together they could ransom him to the Senate and force the legions to withdraw from Africa entirely. Bocchus agreed to meet Jugurtha at a secluded location outside of the city.²⁷

With both sides having made their pitches, Bocchus found himself with an ulcer-inducing decision to make: betray his fellow king to the Romans and possibly risk the wrath of his subjects, or seize Sulla and risk the wrath of the legions. The king stayed up the whole night before the rendezvous with Jugurtha deciding what to do.²⁸

The next day Bocchus, Sulla, and a small party of retainers rode out toward the secluded spot. Bocchus was about to double-cross either Sulla or Jugurtha, and to Sulla’s satisfaction, Jugurtha drew the short straw. Bocchus’s men surrounded the clearing and when Jugurtha appeared the men sprang out of the ambush. Jugurtha’s few remaining retainers were killed and the king himself was seized and handed over to Sulla. Sulla dutifully delivered Jugurtha in chains to Marius. Twelve years after Jugurtha had begun all this by assassinating Hiempsal, and seven years after the Senate had been forced to declare war following the massacre at Cirta, the war with Jugurtha was over.²⁹

BUT THIS HAPPY news was about to be blotted out by an unfathomable disaster in the north. The Cimbri had first arrived in 113, defeated the Romans at Noreia, and then moved on. After a four-year hiatus, they had come down the Rhône river in 109 and defeated the Romans again. Now, after yet another four-year cycle, the Cimbri came back around in 105, once again migrating down the Rhône toward the Mediterranean coast. The Senate was understandably spooked by the return of this enemy that had bested them twice.³⁰

Though now widely suspected of playing a role in the disappearance of the Tolosa gold, the Senate extended Caepio’s command in the north and kept his army intact—two full Roman legions plus twice as many Italian allies and Gallic auxiliary forces—bringing his combined numbers up to somewhere around thirty-five thousand. To double the number on the northern front the Senate instructed one of the consuls for 105, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, to gather an army of equal strength. This time the Cimbri must be destroyed. It was a good thing the property requirements had been dropped or Rome might not have been able to muster the strength to put the sixty to eighty thousand men through the Alps while simultaneously maintaining the legions in Numidia.³¹

Gnaeus Mallius was not just any newly elected consul, though. He was, like Marius, a novus homo. Between 191 and 107 only three confirmed novus homo had been elected consul. But in the rising tide of populare agitation, the Senate could not stop a string of novus homo from entering office. In the fourteen years between 107 and 94, five novus homo would be elected consul, and Gaius Marius himself would become far and away the most dominant leader in Rome. When Mallius drew Gaul as his province, the Senate was once again forced to trust a new man with the safety of Rome.³²

In the Roman military hierarchy, no one outranked a consul, so when Mallius arrived in Gaul it was his right to supplant Caepio as commander in chief. But Caepio, being the arrogant noble that he was, greeted the novus homo Mallius with nothing but dismissive insolence. He claimed to be operating in a separate geographic province on the other side of the Rhône and insisted on maintaining autonomy on his side of the river. This lack of unity between the two senior commanders—which all the sources lay squarely at Caepio’s feet—was the principal cause of their shared demise. There was not one 60,000-strong Roman army. There were two 30,000-man armies—and the Cimbri would fatally exploit the difference.³³