But while some of these populare attacks were carried out by ambitious men of noble rank simply looking to inflict as much damage as possible on their political rivals, many more were real populare radicals looking to burn down the world.
WHILE ALL OF this played out in Rome, Marius remained on alert in Gaul. While he waited, he introduced an array of strategic and logistical reforms that revolutionized how the Roman army functioned in the field. In the long arc of Roman military history, the last great transformation of the legions had occurred back in the 300s during the Samnite Wars. Fighting in the broken hill country of central Italy, the Romans abandoned the rigid Greek phalanx and developed more flexible formations. The organization of the legions then remained largely unchanged all the way down to the final conquests of 146. The years after 146 saw the legions transform once again, and the ancient sources credit Marius with many of the innovations that turned the legions as they had existed in the third century BC into the armies Pompey and Caesar would lead as they completed the conquest of the Mediterranean in the first century.18
The most important of Marius’s innovations was a heavy emphasis on the physical conditioning of the soldiers and the speed of their maneuvers. Concluding that the endless baggage trains that followed any Roman army hindered the mobility of the legions, Marius decreed that his men would now carry their own gear—their weapons, blankets, clothes, and rations would be hoisted on their own backs. Observing these self-sustaining soldiers, old-school officers took to derisively calling the men “Marius’s Mules.” But it was effective: speed and cohesion became vital assets to the legions. Marius also promoted a pan-legionary esprit de corps by ending the practice of each legion having its own animal symbol, ordering instead that the eagle—a bird that had special meaning for Marius—be the universal symbol of the legions.19
Marius also introduced tactical improvements to the weaponry his soldiers carried, most prominently developing a new type of spear. The standard weapon carried by every soldier was usually hurled at the enemy at the outset of any battle. But the hurled weapons were often then picked up and chucked back at the Romans. So Marius developed a new type of spear using lead to join the steel tip to the wooden shaft. When it hit its mark, the soft lead would buckle and bend and leave the spear of no use to the enemy, who now also had to disentangle themselves from the awkwardly protruding projectile.20
But though he is often credited with every military reform that took place during these years, Marius was not solely responsible for the changing face of the legions. He is, for example, often credited with changing the basic tactical unit of the army from the small
Marius wound up spending the entirety of 104 waiting for a Cimbric invasion that never materialized. But unwilling to allow any other man to take over the Gallic frontier, the Assembly once again bucked mos maiorum by electing Marius to a second consecutive consulship for 103. Only a few scattered times in the whole history of the Republic had a man ever served two consulships in a row—the last time being during the Second Punic War when the great Quintus Fabius Maximus served as consul in both 214 and 215. But Caepio and Mallius’s inability to work together meant that Rome could not risk another such division of authority. So the Assembly elected Marius to a groundbreaking second consecutive consulship—his third consulship in six years.22
While Marius waited patiently for the return of the Cimbri, he spent a great deal of time rebuilding Roman alliances in Gaul. He sent men under cover to gather intelligence on the local tribes, to learn what they wanted, what they feared, what their internal rivalries were. Then he dispatched Sulla on a diplomatic circuit to offer each tribe a unique package of carrots and sticks that would bring them back into the Roman fold. By the end of 103, the Romans once again had a network of allies they could count on when the Cimbri came back.
