Having scouted the landscape of southern Gaul for over two years, Marius knew exactly where he wanted to place his fortified camps for first contact with the enemy. Situated on high ground next to the Rhône, the camps would be nearly impregnable. When word came that the Teutones and Ambrones were about to appear, Marius led his legions north and built their camps. We have already seen what happened when first contact came. Marius refused to let his men leave the camps and forced them to wait until the great horde had moved on. When the Teutones and Ambrones departed, Marius finally ordered his men to break camp and follow. The antsy legionaries were baffled by their general’s seeming lack of nerve. They did not yet realize that Marius was executing a carefully laid-out plan.36
Using the superior speed of his legions, Marius raced along parallel to the barbarian horde until they all reached another location he had carefully selected near Aquae Sextiae. With the Teutones and Ambrones camped beside the river, the legions occupied a clearing in the forest that overlooked the barbarians’ camps. Marius told his thirsty troops that “they could get water there, but the price of it was blood.” The battle began with a preliminary engagement that saw Marius isolate and eliminate thirty thousand Ambrones. Then, a few days later, Marius arrayed his troops at the crest of a long slope and forced the Teutones to charge up to meet them. But as soon as contact was made the legions drove them right back down the hill. As the Teutones fell back under heavy assault, Marius ordered a hidden reserve unit to burst out of the woods into the exposed Teutone rear. By the end of the battle, Marius and his legions were not just victorious; they destroyed an entire branch of this two-pronged invasion of Italy.37
The casualties of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae were massive: somewhere between one hundred and two hundred thousand dead, including plenty of civilians caught up in the bloody chaos. Rather than fall into slavery, mothers “dashed their children upon the rocks and then took their own lives by the sword or by hanging.” It was later said that the local inhabitants of the region “fenced their vineyards round with the bones of the fallen, and that the soil, after the bodies had wasted away in it and the rains had fallen all winter upon it, grew so rich and became so full to its depths of the putrefied matter that sank into it, that it produced an exceeding great harvest in later years.”38
WHILE MARIUS WON the greatest battle of his career to date, he did not have long to bask in the glow of victory. Reports came through that his colleague Catulus was having a hell of a time over in northeastern Italy. Catulus was an upstanding optimate senator, but he was more scholar and statesman than soldier. Catulus was “a man eminent for all the politer virtues, for wisdom and for integrity,” but revealed himself to be “too sluggish for arduous contests.” Marius read alarming reports from the east about failures to hold the Alpine passes.39
Catulus may not have been an experienced general, but he did have by his side the supremely talented Sulla. Chafing under years of subordination to Marius, Sulla managed to get himself transferred to Catulus’s command for the campaigns of 102. Sulla did signal work as the legions awaited the Cimbri, arranging alliances with native tribes and organizing stable supply lines. But with only about twenty thousand men at their disposal, no amount of preparation was going to make a difference against hundreds of thousands of Cimbri. An initial clash in the mountains proved that the numerical superiority of the slow-moving horde was too great. The Romans were forced into a fighting retreat.40
In danger of being enveloped in the mountains and destroyed like every other Roman army that had fought the Cimbri, Catulus declared the Alpine passes indefensible and pulled his legions out of the mountains, falling all the way back to the Adige River in northern Italy. It may have been a sound strategic judgment, but when Catulus abandoned the mountains he allowed the Cimbri an uncontested passage into Cisalpine Gaul. After a decade of knocking on the door, the Cimbri were finally in Italy.41
