THE SITUATION IN the north following Catulus’s defeat was drastic but not dire. Marius had already wiped out the Teutones and Ambrones, and though the Cimbri now squatted in north Italy they showed no signs of continuing south. Marius entered his fourth consecutive consulship in January 101 and spent the winter transferring as many troops as possible from Gaul to Italy. Massing all available forces on the south bank of the Po River, Marius combined his Gallic army with Catulus’s remaining legions and assumed overall command. Marius kept both Catulus and Sulla in positions of leadership, but there would be no repeat of the fatal disunity at Arausio. Marius was in sole command. In the spring of 101, he led 50,000 men across the Po River to confront 200,000 Cimbri.9
When the legions appeared on the horizon, Cimbric ambassadors rode out to greet the Romans. The Cimbri were confident and demanded the Romans cede territory in Cisalpine Gaul. The ambassadors reminded Marius that the Teutones and Ambrones would be crossing over into Italy soon and the Romans couldn’t hope to withstand their combined might. At this, Marius burst out laughing and said, “Don’t trouble yourself about your brethren, for they have land, and they will have it forever—land which we have given them.” The Cimbri refused to believe Marius’s claim to have wiped out their allies, until Marius ordered the shackled kings of the Teutones paraded through the camp. Incensed, the Cimbric ambassadors withdrew. A few days later one of their principal chiefs rode to the Roman camp to settle a simple question with Marius: when and where the two armies would meet in battle.10
On the third day following this meeting, the Romans and Cimbri lined up for battle on the Raudian Plain. Marius led the left wing of the legions, with Catulus in the center and Sulla on the right. Across the plain the Cimbri arrayed a massive infantry that allegedly spanned more than three miles across, with a cavalry detachment alone numbering fifteen thousand. Though a fog in the morning covered everything with a hazy mist, Marius made sure his army faced west so that when the sun rose and burned off the fog, the Cimbri would be staring directly into the sun. This position also put the legions upwind from the enemy—both the sun and the wind would become key factors in the battle to come.11
In their memoirs, both Sulla and Catulus claimed that once the Battle of the Raudian Plain began, Marius became confused in the rising dust cloud, and when he advanced, he missed the Cimbri completely, leaving Catulus and Sulla to do the real fighting. But this is fairly obviously propaganda. Most likely Marius deployed the same strategy he used at Aquae Sextiae: pin down the main front line of the enemy and then deliver a deadly flanking shot. Catulus and Sulla did indeed fight a heated battle while Marius disappeared into the dust, but far from missing the enemy, he was off delivering the fatal blow to their exposed flank.12
For the Cimbri the battle turned into a rout. The blinding sun gave way to a huge cloud of dust that blinded them, and they found themselves under relentless attack from multiple sides. Their warriors began to flee but their own mothers and wives would not allow them to escape. Standing behind the front line, “the women, in black garments, stood at the wagons and slew the fugitives—their husbands or brothers or fathers, then strangled their little children and cast them beneath the wheels of the wagons or the feet of the cattle, and then cut their own throats.” The Battle of the Raudian Plain spelled the end of the Cimbri—they left 120,000 dead on the plain and the survivors were enslaved. As is so often the case in Roman history, repeated defeats in battle could be endured as long as the Romans won the war.13
When news of the victory reached Rome, no one could now deny the magnificent supremacy of Gaius Marius, Rome’s invincible general. At the pinnacle of his fame, power, and prestige, even “the first men in the state, who had until then envied the ‘new man’ who had reached so many important posts, now admitted that the state had been rescued by him.” Marius was hailed as “the Third Founder of Rome,” elevating him to a hyper-elite pantheon of heroes that included only Romulus himself and the legendary Marcus Furius Camillus, the man who had brought Rome back from the brink of extinction after the traumatic sack by the Gauls in the 380s. Not even Scipio Africanus, who had delivered Rome from Hannibal, earned such an honorific. But strangely Marius himself refused to assume the standard triumphant cognomen and he never became known as “Marius Gallicus” or “Marius Cimbricus.” Instead he retained the two simple names he had been born with: Gaius Marius.14
