Gaius Marius

Gaius Marius was a Roman general and politician of the late Roman Republic who was elected consul seven times, a record for the Republican era. An outsider from a provincial town, he ended a war in North Africa, destroyed two great Germanic invasions, and then, in old age, helped drag Rome into its first civil wars.

Marius was born around 157 BC near Arpinum, a town south-east of Rome. Plutarch later called his father a labourer, but historians think the family was locally prominent and wealthy, of equestrian rank. Because no ancestor had held high office in Rome, he was a "new man", and his climb was slow. His first military experience came in 134 BC, on the staff of Scipio Aemilianus during the long Roman siege of Numantia in Spain. Elected a tribune of the plebs for 119 BC, he passed a law narrowing the walkways to the voting booths, so that the rich could not watch or pressure voters. He scraped into the praetorship, governed Further Spain, and around 110 BC married Julia, an aunt of Julius Caesar.

In 109 BC Marius went to Numidia as a senior officer under the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus, who was fighting the Numidian king Jugurtha. He fell out with his commander, returned to Rome, and won the consulship for 107 BC on a promise to end the war quickly. Through a vote of the people's assembly he took the command away from Metellus. He enlisted volunteers, including men without property, and fought a hard campaign, taking and razing the town of Capsa. The war ended in 105 BC when King Bocchus of Mauretania handed Jugurtha to Marius's quaestor, Sulla. The question of who deserved the credit began a lifelong rivalry between the two men.

Wandering Germanic peoples, the Cimbri and Teutones, had beaten several Roman armies, most disastrously at Arausio in 105 BC. In alarm, voters elected Marius consul again, in his absence, and then re-elected him annually until 100 BC. He trained a new army in southern Gaul and in 102 BC crushed the Teutones and Ambrones near Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence). In 101 BC, together with Quintus Lutatius Catulus, he destroyed the Cimbri at Vercellae in northern Italy. Ancient writers give very large death tolls, which are uncertain.

In 100 BC, the year of his sixth consulship, Marius worked with the radical tribune Saturninus, then turned against him when the tribune's supporters resorted to murder. On the Senate's orders he besieged Saturninus, who surrendered, but a mob killed the prisoners. Marius then largely withdrew from public life and travelled east. In the Social War against Rome's Italian allies, which broke out in 91 BC, he won some victories in 90 BC but was not given a command afterwards.

In 88 BC a tribune, Sulpicius, passed a law transferring the command against Mithridates VI of Pontus from Sulla, then consul, to Marius, who held no office at all. Sulla answered by marching his army on Rome, something no Roman general had done before. Marius fled and eventually reached Africa. In 87 BC he returned with troops, joined the consul Cinna, and took the city. Their followers killed many opponents, including former consuls, and displayed their heads in the Forum. Marius secured a seventh consulship for 86 BC but died on 13 January, within weeks of taking office.

Ancient writers portrayed Marius as ruthlessly ambitious. Modern historians stress that his repeated consulships and his use of the assemblies to grab commands weakened the Republic's traditions. Scholars of the nineteenth century credited him with sweeping "Marian reforms" that created a professional army; many historians today regard those reforms as largely a modern construct.

Our 100 BC map shows the Roman Republic in the year of his sixth consulship, just after his victories over the Cimbri and Teutones.