The Rest Is History - 701. Roman Civil War: Rise of the General (Part 1)

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

Who was Gaius Marius, one of the two men who would shape the fate of Rome in the first century BC? Why was his road to fame, fortune, and political greatness, from total obscurity, so dangerous? And, would Marius be the man to face down the existential threat facing the empire during this period?  Join Tom and Dominic as they launch into one of the greatest struggles in the history of Rome, as two titanic generals and politicians clash over hegemony of the empire, in an age of tumult.  *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton  Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill   Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello. Now, before we go to today's episode, I have some insanely exciting news for you. On Friday, the 4th of September, Dominic and I will be forming live at the South Bank Centre in London. And better yet, we will be doing something completely new, something that no one has ever heard before on the rest is history. The ultimate Victorian adventure. So to give you just a little taste, we will be in Africa in 18, The Emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore II, has kidnapped 59 Europeans and he is holding them hostage after descending into this demented rage because one of his fellow monarchs, Queen Victoria, has declined to answer his letters. I'm not making this up. And the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting, have lost patience and they have sent a military expedition. under General Napier, halfway around the world to save them, an expedition that includes

thousands of mules, loads of elephants, and they've even had to build their own railway across the highlands of Abyssinia or Ethiopia to try to get to his mountain citadel. It is a bonkers story. Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary, full-blown British imperial epic, full of ludicrous behaviour, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on The Rest is History. It is, though I say so myself, a guaranteed classic in the making. So you're probably thinking how can I get a ticket for this extraordinary Victorian adventure? Here is the answer. If you want to get a ticket for this event on Friday, the 4th of September, all you have to do is to go to The Restis History.com.

as simple as that, you maybe have to part with some money, but it will be money very, very, very, very well spent. See you there. And now it was, the news began to reach Rome of the Teutons and the Kimbrey. Initially, the reports detailing the numbers and strength of these invaders seemed fantastical. But it soon became clear that all the rumours were in reality underwere. estimates of the truth. Three hundred thousand warriors were on the march, accompanied by even larger numbers of women

and children, all of them looking for lands and cities in which to settle. Who were these people? From what distant part of the world had they emigrated? It was unclear. For prior to their descent on Gaul and Italy, no one had ever heard of them. The best guess, they were Germans, and had travelled from the lands that border the northern ocean. This supposition derived from various clues. Firstly, their enormous size. Next, the light blue colour of their eyes. And finally, the fact that Kimbrey is a word which in the

language of the Germans means plunderer. That was the Greek historian Plutarch. And he's describing a very chilling and spine-tingling terms. One of the most terrifying moments in Roman history, a migration of barbarians, which by the year 113 BC, had arrived at the gates of Roman Italy. And these people, the Teutons and the Kimbrey, Tom, am I stretching a point to say that effectively they're the Danes? Yeah, Plutuck says that they come from the lands that border the Northern Ocean. And the general thinking is that this was probably Jutland and the regions north of it. I mean, it's a kind of proto-viking invasion, if you like.

And it would have taken them a long time to get from Jutland down to the Alps. So it could well have taken the Toutons and the Kimbrey, anything up to a decade to get there. And if so, for most of that decade, obviously the Romans and the people of Italy had no idea what was approaching them. And it always kind of makes me think of those kind of Hollywood dramas where there's an asteroid hurtling towards planet Earth, or there are scientists experimenting with some zombie mutation in a lab and people are going about their everyday lives, just waiting for this kind of appalling apocalypse to hit them. Yeah. It's December 2019 and you're hearing the first reports from Wuhan. Yes. Of people with people with unusual colds.

And around the breakfast table, people are discussing their summer holidays. Exactly. And so in today's episode, we are going to be looking at what is going on in Rome as this migrationary apocalypse is hurtling towards them. And just to give people a sense of where we are in the history of Rome, we are a century before the age of Augustus. So before the establishment of the rule of the Caesars. And Rome at this point is still a republic.

It is not ruled by. an autocrat. And the star of this episode, the star of the show, is the dominant figure of this period in the kind of the 110s, the 100s BC. And he is a brilliant soldier. He is a superb political operator. And he has emerged seemingly from nowhere to become the city's great popular hero. And this is a man called Gaius Marius. And he is a man whose achievements, whose ambitions over the course of the 110s and the 100s have increasingly put the whole of Rome in his shadow and will continue to do so for several decades after he is a titanic figure in the history of the Roman Republic. Yeah, and we'll be tracing his story, won't we?

So he has this great confrontation, doesn't he, with the Teutons and the Kimbray? But that's merely the beginning of his extraordinary career. Spoiler, he is the guy who is going to see off this apocalyptic threat. He is the kind of the Bruce Willis seeing off the asteroid. Then in 91 BC, when he's considerably older, he plays an important role in one of the most desperate wars that the Romans ever fight. It's not very well known, but it brought Rome almost to the brink. And this was a war that was fought against the Socki, they called them, their comrades in arms. And these were the Italian allies who had been by the side of the Romans. for centuries by this point, and suddenly they erupt and there's this terrible war that rages across Italy. And then most fatefully of all, and escalating gradually throughout the series to an incredibly bloody climax, we have the bitter rivalry between Marius and a younger man who had once been Marius' deputy. And this is a man called Lucius Cornelius Sulla. So I've been looking forward to this since we started the rest of history, because when I was a teenager,

I read a series of books by Colleen McCulloch, I think, he wrote The Thorn Birds. And she wrote this Roman sequence in which the Marius Sulla rivalry played a huge part. It was a brilliant, if you're a teenage boy interested in Rome. You know, this is absolute catnip. And the great thing about them is they seem such archetypes. So Marius, the representation, this is how she portrayed it anyway. Marius was ordinary kind of rough hewn. He was sort of unpolished.

He's the representative of the ordinary, of the ordinary, people and Sulla is decadent and his golden-haired and he's cosmopolitan and sophisticated and he's the representative of the upper classes. And I'm looking forward to finding out if this is absolute Tosh or if this is actually true. And you can tell from their names. So Gaius Marius, he just has the two names. Lucius Cornelius Sulla. If you have three, that's a giveaway. You are from a kind of a higher class background. And Sulla is actually a patrician, which is the kind of the grandest of the grand in Rome. So there is definitely a class animus there. But the two of them, in lots of ways, are not entirely dissimilar. So both of them

are intensely ambitious and both of them are kind of dazzlingly ruthless opportunists. So they are completely worthy rivals. And Dominic, this rivalry, as you were implying, between the self-made man and the patrician, the one-time commander and the one-time subordinate, the guy with the two names and the guy with the three names, this is going to end up shaking the very foundations of Rome's Republic, because it's going to result for the first time ever in a Roman army marching on Rome itself. Then there will be a murderous civil war. Prescription lists will be posted in the heart of the city, and Rome will end up being ruled by a military dictatorship. And this is a crucial turning point in the history of Rome. And it is a crucial turning point in the history of Rome.

and it is a massive waystep on the road that will lead to the final collapse of the Republic and the establishment of the autocracy of the Caesars. So in some ways it anticipates, isn't it, the civil wars between, you know, I don't know, Brutus and Cassius in one hand and Anthony and Octavian on the other. And as you said, it's the first step in this process that leads to the empire. Well, I think more saliently between Pompey and Julius Caesar, and Pompey, we are going to see the young Pompey towards the end of the series. and Marius, as we see, is going to develop links with the family of Julius Caesar.

And so it's a kind of preface to that great Titanic struggle. But it's more than just a story about Rome, isn't it? About Rome as a city, because we're at a point in Rome's history where Rome is a real geopolitical player, and so what happens here matters across the Mediterranean. Yes, absolutely. And this has been signalled in incredibly brutal fashion. A few decades previously in 146 BC, when the Romans had wiped out two of the oldest and most celebrated cities in the whole of the Mediterranean.

And the first of these was a city called Carthage. We did three whole series on the terrible wars that Rome fought against the Carthaginians. It was their old enemy. It was the kind of the great rival superpower in the Western Mediterranean. And those three wars had culminated in the complete annihilation of Carthage. And then in the same year, the Romans wipe out the Greek city of Corinth, which again, I mean, it's one of the most famous cities in Greece. It's a place rich in mythology and culture and history, absolutely obliterated. And this obviously serves as a devastating warning to the Greeks that there's very much a new sheriff in town. You do not want to mess with the Romans. And to be honest, the destruction of these two cities is a shock that reverberates across the Mediterranean. But the there are plenty of people in Rome itself that feel a bit queasy about it, that there are Romans who start saying, well, you know, are we actually the baddies here? And this worries

them because the conceit of the Romans throughout their rise to superpower status has always been that they are the most moral of people and that everything they do is in self-defense. And if it's not in self-defense, then the gods won't back them. And so the fact that they have this great empire is proof that the gods have been backing them. So in a way they kind of conquer the world in self-defense. And so they don't want to think that they're bad people. They don't want to think that the gods are against them. You talk about them conquering the world.

But actually, have they conquered the world? I mean, their empire territorially, it's not enormous at this point, is it? So just give us a sense of the panorama of Roman power. They have a kind of informal hegemony, I guess, over much of the Mediterranean. But you're right that the formal empire, the sense in which they have provinces, It is at this point still relatively small. So if you think of Rome in the centre of Italy and you go clockwise around the Western Mediterranean. So Sicily, that was Rome's first province.

They had instituted as a province in 241 BC as the result of the first great war that they'd fought against Carthage. So Sicily had been the kind of the prize that they'd taken in that war. Then across the sea from Sicily, you have what's now Tunisia, what the Romans call Africa. this is where Carthage had stood and the Romans have annexed the hinterland of what had been the Carthage's territory in North Africa. Then southern and central Spain, again, the Romans had taken that from Carthage in the Second War, the war that featured Hannibal. And at this point, the Romans are advancing northwards into the kind of the northern reaches of Spain. And then you have the southern strip of Gaul, what the Romans called the Provincia, the province. and this is the Latin word that ultimately gives us the word Provence.

So it's what's now southern France. And so there's no question with Carthage gone, with all these former provinces of Carthage absorbed or new territories conquered, that Rome is undisputed as the great hegemon of the Western Mediterranean. But what is ominous, I think, for people in the Eastern Mediterranean, is that Rome by this point also has a couple of provinces in the eastern half of the of the Mediterranean Sea. And this, of course, is, these are lands that previously had been ruled by Macedonian kings, so the heirs of Alexander the Great. So one of these provinces had been

the former kingdom of Alexander the Great. It's become the Roman province of Macedon in that fateful year 146 that had seen Corinth and Carthage destroyed as well. And across the Aegean from Greece, So what is now the Eegean seaboard of Turkey? There is another province which the Romans call Asia. And this had been the kind of the Greek-ruled kingdom of Pergamum. Pergamum is a Greek city that controlled the kind of, you know, the western half of what's now Turkey. And in 133 BC, its last king, a man called Attalus, he didn't really have an obvious successor. He was nervous at the Romans of what the Romans might do.

And so basically he thought, well, maybe the obvious solution is just to give it to the Romans in my will. And so that's what he does. And it's one of the most spectacular bequests in the whole of history because Pergamum is fabulously rich, quite apart from giving the Romans a tollhold in Asia. And it is, it offers the Romans all kinds of decadent pleasures that they had barely even realized existed until that moment. So everything from celebrity chefs to sex manuals, they're all brought back to Rome, where the elites, of course, think secretly they're brilliant, but lots of them pretend to be very disapproving. And lots of Roman moralists are genuinely disapproving. And I think it's, I guess the closest parallel in modern history would be Puritan American tourists in the Gilded Age going to Paris. Right.

Yeah. The flesh pots of Europe. The flesh pots of Europe. of course bringing them back to the East Coast. Going to the Folly Berger with Toulouseau, or something. Yes, exactly. And so Pliny the Elder, very much friend of the show, when he's writing about this, he sees this whole period from the conquest of Macedon to the granting biatulus of his kingdom

of Pergamum to the Romans as a period that is disastrous for Rome's moral character. So Pliny wrote that the Romans were becoming a people who didn't just admire foreign opulence but had learnt to covet it. And Pliny identifies the appropriation of Asia as a province as having been a particularly disastrous blow to Roman morals. And it is a feature of the way the Romans think about geopolitics and the functioning of their own state. That morals are incredibly important.

Because as we've said, if they're not a moral people, then the gods won't favour them and their empire will collapse. That's a tiny bit like the British, with Indian people. India in the 18th century and the sort of anxiety that great wealth and expansion would bring corruption, you know, which kind of wrapped up with people like Warren Hastings and all these people who came back and built great palaces. And I think it's there with Jefferson and that kind of tradition in America as well, isn't it?

The anxiety about wealth and power about empire. So yes, absolutely. This sense that the very greatness that Rome is winning threatens the moral foundations on which that greatness has been raised. And also, of course, the influx of enormous wealth into Rome contributes to a kind of a growing sense of resentment in the slums of the city, that the rich are getting richer and the poor is getting poorer. And again, this is something with which subsequent periods of history, I mean, people will be completely familiar with it, that influxes of wealth tends to heighten class divisions, divisions in living standards. And the poor in Rome, you know,

are all citizens of a republic. They're meant to be part of a kind of, you know, a common project, raise publica means, kind of things that are shared in common, things that are public. The poor in Rome are increasingly suspicious that the aristocratic class, the nobilase, as they're called in Matin, that they no longer care anything for the mass of their poorer fellow citizens. Metropolitan elites are out of touch. Exactly. And so this is generating a febrile mood in Rome and it's the kind of mood again perhaps not entirely dissimilar to the present day in which an outsider if he has luck if he has talent if he has boldness on his side you know he might be able to prosper he might you know people from from not the obvious backgrounds might be able

to get to the top of the tree might be able to make themselves the masters of the republic And this brings us very neatly, doesn't it, to our protagonist, to Gaius Marius. So Marius is born in 157 BC in Arpenum, which is about 80 miles outside Rome. And is there a British town that would be a nice equivalent for Arpenum, Tom? I guess it's kind of Swindon, basically. Wow, roundabouts. Roundabouts and warehouses. I mean, having said that, Arpenham is actually a kind of very old city,

so perhaps the parallel doesn't exist. exactly hold. But I guess that the people in Rome would view Arpinum as, I don't know, people in W1 might view Swindon. Right. Yeah. As being not exactly the obvious breeding ground of great dominant figures in the state. And actually, Arpenum is a classic example of how the kind of the immediate hinterland around Rome, so Lashem, as it's called, has come to be knitted into the fabric of the Republic and basically kind of turned into the people of Lashem have been turned into Romans. So Arpinum had been conquered back in 305 BC and its people initially had been given a slightly inferior form of Roman citizenship. So the Romans called it Kivitas Senei suffraggio citizenship without, well, without suffrage, without the vote.

They have lots of rights, but they don't have the right to vote for magistrates. But then in 188 BC, Arpinum finally gets the full deal. So citizenship with the right to vote. and that means that the parents of Marius, who belong to the local aristocracy in Arpena, they basically belong to the first generation in the town who can take this for granted, who can feel that they are part of not just the local politics of their own small town, but of the great city 80 miles to the west. This, of course, means that the young Marius growing up in Arpenum,

he's aware of himself as a Roman. but he is also still very much aware of himself as a provincial, that he's in a city where people have not been able to vote for magistrates in Rome, let alone run as magistrates in Rome for very long, only a few decades. And so probably as a boy, he doesn't hold out much prospect for himself, you know, as a future political star, because there is a very deep vein of snobbery in the Roman people, and they may resent the nobilase, the aristocracy,

for their wealth and their sense of superiority. But they do simultaneously love families with strong brand recognition. And I guess, again, if you want an American parallel, it would be like the way people keep voting for Clintons or bushes or whatever. Yeah. But unlike, let's say Bill Clinton, or indeed, I think any of the bushes, Marius is the recipient of an extraordinary omen. Well, he's the subject of an extraordinary omen when he's a little boy.

And Plutarch recorded this, didn't he? Something to do with an eagle. Plutarch has to be said, will always prioritize a fun story over a likely story. He'd be a very good history podcaster. Yeah, he absolutely would. So this is Plutarch. When Marius was still a boy and living out in the country, he caught an eagle's nest in his cloak as it fell from a tree. This nest contained seven baby eagles.

His parents were so surprised by this freak occurrence that they asked a local soothsayer what it portended. And the soothsayer replied that Marius would become the greatest man in. in the world and was destined to hold the consulship no less than seven times. Wow. And of course, Plutarch is writing this sometime after the events after he knew what happened to Maris. A skeptic might say that Plutarch was making this up. But I choose to believe it.

I choose to believe that this happened. Well, just to say that there is, as we will see in due course, evidence that Maris did believe something like this. He did believe that he was destined to have seven consulships. But seven consulships. I know that that is an absolutely extraordinary prediction. And maybe you should explain to the listeners precisely why it's such a mad prediction. It's completely implausible because of the significance that the consulship plays in Rome's Republic.

So every year, two consuls are elected and they wield the powers of the monarchy that had been expelled from Rome back in 509 BC. So the consuls are the magistrates who lead Rome's armies into war, who preside over the Senate and over the elections that are held in the city, and who crucially mediate between the Roman people and the gods. And these powers, of course, are potentially very, very intoxicating. And this is why there are two consuls so that each one can keep a watch on the other. And it's why their term of office is limited to a single year so that they won't have time to. entrenched their power. And for a century now, so as Maris is growing up, it's been a no-no for someone to have more than one consulship. That hadn't always been the case, but it's become kind of institutionalised. And whether this is an official law or whether it's just the pressure of

custom is, I think, unknowable. But it's clearly the case that you're not supposed to have more than one consulship as Marius is growing up. And what makes it even more of a challenge for Marius, you know, any prospect of seven consulships, just having one consulship seems an almost impossible dream, because he is what the Romans called a novice homo, a new man, someone who has no tradition of holding magistrates in his family and particularly consulships. And it's obvious why this would be the case, because Marius is from Arpanum and Arpanum has only just been given the vote. So of course, you know, his family haven't had time to get loads of consulships. And just to emphasize how how mad it is even to dream of having seven consulships. No Roman in history has held seven consulships.

The record is six, seven just seems impossible. All right. Well, we'll see whether he gets there. But let's kick off with Maris's first steps on the ladder. And I guess if you're an ambitious and talented young man from nowhere, from a provincial town, the obvious way to get ahead is through proving yourself in the one thing that the Romans prize more than any other, which is the kind of, you know, the military arena. Because, you know, this is the bedrock of Roman power, isn't it? The army. And this is where Marius is really intending to make his name. Yeah. So if you want to make a name for yourself, what you ideally want is some desperate and hard fought war in which you can go off and be a hero. And fortunately for Marius, in 134 BC, exactly such a war is being fought

in the northeast reaches of Spain. So remember we said that the Romans are pushing northwards into the Iberian peninsula and they have come up against the people of a city called Numantia. And this war has been grinding on for two decades. And the Senate have got absolutely fed up with it. So the Senate is the assembly of the nobles, the kind of the movers and shakers in Rome. And so accordingly they say we need our top man to go and sort this out. And there's no question who the top man in Rome at this point is. It's a guy called Scipio Emilianus, and people who listen to our episode on the destruction of Carthage may remember that he is the general who brings that final war against Carthage to a close and wipes the city out. And it's a measure of how desperate the Senate is to have

Scipio take over this command, that they allow him to have a second consulship. So we said, this is very, very irregular. They really, really need Scipio at the front, though. So they say they kind of turn a blind eye to the irregularity of it. And so, Scipio travels to Spain in command of a vast army. He has 20,000 men, which is roughly four legions, so a very sizable fighting force of Roman citizens. He also has lots of Socki, these Italian allies, who fight alongside the Romans, and also he has auxiliaries. And the Sochi and these auxiliaries come to 40,000 in all. And among the auxiliaries, there are some particularly glamorous and celebrated fighters. And these are horsemen from a region in North Africa, basically it's

Algeria now called Numidia. And the Numidians have been allies of the Romans for almost a century. The alliance had been forged in the war against Hannibal. Originally, the Numidians had been on the side of Hannibal and then they had switched sides. And when Carthage falls, the Neumis Midians have been given a lot of Carthaginian territory as a kind of reward and to cement their status as allies of the Roman people. And the particular contingent of horsemen at Neumantia is led by a very charismatic young Numidian prince called Jugurtha. And he has brought not only cavalry, but also 12 war elephants.

And there is a kind of ancestral relationship between the Numidian royal family and the families of the Scipio's, because Scipio, Afrikanus, the guy who had defeated Hannibal, he'd been great mates with this Numidian king. So there's a kind of sense that, you know, this is a family business. Now, when Scipio travels to Numantia, he takes with him as a junior officer, the young Marius. And Marius does really, really well there. Just a quick question about Marius. So do we have any sense of his appearance, personality, sort of, I don't know, his bearing, his

vibe at this point? I think he's like, if you imagine, Channing Tatum. Wow. He's big. Okay. He's brave. He's physically tough. He loves fighting. He's, in other words, he's a natural soldier. And he's a soldier in the kind of traditional old school way that the Romans love. So he, he despises fancy cooking. He's not interested in celebrity chefs. Okay. He despises snooty manners. He doesn't have a, you know, a kind of expensive education. He loves sleeping on hard ground with his men with only his cloak to cover him. You know, it's all that kind of thing. Right.

So he's very Roman. A Roman in the way that the Romans like to imagine themselves. Yeah. You know, he hasn't been spoiled by all these snooty manners and things and by Greek learning and stuff. He's not a man for a sex manual. Well, we'll maybe come to that in due course. I think at this point he's not a man for a sex manual. He is rough and tough.

and Hardy, and he loves fighting barbarians. And this is, this is everything the Romans want in a kind of a young, upwardly mobile officer. He's also a very strict disciplinarian. And to be honest, the Romans love a strict disciplinarian. They love being whipped into shape. And this is what Maris is very good at. And he fights and kills one of the, the commanders of the Neumantians in hand-to-hand combat. And Scipio, Emilianus is watching this and thinks it's absolutely brilliant. And later that evening, Scipio is with all his officers. And one of them asks him, you know, who do you see as being the coming man? Who among the younger generation is someone to watch?

And Scipio turns to Marius and he touches him on the shoulder very fondly. And he says, perhaps this is the man. And this is a massive thing for Marius. you know, a commendation from the great war hero, Skippio Emilianus, and it marks him out as a man who, you know, deserves well of the Roman people. It's something that can launch a political career. He's a future England captain. That's exactly what he is, isn't he?

He's the batsman who has been anointed by the team captain as the man who's going to carry the fortunes of the nation in the next 10 years. I think that's a very fair comparison. And so in 133 BC, Neumanti Falls, it's all great. Skipio goes back and Marius goes back as well. There is one problem, which is that Skipio dies very shortly afterwards. Had Skipio stuck around, then he would have been the perfect patron. So it is a bit of a blow. But Marius doesn't give up because he's got his battle scars.

He does have this commendation from Skipio, which is a big deal. Because all of these really matter when it comes to elections, particularly if you're an unknown. You know, you need a story to tell. and Marius has a story to tell. And fortunately he does also have an alternative source of patronage to Scipio. And this is one of the very grandest of the noble families, a family that has been serving as the patrons of Marius' family in Arpinum for several generations. And these are the Kikili Matteli.

And they are at this period probably the top aristocratic dynasty in Rome. They are madly efficient as a dynasty in hoovering up consulships, for instance. So between 123 and 98 BC, no less than seven of them will hold the consulship. I mean, that's an unprecedented success rate for a single family. And they have been the great rivals of the Scipio family. But when Scipio Emilianus dies, the great patriarch of the Mattelli behaves very, very well in exactly the kind of way. Again, that the Romans like to think that their great men should.

So he runs out into the streets, sobbing, tearing his clothes, crying out, the great buttress of the city has fallen, the man who was our bulwark. And he orders his sons to help carry the funeral buyer of Scipio. So in death, there is reconciliation between these two great families. And how is it that Marius can ride both horses? How can he have the patronage of both, if they're rivals? Or is that not a problem? Because the Mattelli are his political patrons and Scipio had been his military patron.

And basically, you know, if you're not a threat to either of them, you can have both of them, I think. So Maris is a, I mean, although we've portrayed him as Channing Tatum as kind of roughhune, he's a smart political operator to line up both of these. Yeah. And the fact that you play the simple rough hume soldier doesn't mean you're stupid. I mean, you may well be playing that part because you know that it appeals. I mean, there's obviously you can't do it unless as a strong element of truth to it, but it doesn't imply that there's not an element of calculation in projecting that image. And again, you know, people will be able to think of people in their own politics, perhaps,

who you know, you can draw comparisons with. Yeah. So in Britain, we would talk about the greasy bowl, wouldn't we, about climbing the greasy pole, which Maris clearly is now hoping with their backing, with his war record that he can do. They don't have the same expression, do they? Obviously, what's the expression the Romans have? So they call it the cursus honor, so it's literally the kind of the race track of honors of magistracies. And the racetrack is obviously derived from the Circus Maximus,

which is this great public space where all the people of Rome gather. And this racetrack leads from magistracy to magistracy, and the finishing line, of course, is the consulship, which is the top magistracy. But as we've said, this for a novice homo, like Marius, a new man, I mean, it's a big ask. That finishing tape of the consulship is a very long way. So in the immediate present, he has to focus on kind of more junior magistracies. Unfortunately, there is one magistracy in particular which really seems to suit his skill set, because this is a magistracy which requires the man who holds it to defend the interests of the people

against the senatorial elites. And this is perfectly suited to Marius. The problem is that in 119 BC, when Marius decides to run for it, even though that this office is a very potent one, it is also quite a dangerous one to hold. And this office is the Tribune of the PLEBs, of the plebeians, of the people. And it comes with incredible powers. So the Tribune has the veto, very famous. A Tribune can veto any bill that he thinks threatens the interests of the plebs, of the people. He has a right to convene public assemblies, so not the Senate, but gatherings of the general citizenship,

and get them to pass bills of his own, say plebiscites. His own person is absolutely inviolate. It is completely forbidden to lay hands on him. And the reason why that's important is obviously is that if the Tribune is passing measures or blocking legislation that is supported by the mass of the aristocracy, he has to be respected. But is he respected. This is the question. So this is the question. So Marius decides that he's going to run for the tribunate in 1119.

And we've said it's a very potent magistracy. But at this time, it is also a very dangerous one for anyone. to have. Maris has been elected Tribune just two years after one of his predecessors had been murdered. And this, of course, had been a terrible sacrilege. We've said that the person of a Tribune is inviolid. And the death squad that killed this Tribune had been led by a consul. And the corpse of the Tribune had been systematically insulted. The body had been decapitated and the head the skull had been filled with lead to serve as a trophy. So in other words, class war, as Marius is looking to make his way, you know, the first kind of lengths of the cursus andorum, has come to

Rome. And for someone like Marius, who is a man of the people, no real pedigreel background, but very ambitious, this means that the tight rape he's going to have to tread is incredibly treacherous and potentially fatal. So Maris is setting out on this potentially fatal tightrope and the stakes are very high and we'll find out what happens after the break. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Tom throughout history,

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cancerresearchukuk.org slash rest is science. Hola, Camaradas. It's Dominic here. Sorry to interrupt the episode, but I just thought you'd like to know that we've been thinking about something that you've been writing to us a lot. one of the most requested subjects ever since we started the rest of its history, which is the Spanish Civil War. Now, I can tell you exclusively that plans are afoot for us to do the Spanish Civil War at some point, hopefully next year in 2027. But as a little taster or teaser, on our sister show, The Book Club, my co-presenter Tabby and I have just released an episode on perhaps the emblematic novel of the Spanish Civil War, which is Ernest Hemingway's book for whom the bell tolls.

So in this episode, we do dig into the history. We talk about the clash between fascism and idealism. We talk about the roots of the conflict. And of course, the way in which it drew in so many foreign intellectuals and artists and writers, Hemingway, of course, among them. And many of you will know that Hemingway was in Spain during the war. He was a correspondent in Madrid, which was under siege by Franco's forces. And he draws on that experience.

in for whom the bell tolls, to tell the story of an American volunteer who's part of a guerrilla unit who are fighting Franco's troops. So if you keep listening at the end of this episode, we will have an exclusive short clip which discusses the history of the Spanish Civil War. Welcome back, everybody, to the rest is history of the year is 119 BC. And the ambitious provincial self-made man Gaius Marius, who is now already in his late 30s. who's only two years short of his 40th birthday. He has won his first major political office, his first major magistracy. He has become, as he intended, a tribune of the plebs.

And as we were saying before the break, Tom, although it's meant supposedly inviolate, this is an increasingly dangerous role in the febriarch politics of Rome at this point for a man like Marius to hold. Now, why specifically at this point is this so politically feebrile? What makes this so contentious? Because the previous decade and a half, the tribunate had been used to foster what, in the opinion of conservatives in the Senate, are very radical, very dangerous and in the opinion of conservatives, very un-Roman reforms and policies.

And these have been pushed by two brothers. The eldest of these is Tiberius Crackers. he had become tribune in 133 BC. His younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, he had become tribune 10 years later. And both these brothers had used their tribunates to push for reforms that were very overtly in favour of the poor. So the measures that they pushed for included having publicly held land, state held land, being divided up and given as allotments to those who had no land in the city. so the bottom of the bottom, the most impoverished layers of Roman society. They had pressed for corn to be sold below the market rate, so subsidised food, and they pushed for the poorest citizens when they got levied into the army to be given

their own clothes, their own kind of kit and equipment. And this was seen by the Senate as monstrously left wing, to be anachronistic about it. Militant class war politics. Yeah, and particularly, Gaius Gracchus, the younger, the Tony Ben of Republican Rome, because he had far more than his elder brother, a very self-consciously revolutionary vision. So he, basically, he wanted to turn the republic into a kind of version of the democracy that the Athenians had. He wanted very deliberately to alter the balance of power between the nobleses, between the, the senatorial elite,

and the mass of the people. And I suppose ultimately, he wanted to enshrine the populace, the people as the arbiters of Rome, rather than the sonatus, the Senate. So it would be, I guess, the people in the Senate of Rome rather than the other way around. That's his kind of ambition. And to conservatives in the Senate, I mean, this is beyond the pale. This is monstrous. And they see Tiberius Gracus and particularly Gaius gracus as potential tyrants. Why else would they be pushing these reforms? It could only be because they want absolute power. And something that confirms the senatorial conservatives in this opinion is a very sinister trend. So Tiberius Grakus, when he'd finished his one year as Tribune, he'd immediately sought re-election. And Gaius

in 122 BC, he'd finished his term, stood again, and actually been elected. And this is really sinister because it is pretty fundamental to the way that the Romans understand politics, that you shouldn't hold a magistracy for more than one year. Because if you do, then you have the chance to entrench your own powers, your own support. And so the enemy of the Gracki in the Senate feel themselves entirely justified in imagining that it is an ambition for tyranny that is motivating the Gracky. And that the office of the tribunate may be inviolate, but it's not as inviolate as maintaining the integrity of the Republic.

And so twice this great cry had gone up that the Republic needs defending, the Constitution is in peril, and twice this cry had been answered. So in 133, Tiberius Gracchus had been clubbed to death with the leg of a stool. He'd been cornered and had his head smashed to pieces. And then in one, two, one, Gaius, as we heard before the break, he'd been murdered, his corpse decapitated, the skull filled with lead, and 3,000 of his followers had been rounded up and executed without trial by the consuls. And these executions had been justified in terms of a national emergency. To stress, if people think, well, this is probably part of the run in the mill, Roman politics is very violent.

That's not right at all right. This is a massive rupture with the previous traditions of Roman politics. Completely. These are the first eruptions of civil violence. on the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the monarchy back in 509 BC. It's that big a deal.

Wow. So for 400 years or so? For 400 years. And it is experiencing something completely shocking. So what's the significance of these atrocities? I think both more and less than they seem. So more because it's a fatal precedent.

I guess if you're being florid, you would say that a fatal toxin. has been injected into the body politic. And we're never floored. If a consul can justify putting an elected tribune to death and completely ignoring his inviolability simply by referencing a national emergency, then what's the stop magistrates in the future doing exactly the same?

I mean, it's a kind of FIMA process, isn't it? It leads to bad places. If you can kill a tribune, then why can't you, you can kill anybody. I mean, one consul could kill another consul and say there are a threat to the survival of the Republic. Because when you break a taboo, the taboo is never as strong as it had been before it was broken.

Exactly say. So it's very pregnant with menace for the future. At the same time, I think it's kind of less than it seems because the instincts of the Romans remain across the board, incredibly conservative. There isn't actually a threat of, open class warfare, of the kind that was always tearing Greek cities apart. And this is because, as we've said, the Romans, the mass of the Romans, are just inherently very, very conservative.

They may feel resentful of the elites, but they simultaneously feel very respectful of them. Again, I think there's something of the way that maybe, I mean, American listeners may disagree with this, but from this side of the Atlantic, people seem to really hate billionaires in America, but also simultaneously respect them. Yeah. And I think there's something of that in the kind of the Roman attitude to the senatorial elite.

It's part of the tradition that the Senate and the people should work together and the people feel that tradition to be as precious as the Senate do. So it's not like actually Rome is going to collapse into, as I say, into class conflict. And so this, for someone like Marius, you know, here is an opportunity

because he is perfectly suited to play the part of the people's friend. a popularis in Latin. You could translate that perhaps as a populist. People are very nervous, you know, among the tribunes, they're very nervous of pushing legislation that might offend the elites because they've seen what's happened. But Marius is bold enough to do this.

So he passes a bill that restricts the ability of the Nobel-Aze to influence voters in the voting pens. It's kind of like it's not exactly introducing a secret ban it, but it's kind of something along those lines. And this is the first overtly populist gesture since the death of Gaius Gracchus. And to quote Plutarch, this won him a reputation as a person of great courage, a formidable opponent of the Conservatives in the Senate, and someone who could be relied upon to stick up for the common man.

And Plutarch isn't exaggerating there. Marius was, I think, being brave because it is a period of massive reaction. So the historian Salas, writing a few decades later, he described it as a kind of a faction of the of the few, rule by the few. Just as, and these few consist of just the, you know, the top, the grandest, the snootiest noblets. And among these noblets are the Mattelli. So obviously, for you were asking previously, you know, is there a risk for Marius of running against the interests of the Metali?

There absolutely is because the Mattelli are furious with him for, you know, this law that he's introduced and they withdraw their patronage. And this has a knock-on effect for Marius' prospects, because for several years after his tribunate, he struggles to get another magistracy. And in fact, in 116, massive embarrassment, he manages to lose two elections on the same day. Oh, my God. You know, he's clearly not doing well. But, you know, to pursue the sports analogy, he backs himself.

Right. He's not going to be cast down by a few disappointments. Form is temporary, class is permanent. and he's got class. He's got class, and the evidence of that class is that he's able to keep the backing of the people, but in due course he's able to win back the support of the Mattelli, because the Mattelli can see he is actually someone it's worth having on side. And so relations between them are patched up.

And so a decade on from his tribunate, Maris is back in the race. You know, the cursus sonorum is going well for him. He's secured admittedly by the skin of his life. teeth, but, you know, he's got it, a governorship in Spain. And this enables him to do what he does best, which is to demonstrate his talents as a commander. And he promotes himself as a kind of no-nonsense enthusiast for law and order. Common-sense governorship. So again, to quote Plutarch, the province back then that Spain was still very savage and uncivilised since the Spaniards thought banditory an honourable profession. And Marius is having none of that. Lots of crucifixions and scuris.

and enslavements. As I say, common sense. So he's robust. He's robust in Spain. But also he, now we haven't mentioned his personal life at all, but actually his personal life has taken a very exciting term because he is married into, well, the most single, most well-known family in all Roman history, hasn't he? He has. Yes. Although at the time, it's very ancient, it's very patrician, but it's slightly down on its luck. It hasn't had a great success in elections for centuries and more. And this, of course, is the family of the Caesars. So Marius marries Julia, who is the sister of the father of Julius Caesar.

So Marius is going to be the young Julius Caesar's marital uncle. And so big part in Colley McCulloch's books, all of this. Yeah. So Maris is being knitted into the, you know, a key aristocratic family. And he's got the Mattelli back on side by this point. Yeah. So brilliant. And this is crucial because he's got the backing of one Mattelis in particular.

And this is a guy called Quintus Caichelius Mattelis, who is he is an absolutely instinctive oligarch. I mean, he's very much politically not Maris's cup of tea. He's a person of great personal integrity, but in that kind of flinty, slightly off. putting manner that is characteristic of very moral upstanding Romans. But crucially for Marius, this reputation as someone who is both very upstanding and a very effective soldier has won Mattelis election ship to the consulship for the year 109. And this is great for Marius because Mattelis as consul has been appointed to the command of an exceedingly challenging war in Africa, and this in turn means that Mattelis is going to need

a trusted and competent Legatus, a number two, a deputy. And Marius is the obvious candidate. He's a man of proven courage, of proven ability, and he is also a long-term client of the Mattelie. And so Marius says yes, isn't he? And he says yes, both because he's obviously, he's obviously very good at fighting wars, so be mad for him to say no. But also, you know, the military sphere and the political sphere are, you know, they're interconnected, aren't they in Rome in this period? And Marius is thinking that, you know, proving himself on the battlefield is the perfect way to reboot his stalled political career. Well, I think more specifically, it might give him a chance to have a crack at the ultimate and go for the consulship. And Marius hasn't told Mattelus this.

It's like a kind of dream that he's hugging. to himself. But his plan, I think, is to go to Africa, to win a few dashing victories, to make a name for himself in Rome, to have his backers in Rome, of which he has quite a lot by this point, to kind of really hype him up.

And then to go back, run for election, and, you know, he might be in with a chance. But obviously, this does require him to make a good fist of things in Africa. And things there have not been going well for the Romans at all. So it's not going to be easy. So reason for this is because they are up against an enemy who knows them very, very well. And this is none other than an old

comrade of arms of Marius. They'd served together at Numantia. And this is the Numidian prince, Jugurtha, the guy who had brought the cavalry and the 12 elephants to Neumantia. And I say prince, but in fact by this point, he's killed his two cousins who are the legitimate heirs to the Numidian throne, the legitimate princes, and made himself the king of Numidia. So he's a usurper sitting on the throne. And to oil the wheels of his rise to power to get the approval of the powers that be in Rome, he has lavished massive bribes. He's just been spraying them around.

And even Jigurtha had been surprised by the level of corruption that this had revealed in a city supposedly made up of stern, flinty, unyielding moralists. Right. And he made a very famous. comment on Rome, which Salas recorded, he described it as a city for sale and bound for imminent destruction, should a buyer be found. And on top of this, the other reason that Jagurtha has really been pushing things too far is that he hasn't been behaving as the Romans think a kind of tame client king should. So in 112, in direct contravention of Roman instructions, he had attacked and

killed the second of his two cousins who'd kind of retreated and he's holed up in a town called Kirta. And in the course of this attack, which the Romans had told Jagurtha anyway not to do, Jagurtha's men had killed a number of Romans. And this is too much, really, for the Senate back in Rome, no matter how many bribes Jagertha is shoveling their way. And so they think, okay, this has gone too far. We need to topple him. This, however, proves easier said than done. reasons for this are numerous. Firstly, Numidia is kind of flat and open, so it's perfect cavalry country. And the strength of the Romans, of course, is their legions, their heavy infantry. Also, the Roman forces in Africa are very flabby and out of shape. So they need a strict

disciplinarian to turn up and whip them into shape. And a consul who had been sent out to fight Jagertha had shown himself to be absolutely useless. And, you know, it resulted in a series of embarrassing defeats. So again, to pursue the sporting analogy. You know, The England manager has lost to Andorra. Yeah, to Iceland. Or Iceland, yes. And Mattelis is the guy who's been appointed to go and whip them into shape. Yeah, basically, they've been messing around with wags.

Yeah, exactly. They're barely training. And you've got a new manager who's a discipline there. And he's bringing in Marius, who is the number two. Yeah, who's the set piece coach or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Grim-faced set-piece coach who will make them, like, train. six times a day. Yes. So Salas describes Mattelis as a formidable and unrelenting man,

and so he is. He goes in, gets them onto the training crowd, you know, practicing their corners, whatever, and whips them into shape. And then he gets them ready. They go on the offensive. They defeat Jagertha in a pitched battle. All Jagurtha's war elephants are wiped out, and Mattelis very cleverly then starts suborning Jagirtha's inner circle so that Jagirtha doesn't know who he can, who he can trust. Djirthirthorfer inevitably opts for a guerrilla war. this is the classic thing. I mean, you know, this is with Numidia is the place where the French will end up fighting their war in Algeria, centuries and centuries later.

And Mattelis, rather like the French do, he responds by ravaging the countryside, taking vast numbers of prisoners, capturing settlements one by one, burning them if they resist, kind of calculated series of atrocities. And the Senate think this is brilliant, to quote Salas. They decreed supplications to the immortal gods in return for the successful deeds of Mattelis. And really the only fly in the ointment, as Mattelis is year, as consul draws to a close, is the fact that Jagertha is still on the loose. But Mattelis is assuming that that's not really an issue, he's done so well that even though he's no longer consul,

he's presuming that he will continue to be in charge of this war. And it is at this point that Marius makes his move. So in the summer of 108, he goes to Metellus. And he says that he wants to head back to Rome and he wants to run for the consulship. And Mattelis is stunned by this. You know, he responds with complete astonishment, then with contempt, and then he makes a joke of it. But Marius is absolutely obdurate. And Mattelis, who thinks he hasn't got a hope.

I mean, he's just a novice homo. What hope does he possibly have? He says, fine, okay, you can go back. But very pointedly, he keeps Marius with him in the field until the very last moment, so that Marius only gets back to Rome in the very nick of time to register himself for the consular election. And I think that Mattelis is doing this to ensure that Marius won't have time to do any of the campaigning that is essentially if you're going to be consul. But Mattelis has badly underestimated Marius because we said that Marius has lots of agents back in Rome.

And unknown to Mattelis, these have been doing a lot of campaigning while Maris has been away in Africa. And they have been playing the popularis card. They've been saying, look, Mattelis is stiff, arrogant, chilly, haughty. This isn't the kind of person that we want. What we want is a man of the people, a man like you. That's pretty sneaky of Matt. Marius is turning on his own patron. He completely is.

That's poor. That has slightly messed with my sense of Gaius Maris, who I always thought was... It's like Rupert Lowe turning on Nigel Farage. That is absolutely not the analogy that I would have picked. So I always thought that Marius would never have stooped to that, but I was wrong. Well, we said he gives the impression of being, I think, a bit of a meathead. Yeah. But that's the show.

Marius is a very shrewd calculating commander, but also a politician. He's very, very effective. And he knows that, you know, in politics as in war, you have to prepare for success. And that's what he's been doing. And he knows that there is a huge constituency, and not just among the mass of the people in the Senate as well, who are fed up with this kind of faction of the few, these guys who've been in control and hogging the consulship for year after year after year and want them out of the way. And so he is the guy who dares to put his head above the parapet, and he duly reaps the reward. So not only is he elected consul for 107 BC, he gets Mattelis's African command. My God, if you're Metellus, you are absolutely raging at this point.

Oh, he's furious. He's absolutely livid. He's the guy who's basically defeated Gertha, and he's closing in on the kill. And just as he's doing that, suddenly he gets a message saying you've got to hand over your command to your former deputy. But it is what it is. You know, Mattelis has got to do what the Senate tells him. And so he goes back to Rome in a massive strok. And his mates in the Senate there try to make things up for him by voting him a splendid title, Numidicus.

you know, the guy who's defeated the Numidians. And we've said how the number of names that you have in Rome is a marker of your status. He now has a fourth name. So that's some consolation, I guess. Meanwhile, Marius is in Africa. He takes control of the war against Jagertha. And within a year, he has brought it to a successful conclusion. Jagirtha himself is driven out of Numidia and goes to Mauritania, the neighboring kingdom, what's now Morocco.

but Marius is not going to leave him there to continue to stare up trouble. He wants a line drawn under the whole war with Jagertha. And so accordingly, he has an eye for talent. He's got this general staff and he picks out the shrewdest, the cleverest, the most diplomatically able, the bravest of all his lieutenants, sends this officer to the king of Mauritania to negotiate the surrender of Jagertha. and this officer, you know, proves himself to be everything that Marius had hoped, incredibly subtle, incredibly fearless. He pulls the diplomatic mission off. Jigurtha falls into Roman hands.

This lieutenant takes Jigurtha back to Marius, and Marius then heads back to Rome with Jigurtha in chains. Do you know, I've been massively looking forward to this. Well, actually, dreading it, because I remember having to translate this, like some passage about Jigurtha's in chains. Yeah, in Salist. As it was Salas, yeah, we had to do this at school. I mean, I don't want to make this switch off, but the act of translating this was soul destroying. It was so dull.

But you're going to make it exciting, aren't you? I thought from your enthusiasm for Colin McCulloch that you were going to say that you remember this moment as a particularly grim and terrifying moment. So Maris has gone back, and it's the 1st of January 104. So it's the New Year, the Roman New Year. And he's been given a triumph. It's a great kind of celebrated procession through the streets of Rome that gets. it's given to victorious generals, and he's celebrating it on Newer's Day.

His triumph involves him riding in a chariot, dressed in the robes of a triumphful general through Rome, with his legions, all the loot that he's taken in Numidia, and his legions following him. And Jagirtha is led in chains before the cheering mass of the Roman people, being booed and spat at, and people are throwing eggs and whatever at him. I mean, kind of moderately interesting and fun, I think. No, it's a genuinely interesting.

I think the key thing looking at your notes is that they probably didn't know the word for earlobes and that that was what threw me. Because at the end of the triumph, Gigertha is taken to one side and taken to this hideous prison. And there his earrings are pulled off and they yanked off so brutally that his entire earlobe comes away with the earrings. And surely any young Sambrook would have enjoyed that if he'd got to translate it. And then he's thrown into this freezing cold dungeon. And I'll quote Plutarch.

Degyartha's wits unsettled by this and grinning horribly. He cried out by Hercules, what cold baths you have here in Rome. Great banter. I don't think it's banter. I think he's gone mad by this point already. Really? And so he's chained up down in the bottom of this hideous cell. And six days later, he dies of.

the cold and malnutrition and that's the end of chigurtha and so for marius everything's turned out brilliantly so he's got his consulship he's gone to africa he's won his war he's got a brilliant name for himself as rome's greatest general there are just two slight clouds on the horizon and the first of these is that beyond the alps the teutons and the kimbri are reported to be moving on Italy. The asteroid is heading towards Earth. The zombie apocalypse is breaking out. Do you know what they are? They're the white walkers. They're the white walkers from West Ross. Yeah. And so in Rome, all eyes are fixed on Marius. He is the hero of the hour. He is Rome's greatest soldier. And so it's not surprising that it's on his shoulders that responsibility for saving the city is laid by

a desperate and terrified people. Then there is a second cloud. And this is less obvious. It's more private. I'd say that at this stage, it's just a kind of a little niggle. But it is one that threatens a good deal of trouble in the future, to put it mildly. So just as Mattelus had been upstaged by Marius, so does Marius feel just a little bit upstaged by his own lieutenant. And this is, of course, the guy who had successfully negotiated the surrogated. render of Jagirtha. And this lieutenant like Marius himself is a naturally ambitious man, a man with a hyper keen sense of his own worth, and a man with all kinds of military and political talents. And there are a sum in Rome, Marius's enemies in the Senate, prominent among them, who have begun to attribute the defeat of Jagertha, not to Marius but to this lieutenant. They're saying, Marius is just showboating, the guy who really ended the war, is this person. And this person, this lieutenant, you know, he doesn't disavow this perspective.

And in fact, he's had a signet ring made for himself, which shows him negotiating the surrender of Jagertha. And so he kind of flashes it around. And to quote Plutarch, by insisting on wearing this ring all the time, he greatly irritated Marius, who was incredibly sensitive when it came to his own honor, scorn to share his glory with. anyone else and was always ready to take a fence and Dominic the name of this lieutenant we are going to be hearing a lot about him in the episodes to come it is Lucius Cornelius soler in our next episode we are going to be finding out who he is what's his background his upbringing all of that and we will also of course be following Marius to war with the

teutons and the Kimbray Grigy, so exciting. So if you'd like to hear that episode right now, and if you'd like to hear the final two episodes of this absolutely thrilling swashbuckling Roman series. And if you're not already a member of the Restis History Club, because of course if you're in the club, you can listen to the next episode. Well, if you want to hear it, join our own band of Marauding Barbarian Cannibals, the Restis History Club, at the Restis History.com. And you can, of course, always find out more about this series and about this series

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Goodbye, everybody. Enjoy them. Are they? Aquevali. Even as Marius is riding through the streets of Rome and being cheered by the watching crowds, there is a mood of panic, maybe even desperation in the city,

because Jagurtha may have been defeated. The dignity of the Roman name may have. may have been upheld in Africa, but to the north, beyond the Alps, there is a much more terrifying threat than some African king massing on the frontiers of Rome's empire. And again, we mentioned this in the previous episode. It's an immense migration of Germans, the Teutons and the Kimbray from Jutland to the frontiers of the Roman world. So it's almost a kind of proto-viking invasion. Yeah. So in the last episode, to please people who online like to count how often we refer to either the Lord of the Rings or

Game of Thrones, I compared them with the White Walkers, the people who in the Game of Thrones TV series you see right at the beginning, they're massing all the time. You know, all the internal politics of West Ross is nothing compared with the existential apocalyptic threat that these blokes represent. And actually, I'm going to congratulate myself on my my own comparison. I think it's an absolutely superb comparison. Yeah. Because, I mean, these people, the Teutons and the Kimbray, they're massive, they're terrifying, they look weird, they are an existential threat. They're reputed to be cannibals. Right. This is Plutarch on them. He said they were impervious to cold because they've been brought up in icebound countries full of forests.

I mean, Tom, the parallels are stacking up. You're absolutely right. And also, isn't this also the case with the White Walkers, the Tutans and the Kimbrey accompanied by women and children. Yeah, because some of them are women and children, yeah. And in fact, actually, in Game of Thrones, the children are the most frightening. There's always something terrifying about a murderous, sinister child. And frankly, if you've ever met a German child, you know, it's the same story. Well, they're Danes, really, aren't they? Yeah, they're the worst.

And the women also are very frightening because they're said to fight alongside the men. Of course. And it's an entire people on the move. So there are tens of thousands of them, according to the Roman sources. I mean, we don't know how accurate they are. But basically, there are loads and loads of them. And they are experienced by the Romans less as an army than as some kind of force of nature, you know, a great flood, a tide, a tsunami, whatever you want to reach for. You know, the news had been brought to them that this monstrous tide of people is advancing towards you. And so they sent an army under a consul into a region called Norikam, which is basically Austria today in 113 BC. And the consul had set an ambush for these barbarians, and the barbarians had rumbled it and had outsmarted the consul and given him a serious mauling. And so he'd withdrawn. And he had assumed that the barbarians would pursue him and invade Italy.

In fact, they don't. They swing westwards into Gaul, which is a big relief to the Romans. But I think it's also a little bit unsettling because it's clear that the Kimberian and the Teutans are unlike any enemy that they've come up against before. There's no predicting what they'll do. When you're fighting Carthaginians or Greeks or even Gauls, there's a sense in which the Romans understand what makes these people tick. But with these barbarians from the far north, and again, this is maybe the kind of White Walker comparison, the Romans don't understand what they want. They don't understand what's going to motivate them. They don't understand how they're going to

behave. And so that means it's very difficult, I think, for the Romans to devise a strategy to cope with this onslaught. And this becomes manifest in a succession of disastrous Roman attempts to go and be proactive and meet the Teutons and Kimbury and wipe them out beyond the limits of Roman power. Because the barbarians, they're just roaming around Gaul, kind of looting and pillaging and killing and all that kind of stuff. And the Romans keep going and trying to to attack them and they keep being defeated. So first in 109 BC and then two years later near what today is Bordeaux. And one consul in that battle is killed and the other one is cornered and the only way that he can extract himself is to agree that he and his army will go beneath

the yoke. Oh my god. Yeah, ultimate humiliation. You put up, you know, two spears and put another spear across it and everyone has to symbolically bend and crawl and, well, not symbolically. I mean, You literally do it, but it's obviously a symbol of humiliation. So that's very bad. And then I had forgotten the full details of this defeat. So it happens in 105. And it's a culminating disaster in the Roman attempts to stop the barbarians. It happens outside Arousio, which is the town in Southern Gaul, which gives its name

to Orange. So ultimately, to the Orange Order. I mean, that's an amazing thought. And in this battle, the Romans, it said, lose over 100,000 men, which is more than they lose in at Can I. Is that plausible, really, that they lost that many? I mean, these figures are all made up, aren't they really? I don't think they're made up.

It's clearly a massive defeat. And yet it's barely remembered. And you think how much it's written about Can I and the impact that it had on the Romans. At the time, it must have just seemed overwhelming. It must have seemed a disaster on par with that. and when the news of it is brought to Rome, there is this terrible mood of panic. So thank you very much for listening to that. And if you liked it and you would like to hear more, then you can find the full episode at the rest is history.com.

Hi everybody, Dominic again. Now here is the clip that we promised to you from our show The Book Club, which talks about Ernest Hemingway's book for whom the bell tolls, and specifically the history of the Spanish Civil War. So Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all. It's been a backwater, basically. It's been really politically turbulent. There is a king. It's normally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like these huge estates called the Latifundiae, which go back to the Roman period. I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I started reading up for the session. Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolutely gigantic rural estate. It's run by landowners, almost a kind of feudal system.

The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialized, the Basque Country, the North, and Catalonia. But those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured. And there's lots of labor unrest. There's a big anarchist movement. There was a socialist movement. There's a communist party.

In the 20s, there was a coup. and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, you know, under the king. But that didn't really work out. They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polarized and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So, for example, in the north in 1935, there are assassinations, there are kind of paramilitary movements and whatnot.

The son of the previous dictator, Primo de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the Falange, which actually sort of gives its name, really, to, it's then co-opted by the right, by the conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War. I mean, whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question. Right, so it all comes to head in 1936. There's an election at the beginning of the year, which means that a popular front, which is a kind of left-wing alliance of liberals, socialists, you know, sort of left-wing

parties. Some of the separatists, or more nationalist groups from the areas like the Basque Country or Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrest because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. And in July 1936, the army launches, right-wing elements within the army launch a coup. The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work. So basically, the trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army,

and their allies who are often like big landowners, the Catholic Church and so on, who want to defend the status quo. They've got half the country, often kind of rural areas, more conservative and so on. But the big cities and Catalonia and so on, so Madrid, Barcelona, places like that, they stay loyal to the elected government.

So on the one hand, you have what are called the nationalists, And these are the forces of the right, the army, the coup plotters and so on. Effectively, from day one, they have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany. And then on the left, you have the elected government, who are the Republicans, and they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poison chalice. And they do appeal to Britain and France for help, but they don't really get it.

And they have help from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody. I mean, this is always the way with civil wars because people feel it's an existential struggle. The future of their country is at stake. They come to believe, you know, their neighbours, the people in the next town, the landowners or the priests or the anarchists or whoever are going to kill them and their families. They've got to kill them first. People, in some places, there are horrendous, horrendous, sadistic mass.

and things. I think they found something like at the end of, maybe the start of the 21st century or something, that Spain had the highest number of mass graves after Cambodia. So if you want to hear the full episode, just go to Apple or Spotify or YouTube and search for The Book Club. And there it is.