Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
History
Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Biography
with him; among them a dissipated young patrician, called Lucius
Sulla, whose name also was destined to be memorable.
By these methods, and out of these materials, an army was formed, such
as no Roman general had hitherto led. It performed extraordinary
marches, carried its water-supplies with it in skins, and followed the
enemy across sandy deserts hitherto found impassable. In less than two
years the war was over. The Moors, to whom Jugurtha had fled,
surrendered him to Sulla; and he was brought in chains to Rome, where
he finished his life in a dungeon.
Marius had formed an army barely in time to save Italy from being
totally overwhelmed. A vast migratory wave of population had been set
in motion behind the Rhine and the Danube. The German forests were
uncultivated. The hunting and pasture grounds were too straight for
the numbers crowded into them, and two enormous hordes were rolling
westward and southward in search of some new abiding-place. Each
division consisted of hundreds of thousands. They travelled, with
their wives and children, their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians
and with the modern South African Dutch, being at once their
conveyance and their home. Gray-haired priestesses tramped along among
them, barefooted, in white linen dresses, the knife at their girdle;
northern Iphigenias, sacrificing prisoners as they were taken, to the
gods of Valhalla. On they swept, eating up the country, and the people
flying before them. In 113 B.C. the skirts of the Cimbri had
encountered a small Roman force near Trieste, and destroyed it. Four
years later another attempt was made to stop them, but the Roman army
was beaten and its camp taken. The Cimbrian host did not, however,
turn at that time upon Italy. Their aim was the south of France. They
made their way through the Alps into Switzerland, where the Helvetii
joined them and the united mass rolled over the Jura and down the bank
of the Rhone. Roused at last into the exertion, the Senate sent into
Gaul the largest force which the Romans had ever brought into the
field. They met the Cimbri at Orange, and were simply annihilated.
Eighty thousand Romans and forty thousand camp-followers were said to
have fallen. The numbers in such cases are generally exaggerated, but
the extravagance of the report is a witness to the greatness of the
overthrow. The Romans had received a worse blow than at Cannae. They
were brave enough, but they were commanded by persons whose
recommendations for command were birth or fortune; "preposterous men,"
as Marius termed them, who had waited for their appointment to open
the military manuals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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