The barbarians had no wish to attack Marius, and so they separated: the Cimbri went round the northern range of the Alps, that they might invade Italy from the other side, where it was more easily entered; the Teutones remained in Gaul. For what reason Marius should have now retreated from Valence to Aquæ Sextiæ, our scanty sources do not tell us: probably it was for the purpose of getting provisions. The Cimbrians passed with jeers by the camp of Marius, and went round Switzerland: for between the Pennine and the Tridentine Alps, there was not yet at that time any practicable road for such hosts of men with their waggons and baggage: the only way was that across the little St. Bernard, which they could not take on account of the Romans; single troops may have gone by the St. Gotthard and the Splügen. The Romans had opposed to them, near Trent in Italian Tyrol, another army under the command of the consul Q. Lutatius Catulus, a man who was the very opposite of Marius, as he was one of those persons of high rank in that day who had had a Greek education: according to Cicero, he was even a fair author, and he left behind him memoirs in Greek, as was then much the fashion among people of refinement at Rome, Latin prose not being yet cultivated by great writers; just as Frederic the Great wrote his memoirs in French. Incalculable is the loss to us of the books of Livy which treat of this period, as we do not know any thing more about it than we do of earlier centuries; in fact, we know less of the gigantic struggles against the Cimbri and Teutones, than we do of the national emigrations and the wars against the barbarians in the beginning of the fifth century. Here we find Orosius on the whole an unadulterated source, and now and then we have to make shift with Florus; all the epitomizers, however, as Orosius, Eutropius, Florus, are full of discrepancies when compared together, though they every one of them drew from Livy. Quite independent of these is the account of Plutarch, which is the most detailed narrative we have of the Cimbric war.