Roman Civil War: Rise of the General (Part 1)

**Tom Holland** (0:11)
And now it was. The news began to reach Rome of the Teutons and the Kimberley. 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 underestimates 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 Kimbri is a word which in the language of the Germans means plunderer.
That was the Greek historian Plutarch, and he's describing in 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 Kimbri, Tom, am I stretching a point to say that effectively they're the Danes?

**Dominic Sandbrook** (1:50)
Yeah, Plutarch 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 Teutons and the Kimbri, 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.

**Tom Holland** (2:45)
Yeah, it's December 2019, and you're hearing the first reports from Wuhan.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:49)
Yes.

**Tom Holland** (2:50)
Of people with unusual colds.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:53)
And around the breakfast table, people are discussing their summer holidays.

**Tom Holland** (2:57)
Exactly.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (2:57)
And so in today's episode, we are going to be looking at what is going on in Rome as this migration re-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 one-tens, the one-hundreds 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 one-tens and the one-hundreds, 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.

**Tom Holland** (4:13)
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 Kimberley, but that's merely the beginning of his extraordinary career.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:22)
I mean, spoiler alert, 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. This was a war that was fought against the Socchi, they called them, their comrades in arms. These were the Italian allies who had been by the side of the Romans for centuries by this point. Suddenly, they erupt and there's this terrible war that rages across Italy.
Then most faithfully 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. This is a man called Lucius Cornelius Sulla.