Quintus Servilius Caepio, consul for 106 BCE,…
105 BCE
Quintus Servilius Caepio, consul for 106 BCE, had brought forward a law by which the jurymen were again to be chosen from the senators instead of the equites (Tacitus, Ann.
xii.
60).
He had been prorogued into 105, when one of the new consuls, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, had also operated in southern Gaul.
Mallius is a new man like Marius, and he and the noble Caepio had found it impossible to cooperate.
Caepio had refused even to camp with Maximus and his troops; when it appeared that Maximus was going to reach a treaty and take the glory for the resolution, Caepio had ordered his men to engage the Germans, and the battle that ensued had seen the complete destruction of the Roman army.
Following the disastrous Roman losses at the Battle of Aurasio in October 105 BCE, the terror cimbricus becomes a watchword, as Rome expect the Cimbri at its gates at any time.
In this atmosphere of panic and desperation, an emergency is declared.
The catastrophic scale of the loss to the Cimbri and Teutons inspires the Roman senate and people to set aside the current legal peacetime constraints, that no man could be consul a second time until ten years had passed since his first consulship: and instead, Gaius Marius is immediately proposed (in his absence) and elected as consul, only three years after his first consulship (and then for an unprecedented, and arguably illegal, further four successive years after that.)
As a warfaring nation, Rome is accustomed to setbacks.
However, the recent string of defeats ending in the calamity at Arausio is alarming for all the people of Rome.
The defeat has left them with a critical shortage of manpower but also with a terrifying enemy camped on the other side of the now-undefended Alpine passes.
In Rome, it is widely thought that the defeat was due to the arrogance of Caepio rather than to a deficiency in the Roman Army, and popular dissatisfaction with the ruling classes grows.