History Against the Pagans 1 part 13/24

indeed in Numidia, where Micipsa was then king, eight hundred thousand men, and along the maritime coast, which especially adjoins the Carthaginian and Utican shore, more than two hundred thousand are recorded to have perished; while at the very city of Utica thirty thousand soldiers, who had been arrayed for the defense of all Africa, were extinguished and swept away. So sudden and so violent did this disaster press upon them, that it is told that then at Utica, in a single day through a single gate, more than fifteen hundred dead were carried out from among those younger men. Yet — and let me say it by the peace and grace of Almighty God, of whose mercy and in whose trust I speak these things —

although even in our own times locusts sometimes arise, and that in various regions, and for the most part do harm, yet tolerably, never in Christian times has so great a force of inextricable evil befallen as that the destruction of locusts, which could in no way be endured while alive, should harm more when dead; and that, while they long lived, all things were doomed to perish, so that, once they had perished, with all things perishing the more, it would have been preferable that they had not perished. In the six hundred and twenty-seventh year from the founding of the City, Lucius Caecilius Metellus and Quintus Titius Flamininus being consuls, Carthage in Africa, ordered to be restored, was at length, in the twenty-second year after it had been overthrown, restored and refilled by leading in families of Roman citizens to dwell in it, a great portent going before.

For when the surveyors sent to mark the boundaries of the Carthaginian field had found the stakes, the markers of the boundaries, fixed in the ground, torn out by wolves in the night and bitten and gnawed asunder, there was hesitation for some time whether it was expedient for Roman peace that Carthage should be refashioned. In the same year Gaius Gracchus, brother of that Gracchus who had already been slain in sedition, made tribune of the plebs through tumult, was a great bane to the commonwealth. For when he had often roused the Roman people, by largesses and excessive promises, into most bitter seditions, chiefly for the sake of the agrarian law, for which his brother Gracchus too had been slain, he at length withdrew from the tribunate, Minucius being his successor.

When the tribune of the plebs Minucius had for the most part torn up the enactments of his predecessor Gracchus and abrogated his laws, Gaius Gracchus, escorted by Fulvius Flaccus with a huge throng, ascended the Capitol, where the assembly was being held: there, a very great tumult being stirred up, a certain herald was slain by the Gracchans and was as it were the signal of war. Flaccus, girt about by his two armed sons, with Gracchus also accompanying him in his toga and concealing a short sword beneath his left arm, although he had even in vain sent ahead a herald to call the slaves to liberty, occupied the temple of Diana as if it were a citadel. Against him Decimus Brutus, a man of consular rank, rushed from the Publician slope with a mighty struggle. There Flaccus fought long and most stubbornly;

Gracchus, after he had withdrawn into the temple of Minerva and wished to fall upon his sword, was held back by the intervention of Laetorius. And so, when the doubtful battle had been waged for a long time, at length the archers sent by Opimius scattered the densely packed multitude. The two Flacci, father and son, when they had leaped down through the temple of Luna into a private house and barred the doors, were stabbed through after the wattled wall had been cut open. Gracchus, while his friends long fought and perished for him, with difficulty reached the Sublician bridge, and there, lest he be taken alive, offered his neck to his slave. The head of Gracchus was cut off and brought to the consul; his body was carried down to his mother Cornelia at the town of Misenum.

Now this Cornelia, daughter of the elder Africanus, had, as I said, withdrawn to Misenum after the death of her elder son. The goods of Gracchus were confiscated; the young Flaccus was killed in prison; of Gracchus's faction two hundred and fifty are reported to have been cut down on the Aventine. The consul Opimius, just as he was brave in war, so was he cruel in the inquiry. For he put to death by punishment more than three thousand men, of whom very many, innocent, were slain without even their case being pleaded. At the same time Metellus, ranging through the Balearic Islands in war, subdued them and, by the very great slaughter of the inhabitants, suppressed the infestation of piracy which was then arising from those same islands.

Gnaeus Domitius too, as proconsul, conquered the Allobroges, a Gallic people, near the town of Vindalium in a most grievous war, chiefly when, terrified by the strange form of the elephants, both the enemy's horses and the enemy themselves had fled in all directions: twenty thousand of the Allobroges are reported to have been cut down there, three thousand taken captive. At the same time Mount Aetna blazed beyond its wont, and with fiery torrents poured over and flowing widely round about, oppressed the city of Catina and its territories, so that the roofs of the houses, scorched and weighed down by hot ashes, collapsed: to relieve this disaster the senate remitted ten years' tribute to the people of Catina.

In the six hundred and twenty-eighth year from the founding of the City, the consul Fabius confronted with so small an army Bituitus, king of the Arverni, a city of Gaul, who was preparing for war with the greatest array, that Bituitus boasted the small number of the Romans could scarce suffice as fodder for the dogs which he kept in his column. And when he understood that the single bridge of the river Rhône was too little for transferring his forces across, he constructed another, framed of boats fastened together with chains and laid over and fixed with planks. Battle being joined and waged long and grievously, the Gauls, conquered and turned to flight, while each feared for himself, with their columns heaped together heedlessly and by a too hasty crossing, broke the bonds of the bridge and were soon plunged in along with the very boats.

A hundred and forty thousand armed men are reported to have been in the army of Bituitus, of whom a hundred and fifty thousand were either cut down or drowned. The consul Quintus Marcius assailed in war a people of the Gauls situated at the foot of the Alps. When they saw themselves hemmed in by the Roman forces and understood that they would be unequal to the war, having killed their wives and children, they flung themselves into the flames. Those, however, who, the Romans forestalling them, had not then the means of accomplishing their own death, and had been taken captive, destroyed themselves, some by the sword, some by hanging, some by refusing food; and absolutely no one survived, not even a little child, who would endure the condition of slavery for love of life. In the six hundred and thirty-fifth year from the founding of the City, Publius Scipio Nasica and Lucius

Calpurnius Bestia being consuls, the senate, with the consent of the Roman people, declared war upon Jugurtha, king of the Numidians. But I shall touch upon Jugurtha only briefly, for the sake of order and as a matter of commemoration, since, just as concerning his nature, varied and intolerable, so also concerning his deeds, done as craftily as energetically, there is sufficient knowledge among all on account of the rich brilliance of the writers. So then Jugurtha, made the adopted son and heir of Micipsa, king of the Numidians, among his natural sons, first slew his co-heirs, that is, Hiempsal; he drove Adherbal, conquered in war, out of Africa. Then he corrupted with money the consul Calpurnius, sent against him, and brought him to most shameful conditions of peace.

Moreover, when he himself had come to Rome, having either corrupted or tested everyone with money, he mingled together seditions and dissensions; and when he was departing thence, he marked it with a notorious enough epigram, saying: 'O venal city, and soon to perish, if it find a buyer!' In the following year he overwhelmed in war Aulus Postumius, brother of the consul Postumius, whom the latter had set over an army of forty thousand armed men, as he gaped greedily at the royal treasures stored at the city of Calama, and exacted from him, when conquered, a most ignominious treaty. He joined to his own kingdom almost all of Africa as it fell away from the Romans. Yet afterwards, restrained by the integrity and discipline of the consul Metellus, and defeated also in two battles, he saw, in his own presence, both his own Numidia laid waste and that it could not be defended:

by whom forced to surrender, he gave three hundred hostages, pledged that he would deliver grain and other supplies, and gave back more than three thousand deserters. Then, since, untrustworthy, he did not in peace restrain his wicked forays, he was broken by the craft of the consul Gaius Marius, almost no less than that with which he himself was endowed, and by Roman forces, especially after Marius by guile surrounded and took the city of Capsa — founded, as they say, by the Phoenician Hercules — then most full of the royal treasures. Then, distrusting his own resources and strength, Jugurtha made an alliance with Bocchus, king of the Moors, by whose cavalry, immensely increased, he wearied the army of Marius with very frequent raids.

At last at Cirta, an ancient city, the royal seat of Masinissa, he confronted the Romans, who were preparing to storm it, equipped with sixty thousand horsemen. Never was there a battle more tumultuous and more terrible to the Roman soldier, so much so that the dust raised by the running and roaring of the horsemen circling and charging about overspread the sky, took away the day, and drew on night; and so great a storm of missiles came rushing on that no part of the body was safe from the blow, since indeed both sight for looking forward was impeded by the gloom and freedom for taking heed was wanting through the pressure of the multitude.

Nor did the Moorish and Numidian horseman take pains to pick out a well-placed enemy with a timely cast of the spear, but rather they hurled their javelins at random, certain that wounds amid the uncertainty would not be uncertain. Thus the Roman foot-soldiers, forced together, were crowded into a ring. Night, intervening, gave a respite from so great a peril. The next day too the same face of war and of peril: the soldier was not able to burst forth upon the enemy, though with sword drawn, for he was driven back from afar by their darts; nor could they flee, for on every side the swifter horseman had hemmed them in for pursuit. Now the third day, and no help from any quarter; the grim face of death was thrust upon them on every side:

at last the consul Marius, with the brave desperation of hope, made a way; with the whole column at once he burst forth from the rampart and gave himself at once both to the field and to battle. And when again the enemy, poured round about, not only mangled the rear of the column but even struck down the middle with darts hurled from afar, and the heat of the sun, the intolerableness of thirst, and the encircling presence of death wore down the disordered Romans to the very limit of desperation, suddenly that aid well known to the Romans against the Africans — of storms and rains, sent from heaven — was for their unhoped-for salvation.

For a sudden rain afforded refreshment and drink to the Romans, thirsting and overheated; while on the other hand it rendered to the Numidians the shafts of their darts, which they are wont to whirl with the hand without thongs, slippery and thereby useless; their shields too, which they carried, handy and protective, made of stretched and hardened elephant hide — whose nature is such that it drinks up rain received like a sponge and thereby, by its sudden weight, becomes unmanageable — these, because they could not be carried about, they could not use for defense. So, the Moors and Numidians unexpectedly thrown into confusion and left helpless, Bocchus and Jugurtha fled. After this, ninety thousand armed men were brought against them by those same kings in a final battle;

these too, with the Romans conquering, are reported to have been cut down even to extermination. Thereupon Bocchus, casting away hope of war, sought peace, and as the price of peace sent Jugurtha — taken by guile and loaded with chains — through the legate Sulla to Marius. He, in the triumph, was driven before the chariot with his two sons, and soon was strangled in prison. In those same days an obscene prodigy and a sad spectacle was seen. Lucius Helvius, a Roman knight, returning from Rome into Apulia with his wife and daughter, being caught by a storm, when he saw his daughter terrified, in order that they might more quickly take shelter under nearer roofs, having left the carriages and seized the horses, took up his maiden daughter, seated on a horse, into the midst of the column.

The girl was instantly slain by a stroke of lightning, yet with all her garments stripped off without any tearing, and the fastenings of her breast and feet loosened, her necklaces too and rings scattered apart, while her very body was unharmed, except that she lay naked in an obscene manner and with her tongue slightly protruding; the horse too, which she was riding, lay lifeless at a distance, its trappings, bridle, and girths loosened and scattered here and there. A little while after this, Lucius Veturius, a Roman knight, defiled the Vestal virgin Aemilia by stealthy debauchery. Moreover, this same Aemilia, having solicited two other Vestal virgins to a sharing in the unchastity, exposed and handed them over to the comrades of her corrupter.

Information being given through a slave, punishment was exacted of them all. Besides, in those same times of the Jugurthine war, the consul Lucius Cassius, having pursued the Tigurini in Gaul as far as the Ocean, and again surrounded by ambush from those same men, was slain. Lucius Piso too, a man of consular rank, legate of the consul Cassius, was killed. Gaius Publius, the other legate, lest the remaining portion of the army, which had fled into the camp, should be destroyed, gave to the Tigurini, by a most shameful treaty, hostages and the half part of all their goods: he, returning to Rome, a day having been appointed for him by Caelius, tribune of the plebs, because he had given hostages to the Tigurini, fled into exile.

Caepio, as proconsul, having captured a city of the Gauls whose name is Tolosa, carried off from the temple of Apollo a hundred thousand pounds' weight of gold and a hundred and ten thousand of silver: and when he had sent this with escorts to Massilia, a city friendly to the Roman people, it is related that, those to whom he had entrusted it to be guarded and conveyed having been secretly killed — as some attest — he stole the whole through crime. Whence too a great inquiry was afterwards held at Rome. In the six hundred and forty-second year from the founding of the City, the consul Gaius Manlius and the proconsul Quintus Caepio, sent against the Cimbri and Teutones and Tigurini and Ambrones, peoples of the Gauls and Germans, who had then conspired to extinguish the Roman empire, divided the provinces between themselves with the river Rhône in the middle.

There, while they disputed between themselves with most grievous envy and contention, they were conquered with great disgrace and peril to the Roman name. Indeed in that battle Marcus Aemilius, a man of consular rank, was captured and slain, and the two sons of the consul were cut down; eighty thousand Romans and allies were slaughtered at that season, and forty thousand camp-servants and sutlers killed, as Antias writes. Thus, out of the whole army entirely, only ten men are reported to have survived, who carried back the wretched news to the increasing of miseries. The enemy, having gained possession of both camps and immense booty, by a certain new and unwonted execration cast to destruction all that they had taken;

Clothing was torn up and cast away, gold and silver were thrown into the river, the men's breastplates were hacked to pieces, the horses' trappings were destroyed, the horses themselves were plunged into the deep waters, and men with nooses fastened about their necks were hanged from the trees, so that the victor acknowledged nothing as plunder, and the vanquished acknowledged nothing as mercy. There was then at Rome the greatest grief, and indeed also fear, lest the Cimbri should at once cross the Alps and destroy Italy. At the same time Quintus Fabius Maximus put to death his own son, a young man whom he had banished to the countryside, together with two slaves who served as the agents of the parricide; and immediately thereafter he set those very slaves free as the reward of their crime. On the appointed day, with Gnaeus Pompeius prosecuting, he was condemned.

Therefore Marius, in his fourth consulship, having pitched his camp near where the rivers Isara and Rhone flow together into one, found that the Teutones, the Cimbri, the Tigurini, and the Ambrones, after fighting for three days continuously around the Roman camp—seeking by some means to dislodge them from the rampart and pour them out onto the open plain—resolved to make for Italy in three columns. Marius, after the departure of the enemy, moved his camp and seized a hill which overlooked the plain and the river where the enemy had spread themselves out. And when his army lacked water to drink, and he was assailed by the complaints of all, he answered that water was indeed in sight, but that it must be won by the sword.

And so, when the camp-servants first rushed into battle with a shout, the army followed close behind them; soon, the ranks being marshalled in a regular engagement, the battle was fought, and the Romans were victorious. On the fourth day the battle-lines were again brought forth on both sides into the plain, and they fought almost until midday on equal terms. Afterwards, when under the growing heat of the sun the soft bodies of the Gauls melted away like snow, it became slaughter rather than battle, dragged out until nightfall. Two hundred thousand armed men were slain in that war, eighty thousand taken captive, and scarcely three thousand are reported to have escaped; their leader Teutobodus also was killed.

Their women, with a more steadfast spirit than if they had won, appealed to the consul that, if their virgin chastity might be preserved inviolate to serve as sacred virgins for the gods, their lives might be spared. And so, when they had not obtained what they sought, they dashed their little children against the rocks and all destroyed themselves by the sword and by hanging. These things were done among the Tigurini and the Ambrones. The Teutones, however, and the Cimbri, their forces intact, having passed over the snows of the Alps, had overrun the plains of Italy; and there, while that hardy race was for a long time being softened by gentler breezes, by drink, by food, and by baths, Marius in his fifth consulship and Catulus were sent against them. A day and a field having been appointed for battle, they followed the strategy of Hannibal: they arranged their battle in the mist, and fought in the sunlight.

The first confusion of the Gauls indeed arose from this: that they encountered the Roman line already drawn up before they perceived it to be present. And when at once the wounded horsemen were forced back upon their own men, and threw the whole multitude—still advancing in disorder—into confusion, and the sun together with the wind, rising from the opposite quarter, flashed out in front of them, the dust filled their sight and the brightness dimmed it. So it came about that so great and so terrible a multitude was cut down with the slightest loss to the Romans, but with utter annihilation to themselves. A hundred and forty thousand of them are said to have been slain then in that war, and sixty thousand taken captive. The women stirred up an almost more grievous battle: drawing up their wagons in the fashion of a camp, and themselves fighting from above, they long beat back the Romans.

But when they were terrified by these men with a new kind of slaughter—for their crowns were cut off together with the hair, and they were left disfigured by a wound shameful enough—they turned the iron, which they had taken up against the enemy, against themselves and their own. For some were slain by mutually rushing upon one another; others, seizing each other by the throat, were strangled; others, having tied ropes about the legs of horses and then immediately goading on the horses themselves, after they had inserted their own necks into the same ropes with which they had bound the horses' legs, were dragged along and killed; others hung by a noose from the upraised poles of the wagons.

There was even found a certain woman who, with nooses passed through their necks, had bound her two sons to her own feet, and, when she had let herself drop to die by hanging, dragged them down with her to be killed. Amid these many and pitiable kinds of death, the petty kings too are reported to have rushed upon one another with drawn swords. The kings Lugius and Boiorix fell in the battle line; Claodicus and Caesoris were taken captive. So in these two battles three hundred and forty thousand of the Gauls were slain and a hundred and forty thousand taken captive, apart from the countless multitude of women who, with a feminine frenzy yet with a manly force, killed themselves and their little ones. Thus an incredible deed, never before known to the Romans, was suddenly perpetrated at Rome and turned such a triumph of Marius and such a Roman victory.

and darkened the whole City into horror and mourning. For Publicius Malleolus, with his slaves lending their hands, murdered his own mother; condemned of parricide, he was sewn up in a sack and cast into the sea; and the Romans fulfilled both the crime and the punishment, concerning which even Solon of Athens had not dared to legislate, since he did not believe it could happen, while the Romans, who knew themselves descended from Romulus, understanding that this too could happen, ordained a singular punishment for it. In the six hundred and forty-fifth year from the founding of the City, after the Cimbric and Teutonic war and the fifth consulship of Marius—in which the condition of the Roman state is judged to have been preserved by right—in the sixth consulship of the same Gaius Marius it was so shaken that it nearly collapsed almost to the very end through internal slaughter.

To unfold and run through the labyrinths of dissensions and the inextricable causes of seditions seems to me both inconvenient and tedious; let it suffice to have touched on them briefly. Lucius Apuleius Saturninus was the first author of the tumult that was stirred up, a most bitter enemy of Quintus Metellus Numidicus, a man certainly of the first rank, whom, when he had been made censor, he dragged from his house and besieged with an armed throng as he fled to the Capitol; whence he was driven off by the indignation of the Roman knights, after very great slaughter had been wrought before the Capitol. Then Saturninus and Glaucia, by the treachery of the consul Gaius Marius, killed Aulus Nunius, his rival candidate.

In the following year Marius, consul for the sixth time, and Glaucia the praetor, and Saturninus the tribune of the plebs, conspired to drive Metellus Numidicus into exile by whatever force. On the appointed day, by judges of his own faction who had been suborned, the innocent Metellus was wickedly condemned, and went into exile amid the grief of the whole City. The same Saturninus, fearing that Memmius, a keen and upright man, would be made consul, when a sedition suddenly arose, had him killed as he fled, beaten to pieces with a shapeless cudgel by his henchman Publius Mettius. While the senate and the Roman people murmured at such great evils to the commonwealth, the consul Marius, adapting his disposition to the moment, mingled himself with the consensus of the good and calmed the disturbed plebs with a gentle speech.

Saturninus, in his infamous audacities, held a public meeting at his own house, and there he was called king by some and emperor by others. Marius, having organized the plebs into companies, stationed the other consul with guards on a hill, and himself fortified the gates. A battle was joined in the forum; Saturninus, driven from the forum by the Marians, fled to the Capitol; Marius cut the pipes by which water was brought to it. Then a battle grim enough was fought at the approach to the Capitol, and many around Saufeius and Saturninus were slain. Saturninus, crying out openly that Marius was the author of all his schemes, called him to witness; but when Saturninus himself and Saufeius and Labienus, compelled by Marius, had fled into the senate-house, they were killed by the Roman knights, who broke down the doors.

Gaius Glaucia, dragged out of the house of Claudius, was butchered. Furius, tribune of the plebs, decreed that the goods of all of them should be confiscated. Gnaeus Dolabella, Saturninus' brother, fleeing through the vegetable market, was killed along with Lucius Giganius. And so, the authors of so great a sedition having been slain, there was quiet for the people. Then Cato and Pompeius proposed a bill concerning the return of Metellus Numidicus, to the joy of the whole City; but lest it be carried through, it was vetoed by the factions of the consul Marius and the tribune of the plebs Furius.

Rutilius too, a man of the utmost integrity, used such constancy of faith and innocence that, on the day appointed for him by his accusers, up until the trial he neither let his hair or beard grow long, nor by sordid dress or humble bearing courted supporters, soothed his enemies, or tampered with the jurors; the speech also that was granted him by the praetor he kept no more submissive than his spirit. Although he was assailed by manifest slander, and in the opinion of all good men was thought rightfully to be acquitted, he was condemned by the perjury of the jurors. He, removing to Smyrna and intent upon literary studies, grew old there. In the six hundred and fifty-third year from the founding of the City, in the consulship of Sextus Julius Caesar and Lucius Marcius Philippus, from internal causes the Social War set all Italy in commotion.

For Livius Drusus, tribune of the plebs, having allured all the Latins with the hope of liberty, when he could not fulfill them with what he had promised, stirred them up to arms. To this it was added that dire portents terrified the mournful City. For at sunrise a ball of fire flashed out from the region of the north with the greatest crash of the sky. Among the people of Arretium, when loaves were broken at feasts, gore flowed from the midst of the loaves as if from the wounds of bodies. Besides, for seven continuous days a hail of stones, mixed even with fragments of potsherds, lashed the earth far and wide. Among the Samnites, flame burst forth from a vast chasm in the earth and was seen to stretch up to the sky.

Moreover, on a journey several Romans saw a ball of golden color roll down from the sky to the earth, and, made larger, borne up again from the earth into the heights toward the rising sun, and by its own magnitude cover the sun itself. Drusus, troubled by such great evils, was killed in his own house, the perpetrator indeed being uncertain. Then the Picentes, the Vestini, the Marsi, the Paeligni, the Marrucini, the Samnites, and the Lucani, while they were still plotting a hidden revolt, killed at Asculum Gaius Servius the praetor, who had been sent as an envoy to them, and at once, the city being closed, slaughtered all the Roman citizens without any formal proclamation of execution. Immediately the most atrocious destruction was preceded by most infamous portents.

For animals of every kind, which had been wont to endure the hand of man gently and to live among men, abandoning their stalls and pastures, fled to the woods and mountains with pitiable bleating, neighing, and lowing. Dogs too, whose nature it is to be unable to live apart from men, wandering with tearful howls, roamed about after the manner of wolves. Therefore Gnaeus Pompeius the praetor waged war by order of the senate against the Picentes and was defeated, after the Samnites had set Papius Mutilus over themselves as commander, and the Marsi had preferred Agamemnon, an arch-pirate. Julius Caesar, defeated in a battle with the Samnites, fled with his army cut to pieces. Rutilius the consul chose Marius, his kinsman, as his legate.

When Marius continually warned him that delay would be useful in war, and that the recruit soldier ought to be drilled for a little while in camp, Rutilius, supposing that he was doing this out of guile, despised him and incautiously cast himself and the whole column of his army into an ambush of the Marsi, where the consul himself was killed, many nobles slain, and eight thousand Roman soldiers cut down. The river Tolenus carried the arms and bodies of the slain into the sight of Marius the legate and bore them along as testimony of the disaster. Marius, snatching up his forces at once, unexpectedly overwhelmed the victors and himself killed eight thousand of the Marsi. Caepio, however, led into an ambush by the Vestini and the Marsi, was butchered with his army.