# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Marius, Gaius

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​MARIUS, GAIUS (155–86 B.C.), Roman general, of plebeian descent, the son of a small farmer of Cereatae (mod. Casamare, “home of Marius”) near Arpinum. He served first in Spain under the great Scipio Africanus, and rose from the ranks to be an officer. In 119 as tribune he proposed a law intended to limit the influence of the nobles at elections. This brought him into conflict with the aristocratic party, who prevented him from obtaining the aedileship. When about forty years of age he married a lady of patrician rank, Julia, the aunt of Julius Caesar. This gave him a new social status, and being at the same time a popular favourite and a brave, energetic soldier, he was in 115 elected praetor, in which capacity he effected the subjugation of the troublesome province of Further Spain. In the war with Jugurtha (109–106) he came to the front as lieutenant of the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus. When he had already achieved some important successes over Jugurtha (q.v.), in 107 he was elected consul for the first time (an almost unheard-of honour for a “new man”), his popularity with the army and people being sufficient to bear down all opposition. In the following year, in conjunction with Sulla, he brought the war to a triumphant issue, and passed two years in his province of Numidia, which he thoroughly subdued and annexed. The surrender of the person of Jugurtha to Sulla gave rise to the view that he, not Marius, had really ended the war, and so laid the foundation of the subsequent enmity between the two leaders.
By this time Marius was generally recognized as the ablest general of the day, and was appointed to the chief command against the Cimbri and Teutones. Two Roman armies had been destroyed near the Lake of Geneva, and it seemed as if a repetition of the disaster of the Allia and the capture of Rome itself might not be impossible. Marius, out of unpromising materials and a demoralized soldiery, organized a well-disciplined army, with which he inflicted on the invaders two decisive defeats, the first in 102 at Aquae Sextiae (Aix), 18 m. north of Marseilles, and the second in the following year on the Raudian plain near Vercellae (Vercelli), about midway between Turin and Milan. For some centuries afterwards Rome remained unmolested by northern barbarians. In 101 Marius was elected consul a fifth time (previously in 107, 104, 103, 102), hailed as the “saviour of his country,” and honoured with a triumph of unprecedented splendour.
The glorious part of his career was now over. Though a very able soldier, he was without the intellectual culture which the Gracchi, his political ancestors, possessed. As a politician he on the whole failed, though he retained the confidence of the popular party almost to the last. But he unfortunately associated himself with the demagogues Saturninus (q.v.) and Glaucia, in order to secure the consulship for the sixth time (100). The manner in which he turned against his former associates (although he probably had no choice in the matter) alienated the sympathies of the plebs; and Marius, feeling that his only chance of rehabilitation lay in war, left Rome for Asia, where he endeavoured to provoke Mithradates to hostilities. On his return he served as legate in the Social War (90), and defeated the Marsi on two occasions. In 88 war broke out with Mithradates, and Sulla was appointed by the senate to the chief command, which was eagerly desired by Marius. This led to a rupture. With the assistance of the tribune Sulpicius Rufus, Marius succeeded in getting the command transferred to himself. Sulla marched upon Rome and defeated Marius, who fled to the marshes of Minturnae in Latium. He was discovered and taken prisoner; and the local magistrates, in accordance with Sulla’s proclamation, resolved to put him to death. The Gallic trooper sent to strike off the old man’s head quailed, it is said, before the fire of his eyes, and fled exclaiming, “I cannot kill Gaius Marius.” The inhabitants out of compassion then allowed Marius to depart, and put him on board a ship which conveyed him to Carthage. When forbidden to land, he told the messenger to inform the governor that he had seen Marius sitting as a fugitive among the ruins of Carthage. Having been joined by his son, he took refuge in the island of Cercina. Meantime, Sulla having left Italy for the Mithradatic war, Cinna’s sudden and violent revolution put the senate at the mercy of the popular leaders, and Marius greedily caught at the opportunity of a bloody vengeance, which became in fact a reign of terror in which senators and nobles were slaughtered wholesale. He had himself elected consul for the seventh time, in fulfilment of a prophecy given to him in early manhood. Less than three weeks afterwards he died of fever, on the 13th of January 86.
​Marius was not only a great general, but also a great military reformer. From his time a citizen militia was replaced by a professional soldiery, which had hitherto been little liked by the Roman people. He further made the cohort the military unit instead of the maniple, and his cavalry and light-armed troops were drawn from foreign countries, so that it may be said that Marius was the originator of the mercenary army. The Roman soldier was henceforth a man who had no trade but war. A great general could hardly fail to become the foremost man in the state. Marius, however, unlike Caesar, did not attempt to overturn the oligarchy by means of the army; he used rather such expedients as the constitution seemed to allow, though they had to be backed up by riot and violence. He failed as a political reformer because the merchants and the moneyed classes, whom the Gracchi had tried to conciliate, feared that they would themselves be swept away by a revolution of which the mob and its leaders would be the ultimate controllers. Marius had a decided tinge of fanaticism and superstition. In canvassing for the consulship he was guided by the counsels of an Etruscan soothsayer, and was accompanied in his campaigns by a Syrian prophetess. The fashionable accomplishments of the day, and the new Greek culture, were wholly alien to his taste.
For the life of Marius the original sources are numerous passages in Cicero’s works, Sallust’s Jugurtha, the epitomes of the lost books of Livy, Plutarch’s Lives of Sulla and Marius, Velleius Paterculus, Florus and Appian’s Bellum civite. See F. D. Gerlach, Marius und Sulla (Basel, 1856); I. Gilles, Campagne de Marius dans la Gaule (1870); W. Votsch, Marius als Reformator des römischen Heerwesens (with notes and references to ancient authorities, 1886); A. H. J. Greenidge, History of Rome, vol. i. (1904); also Rome: History, II. “The Republic.”