Jugurthine War

In the short term, these reforms saved Rome, for the Republic faced dire threats.

The Jugurthine War in North Africa, where Marius defeated the cunning King Jugurtha, and soon after the terrifying invasions of the Cimbri and Teutones, migrating tribes from the north.

At Aquae Sextiae in one hundred and two BCE, and Vercellae in one hundred and one BCE, Marius' soldiers annihilated their foes, saving Italy from destruction.

He was hailed as the third founder of Rome after Romulus and Camillus.

It was not that Rome interfered with the local self-government she had granted by treaty, but the Italians labored under grievous disabilities and oppression.

So late as the Jugurthine War, Latin officers were executed by martial law, whereas any Roman soldier could appeal to a civil tribunal.

Again, while the armies had formerly been recruited from the Romans and the allies equally, now the severest service and the main weight of wars fell on the latter who furnished moreover two soldiers to every Roman.

Again, without a certain amount of property a man at Rome could not be enrolled in the army, but the rule seems not to have applied to Italians.

But for the present no one could tell how far he would or could go, and though he had already been made praetor, the Metelli could as yet afford to despise him.

The death of Gaius prolonged the Senate's misrule for twenty years.

Twenty years of shame at home and abroad, the turpitude of the Jugurthine war, a second and more stubborn slave revolt in Sicily, the apparition of the northern hordes inflicting disaster after disaster upon the Roman armies, which in 105 B.C. culminated in another and more appalling Cannae.

These things had yet to come about before the cup of the Senate's infamy was full, and before those who had drawn the sword against the Grochi perished by the sword of Marius, impotent, unpitied, and despised.

This, in fine, in common with every other measure of domestic reform, which formed the subject of contention between Senate and plebs, was ultimately useful only insofar as the struggle it occasioned helped to diminish the power of the aristocracy, and paved the way for the abolition of its rule.

Of the effiteness of this aristocracy, the provinces, meanwhile, had their experience in the exactions practiced upon them by each successive governor, and at home the people were learning to despise it by their success in bringing its members to trial after such disasters to the Roman arms as those which occurred in the Jugurthine and the early part of the Cimbrian War.

Sulla gave the aristocracy one last chance, but this also it threw away, and its impotence in the face of Spartacus and his gladiators, and of the pirates of Cilicia and Crete, proved to Italy and the whole Roman world its unfitness to rule.

At the date when Sallust's narrative begins, the end of B.C. 66, this feeling on the part of the people of the utter incapacity of the aristocracy had just taken decisive effect.

Works of Gaius Sallustius Crispus.

Translated by Alfred W. Pollard.

Jugurthine War, Part 1.

It's the unfounded complaint of mankind that they're naturally weak and short-lived, and that it's chance, not merit, that rules their destiny.