Gnaeus Mallius Maximus

Gnaeus Mallius Maximus commanded at Arausio in 105 BC, the worst defeat Rome suffered between Cannae and Adrianople, and the reason it happened was that his colleague would not take orders from him. He was a novus homo, the first of his family to reach the consulship, which in the Roman senate of that decade meant he was tolerated rather than respected. He was sent to the Rhone with a consular army to deal with the Cimbri and Teutones, who had already destroyed three Roman armies in four years. Also in the field was Quintus Servilius Caepio, proconsul, a patrician of the Servilii, who had taken Tolosa the previous year and whose convoy of its temple gold had vanished on the road in circumstances nobody ever explained. Caepio refused to combine his camp with Mallius's, refused to accept the overall command that was legally Mallius's as the sitting consul, and kept his army on the opposite bank of the river. When envoys reached Mallius and negotiations began, Caepio attacked on his own initiative to prevent his colleague getting the credit. His army was destroyed first and Mallius's, pinned against the river, immediately after. Ancient estimates of the dead run to eighty thousand soldiers and more camp followers; the figure is probably inflated and the scale of the catastrophe is not. Rome lost two consular armies in an afternoon because of a quarrel about precedence. Caepio was stripped of his citizenship and exiled, Mallius was exiled too, and the consulship was given to Marius in absentia for the following year and then repeatedly, against every constitutional convention, which is where the road to the civil wars begins.

• Nationality: Roman
• Roles: military, politician