Cimbri and Teutones

The migration that terrified Rome a century before Caesar and changed how its armies were recruited. The Cimbri and Teutones moved south out of Jutland around 120 BC, apparently displaced by flooding, travelling as whole peoples with women, children and wagons rather than as an army. They asked for land and were refused. What followed was the worst run of defeats Rome suffered between Hannibal and the Teutoburg Forest: four Roman armies were destroyed, and at Arausio in 105 BC two consular armies camped separately were annihilated in a single day, with losses ancient sources put at 80 thousand men. Rome had no reserves and expected invasion. The crisis put Gaius Marius in the consulship five times in succession, against all precedent, and let him recruit from citizens without property - a change that made the legions professional and, in the long run, loyal to their commanders rather than the state, which is one of the roads to the fall of the republic. Marius destroyed the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC and the Cimbri at Vercellae in 101 BC. Roman accounts describe Cimbrian women killing their children and themselves rather than be enslaved. The survivors were sold. Whether the two peoples were Germanic or Celtic is still argued. The panic they caused shaped Roman writing about northern peoples for centuries. Their migration covered thousands of kilometres over two decades. Marius was hailed as the third founder of Rome for defeating them. The reformed legions he raised carried the eagle as their standard. Jutland's Himmerland district is thought to preserve the Cimbri's name.

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