GAIUS MARIUS WAS BORN IN 157 BC IN ARPINUM, AN ITALian city that had only recently been enfranchised by the Senate. Though later denigrated as “a man of rustic birth, rough and uncouth, and austere in his life,” Marius was in fact the son of a respected Equestrian family, raised in comfort and privilege. But though he was the well-educated son of a prosperous family, Roman politics in the second century seemed designed to make a mockery of his ambitions. Marius was a novus homo Italian without sufficient ancestry or connections to dream of anything more than a respectable career in local
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