The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

by Mike Duncan

We do not know whether Caepio then marched out to instigate battle or whether he waited for the Cimbri to come to him, but it’s clear he provoked the disaster to come. He never once seemed to realize that the Romans were about to face hundreds of thousands of Cimbric warriors and that even combined, the Romans would be outnumbered. When the battle began, it is likely that Caepio’s forward army was overwhelmed by the first wave. Pushed backward, Caepio’s forces would have run into Mallius’s army and created a confused tangle without form, direction, or unity of purpose. This frustrated mob of confused legionaries was then surrounded by the Cimbri and pinned against the Rhône. With nowhere to go and all order lost, the Cimbri consumed the trapped legions like acid eating through flesh.35 By nightfall, the Romans were not just defeated, they were annihilated. The sources place the total dead at somewhere between 60,000 to 80,000 legionaries plus another 40,000 camp followers. Everyone agrees that almost no one made it out alive. There were some survivors who got away—both Caepio and Mallius made it back to Rome, as did a young officer named Quintus Sertorius, who was able to swim across the river to safety (he would go on to become one of the greatest generals in Roman history). Many more Romans were presumably taken as slaves. But, taken together, it is clear that the Battle of Arausio was one of the single greatest disasters in the history of Rome from its founding in 753 B...