idenote: How the Romans
had been occupied meanwhile.] But meantime the generals of the
Republic had not been idle. Rutilius Rufus, the old comrade of Marius,
had been diligently drilling troops, having engaged gladiators to
teach them fencing. Probably Marius was engaged in the same work at
the beginning of 104, and then went to South Gaul, where, as we
hear of Sulla capturing the king of the Tectosages, he was no doubt
collecting supplies and men, and suppressing all disaffection in the
province. He also cut a canal from the Rhone, about a mile above
its mouth, to a lake supposed to be now the Etang de l'Estouma; for
alluvial deposits had made access to the river difficult, and he
wanted the Rhone as a highway for his troops and commissariat.
[Sidenote: Marius consul in 103 and 102 B.C.] In 103 he was made
consul for the third time, and again in 102. And now he was ready to
meet the invaders.

[Sidenote: Nationality of the Cimbri.] Who these invaders were has
been a matter of hot dispute. Were they Celts? Were they Teutons? Did
they come from the Baltic shores, or the shores of the Sea of Azof; or
were they the Homeric Cimmerii who dwelt between the Dnieper and the
Don? Or did their name indicate their personal qualities, and not
their previous habitation? The following seems the most probable
conjecture. In the great plain which runs along the Atlantic and the
southern shore of the Baltic, from the Pyrenees to the Volga, there
had been in pre-historic times a movement constantly going on among
the barbarous inhabitants like the ebb and flow of a great sea. The
Celts had reached Spain and Italy on the south, and Germany and the
Danube on the east. Then, making the Rhine their frontier, they had
settled down into semi-civilised life. Now the Teutonic tribes were
in their turn going through the same process of flux and reflux; and
impelled probably at this time by some invasion of other tribes, or
possibly, as Strabo says, by some great inundation of the sea, these
invading nations, for they were not armies but whole nations, came
roaming southwards in search of a new home. Celts there were among
them, for the Helvetii had joined them, and therefore Helvetic chiefs.
But the names still exist in modern Denmark and near the Baltic.
Caesar did not think they were Celts. The light hair and blue eyes of
the warriors, and the hair of old age on the heads of children,
which excited the astonishment of the Romans, are not Celti