Rise of Gaius Marius. — When the oligarchy had at last given the African command to an able general, Quintus Caecilius Metellus, and there was no adequate reason for interfering, the democratic party elected his lieutenant, Gaius Marius, to the consulship for 107, and placed him by a special decree in charge of the Jugurthine war. Marius, the tribune of 119, was a farmer's son, rude and uncultivated, but a man of great force and vigor and an able general. In Africa he reaped in the main the fruits of the work of Metellus and Lucius Cornelius Sulla — a potent cause of later rivalries and enmities.
Ascendency of Marius and the Democrats. — In 105 the Romans, who had been defeated several times before in campaigns against the Cimbri and Helvetians, suffered under the consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, and the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio, the terrible disaster at Arausio. As a consequence the democratic party regained the ascendency and elected Marius, who was still in command in Africa, and another new man (novus homo) to the consulship for 104. It conferred the province of Gaul on Marius by popular decree. Moreover, it employed its old tactics and assailed individual aristocrats. Caepio, who by popular decree had been deprived of his proconsulship and expelled from the senate, seems to have been imprisoned in 103; but the worthless man was rescued by a tribune and went into exile. Mallius also was impeached.
A change in the method of selecting priests was of more importance. The law of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (lex Domitia de sacerdotiis), passed in 104, decreed that henceforth the pontiffs, the augurs, the keepers of the Sibylline books (decemviri sacris faciundis), and the masters of banquets (tresviri epulones), a college established in 196, should under certain restrictions be selected by seventeen districts chosen by lot, and then be coöpted by the respective colleges.
