In the year of the first tribuneship of Caius Gracchus, the Belearic islands were added to the Roman dominion; and six years afterwards (B. C. 117), Dalmatia was reduced to a Roman province. About this time the famous Jugurtha, the illegitimate son of one of the sons of Masinissa, already mentioned as a king of Numidia in the Roman interest, was left heir to that kingdom, in conjunction with his two cousins, by Micipsa, their father and his uncle. Aspiring to the undivided sovereignty, he killed one of his cousins, and drove the other to Rome. Interfering in behalf of the expelled prince, the Romans compelled Jugurtha to share Numidia with him. By bribing the commissioners, however, who were sent to effect the division, Jugurtha obtained the best part for himself; and not long after (B. C. 112), he showed his contempt for the Romans by invading his cousin's dominions, and putting him to death. Bribes and wily tactics protected him for a while from the vengeance of the Romans; but at length, in the year B. C. 109, the brave consul Metellus, who was proof against bribes, went over to Numidia to conduct the war which his predecessors had mismanaged. After he had carried on the war successfully for two years, he was supplanted by his second in command, Caius Marius, a man of humble birth, and nearly fifty years of age, who, although almost without education, had raised himself to high rank by his military talents, and whose services under Metellus had been so favorably represented at Rome, that he was appointed consul (B. C. 107), with the express intention that he should end the Jugurthine war. This he speedily accomplished, greatly assisted by his quæstor, a young man of high patrician family and unusual literary accomplishments, named Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Jugurtha was sent to Rome, where he was starved in prison (B. C. 106); and the services of Marius were at the disposal of the Romans for a war of an infinitely more formidable character than that which had been waged against this ill-fated African.
About the year B. C. 113, a numerous tribe of savages, called Cimbri, but who were most probably Celts, had been set in motion in the south-*east of Europe; and emigrating westward, they had communicated their restlessness to the Tutones, and undoubtedly German race, through whose territories they must have passed. Roving about in quest of settlements, sometimes together, and sometimes separately, the two barbarian hosts, consisting of men, women, and children, had thrown all Gaul into consternation; and as the Romans had already colonized the portion of Gaul contiguous to the Alps, the duty of checking the savages devolved on them, the more especially as there was some danger that Italy would be invaded. But such a moving mass of human beings, driven by that hardest of forces, hunger, was not easily to be checked; and army after army sent by the Romans to oppose them had been shivered to pieces. All Italy began to tremble, and there was a universal cry among the Romans, 'Make Marius again consul.' Accordingly Marius was chosen consul a second time in his absence (B. C. 104), that he might drive back the Cimbri. Meanwhile the poor homeless creatures had made a general rush towards Spain; and the Romans, to secure the services of Marius when they should be required, reëlected him to the consulship in B. C. 102. In the latter
