Gaius Marius

Gaius Marius was a Roman general and politician who held the consulship seven times. He achieved prominence in the war against Jugurtha and in the defeat of the Cimbri and Teutones, becoming a champion of popular politics and a rival of the aristocratic commander Sulla. Although later tradition credited him with a complete reform of the Roman army, change was more gradual. Their struggle led to civil war, political killings and Marius’s violent final return to Rome.

Colleen McCullough’s The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown give Marius a central role and trace his alliance and eventual conflict with Sulla. He also appears in many novels about the collapse of the republic. Fiction is drawn to his rise from an Italian municipal background, military ability and consuming desire for repeated office, but modern scholarship treats some traditional “Marian reforms” with caution.