![arausio town arausio town](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/sardinia-aerial-view-9046315.jpg)
His smaller force was easily stopped, surrounded, and slaughtered by the Germans, and the Germans swiftly counterattacked, encircled Mallius' legionaries, and massacred his men as well. The town is served by numerous bus routes: no.1 from Bollène, no.2 from Avignon, no.3 from Valréas and Richerenches, no.4 from. It flourished as a key city for the Roman colonists in Northern Provence. However, Caepio did not want Mallius to get the credit for defeating the Germanic threat, so he launched his own attack on the Cimbri camp. Originally called Arausio, after a local Celtic water god, Orange was founded in 35 BC by veterans of Augustus Caesars Second Legion. King Boiorix of the Cimbri attempted to negotiate with Mallius, asking that his tribe be allowed to migrate into Hispania. Ranged against the migratory tribes of the Cimbri under Boiorix and the Teutoni were two Roman armies, commanded by the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio and consul Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. Caepio only followed Mallius across the river in response to a Senatorial order, but he insisted on having a separate camp. The Battle of Arausio took place on October 6, 105 BC, at a site between the town of Arausio (modern day Orange, Vaucluse) and the Rhône River. In 105 BC, the 80,000-strong Roman army arrived in Gallia Narbonensis and encamped outside the town of Arausio on the Rhone. Caepio, descended from one of the oldest patrician families in Rome, resented having to take orders from a commoner, causing division between the two men. As Rome's greatest general Gaius Marius was fighting the Jugurthine War in North Africa, command of the army was given to the commoner Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, while the patrician Quintus Servilius Caepio was made his second-in-command. Two Roman armies led by Quintus Servilius Caepio and Gnaeus Mallius Maximus were crushed by a much larger Germanic army of Cimbri and Teutons in present-day southern France in Rome's worst defeat since the Battle of Cannae during the Punic Wars.įollowing the disastrous Battle of Burdigala in 107 BC, the Roman Senate became aware of the threat of the Germanic Cimbri and Teutons and prepared an army of 80,000 troops to face them in battle. The Battle of Arausio was fought on 6 October 105 BC during the Cimbrian War.