they are; and when He is pleased to remind them, it is not by words, as the Persians reminded their king, but by fearful events that He gives His warnings.  At the very moment when Rome believed herself set free from Gallic invasions, and on the point of avenging herself by a course of conquest, a new invasion, more extensive and more barbarous, came bursting upon Rome and upon Gaul at the same time, and plunged them together in the same troubles and the same perils.

In the year 113 B.C. there appeared to the north of the Adriatic, on the right bank of the Danube, an immense multitude of barbarians, ravaging Noricum and threatening Italy.  Two nations predominated; the Kymrians or Cimbrians, and the Teutons, the national name of the Germans.  They came from afar, northward, from the Cimbrian peninsula, nowadays Jutland, and from the countries bordering on the Baltic which nowadays form the duchies of Holstein and Schleswig.  A violent shock of earthquake, a terrible inundation, had driven them, they said, from their homes; and those countries do indeed show traces of such events.  And Cimbrians and Teutons had been for some time roaming over Germany.

The consul Papirius Carbo, despatched in all haste to defend the frontier, bade them, in the name of the Roman people, to withdraw.  The barbarians modestly replied that they had no intention of settling in Noricum, and if the Romans had rights over the country, they would carry their arms elsewhere.  The consul, who had found haughtiness succeed, thought he might also employ perfidy against the barbarians.  He offered guides to conduct them out of Noricum; and the guides misled them.  The consul attacked them unexpectedly during the night, and was beaten.

However, the barbarians, still fearful, did not venture into Italy.  They roamed for three years along the Danube, as far as the mountains of Macedonia and Thrace.  Then retracing their steps, and marching eastward, they inundated the valleys of the Helvetic Alps, now Switzerland, having their numbers swelled by other tribes, Gallic or German, who preferred joining in pillage to undergoing it.  The Ambrons, among others, a Gallic peoplet that had taken refuge in Helvetia after the expulsion of the Umbrians by the Etruscans from Italy, joined the Cimbrians and Teutons; and in the year 110 B.C. all together entered Gaul, at first by way of Belgica, and then, continuing their wanderings and ravages in central Gaul, they at last reached the Rhone, on the frontiers of the Roman province.

There the name of Rome again arrested their progress; they applied to her anew for lands, with the offer of their services.  “Rome,” answered M. Silanus, who commanded in the province, “has neither lands to give you nor services to accept from you.”  He attacked them in their camp, and was beaten.