The initial contact between the two forces occurred when a detached picketing group under the legate Marcus Aurelius Scaurus met an advance party of the Cimbri. However, because Maximus was a novus homo and therefore lacked the noble background of the Roman aristocracy - in addition to his military inexperience - Caepio refused to serve under him and made camp on the opposite side of the river. As the consul of the year, Maximus out-ranked Caepio and therefore should by law have been the senior commander of the combined armies. ![]() (The reasons for Rutilius not taking charge himself do not seem to be known: perhaps he faced political opposition because of his friendship with Gaius Marius, or perhaps he believed Mallius Maximus deserved the chance to earn himself a share of glory, or perhaps he was simply temporarily ill.) Two of the major Roman forces available were camped out on the Rhone River, near Arausio: one led by Mallius Maximus, and the other by the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio. ![]() The senior of the year's two consuls, Publius Rutilius Rufus, was an experienced and highly decorated soldier, veteran of the recent war in Numidia, but for some reason did not take charge of the military campaign himself but remained in Rome while his inexperienced, untried colleague Gnaeus Mallius Maximus led the legions north. In October of 105 BC, they did.Įven before battle was joined, the Romans were in trouble. Having regained Tolosa, the proconsul Quintus Servilius Caepio adopted a defensive strategy, waiting to see if the Cimbri would move toward Roman territories again. An ambush of Roman troops and the temporary rebellion of the town of Tolosa caused Roman troops to mobilize in the area, with three strong forces. Very interesting article with cool examples.The migrations of the Cimbri tribe through Gaul and adjacent territories had disturbed the balance of power and incited or provoked other tribes, such as the Helvetii, into conflict with the Romans. * In the "words that begin with an n" category he didn't include the most famous example: orange, the fruit, which has an n in Persian and Arabic from which it was borrowed but lost it ( (fruit)#Etymology) ![]() * I used to think that baby was the actual word and babe was a corruption, turns out most probably it was just the reverse (baby < babe + y) (. * Somewhat related to the last category: Have you ever wondered why the initial sound in chair and chandelier are pronounced differently in English? There was a sound change in French, chair was borrowed before that change and chandelier, like many other French word that start with ch, after that change. * According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. > Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now. There's always more out there than we're aware of. ![]() > such differences are primarily differences in accent One famous difference is that in Australian english, the words can ("a can of tuna") and can ("I can do that") don't rhyme (I believe "can" is actually the wrong word in AE for "a can of tuna", but the example is just there to illustrate the word's meaning). These obviously exist, but they're often so regular that they don't present much of an obstacle to communication. How do you feel about Jamaican english (which is, in its vernacular, not mutually intelligible with the three I just mentioned)? Vocabulary differences ("a tin of tuna" for "a can of tuna") and meaning differences (like the story where British politicians wanted a motion tabled immediately, because it was important, but American ones felt strongly that it shouldn't be tabled at all, because it was important) happen too.Īustralian, British, and American english are nevertheless fairly close. The original form for at least some of those words is to start with "hw". For example, the first line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is "Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum". "Hwaet" is the word that became "what" in modern English, and was (given that when the poem was written people tended to spell relatively phonetically) presumably pronounced.
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