They witnessed a most fearful tragedy.

[**The following takes place during Gaius Marius’ campaign against an alliance of Germanic tribes that threatened Rome during the earlier part of his military career. In it, we find that the women often fought at least as fiercely as their men, staying behind the battle lines and shouting encouragement until their forces were in retreat, at which point they took up arms and fought everyone – their men fleeing the battle and the Romans that pursued them.**] >Here the greatest part and most valiant of the enemies were cut in pieces; for those that fought in the front, that they might not break their ranks, were fast tied to one another, with long chains put through their belts. But as they pursued those that fled to their camp they witnessed a most fearful tragedy; the women, standing in black clothes on their wagons, slew all that fled, some their husbands, some their brethren, others their fathers, and strangling their little children with their own hands, threw them under the wheels and the feet of the battle, and then killed themselves. >They tell of one who hung herself from the end of the pole of a wagon, with her little children tied dangling at her heels. >The men, for want of trees, tied themselves, some to the horns of the oxen, others by the neck to their legs, that so pricking them on, by the starting and springing of the beasts, they might be torn and trodden to pieces. ________________________ **Source:** Plutarch, John Dryden, and Arthur Hugh Clough. "Caius Marius." *Plutarch's Lives*. New York: Modern Library, 2001. 567. Print.