At the death of Aristobulus in 103 BCE, his widow, Salome Alexandra, liberates his brother Alexander Jannaeus, who had been held in prison.

Jannaeus succeeds Aristobulus as the Judaean king and high priest; and marries Salome Alexandra, whose brother is Shimon ben Shetach, a leading Pharisee.

After a failed siege against Gaza, Jannaeus strikes a phony league of friendship with the Egyptian co-ruler Ptolemy Lathyrus.

In reality Jannaeus seeks the assistance of Lathyrus’ mother, Cleopatra III, against her son.

When Lathyrus learns of this treachery, he takes out his fury on Judea.

After defeating Jannaeus near the Jordan River, Lathyrus’ soldiers slaughter fleeing Jewish troops.

Afterwards, Lathyrus attacks a small village in Judea with utter malice.

The Egyptian troops strangle women and children.

Then the deceased are cut into pieces, boiled in cauldrons, and eaten as a sacrifice.

This act of cannibalism is used to terrify the Judean people and their military.

After this massacre, Jannaeus is in no position to stop the onslaught of Lathyrus.

However, Cleopatra III, who is probably swayed to support Jannaeus through two Jewish commanders in her military, steps in to prevent Lathyrus from sacking Jerusalem.

The twelve-year-old future king Ptolemy XI Alexander II is sent, with substantial treasure, to the Aegean island of Cos for safekeeping during the war with the Seleucid kingdom conducted by his grandmother Queen Cleopatra III and his father, Ptolemy X Alexander.

His nine-year-old half-brother, a son of Ptolemy IX Soter II (the identity of his mother is not certain), accompanies him him.

Marius replaces the Roman militia with a professional standing force composed mostly of able-bodied but landless volunteers.

He improves and standardized training, weapons, armor, equipment, and command structure, and makes the cohort the main tactical and administrative unit of the legion.

Along with these new arrangements come new standards and symbols, such as the aquila, which the troops come to revere and which is never allowed to fall into enemy hands.

Caepio, upon his return to Rome, is tried by a tribune of the plebs, Gaius Norbanus, for having brought about the defeat of his army by the Cimbri through rashness, and also of having plundered the temple of Tolosa.

Caepio is convicted, and is given the harshest sentence allowable: he is stripped of his citizenship, forbidden fire and water (a formulaic expression of banishment) within eight hundred miles of Rome, nominally fined fifteen thousand talents (about eight hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds) of gold, and forbidden to see or speak to his friends or family until he has left for exile.

(The huge fine—which greatly exceeds the Treasury of Rome—will never be collected.)

Caepio will spend the rest of his life in exile in Smyrna in Asia Minor.

Mallius, who had lost his sons in the battle, is also impeached for the loss of his army.

Although it is unclear whether Mallius was convicted at trial and subsequently went into exile, he is also placed under an aquae et ignis interdictio by a rogatio of Saturninus.

Jannaeus, with a mercenary army similar to that of his father, leads a Judean army that conquers the entire coastal plain …

…except for Ashkelon.

Plutarch gives the numbers advancing on Italy as three hundred thousand armed fighting men, and much larger hordes of women and children.

The barbarians divide themselves into two bands, and it falls to the Cimbri to proceed through Noricum in the interior of the country against Catulus, and of a passage there, while the Teutones and Ambrones are to march through Liguria along the seacoast against the consul Gaius Marius, who has set up camp on the Rhône.

Marius, choosing his ground carefully, builds a well-fortified camp on the top of a hill near Aquae Sextiae, where he lures the Teutons and their allies the Ambrones into attacking him.

During their attack they are ambushed from the rear by a select force of five cohorts which Marius had hidden in a nearby wood The Roman accounts claim that in the ensuing massacre ninety thousand Teutons were slain and twenty thousand, including their King Teutobod, were captured.

The only surviving reports are Roman, but certainly the complete annihilation of the Teutons and Ambrones speaks to the crushing nature of their defeat.

The captured women commit mass suicide, which passes into Roman legends of Germanic heroism (Jerome, letter cxxiii.8, CE409): By the conditions of the surrender three hundred of their married women were to be handed over to the Romans.

When the Teuton matrons heard of this stipulation they first begged the consul that they might be set apart to minister in the temples of Ceres and Venus; and then when they failed to obtain their request and were removed by the lictors, they slew their little children and next morning were all found dead in each other's arms having strangled themselves in the night.

Plutarch mentions (Marius 10, 5-6) that during the battle, the Ambrones began to shout "Ambrones!"

as their battle-cry; the Ligurian troops fighting for the Romans, on hearing this cry, found that it was identical to an ancient name in their country which the Ligurians often used when speaking of their descent, so they returned the shout, "Ambrones!".

Marius takes one hundred thousand prisoners.

Plutarch tells us that Ambrones alone numbered more than 30,000 and were the most warlike division of the enemy, who had earlier defeated the Romans under Manlius and Caepio.

The Ambrones have been destroyed.

Although Caesar mentions that the remnants of the Cimbri and Teutons formed a new tribe in Belgic Gaul, the Aduatuci, he does not mention any remnants of the Ambrones.

Aquae Sextiae has only evened the score, however: while the Teutons have been eliminated, the Cimbri remain a formidable threat.

Ptolemy IX Soter II remains entrenched in Cyprus.

Ptolemy X Alexander orders the death of his mother, Cleopatra III, in 101 BCE, and from this point rules either alone or with his niece/wife, Berenice III, the daughter of his brother Soter and either Cleopatra Selene or Cleopatra IV, who he marries following his murder of her grandmother.

The death of Cleopatra III effectively ends the protracted civil war in Syria.

Manius Aquillius, probably a son of the Manius Aquillius who was consul in 129 BCE, is a loyal follower of Gaius Marius.

During the election campaign for Marius' fourth consulship, Aquillius had been left in command of the army in case the migrating Cimbri attacked before Marius could return to command the army himself.

As a reward for his loyal services, Gaius Marius runs with Aquillius under a joint ticket for the consulship of 101 BCE.

After the consulship, with Rome struggling with famine caused by the slave revolt on Sicily, Aquillius is sent to put it down.

The Cimbri return to Gaul in 101 BCE and prepare for the final stage of their struggle with Rome.

For the first time they penetrate through the Alpine passes, which Catulus had failed to fortify, into northern Italy.

Catulus withdraws behind the Po River, leaving the countryside open to the invaders.

But the Cimbri take their time ravishing the fertile region, which gives Marius time to arrive with reinforcements—his same victorious legions from Aquae Sextiae.

At Vercellae, near the confluence of the Sesia River with the Po on the Raudine Plain, the superiority of the new Roman legions and their cavalry is clearly demonstrated.

In the devastating defeat, the Cimbri are virtually annihilated, and both their highest leaders, Boiorix and Lugius, fall.

The women kill both themselves and their children in order to avoid slavery.

Thus the war, which had begun with a mass migration, ends in defeat and mass suicide.

The Romans supposedly killed one hundred and forty thousand of the barbarian invaders, and took captive more than fifty thousand.

Sulla had served on Marius' staff as tribunus militum during the first half of this campaign, but by 101 had transferred to the army of Catulus to serve as his legatus, and is credited as being the prime mover in the defeat of the tribes (Catulus being a hopeless general and quite incapable of cooperating with Marius).

Contemporaries assign more credit for the victory to Marius than to Catulus.

Despite their joint success, the two commanders regard each other as bitter rivals and after the war build competing temples to demonstrate divine favor.