Quintus Servilius Caepio was a Roman statesman and general, consul in 106 BC, and proconsul of Cisalpine Gaul in 105 BC. He was the father of Quintus Servilius Caepio and the grandfather of Servilia.
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Consulship and Arausio
During his consulship in 106 BC, he passed a controversial law, with the help of the famous orator Lucius Licinius Crassus, by which the jurymen were again to be chosen from the senators instead of the equites. However, it appears this law was overturned by a law of Gaius Servilius Glaucia in either 104 or 101 BC.
After his consulship, he was assigned to Gaul, where he captured the town of Tolosa, ancient Toulouse. There, he found some 50 thousand bars of gold and 10 thousand bars of silver which were legendarily stolen from the temple of Delphi by the Scordisci in the Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BC. The riches of Tolosa were shipped back to Rome, but only the silver arrived; the gold was stolen by a band of marauders, rumoured to have been hired by Caepio himself. The Gold of Tolosa was never found, and was said to have been passed all the way down to the last heir of the Servilii Caepiones, Marcus Junius Brutus.
During the southern migration of the Cimbri in 105 BC, Caepio was assigned an army to defeat the migrating tribe. Also tasked to defeat the Cimbri was the consul for that year, Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, who was a novus homo ("new man"). While the sitting consul outranked Caepio, Caepio refused to cooperate with the consul and his army. Leading one of the two Roman armies into the Battle of Arausio, this refusal to cooperate with his superior officer, led to the destruction of both armies. Caepio refused to camp with Maximus and his troops; when the battle began, both Roman armies were overrun and defeated by the massively numerically superior Cimbri force, resulting in the deaths of some 60 to 80 thousand Roman soldiers.
