The Historians' History of the World 05

The personal rivalry of her two most fortunate generals becomes now the main channel of the history of Rome herself. In the year which closed the contest of the republic with her dependent allies (88), Sulla was forty-nine years old, Marius about seventy. The former was enjoying the full breeze of popularity and renown, while the latter, wearied but not sated with accumulated honours, was moodily throwing away the advantages he had earned in his earlier career. From campaign to campaign Sulla, as we have seen, had dogged the steps of the elder warrior, always ready to step in and seize the opportunities which the other cast recklessly in his way. Not that Marius in his exalted station was even from the first indifferent to this incipient rivalry. He was deeply jealous of his subordinate. He felt chagrin at the contrast presented by their respective birth and origin; for Sulla, though needy in point of fortune, was a scion of the illustrious house of the Cornelii, and plumed himself on the distinction and advantage such a lineage conferred. Sulla, moreover, was trained in the accomplishments of Hellenic education, which Marius, conscious of his want of them, vainly affected to despise. Sulla wrote and spoke Greek; his memoirs of his own life became the text-book of the Greek historians of Rome, from whom we principally derive our acquaintance with him. But this varnish of superior culture seems to have failed in softening a rough plebeian nature. Sulla was one of many noble Romans who combined with pretensions to literary taste the love of gross debauchery, and pleasure in the society of mimes and vulgar jesters. He was a coarse sensualist and by his disregard of the nuptial tie offended even the lax morality of his age. His eyes, we are told, were of a pure and piercing blue, and their sinister expression was heightened by the coarseness of his complexion and a countenance disfigured by pimples and blotches, compared by the raillery of the Greeks to a mulberry sprinkled with meal. His manners, except when he unbent in the society of his inferiors, were haughty and morose; nor is there any act of kindliness or generosity recorded of him. The nobles who accepted him as their champion had no personal liking for him. But selfish and ambitious though he was, the aggrandisement of his party and order was with Sulla a species of fanaticism. He despised the isolated ascendency of a Marius, and aspired to rule in Rome at the head of a dominant oligarchy.

Marius had quitted the camp at the most critical moment of the war, and while he buried himself in a distant retreat, Sulla brought the contest to a close, having obtained his election to the consulship for the year 88. The imminence of a new war with Mithridates had hastened the arrangements for the peace, and Sulla was still consul when it became necessary to select a general to command in the East. For this important service both his merits and his position gave Sulla the highest claim; but Marius was mortified and jealous, and cursed his own folly in having at such a moment withdrawn himself from the public eye. He returned impatiently to Rome, and showed himself once more among the young soldiers who trained and exercised themselves in the Field of Mars, running, wrestling, and climbing poles in rivalry with the most vigorous and active among them, to prove that, though old in years, he possessed the energy requisite for command. But the nobles had no wish to gratify the man they feared and distrusted, while they had found one of their own order, on whose fidelity they could rely as implicitly as on his valour. They mocked the clumsy feats of the veteran candidate, and persuaded the people to follow their example, and send their old favourite with jeers to his retreat in Campania.