The Historians' History of the World 05

Fimbria might well despair when he saw the forces with which his own victory over Mithridates had armed the champion of the party he had outraged. Sulla could leave in the East the legions which his rivals had brought to share or contest his laurels, while he took himself the route of Italy with a force of thirty thousand veterans, who had served three years under his standard, and had learned in a rapid career of glory and plunder to regard him as the founder and the pledge of their fortunes. The treasures of Mithridates, swelled by the ransom of an hundred Greek and Asiatic cities, furnished him with ample means for securing their fidelity. The vast fleets of Asia, delivered into his hands, might be used to abridge the long march through Thrace and Macedonia. The news of the surrender and death of Fimbria was accompanied by the announcement of Sulla’s speedy return; and the moderation he had professed while his successes were still incomplete was already exchanged for bitter complaints of the injuries he had received, the confiscation of his estates, the banishment of his family, the proscription of his own person, and persecution of his party. But his foes and those of the republic, whom he classed together, were now, he declared, about to suffer due chastisement; in proclaiming an amnesty for honest men of all parties, he announced that he would respect the privileges of the Italians, and leave them no excuse for devoting themselves to his adversaries.

THE RETURN OF SULLA; AND THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

[84-83 B.C.]

The senate, no less than the populace, was terrified by this manifesto. So many of the Marian party had become incorporated among the thinned ranks of the ancient aristocracy, that the counter-revolution now impending seemed not only to menace the safety of the particular faction which had aspired to rule the state, but to threaten the great mass of the nobility with indiscriminate massacre. Both in Rome and throughout the states of the peninsula, the vicissitudes of war and conflicts of special interests had gone far to efface the old distinctions of parties, and both Cinna and Sulla relied rather upon personal than political attachments. The senate, as an order in the state, could only pretend to mediate between rival chieftains.