but the timid
mariners soon put him ashore again and made off, while Marius stole
along the beach. His pursuers found him in the salt-marsh of
Minturnae sunk to the girdle in the mud and with his head concealed
amidst a quantity of reeds, and delivered him to the civic authorities
of Minturnae. He was placed in prison, and the town-executioner, a
Cimbrian slave, was sent to put him to death; but the German trembled
before the flashing eyes of his old conqueror and the axe fell from
his hands, when the general with his powerful voice haughtily demanded
whether he dared to kill Gaius Marius. When they learned this, the
magistrates of Minturnae were ashamed that the deliverer of Rome should
meet with greater reverence from slaves to whom he had brought bondage
than from his fellow-citizens to whom he had brought freedom; they
loosed his fetters, gave him a vessel and money for travelling expenses,
and sent him to Aenaria (Ischia). The proscribed with the exception
of Sulpicius gradually met in those waters; they landed at Eryx and
at what was formerly Carthage, but the Roman magistrates both in
Sicily and in Africa sent them away. So they escaped to Numidia,
whose desert sand-dunes gave them a place of refuge for the winter.
But the king Hiempsal II, whom they hoped to gain and who had seemed
for a while willing to unite with them, had only done so to lull them
into security, and now attempted to seize their persons. With great
difficulty the fugitives escaped from his cavalry, and found a temporary
refuge in the little island of Cercina (Kerkena) on the coast of Tunis.
We know not whether Sulla thanked his fortunate star that he had been
spared the odium of putting to death the victor of the Cimbrians; at any
rate it does not appear that the magistrates of Minturnae were punished.

Legislation of Sulla

With a view to remove existing evils and to prevent future
revolutions, Sulla suggested a series of new legislative enactments.
For the hard-pressed debtors nothing seems to have been done, except
that the rules as to the maximum of interest were enforced;(24)
directions moreover were given for the sending out of a number of
colonies. The senate which had been greatly thinned by the battles
and prosecutions of the Social war was filled up by the admission of
300 new senators, who were naturally selected in the interest of the
Optimates. Lastly, material changes were adopted in respect to the
mode of election and