embittered his victories and
envenomed his defeats; he had been enabled to retaliate for every
sarcasm by a stroke of the dagger. Moreover he entered on the new
year once more as consul; the vision of a seventh consulate, which
the oracle had promised him, and which he had sought for thirteen
years to grasp, had now been realized. The gods had granted to him
what he wished; but now too, as in the old legendary period, they
practised the fatal irony of destroying man by the fulfilment of
his wishes. In his early consulates the pride, in his sixth the
laughing-stock, of his fellow-citizens, he was now in his seventh
loaded with the execration of all parties, with the hatred of the
whole nation; he, the originally upright, capable, gallant man, was
branded as the crackbrained chief of a reckless band of robbers.
He himself seemed to feel it. His days were passed as in delirium,
and by night his couch denied him rest, so that he grasped the
wine-cup in order merely to drown thought. A burning fever seized
him; after being stretched for seven days on a sick bed, in the
wild fancies of which he was fighting on the fields of Asia Minor
the battles of which the laurels were destined for Sulla, he
expired on the 13th Jan. 668. He died, more than seventy years
old, in full possession of what he called power and honour, and in
his bed; but Nemesis assumes various shapes, and does not always
expiate blood with blood. Was there no sort of retaliation in the
fact, that Rome and Italy now breathed more freely on the news of
the death of the famous saviour of the people than at the tidings
of the battle on the Raudine plain?

Even after his death individual incidents no doubt occurred, which
recalled that time of terror; Gaius Fimbria, for instance, who more
than any other during the Marian butcheries had dipped his hand in
blood, made an attempt at the very funeral of Marius to kill the
universally revered -pontifex maximus- Quintus Scaevola (consul in
659) who had been spared even by Marius, and then, when Scaevola
recovered from the wound he had received, indicted him criminally
on account of the offence, as Fimbria jestingly expressed it, of
having not been willing to let himself be murdered. But the orgies
of murder at any rate were over. Sertorius called together the
Marian bandits, under pretext of giving them their pay, surrounded
them with his trusty Celtic troops, and caused them to be cut down
en masse to the numb