han the citizens in arms, called for the
moment from their various occupations, to return to them when the
occasion for their services was past. Marius had perceived that fewer
men, better trained and disciplined, could be made more effective and
be more easily handled. He had studied war as a science. He had
perceived that the present weakness need be no more than an accident,
and that there was a latent force in the Roman state, which needed
only organization to resume its ascendency. "He enlisted," it was
said, "the worst of the citizens," men, that is to say, who had no
occupation, and who became soldiers by profession; and as persons
without property could not have furnished themselves at their own
cost, he must have carried out the scheme proposed by Gracchus, and
equipped them at the expense of the state. His discipline was of the
sternest. The experiment was new; and men of rank who had a taste for
war in earnest, and did not wish that the popular party should have
the whole benefit and credit of the improvements, were willing to go
with him; among them a dissipated young patrician, called Lucius
Sulla, whose name also was destined to be memorable.

By these methods, and out of these materials, an army was formed, such
as no Roman general had hitherto led. It performed extraordinary
marches, carried its water-supplies with it in skins, and followed the
enemy across sandy deserts hitherto found impassable. In less than two
years the war was over. The Moors, to whom Jugurtha had fled,
surrendered him to Sulla; and he was brought in chains to Rome, where
he finished his life in a dungeon.

Marius had formed an army barely in time to save Italy from being
totally overwhelmed. A vast migratory wave of population had been set
in motion behind the Rhine and the Danube. The German forests were
uncultivated. The hunting and pasture grounds were too straight for
the numbers crowded into them, and two enormous hordes were rolling
westward and southward in search of some new abiding-place. Each
division consisted of hundreds of thousands. They travelled, with
their wives and children, their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians
and with the modern South African Dutch, being at once their
conveyance and their home. Gray-haired priestesses tramped along among
them, barefooted, in white linen dresses, the knife at their girdle;
northern Iphigenias, sacrificing prisoners as they were taken, to the
gods of Valhalla. On they sw