d not like it, and even opposed it, but let it
pass at last.

Marius was an indifferent politician. He perceived as well as any one
that violence must not go on, but he hesitated to put it down. He knew
that the aristocracy feared and hated him. Between them and the
people's consul no alliance was possible. He did not care to alienate
his friends, and there may have been other difficulties which we do
not know, in his way. The army itself was perhaps divided. On the
popular side there were two parties: a moderate one, represented by
Memmius, who, as tribune, had impeached the senators for the
Jugurthine infamies; the other, the advanced radicals, led by Glaucia
and Saturninus. Memmius and Glaucia were both candidates for the
consulship; and as Memmius was likely to succeed, he was murdered.

Above the tumults of the factions in the Capitol a cry rising into
shrillness began to be heard from Italy. Caius Gracchus had wished to
extend the Roman franchise to the Italian states, and the suggestion
had cost him his popularity and his life. The Italian provinces had
furnished their share of the armies which had beaten Jugurtha, and had
destroyed the German invaders. They now demanded that they should have
the position which Gracchus designed for them: that they should be
allowed to legislate for themselves, and no longer lie at the mercy of
others, who neither understood their necessities, nor cared for their
interests. They had no friends in the city, save a few far-sighted
statesmen. Senate and mob had at least one point of agreement, that
the spoils of the Empire should be fought for among themselves; and at
the first mention of the invasion of their monopoly a law was passed
making the very agitation of the subject punishable by death.

The contrast of character between two classes of population, became at
once uncomfortably evident. The provincials had been the right arm of
the Empire. Rome, a city of rich men with families of slaves, and of a
crowd of impoverished freemen without employment to keep them in
health and strength, could no longer bring into the field a force
which could hold its ground against the gentry and peasants of
Samnium. The Senate enlisted Greeks, Numidians, any one whose services
they could purchase. They had to encounter soldiers who had been
trained and disciplined by Marius, and they were taught, by defeat
upon defeat, that they had a worse enemy before them than the Germans.
Marius himself