s
a mind incapable of idealism. He and Caius Marius, his great rival, are
alike in nothing except the harsh cruelty that belongs to times of
revolutionary upheaval. In all other respects they are as unlike as any
two men that ever lived. Marius was a son of the soil, a soldier with a
soldier's merits--courage, rude good humour, careless generosity--and
his faults--cruelty, coarseness, indifference to everything but the
rudest of pleasures. His one big work was the reconstruction of the
army. Sulla was an aristocrat to the finger-tips: proud, cold-blooded,
indifferent, highly educated, with a deep disbelief in everything and
everybody. He had a remarkable intellect, and a physical beauty which
attracted women without number. But it is doubtful whether he ever cared
for a human creature. His extraordinary courage and his equally
extraordinary indifference rested on a chilling belief in Fate. He was
lucky: he called himself Sulla Felix; but nothing in the end was going
to make any difference.

[Illustration: THE ARISTOCRAT distributing largesse]

To see Marius and Sulla against the background of their time the events
must be traced that followed on the death of Caius Gracchus.

Tiberius Gracchus, and far more clearly his brother Caius, had seen the
growing dangers that threatened Rome, if no wise steps were taken in
time to meet them. Both brothers gave their lives in the effort to save
their country. Their sacrifice was vain. The men who had power in their
hands were blind to the great change that was taking place. They tried
to compel the stream to go on flowing in its old channels, although the
weight of waters had grown too great for them to carry. The result was
that suddenly the waters broke loose and flooded everything. Rome, all
Italy, was torn by a bloody and terrible civil war.

At the time many people put these things down to the Gracchi. They had
stirred up the lower orders and the Italians to discontent and
bitterness. They had set strife between classes in Rome: roused the
middle class against the senators and the mob against both. This was not
a just statement. Caius Gracchus had thought out a great plan of reform
that, if carried through, might have saved Rome and Italy from
revolution and civil war. He had to win people to his side. In order to
do so he passed measures that were not good in themselves but only as
means to his great end. Thus he made the knights, the new class of
wealthy men, judges i