lled night and day. The artisans of the city and
the country class from which he sprang thronged to hear him abuse
Metellus, and boast how soon he would capture or kill Jugurtha, and he
was triumphantly elected consul for the year 107.

How his after achievements turned his head we shall see. Already there
were drops of bitterness in the sweet cup of success. It was Metellus
who was called Numidicus, not he, and it was Sulla whose dare-devil
knavery had entrapped the king. The substantial work had been done
by the former. The _coup de theatre_ which completed it revealed
the latter as a rival. Marius fumed at the credit gained by
these aristocrats; and when Bocchus dedicated on the Capitol a
representation of Sulla receiving Jugurtha's surrender, he could not
conceal his wrath. [Sidenote: L. Cornelius Sulla.] In Sulla he perhaps
already recognised by instinct one who would outrival him in the end.
He was the very antipodes of Marius in everything except bravery and
good generalship, and faith in his star. He was an aristocrat. He was
dissolute. He was an admirer of Hellenic literature. War was not his
all in all as a profession. If he had a lion's courage, the fox in him
was even more to be feared. He, like Marius, owed his rise partly to a
woman, but, characteristically, to a mistress, not a wife, who helped
him as Charles II.'s sultana helped the young Churchill. If the
boorish nature of the one degenerated with age into bloodthirsty
brutality, the other was from the first cynically destitute of
feeling. He would send men to death with a jest, and the cold-blooded,
calculating, remorseless infamy of his entire career excites a
repulsion which we feel for no other great figure in history, not even
for the first Napoleon. Sulla's whole soul must have recoiled from the
coarse manners of the man under whom he first won distinction, and,
while he scorned his motives, he must, as he saw him gradually
floundering into villainy, have felt the serene superiority of a
natural genius for vice. But at present it was not his game to show
his animosity. Though Marius had given fresh umbrage to the optimates
by coming from his triumph (Jan. 1, 104 B.C.) into the Senate wearing
his triumphal robes, with the people he was the hero of the hour, and
when the storm in the North broke, it was the safest course for Sulla
to follow the fortunes of his old commander, who in his turn could not
dispense with so able a subordinate.

[Sidenote