' wife, Caius
Julius Caesar, but, as he was of a high patrician family, Sulla only
required of him to divorce his wife and marry a stepdaughter of his own.
Caesar refused, and fled to the Sabine hills, where pursuers were sent
after him; but his life was begged for by his friends at Rome,
especially by the Vestal Virgins, and Sulla spared his life, saying,
however, "Beware; in that young trifler is more than one Marius." Caesar
went to join the army in the East for safety, and thus broke off the
idle life of pleasure he had been leading in Rome.

[Illustration: PALAZZO VECCHIO, FLORENCE.]

The country people were even more cruelly punished than the citizens:
whole cities were destroyed and districts laid waste; the whole of
Etruria was ravaged, the old race entirely swept away, and the towns
ruined beyond revival, while the new city of Florence was built with
their remains, and all we know of them is from the tombs which have of
late years been opened.

[Illustration: CORNELIUS SULLA.]

Both the consuls had perished, and Sulla caused himself to be named
Dictator. He had really a purpose in all the horrors he had perpetrated,
namely, to clear the way for restoring the old government at Rome, which
Marius and his Italians had been overthrowing. He did not see that the
rule which had worked tolerably well while Rome was only a little city
with a small country round it, would not serve when it was the head of
numerous distant countries, where the governors, like himself and
Marius, grew rich, and trained armies under them able to overpower the
whole state at home. So he set to work to put matters as much as
possible in the old order. So many of the Senate had been killed, that
he had to make up the numbers by putting in three hundred knights; and,
to supply the lack of other citizens, after the hosts who had perished,
he allowed the Italians to go on coming in to be enrolled as citizens;
and ten thousand slaves, who had belonged to his victims, were not only
set free, but made citizens as his own clients, thus taking the name of
Cornelius. He also much lessened the power of the tribunes of the
people, and made a law that when a man had once been a tribune he should
never be chosen for any of the higher offices of the state. By these
means he sought to keep up the old patrician power, on which he believed
the greatness of Rome depended; though, after all, the grand old
patrician families had mostly died off, and half the