he
Sublician bridge and the bridge is held behind him by one friend, almost
as Horatius held it against an army. Yet the nobles and their hired
Cretan bowmen force the way and pursue him into Furina's grove. There a
Greek slave ends him, and to get more gold fills the poor head with
metal--and is paid in full. Three hundred died with Tiberius, three
thousand were put to death for his brother's sake. With the goods of the
slain and the dowries of their wives, Opimius built the Temple of
Concord on the spot where the later one still stands in part, between
the Comitium and the Capitol. The poor of Rome, and Cornelia, and the
widows and children of the murdered men, knew what that 'Concord' meant.

[Illustration: BRASS OF TIBERIUS, SHOWING THE TEMPLE OF CONCORD]

Then followed revolution, war with runaway slaves, war with the
immediate allies, then civil war, while wealth and love of wealth grew
side by side, the one, insatiate, devouring the other.

First the slaves made for Sicily, wild, mountainous, half-governed then
as it is today, and they held much of it against their masters for five
years. Within short memory, almost yesterday, a handful of outlaws has
defied a powerful nation's best soldiers in the same mountains. It is
small wonder that many thousand men, fighting for liberty and life,
should have held out so long.

And meanwhile Jugurtha of Numidia had for long years bought every Roman
general sent against him, had come to Rome himself and bought the laws,
and had gone back to his country with contemptuous leave-taking--'Thou
city where all is sold!' And still he bought, till Caius Marius,
high-hearted plebeian and great soldier, brought him back to die in the
Mamertine prison.

Then against wealth arose the last and greatest power of Rome, her
terrible armies that set up whom they would, to have their will of
Senate and fathers and people. First Marius, then Sylla whom he had
taught to fight, and taught to beat him in the end, after Cinna had been
murdered for his sake at Ancona.

Marius and Sylla, the plebeian and the patrician, were matched at first
as leader and lieutenant, then both as conquerors, then as alternate
despots of Rome and mortal foes, till their long duel wrecked what had
been and opened ways for what was to be.

First, Sylla claims that he, and not Marius, took Jugurtha, when the
Numidian ally betrayed him, though the King and his two sons marched in
the train of the plebeian's triump