their houses, defiled their children, and violated
their wives; and they went on plundering and committing violence, till
Cinna and Sertorius combining, attacked them when they were asleep in
the camp, and transfixed them with spears.

XLV. In the meantime, as if the wind was beginning to turn, reports
reached Rome from all quarters that Sulla had finished the war with
Mithridates, and recovered the provinces, and was sailing against the
city with a large force. This intelligence caused a brief cessation
and pause to unspeakable calamities, for Marius and his faction were
in expectation of the immediate arrival of their enemies. Now being
elected consul[139] for the seventh time, on the very Calends of
January, which is the beginning of the year, Marius caused one Sextus
Lucinus[140] to be thrown down the Tarpeian rock, which appeared to be
a presage of the great misfortunes that were again to befal the
partisans of Marius and the State. But Marius was now worn out with
labour, and, as it were, drowned with cares, and cowed in his spirit;
and the experience of past dangers and toil made him tremble at the
thoughts of a new war, and fresh struggles and alarms, and he could
not sustain himself when he reflected that now he would have to
hazard a contest, not with Octavius or Merula at the head of a
tumultuous crowd and seditious rabble, but that Sulla was
advancing--Sulla, who had once driven him from Rome, and had now
confined Mithridates within the limits of his kingdom of Pontus. With
his mind crushed by such reflections, and placing before his eyes his
long wanderings and escapes and dangers in his flight by sea and by
land, he fell into a state of deep despair, and was troubled with
nightly alarms and terrific dreams in which he thought he heard a
voice continually calling out,

"Dreadful is the lion's lair
Though he is no longer there."

As he greatly dreaded wakeful nights, he gave himself up to drinking
and intoxication at unseasonable hours and to a degree unsuited to his
age, in order to procure sleep, as if he could thus elude his cares.
At last when a man arrived with news from the sea, fresh terrors
seized him, partly from fear of the future and partly from feeling the
burden and the weariness of the present state of affairs; and while he
was in this condition, a slight disturbance sufficed to bring on a
kind of pleurisy, as the philosopher Poseidonius[141] relates, who
also says that he had an in