crouched for fear. The Tuscan seers interpreted
this to portend the commencement of a new period, and a general
change. They say that there are in all eight periods, which differ in
mode of life and habits altogether from one another, and to each
period is assigned by the deity a certain number of years determined
by the revolution of a great year. When a period is completed, the
commencement of another is indicated by some wondrous sign on the
earth or from the heavens, so as to make it immediately evident to
those who attend to such matters and have studied them, that men are
now adopting other habits and modes of life, and are less or more an
object of care to the gods than the men of former periods. They say,
in the change from one period to another there are great alterations,
and that the art of the seer at one time is held in high repute, and
is successful in its predictions, when the deity gives clear and
manifest signs, but that in the course of another period the art falls
into a low condition, being for the most part conjectural, and
attempting to know the future by equivocal and misty signs. Now this
is what the Tuscan wise men said, who are supposed to know more of
such things than anybody else. While the senate was communicating on
these omens with the seers, in the temple of Bellona,[190] a sparrow
flew in before the whole body with a grasshopper in his mouth, part of
which he dropped, and the rest he carried off with him out of the
place. From this the interpreters of omens apprehended faction and
divisions between the landholders on the one side and the city folk
and the merchant class on the other, for the latter were loud and
noisy like a grasshopper, but the owners of land kept quiet on their
estates.

VIII. Now Marius contrived to gain over the tribune Sulpicius,[191] a
man without rival in any kind of villainy, and so one need not inquire
whom he surpassed in wickedness, but only wherein he surpassed
himself. For in him were combined cruelty, audacity, and
rapaciousness, without any consideration of shame or of any crime,
inasmuch as he sold the Roman citizenship to libertini[192] and
resident aliens, and publicly received the money at a table in the
Forum. He maintained three thousand men armed with daggers, and also a
number of young men of the equestrian class always about him, and
ready for anything, whom he called the Opposition Senate. He caused a
law to be passed that no Senator should cont