settled, that the so-called popular party
as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of
government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an
oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently
well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of
the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual
oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon
as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the
rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius
was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted.
If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of
Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but
after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing
more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the
commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious
officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older
Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for
himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly-
expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in
the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible
weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say
that Marius intended to play the pretender, at least at the time when
he canvassed the people for the supreme command in Africa; but,
whether he did or did not understand what he was doing, there was
evidently an end of the restored aristocratic government when the
comitial machine began to make generals, or, which was nearly the
same thing, when every popular officer was able in legal fashion to
nominate himself as general. Only one new element emerged in these
preliminary crises; this was the introduction of military men and of
military power into the political revolution. Whether the coming
forward of Marius would be the immediate prelude of a new attempt
to supersede the oligarchy by the -tyrannis-, or whether it would,
as in various similar cases, pass away without further consequence
as an isolated encroachment on the prerogative of the government,
could not yet be determined; but it could well be foreseen that, if
these rudiments of a second -tyrannis- should attain any development,
it was not a statesman like Gaius Gracchus, but an officer