at that period it was considerations of political
partisanship rather than of military merit which attached the glory
of having saved Rome from the Cimbri and Teutones entirely to the name
of Marius. Catulus was a polished and clever man, so graceful a
speaker that his euphonious language sounded almost like eloquence,
a tolerable writer of memoirs and occasional poems, and an excellent
connoisseur and critic of art; but he was anything but a man of the
people, and his victory was a victory of the aristocracy. The battles
of the rough farmer on the other hand, who had been raised to honour
by the common people and had led the common people to victory, were
not merely defeats of the Cimbri and Teutones, but also defeats of the
government: there were associated with them hopes far different from
that of being able once more to carry on mercantile transactions on
the one side of the Alps or to cultivate the fields without molestation
on the other. Twenty years had elapsed since the bloody corpse of
Gaius Gracchus had been flung into the Tiber; for twenty years the
government of the restored oligarchy had been endured and cursed;
still there had risen no avenger for Gracchus, no second master to
prosecute the building which he had begun. There were many who
hated and hoped, many of the worst and many of the best citizens
of the state: was the man, who knew how to accomplish this vengeance
and these wishes, found at last in the son of the day-labourer of
Arpinum? Were they really on the threshold of the new much-dreaded
and much-desired second revolution?

CHAPTER VI

The Attempt of Marius at Revolution and the Attempt of Drusus at Reform

Marius

Gaius Marius, the son of a poor day-labourer, was born in 599 at the
village of Cereatae then belonging to Arpinum, which afterwards obtained
municipal rights as Cereatae Marianae and still at the present day bears
the name of "Marius' home" (Casamare). He was reared at the plough,
in circumstances so humble that they seemed to preclude him from access
even to the municipal offices of Arpinum: he learned early--what he
practised afterwards even when a general--to bear hunger and thirst,
the heat of summer and the cold of winter, and to sleep on the hard
ground. As soon as his age allowed him, he had entered the army and
through service in the severe school of the Spanish wars had rapidly
risen to be an officer. In Scipio's Numantine war he, at that time
twenty-thr