the whole it seemed as if
nothing was wanted but a chief, who should give to the opposition a firm
rallying point and a practical aim; and this was now found in Marius.

For the execution of his task two methods of operation offered
themselves; Marius might attempt to overthrow the oligarchy either as
-imperator- at the head of the army, or in the mode prescribed by the
constitution for constitutional changes: his own past career pointed to
the former course, the precedent of Gracchus to the latter. It is easy
to understand why he did not adopt the former plan, perhaps did not even
think of the possibility of adopting it The senate was or seemed so
powerless and helpless, so hated and despised, that Marius conceived
himself scarcely to need any other support in opposing it than his
immense popularity, but hoped in case of necessity to find such a
support, notwithstanding the dissolution of the army, in the soldiers
discharged and waiting for their rewards. It is probable that Marius,
looking to Gracchus' easy and apparently almost complete victory and to
his own resources far surpassing those of Gracchus, deemed the overthrow
of a constitution four hundred years old, and intimately bound up with
the manifold habits and interests of the body-politic arranged in a
complicated hierarchy, a far easier task than it was. But any one, who
looked more deeply into the difficulties of the enterprise than Marius
probably did, might reflect that the army, although in the course of
transition from a militia to a body of mercenaries, was still during
this state of transition by no means adapted for the blind instrument of
a coup d'etat, and that an attempt to set aside the resisting elements
by military means would have probably augmented the power of resistance
in his antagonists. To mix up the organized armed force in the struggle
could not but appear at the first glance superfluous and at the second
hazardous; they were just at the beginning of the crisis, and the
antagonistic elements were still far from having reached their last,
shortest, and simplest expression.

The Popular Party

Marius therefore discharged the army after his triumph in accordance
with the existing regulation, and entered on the course traced out by
Gaius Gracchus for procuring to himself supremacy in the state by
undertaking its constitutional magistracies. In this enterprise he
found himself dependent for support on what was called the popular
part