and skilled
rider and fencer, a bold leader of volunteer bands, the youth had
become Imperator and triumphator at an age which excluded him
from every magistracy and from the senate, and had acquired
the first place next to Sulla in public opinion; nay, had obtained
from the indulgent regent himself--half in recognition, half in irony--
the surname of the Great. Unhappily, his mental endowments by no means
corresponded with these unprecedented successes. He was neither
a bad nor an incapable man, but a man thoroughly ordinary, created
by nature to be a good sergeant, called by circumstances to be
a general and a statesman. An intelligent, brave and experienced,
thoroughly excellent soldier, he was still, even in his military
capacity, without trace of any higher gifts. It was characteristic
of him as a general, as well as in other respects, to set to work
with a caution bordering on timidity, and, if possible, to give
the decisive blow only when he had established an immense superiority
over his opponent. His culture was the average culture of the time;
although entirely a soldier, he did not neglect, when he went
to Rhodes, dutifully to admire, and to make presents to,
the rhetoricians there. His integrity was that of a rich man
who manages with discretion his considerable property inherited
and acquired. He did not disdain to make money in the usual senatorial
way, but he was too cold and too rich to incur special risks,
or draw down on himself conspicuous disgrace, on that account.
The vice so much in vogue among his contemporaries, rather than
any virtue of his own, procured for him the reputation--comparatively,
no doubt, well warranted--of integrity and disinterestedness.
His "honest countenance" became almost proverbial, and even after
his death he was esteemed as a worthy and moral man; he was in fact
a good neighbour, who did not join in the revolting schemes
by which the grandees of that age extended the bounds of their domains
through forced sales or measures still worse at the expense
of their humbler neighbours, and in domestic life he displayed
attachment to his wife and children: it redounds moreover to his
credit that he was the first to depart from the barbarous custom
of putting to death the captive kings and generals of the enemy,
after they had been exhibited in triumph. But this did not prevent
him from separating from his beloved wife at the command of his lord
and master Sulla, because sh