which office he held in 661 after having failed in a previous candidature, it once more chanced that in his province, the least important of all, the first victory over king Mithradates and the first treaty with the mighty Arsacids, as well as their first humiliation, occurred.  The Civil war followed.  It was Sulla mainly, who decided the first act of it—­the Italian insurrection—­ in favour of Rome, and thus won for himself the consulship by his sword; it was he, moreover, who when consul suppressed with energetic rapidity the Sulpician revolt.  Fortune seemed to make it her business to eclipse the old hero Marius by means of this younger officer.  The capture of Jugurtha, the vanquishing of Mithradates, both of which Marius had striven for in vain, were accomplished in subordinate positions by Sulla:  in the Social war, in which Marius lost his renown as a general and was deposed, Sulla established his military repute and rose to the consulship; the revolution of 666, which was at the same time and above all a personal conflict between the two generals, ended with the outlawry and flight of Marius.  Almost without desiring it, Sulla had become the most famous general of his time and the shield of the oligarchy.  New and more formidable crises ensued—­the Mithradatic war, the Cinnan revolution; the star of Sulla continued always in the ascendant.  Like the captain who seeks not to quench the flames of his burning ship but continues to fire on the enemy, Sulla, while the revolution was raging in Italy, persevered unshaken in Asia till the public foe was subdued.  So soon as he had done with that foe, he crushed anarchy and saved the capital from the firebrands of the desperate Samnites and revolutionists.  The moment of his return home was for Sulla an overpowering one in joy and in pain:  he himself relates in his memoirs that during his first night in Rome he had not been able to close an eye, and we may well believe it.  But still his task was not at an end; his star was destined to rise still higher.  Absolute autocrat as was ever any king, and yet constantly abiding on the ground of formal right, he bridled the ultra-reactionary party, annihilated the Gracchan constitution which had for forty years limited the oligarchy, and compelled first the powers of the capitalists and of the urban proletariate which had entered into rivalry with the oligarchy, and ultimately the arrogance of the sword which had grown up in the bosom of his own staff, to yield once more to the law which he strengthened afresh.  He established the oligarchy on a more independent footing than ever, placed the magisterial power as a ministering instrument in its hands, committed to it the legislation, the courts, the supreme military and financial power, and furnished it with a sort of bodyguard in the liberated slaves and with a sort of army in the settled military colonists.  Lastly, when the work was finished, the creator gave way to his own creation; the absolute autocrat became