having rendered new services and of having received in return new and most severe mortifications, with the bitter feeling of being no longer dreaded but despised by his enemies, with that gnawing spirit of vengeance in his heart, which feeds on its own poison.  It was true of him also, as of the new burgesses and the excluded; incapable and awkward as he had shown himself to be, his popular name was still a formidable weapon in the hand of a demagogue.

Decay of Military Discipline

With these elements of political convulsion was combined the rapidly spreading decay of decorous soldierly habits and of military discipline.  The seeds, which were sown by the enrolment of the proletariate in the army, developed themselves with alarming rapidity during the demoralizing insurrectionary war, which compelled Rome to admit to the service every man capable of bearing arms without distinction, and which above all carried political partizanship directly into the headquarters and into the soldiers’ tent.  The effects soon appeared in the slackening of all the bonds of the military hierarchy.  During the siege of Pompeii the commander of the Sullan besieging corps, the consular Aulus Postumius Albinus, was put to death with stones and bludgeons by his soldiers, who believed themselves betrayed by their general to the enemy; and Sulla the commander-in-chief contented himself with exhorting the troops to efface the memory of that occurrence by their brave conduct in presence of the enemy.  The authors of that deed were the marines, from of old the least respectable of the troops.  A division of legionaries raised chiefly from the city populace soon followed the example thus given.  Instigated by Gaius Titius, one of the heroes of the market-place, it laid hands on the consul Cato.  By an accident he escaped death on this occasion; Titius was arrested, but was not punished.  When Cato soon afterwards actually perished in a combat, his own officers, and particularly the younger Gaius Marius, were—­whether justly or unjustly, cannot be ascertained—­designated as the authors of his death.

Economic Crisis
Murder of Asellio

To the political and military crisis thus beginning fell to be added the economic crisis—­perhaps still more terrible—­which set in upon the Roman capitalists in consequence of the Social war and the Asiatic troubles.  The debtors, unable even to raise the interest due and yet inexorably pressed by their creditors, had on the one hand entreated from the proper judicial authority, the urban praetor Asellio, a respite to enable them to dispose of their possessions, and on the other hand had searched out once more the old obsolete laws as to usury(21) and, according to the rule established in olden times, had sued their creditors for fourfold the amount of the interest paid to them contrary to the law.  Asellio lent himself to bend the actually existing law into conformity with the letter, and put into