day, and was in military gifts and experience beyond doubt far superior to his colleague, but especially because the second victory at Vercellae had in fact been rendered possible only by the first victory at Aquae Sextiae.  But 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-three years of age, attracted the notice of the stern general by the neatness with which he kept his horse and his accoutrements, as well as by his bravery in combat and his decorous demeanour in camp.  He had returned home with honourable