by Ofella;] Quintus Lucretius Ofella also came, soon to find to his cost that he had chosen a master who could as readily forget as accept timely service. [Sidenote:  by Cn.  Pompeius;] Most welcome of all was Cneius Pompeius, welcome not only for his talents, energy, and popularity, but because he did not come empty-handed.  He had taken service under Cinna, but had been looked on with distrust, and an action had been brought against him to make him surrender plunder which his father, Cneius Pompeius Strabo, was said to have appropriated when he took Auximum.  Carbo had pleaded for him, and he had been acquitted.  But, as soon as Sulla was gaining ground in Italy, he went to Picenum where he had estates, and expelled from Auximum the adherents of Carbo, and then passing from town to town won them one by one from his late protector’s interests, and got together a corps of three legions, with all the proper equipment and munitions of war.  Three officers were sent against him at the head of three divisions; but they quarrelled, and Pompeius, who is said to have slain with his own hand the strongest horseman in the enemy’s ranks, defeated one of them and effected a junction with Sulla somewhere in Apulia.  Sulla’s soldierly eye was pleased at the sight of troops thus successful, and in good martial trim; and when Pompeius addressed him as Imperator, he hailed him by the same title in return.  Or, perhaps, he was only playing on the youth’s vanity, for Pompeius, who was for his courage and good looks the darling of the soldiers and the women, was very vain, and flattery was a potion which it seems to have been one of Sulla’s cynical maxims always to administer in strong doses. [Sidenote:  by Philippus;] Later on he was joined by Philippus, the foe of Drusus, who for shifty and successful knavery seems to have been another Marcus Scaurus; [Sidenote:  by Cethegus;] by Cethegus, who had been one of his bitterest enemies, which to a man of Sulla’s business-like disposition would not be an objection, so long as he could make himself useful at the time; [Sidenote:  by Verres.] and by Caius Verres, a late quaestor of Carbo, who had embezzled the public money in that capacity, and thus began by tergiversation and theft a notorious career.

Sulla marched northwards through Apulia, gaining friends by committing no devastation, and sending proposals of peace to the consul Norbanus, which were as hypocritical as was his abstinence from ravaging the country.  He meant to deal with these Samnites through whose country he was marching at some other time.  At present it was most politic not to provoke them.  According to Appian, he met the consul at Canusium, on the Aufidus. [Sidenote:  Battle of Mount Tifata.  Defeat of Norbanus.] But it is probable that this is a mistake, and that the first battle was fought at Mount Tifata, a spur of the Apennines, near Capua.  Norbanus had seized Sulla’s envoys, and this so enraged the soldiers of the latter that they charged