down the hill with irresistible impetuosity, and killed 6000 of the foe.  Norbanus fled to Capua.  Only seventy of the Sullans were killed.  Sulla now crossed the Volturnus, and marching along the Appian Road met the other consul, Scipio, at Teanum, with whom he opened negotiations.  Scipio sent Sertorius to Norbanus, who was blockaded in Capua, to consult him on the terms proposed.  Sertorius, who had guessed what was coming and hoped to prevent it by something more efficacious than the advice of Norbanus, went out of his way and seized Suessa.  This would interrupt Sulla’s immediate communications with the sea, of which he was master.  Sulla complained; but all the while he was, as Sertorius had warned Scipio, corrupting the Consul’s troops. [Sidenote:  Scipio’s troops desert to Sulla.] They murmured when Scipio returned the hostages which Sulla had given; and, when the latter on their invitation approached their lines they went over to him in a body.  On hearing of this Carbo said, that in contending with Sulla he had to contend with a lion and a fox, and that the fox gave him most trouble.

It may be noted here that Sulla, whose calculated moderation was paying him well—­the more pleasantly because he knew that he could wreak his revenge afterwards at his leisure—­never scrupled to employ every kind of subterfuge and lie. [Sidenote:  Sulla’s mendacity.] He tricked and lied on his march to Rome in 88.  He lied foully to the Samnites after the battle of the Colline Gate.  And he lied in his Memoirs, when he said that he only lost four at Chaeroneia, and twenty-three at Sacriportus, where he also said that he killed 20,000 of the foe.  Absurd assertions like these may have been dictated as a sort of lavish acknowledgment paid to fortune, of whom he liked to be thought the favourite—­lies that no one believed or was expected to believe, but keeping up a fiction of which it was his foible to be proud. [Sidenote:  His success due greatly to desertions.] Another thing we may note is, that this was only the first of a long series of treasons to which, as much almost as to his own generalship, Sulla owed his final success.  Five cohorts deserted at Sacriportus.  Five more went over from Carbo to Metellus.  Two hundred and seventy cavalry went over from Carbo to Sulla in Etruria.  A whole legion, despatched by Carbo to relieve Praeneste, joined Pompeius.  At the battle of Faventia 6000 deserted, and a Lucanian legion did the same directly afterwards.  Naples and Narbo were both banded over by treachery.  We hear also of commanders deserting.  On the other hand, nothing is said of anyone deserting from Sulla, so that from the very beginning the contest could never have been really considered doubtful.