in Spain the next year, and showed his usual vigour there in putting down brigandage.  With the soldiers he was as popular as Ney was with Napoleon’s armies, for he was one of them, rough-spoken as they were, fond of a cup of wine, and never scorning to share their toils.  While he was with Metellus at Utica, a soothsayer prophesied that the gods had great things in store for him, and he asked Metellus for leave to go to Rome and stand for the consulship.  Metellus replied that when his own son stood for it it would be time enough for Marius.  The man at whom he sneered resented sneers.  There is evidence that the simple nature of the rough soldier was becoming already spoiled by constant success.  He was burning with ambition, and would ascribe the favours of heaven to his own merits.  He at once set to work to undermine the credit of his commander with the army, the Roman merchants, and Gauda, saying that he himself would soon bring the war to an end if he were general.  Metellus can hardly have been a popular man anywhere, and his strictness must have made him many enemies.  Thus he scornfully refused Gauda a seat at his side, and an escort of Roman horse.  Gauda and the rest wrote to Rome, urging that Marius should have the army.  Metellus with the worst grace let him go just twelve days before the election.  But the favourite of the gods had a fair wind, and travelled night and day.  The artisans of the city and the country class from which he sprang thronged to hear him abuse Metellus, and boast how soon he would capture or kill Jugurtha, and he was triumphantly elected consul for the year 107.

How his after achievements turned his head we shall see.  Already there were drops of bitterness in the sweet cup of success.  It was Metellus who was called Numidicus, not he, and it was Sulla whose dare-devil knavery had entrapped the king.  The substantial work had been done by the former.  The coup de theatre which completed it revealed the latter as a rival.  Marius fumed at the credit gained by these aristocrats; and when Bocchus dedicated on the Capitol a representation of Sulla receiving Jugurtha’s surrender, he could not conceal his wrath. [Sidenote:  L. Cornelius Sulla.] In Sulla he perhaps already recognised by instinct one who would outrival him in the end.  He was the very antipodes of Marius in everything except bravery and good generalship, and faith in his star.  He was an aristocrat.  He was dissolute.  He was an admirer of Hellenic literature.  War was not his all in all as a profession.  If he had a lion’s courage, the fox in him was even more to be feared.  He, like Marius, owed his rise partly to a woman, but, characteristically, to a mistress, not a wife, who helped him as Charles II.’s sultana helped the young Churchill.  If the boorish nature of the one degenerated with age into bloodthirsty brutality, the other was from the first cynically destitute of feeling.  He would send men to death with a jest, and the cold-blooded, calculating, remorseless infamy