of his entire career excites a repulsion which we feel for no other great figure in history, not even for the first Napoleon.  Sulla’s whole soul must have recoiled from the coarse manners of the man under whom he first won distinction, and, while he scorned his motives, he must, as he saw him gradually floundering into villainy, have felt the serene superiority of a natural genius for vice.  But at present it was not his game to show his animosity.  Though Marius had given fresh umbrage to the optimates by coming from his triumph (Jan. 1, 104 B.C.) into the Senate wearing his triumphal robes, with the people he was the hero of the hour, and when the storm in the North broke, it was the safest course for Sulla to follow the fortunes of his old commander, who in his turn could not dispense with so able a subordinate.

[Sidenote:  Frontier wars of Rome previous to the Cimbric invasion.] The Romans were constantly at war on the frontiers.  Besides the natural quarrels which would arise between them and lawless barbarians, it was the interest of their generals to make small wars in order to gain sounding names and triumphs.  Such wars, however, by no means always ended in Roman victories; and while in the last thirty years of the second century before the Christian era there were many wars, there were also many defeats. [Sidenote:  The Iapydes.] Sempronius Tuditanus had a triumph for victories over the Iapydes, an Illyrian nation; but he was first beaten by them. [Sidenote:  The Salyes.] In 125 the Salyes, a Ligurian people, who stretched from Marseilles westwards to the Rhone and northwards to the Durance, attacked Marseilles.  Flaccus went to its aid, and triumphed over the Salyes in 123. [Sidenote:  The Balearic Islands.] Quintus Caecilius Metellus subdued the Balearic Islands in the same year, and relieved Spain from the descents of pirates, who either lived in those islands or used them as a rendezvous.  The Salyes again gave trouble in 122, and Calvinus took their capital, which was most probably the modern Aix, establishing there the colony of Aquae Sextiae.  This colony was the point d’appui for further conquests.  The most powerful nations of Gaul were the Aedui and Arverni, whose territory was separated by the Elaver, the modern Allier.  The Arverni were rivals of the Aedui and friends of the Allobroges, a tribe in the same latitude, but on the east of the Rhone.  The Romans made an alliance with the Aedui, and the proconsul Domitius Ahenobarbus, in 122 or 121 B.C., charged the Allobroges with violating Aeduan territory, and with harbouring the king of the Salyes. [Sidenote:  The Allobroges.] The Allobroges were helped by the Arverni, and Domitius defeated their united forces near Avignon, with the loss of 20,000 men.  Fabius succeeded Domitius, and marched northwards across the Isara. [Sidenote:  The Arverni.] Near its junction with the Rhone, on August 8, 121, he defeated with tremendous carnage the Arverni who had crossed