but, as she did not know the name of the shining ornaments, the language she used to designate them was, “Those things you have upon your arms.”  The soldiers acceded to her terms; she opened the gates, and they, instead of giving her the bracelets, threw their shields upon her as they passed, until the poor girl was crushed down with them and destroyed.  This was near the Tarpeian Rock, which afterward took her name.  The rock is now found to be perforated by a great many subterranean passages, the remains, probably, of ancient quarries.  Some of these galleries are now walled up; others are open; and the people who live around the spot believe, it is said, to this day, that Tarpeia herself sits, enchanted, far in the interior of these caverns, covered with gold and jewels, but that whoever attempts to find her is fated by an irresistible destiny to lose his way, and he never returns.  The last story is probably as true as the other.

[Sidenote:  Escape of Sylla’s wife.]

Marius continued his executions and massacres until the whole of Sylla’s party had been slain or put to flight.  He made every effort to discover Sylla’s wife and child, with a view to destroying them also, but they could not be found.  Some friends of Sylla, taking compassion on their innocence and helplessness, concealed them, and thus saved Marius from the commission of one intended crime.  Marius was disappointed, too, in some other cases, where men whom he had intended to kill destroyed themselves to baffle his vengeance.  One shut himself up in a room with burning charcoal, and was suffocated with the fumes.  Another bled himself to death upon a public altar, calling down the judgments of the god to whom he offered this dreadful sacrifice, upon the head of the tyrant whose atrocious cruelty he was thus attempting to evade.

[Sidenote:  Illness of Marius.] [Sidenote:  Sylla outlawed.]

By the time that Marius had got fairly established in his new position, and was completely master of Rome, and the city had begun to recover a little from the shock and consternation produced by his executions, he fell sick.  He was attacked with an acute disease of great violence.  The attack was perhaps produced, and was certainly aggravated by, the great mental excitements through which he had passed during his exile, and in the entire change of fortune which had attended his return.  From being a wretched fugitive, hiding for his life among gloomy and desolate ruins, he found himself suddenly transferred to the mastery of the world.  His mind was excited, too, in respect to Sylla, whom he had not yet reached or subdued, but who was still prosecuting his war against Mithridates.  Marius had had him pronounced by the Senate an enemy to his country, and was meditating plans to reach him in his distant province, considering his triumph incomplete as long as his great rival was at liberty and alive.  The sickness cut short these plans, but it only inflamed to double violence the excitement and the agitations which attended them.