[Sidenote:  Marius delirious.] [Sidenote:  Death of Marius.]

As the dying tyrant tossed restlessly upon his bed, it was plain that the delirious ravings which he began soon to utter were excited by the same sentiments of insatiable ambition and ferocious hate whose calmer dictates he had obeyed when well.  He imagined that he had succeeded in supplanting Sylla in his command, and that he was himself in Asia at the head of his armies.  Impressed with this idea, he stared wildly around; he called aloud the name of Mithridates; he shouted orders to imaginary troops; he struggled to break away from the restraints which the attendants about his bedside imposed, to attack the phantom foes which haunted him in his dreams.  This continued for several days, and when at last nature was exhausted by the violence of these paroxysms of phrensy, the vital powers which had been for seventy long years spending their strength in deeds of selfishness, cruelty, and hatred, found their work done, and sunk to revive no more.

[Sidenote:  Return of Sylla.] [Sidenote:  Marius’s son.] [Sidenote:  Proscriptions and massacres of Sylla.]

Marius left a son, of the same name with himself, who attempted to retain his father’s power; but Sylla, having brought his war with Mithridates to a conclusion, was now on his return from Asia, and it was very evident that a terrible conflict was about to ensue.  Sylla advanced triumphantly through the country, while Marius the younger and his partisans concentrated their forces about the city, and prepared for defense.  The people of the city were divided, the aristocratic faction adhering to the cause of Sylla, while the democratic influences sided with Marius.  Political parties rise and fall, in almost all ages of the world, in alternate fluctuations, like those of the tides.  The faction of Marius had been for some time in the ascendency, and it was now its turn to fall.  Sylla found, therefore, as he advanced, every thing favorable to the restoration of his own party to power.  He destroyed the armies which came out to oppose him.  He shut up the young Marius in a city not far from Rome, where he had endeavored to find shelter and protection, and then advanced himself and took possession of the city.  There he caused to be enacted again the horrid scenes of massacre and murder which Marius had perpetrated before, going, however, as much beyond the example which he followed as men usually do in the commission of crime.  He gave out lists of the names of men whom he wished to have destroyed, and these unhappy victims of his revenge were to be hunted out by bands of reckless soldiers, in their dwellings, or in the places of public resort in the city, and dispatched by the sword wherever they could be found.  The scenes which these deeds created in a vast and populous city can scarcely be conceived of by those who have never witnessed the horrors produced by the massacres of civil war.  Sylla himself went through with this work in the most