to him, he cared not for it; but having already formed the design of overthrowing the power of Marius and of getting himself appointed to the command against Mithridates, as the Social War was now considered at an end, he endeavoured to ingratiate himself with his army.  On coming to Rome he was elected consul with Quintus Pompeius[185] for his colleague, being now fifty years of age, and he formed a distinguished matrimonial alliance with Caecilia,[186] the daughter of Metellus,[187] the chief Pontifex.  This gave occasion to the populace to assail him with satirical songs; and many of the highest class were displeased at the marriage, as if they did not think him worthy of such a wife, whom they had judged to be worthy of the consulship, as Titus Livius[188] remarks.  Caecilia was not the only wife that Sulla had.  When he was a very young man he married Ilia, who bore him a daughter; his second wife was AElia; and his third wife was Cloelia, whom he divorced on the ground of barrenness, yet in a manner honourable to the lady, with an ample testimony to her virtues and with presents.  But as he married Metella a few days after, it was believed that his alleged ground of divorce was merely a pretext.  However, he always paid great respect to Metella, which induced the Romans, when they wished to recall from exile the partisans of Marius, and Sulla refused his assent, to apply to Metella to intercede for them.  After the capture of Athens also, it was supposed that he treated the citizens with more severity, because they had cast aspersions upon Metella from their walls.  But of this hereafter.

VII.  Sulla looked on the consulship as only a small matter compared with what he expected to attain:  the great object of his desires was the command in the war against Mithridates.  But he had a rival in Marius, who was moved by an insane love of distinction and by ambition, passions which never grow old in a man, for though he was now unwieldy and had done no service in the late campaigns by reason of his age, he still longed for the command in a distant war beyond the seas.  While Sulla was with the army completing some matters that still remained to be finished, Marius kept at home and hatched that most pestilent faction which did more mischief to Rome than all her wars; and indeed the deity[189] showed by signs what was coming.  Fire spontaneously blazed from the wooden shafts which supported the military standards, and was quenched with difficulty; and three crows brought their young into the public road, and after devouring them, carried the fragments back to their nest.  The mice in a temple gnawed the gold which was kept there, and the keeper of the temple caught one of the mice, a female, in a trap, which produced in the trap five young ones, and devoured three of them.  But what was chief of all, from a cloudless and clear sky there came the sound of a trumpet, so shrill and mournful, that by reason of the greatness thereof men were beside themselves and