crouched for fear.  The Tuscan seers interpreted this to portend the commencement of a new period, and a general change.  They say that there are in all eight periods, which differ in mode of life and habits altogether from one another, and to each period is assigned by the deity a certain number of years determined by the revolution of a great year.  When a period is completed, the commencement of another is indicated by some wondrous sign on the earth or from the heavens, so as to make it immediately evident to those who attend to such matters and have studied them, that men are now adopting other habits and modes of life, and are less or more an object of care to the gods than the men of former periods.  They say, in the change from one period to another there are great alterations, and that the art of the seer at one time is held in high repute, and is successful in its predictions, when the deity gives clear and manifest signs, but that in the course of another period the art falls into a low condition, being for the most part conjectural, and attempting to know the future by equivocal and misty signs.  Now this is what the Tuscan wise men said, who are supposed to know more of such things than anybody else.  While the senate was communicating on these omens with the seers, in the temple of Bellona,[190] a sparrow flew in before the whole body with a grasshopper in his mouth, part of which he dropped, and the rest he carried off with him out of the place.  From this the interpreters of omens apprehended faction and divisions between the landholders on the one side and the city folk and the merchant class on the other, for the latter were loud and noisy like a grasshopper, but the owners of land kept quiet on their estates.

VIII.  Now Marius contrived to gain over the tribune Sulpicius,[191] a man without rival in any kind of villainy, and so one need not inquire whom he surpassed in wickedness, but only wherein he surpassed himself.  For in him were combined cruelty, audacity, and rapaciousness, without any consideration of shame or of any crime, inasmuch as he sold the Roman citizenship to libertini[192] and resident aliens, and publicly received the money at a table in the Forum.  He maintained three thousand men armed with daggers, and also a number of young men of the equestrian class always about him, and ready for anything, whom he called the Opposition Senate.  He caused a law to be passed that no Senator should contract debt[193] to the amount of more than two thousand drachmae, and yet at his death he left behind him a debt of three millions.  This man being let loose upon the people by Marius, and putting everything into a state of confusion by violence and force of arms, framed various pernicious laws, and among them that which gave to Marius the command in the Mithridatic war.  The consuls accordingly declared a cessation[194] of all public business; but while they were holding a meeting of the people near the temple of Castor and Pollux, Sulpicius with