The second battle was no less glorious even than the first. One hundred and fifty thousand of the Cimbri were slain, and more than sixty thousand taken prisoners!

In Rome the gladness of success was proportioned to the gloom that had prevaded the city while events remained uncertain; and though the Patricians attempted to divide equally between the two generals, the fame and the high reward due to Marius alone, "the whole honour of the day," says Plutarch, "was nevertheless ascribed to Marius, on account of his former victories and of his present authority. Nay, such was the applause of the populace that they called him the third founder of Rome, and in their festive banquets at home with their wives and children, the Romans offered to Marius, libations along with the gods!"

Such in fact was the fervor of national gratitude, that the people wished to give to Marius singly, the honour of both triumphs! This deserved reward of his toils, his valour, his unswerving reliance on the fortunes of Rome, the people-born Consul nobly refused; with the generosity that ever mark those who have risen to high honours through their own deeds, he insisted that Catulus should be associated in whatever honours were awarded him: Marius was loth to wound the pride of a fellow soldier, to dissolve that fraternity of the camp and of the battle field, that should ever unite warriors who have fought side by side; Catulus never forgave Marius, either this preference shown to him, by the Romans, or the humiliation of having owed his triumph to the self-denial of his colleague! And in the work to which we have alluded, attempted in vain to obtain from posterity the reversal of the righteous judgment passed upon him and Marius, by their country and their contemporaries!

Thus far we have led Marius, from the thatched roof of his indigent parents, in the village of Cirratum, near Arpinum-(a small territory, made again famous in history, as the birth-place of Cicero)-to the camp of Scipio, under the walls of Numantium. Thence, following his footsteps from the Rostrum, where he vindicated the rights of the Proletaries, to the Senate, awed and rebuked by the majesty of tribunacion authority, we have been borne along with the hero, swift as the flight of his eagles, sometimes over Afric's wastes, sometimes from one extremity of the empire to the other, witnessing in every field where he commanded the triumphs of his genius-in the long series of Numidian and Cimbric battles; and every where—in the city, amidst the wild disorders of contested elections; in camps beleaguered by countless multitudes of barbarians, the most warlike that Romans ever contended against, and in the giant struggles where two whole nations stood embattled against a few legions, (sustained by the evidence of historians hostile to his fame,) we have shown Marius, pure, unstained by the corruption of the times; at home, upholding the birth-rights of the people against the encroachments of an ambitous

aristocracy; abroad, spreading, far and lustrous, the fame of Roman arms by deeds of eternal remembrance.

The portion of our task, on which we now enter, is more difficult than that over which we have travelled hitherto, we trust, successfully. The return of a victorious general, to the scenes of civil life, is ever fraught with dangers, either to the community or to the individual himself, even where power is clearly defined by a written constitution, as in our own country, or, as in England, by precedents having acquired the force and authority of constitutional enactments. But in Rome, the jealousy of the aristocracy of all power, not created by itself to sustain its influence, or to enlarge it, made the position of a successful commander, who posssesed the affection and confidence of the people, one of continual danger. Of this Marius was aware: if born a Patrician, he might have averted the peril, either, as Pompey did, not long after, by securing the friendship of the Patricians in becoming the instrument of their designs; or, as Sylla, and Cæsar after him, by leading his army to Rome to overawe the Senate, and maintain through Italy, the authority of his acts with the sword! But, nurtured in the veneration of the institutions of his country, Marius did not even hesitate in the course which it became him to pursue. Disbanding the legions as soon as he had terminated the Teutonic war, the very day after that when he had entered the city in all the pride and splendour of a Roman triumph, he was seen, a private citizen, clad in the white robe of candidates for office, "soliciting the people with uncommon timidity," as Plutarch testifies, "for a sixth consulate; courting the multitude with condescensions as unsuitable to his dignity as contrary to his disposition; assuming an air of gentleness, for which nature never intended him!" We accept these would-be censures of Marius, as honourable testimonies, borne by his adversaries-(since Plutarch drew [all he has written of Marius from Patrician sources)-to the respect that great man entertained for the popular sovereignty, ever deeming these homages offered to the elective power, ennobling rather than derogatory to the high stations he had filled in the state through the peoples support, both in peace and in war. Surely, it is no evidence of an insatiate thirst for power in Marius, as argued by Plutarch, to have sought, when still in the full strength of manhood, those civic honours, which in periods of general tranquillity, the most renowned Roman captains had ever pursued with no less ardour than the command of armies in times of foreign wars, rather than to have resigned himself to inglorious ease, in an inactivity which his distaste for the arts and letters would not have allowed him to have solaced by learned occupations. What Plutarch has recorded of Marius's timidity at public meetings, would of itself give the lie to this saying he imputes to him, "that the law spoke too softly to be heard amidst the din of arms!" even had he not expressly admitted,

"that his wonted intrepidity in battle forsook him in the assemblies of the people; that the least breath of censure or praise alike influenced him, depressing or elating him;"—and again, "that the noise which Marius most dreaded, and which robbed him of his presence of mind, was that of popular assemblies !"

It is absurd, on the part of Plutarch to allege, on the authority of Rutillius, especially after acknowledging, that "he was particularly prejudiced against Marius," that his sixth consulate was obtained by the distribution of large sums among the tribes. What more natural, that the same people who would fain have awarded to Marius alone the two triumphs for the victories over the Cimbri; who had saluted him, on his return to Rome, after his last campaign, by the glorious title of "Third Founder of Rome;" who, at their domestic sacrifices, offered libations to him along with the gods, should of their own accord, in gratitude for his unprecedented services to the Republic, have bestowed on that great citizen a sixth consulate, as the only reward worthy of his unrivalled achievements! Besides the people, with their instinct of the future, of wider reach than the prevision of the aristocracy, bounded, as it always is, by the narrow horizon of selfish purposes, had divined that no recompense in their gift, could fully repay those victories by which Marius, by crushing in one common ruin, the first swarm from the great Sarmathian, Scandinavian or Scythian hives, would keep) back during many centuries, these barbarians, from their doomed task-the destruction of the Roman Empire!

It has been remarked, "that the Romans never conferred so many consulates upon any one man except Valerius Corvinus! and with this dif ference, that between the first and sixth consulate of Corvinus, elapsed an interval of forty years; whereas Marius, after his first, was carried through five more in succession by a single tide of fortune !"

The restless animosity of the Patricians to Marius, made the whole term of his sixth consulate, an almost continual scene of intestine dissentions. Rome became, on several occasions, the theatre of bloody combats between the rival factions; and it required all the firmness of the Consul to maintain the authority of the law over an aristocracy long accustomed to discard all legal restraint upon the execution of its designs. The mere recital of a fact, which occurred then, will paint the Patrician contemporaries of Marius in their true colour. Caius Rabirius, (the same who was defended, by Cicero, when charged with the murder of Saternius,) a senator of high distinction, cut off with his own hand, the head of Apulleius, a tribune of the people, after he had surrendered himself a prisoner to the Patricians who besieged him in the capitol, "carried it as a trophy, agreeable to the mnnners of those times, and had it presented for

some days at all entertainments which were given on this occasion, and at which he was a guest !"*

During the assembly of the people, Saturnius, a turbulent man, always attended by a crowd of lawless mercenaries, attacked the friends of Sylla: they fled in wild disorder, and Sylla himself, closely pursued by the assassins, sought an asylum in the house of Marius, where, embracing his penates, he invoked the protection of his domestic gods. A Patrician, would perhaps have given up to his pursuers the enemy that had thus implored his protection; but the peasant of Arpinum, bowed obedient to the claims of hospitality; and faithful to the religion of the hearth, offered his just resentment, a grateful sacrifice to his household deities! Marius, himself, led forth his most deadly foe from his house, by a back gate, whence he got safe to the camp. The Patrician, in return for such magnanimity, in less than one year after, proscribed Marius, set an enormous price on his head, and ordered his brother, M. Marius, to be mangled under his very eyes, his limbs being divided from his body one after the other, and while he was still alive! But we must not outstrip the the march of events. The fierce animosity of parties in Rome was suddenly lulled asleep, by the terror of the Social War,-(the most sanguinary contest in which the Republic was ever engaged)—against her Italian allies, before she could be brought to grant them the rights and privileges af Roman citizens.

To the repeated claims urged by the Allies to a full participation in the political advantages enjoyed by the citizens of Rome, the Senate had ever returned a stern and austere denial. The avaricious Patricians feared no less the association of the Italian nobility to their administration of the affairs of the Republic, than the accession of strength which the formation of additional tribes would bring to the popular cause. Blinded on this occasion by their vanity of caste, they lost sight of the deep policy which, by uniting, in the early age of the Republic, the Sabine nation with the motley adventurers assembled by Romulus in his new born city, had enabled Rome, in the course of some centuries, to spread her dominions beyond the Pyrenees, over the most fertile portion of Africa, and to rule Greece, and Macedonia itself, as Roman provinces. But the time was passed when the Italians could be made to endure this degrading vassalage to a metropolitan supremacy. The warriors who had fought against Jugurtha, and the Cimbri, under Marius, sternly claimed the re

* We have copied the passage quoted, from Ferguson. The tory historian and Professor of Moral Philosophy tells us gravely, lest we should be led to think ill of the distinguished senator who went thus about as a guest at entertainments given on the occasion (what occasion? that of a senator cutting off the head of a tribune, we presume)—that going thus to dinner parties among the nobility, with a man's head under one's arm, was acting agreeably to the manners of the age!

ward of their services. These were not Africans, accustomed to dread the superiority of Roman arms and discipline, nor barbarians having no other qualification for war but bodily strength and determined courage— they were Romans in fact; and "a god, too, had taught them the legion !"* Marius, aware of their valour, of their resources, of the military experience and skill of their leaders, several of them equal to the command of consular armies† endeavoured, but in vain, to induce the Senate, by timely concessions, to avert from the Republic the calamities of a civil war; for such must be, he considered, a contest between populations of the same origin, governed by the same laws, retaining the remembrance of the same traditions and speaking the same language! All these considerations, pointed out alike by justice and policy, were unswervingly resisted by the indomitable pride and the grasping avarice of the Patricians.

Here is another deplorable chasm in the annals of Rome. Marius sought not the consulate as long as that fatal war ravaged Italy, decimating its warriors, its population, in battles the more bloody as they were fought with the deadly animosity incident to civil wars, by troops of equal valour inured to the same discipline; battles which always left the conqueror nearly as much weakened, by victory, as the vanquished by defeat. Both Marius and Sylla fought under the command of undistinguished consuls, whose names would have been lost to history, but that the fame of these renowned lieutenants buoyed them up to futurity. Sylla, who had failed to rise in reputation, both in the Numidian and Cimbric wars, began then that career of uninterrupted fortune that led him to the Dictatorship. Active, prodigal, brave, loved by the soldiers, to whom, provided they were firm and daring on the day of battle, he allowed a license unknown in Roman armies before his time; he lost no opportunity to bring his enemy into action,-always trusting to his fortune and to the valour of his troops. With the high renown of Marius ever present to his mind, he thought nothing impossible that might, if accomplished, raise him to the level of that great peasant. Marius, on the contrary, viewing the war, both as to its cause and result, whatever the latter might be, as equally calamitous to the state, sought rather to maintain, than to increase his martial glories,-avaricious of Italian no less than of Roman blood spilled in an impious struggle between brothers, he avoided as much as possible, engaging in pitched battles. He never was worsted, however, on any occasion; and when forced to action, he showed by signal victories, that growing years had not impaired the vigour of the warrior, nor quenched the genius of the commander. It was against Mithridates, that monarch to whose talents and

'It was a god taught the Romans the legion!"-Veget.

+ Forty thonsand men, formed a consular army.

VOL. VIII. NO. XXXVI.-DECEMBER, 1840. H