To understand the strange and in many ways sinister characters of Caius Marius and of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, we must have in our minds a picture of the dark times in which they lived. At a crisis in the life of the State Sulla showed courage, decision and will, and a stern devotion to his country which enabled him, in his own way, to save it. In these things he showed that he was a Roman of the old breed. Until this crisis came Sulla appeared no better than the other aristocrats of his time: like them he was careless of everything save his own selfish pleasure; always he remained hard, cruel, indifferent to the lives, feelings, and happiness of others. Whereas both Tiberius and Caius Gracchus lived and died for an idea greater than themselves, Sulla’s was a mind incapable of idealism. He and Caius Marius, his great rival, are alike in nothing except the harsh cruelty that belongs to times of revolutionary upheaval. In all other respects they are as unlike as any two men that ever lived. Marius was a son of the soil, a soldier with a soldier’s merits--courage, rude good humour, careless generosity--and his faults--cruelty, coarseness, indifference to everything but the rudest of pleasures. His one big work was the reconstruction of the army. Sulla was an aristocrat to the finger-tips: proud, cold-blooded, indifferent, highly educated, with a deep disbelief in everything and everybody. He had a remarkable intellect, and a physical beauty which attracted women without number. But it is doubtful whether he ever cared for a human creature. His extraordinary courage and his equally extraordinary indifference rested on a chilling belief in Fate. He was lucky: he called himself Sulla Felix; but nothing in the end was going to make any difference. [Illustration: THE ARISTOCRAT distributing largesse] To see Marius and Sulla against the background of their time the events must be traced that followed on the death of Caius Gracchus. Tiberius Gracchus, and far more clearly his brother Caius, had seen the growing dangers that threatened Rome, if no wise steps were taken in time to meet them. Both brothers gave their lives in the effort to save their country. Their sacrifice was vain. The men who had power in their hands were blind to the great change that was taking place. They tried to compel the stream to go on flowing in its old channels, although the weight of waters had grown too great for them to carry. The result was that suddenly the waters broke loose and flooded everything. Rome, all Italy, was torn by a bloody and terrible civil war.