So the headship of Rome was won over Italy and the Mediterranean world. A dominion had grown up of which mankind had never seen the like. No king of kings had ever come so near to universal rule as this city of cities. And now, in the last years of the second century and the early years of the first, came the question whether Rome could keep what she had won, the question, we might almost say, whether Rome could keep her own independent being. New powers arose to dispute her claim to be head of the West, to be head of the East, to be head of her own Italy. Gaius Marius came down from his car of triumph over Jugurtha, to march, in a new consulship, in new consulships crowded one upon another, to save Gaul, to save Italy, to save Rome herself, from the attacks of Teutonic invaders who had come before their time. Small are the remains that Aquæ Sextiæ can show to remind us of that great deliverance; yet we look up to the Mount of Victory, and feel that it was in the fates that the bones of our kinsfolk should fence in Massaliot vineyards; the day was not yet come for Gothia and Romania to be freely yoked together in the happy bride-ale of Narbonne. The day of Aquæ Sextiæ, the day of the Raudian fields, confirmed Roman headship in the West for five hundred years. It needed a longer struggle with Eastern powers strengthened by the arts of Greece--when Greece and Asia, allies and subjects, were goaded to revolt by the misdeeds of the ruling city--to secure Roman headship in the East, not for five hundred years only, but for thrice that time. And nearer still, on her own soil, at her own gates, within her own future walls, Rome had again to fight for life and death against Italian enemies. Another Pontius had come from the Samnite hills to root up the wood that sheltered the wolves of Italy. It needed the happy star of Lucius Sulla, it needed the last eager prayer of the Felix, the Epaphroditos, to the angered gods of Greece, to keep in being, not merely the lordship over Gaul and Asia, but the very life of Rome as one Italian city on her own hills.