sent a messenger to request him to "move on;" but the exile, with a dignified air, claimed his right to repose upon the dry rubbish. "Tell thy master," he observed to the officer on duty, who had respectfully told him he must "come out of that," in compliance with the orders of the authorities,--"Tell thy master that thou hast seen Marius, sitting on the ruins of Carthage." The intelligence was not new, but it seems to have been rather startling, for it had the effect of causing Marius to be allowed to remain; and we will, therefore, leave him there, while we proceed with the march of our history. Sulla having reduced the city to the most complete subjection, made a merit of not pursuing his vengeance farther against the defenceless inhabitants; and so great was his confidence in the efficacy of his work, that he acquiesced in the appointment of L. Cornelius Cinna, a partisan of Marius, to the consulship. Sulla proceeded to Greece, where he blockaded Athens, whose inhabitants he plundered, as a practical acknowledgment of their worth; and he spared their lives, to show how he valued their ancestors. He manifested his respect for their arts by robbing their city of its chief ornaments; and he paid their learning the compliment of stealing their principal libraries. In the meantime Cinna had entered on the duties of the consulship at Rome, but there the truth of the maxim, that two heads are better than one, was rendered extremely doubtful by the constant dissensions between himself and his colleague. The latter was Cn. Octavius, who opposed whatever the former recommended; and while one tried to carry his measures by brute force, the other endeavoured to defeat them by armed violence. Cinna appealed to the mob, and Octavius trusted to the army, both forces being the principal movers under a republican rule or misrule, and both being equally repugnant to the spirit of constitutional government. The arms of such a republic might have for its supporters the bludgeon and the sword, with the figure of Liberty battered and bleeding, slashed and sabred, gagged and fettered, in the middle. Octavius and the sword had, on this occasion, got the upper hand; and Cinna, the clubbist, was glad to break his bludgeon or cut his stick, in flying from the city. [Illustration: Marius in the Ruins of Carthage.]