The slaves were ruffians hired to do his bidding, and now, at a word or sign from their master, they began to murder the citizens. The glance of Marius was enough to show them whom to slay. Soon they did not even look to him for a sign, but simply fell upon all whose greetings Marius did not return. Octavius was cut down as he sat in his consular chair, and his head was taken to Cinna. Catulus, too, who had fought side by side with Marius against the Cimbri, was doomed, although his friends begged that his life might be spared. Marius answered their petitions roughly, saying only, ‘He must die.’ But Catulus did not wait for the cruel sentence to be carried out. He shut himself up in a room, and making a huge fire, he suffocated himself. These were days of terror in Rome, for no man knew if his life was safe. At length even Cinna grew ashamed of the cruelty of Marius’s slaves, and he and Sertorius put a number of the ruffians to death. After this the citizens’ lives were in less danger. The time had now come to elect Consuls for the year 86 B.C. As usual the people assembled, but they had no choice save to vote for Marius and Cinna. To do otherwise would have been to court death. Thus, as Marius had believed would happen, even during the miserable days of his flight, he became Consul for the seventh time. But he did not live many days to enjoy the new honour, if honour it could be called, when fear alone had bestowed it upon him. Worn out with the passion of revenge to which he had yielded, and attacked by fever, he died on the 13th January 86 B.C. Cinna was now the most powerful man in Rome. He had no difficulty in making the people elect himself and Carbo Consuls for the years 85 and 84 B.C. There was but one name Cinna dreaded, and that was the name of Sulla. But he thought that, if he proclaimed that the great general who was fighting for Rome in the East was a public enemy, he soon would have no reason to fear him. So he did this, and at the same time ordered Sulla’s house in the city to be pulled down. Cinna, however, had now gone too far. Many of the Optimates, who belonged to the best families in Rome, at once left the city and fled to Greece to the camp of Sulla. So many senators also joined the general, that Sulla could act in the name of the Senate more truly than could his rival in Rome herself. He therefore proclaimed that when the war was over he would come back to Rome with his army and overthrow Cinna and his government. The Consuls, when they heard this, at once began to enrol troops, that they might be prepared to hold the city against Sulla when he came. But Cinna, after all, was not alive to meet his dreaded enemy. For in 84 B.C. the soldiers of the Consul mutinied and murdered him. Sulla did not return to Italy until the spring of 83 B.C. CHAPTER XCVI THE ORATOR ARISTION