During the second century before the Christian era, the forms of popular government were maintained at Rome ready to become more than forms when an organization was also ready to use them. The most important effect of the political work of the Gracchi was to breathe fresh life into the popular assembly; but this was no sooner done than the constitution proved to be unworkable; then followed a period of anarchy in Rome itself, which lasted for seventy years; during this period one party, the party of Greater Rome, steadily grew, and eventually left the constitution so modified that the local politics of the capital no longer had a predominant weight in the Empire. The first great step towards this end was made in the period during which C. Marius had an overpowering influence in Roman politics. Marius is represented to us by the historians from an unfriendly point of view; it is not easy to get at the real man through the mass of legend which obscures his real story. We see him a capable general who reorganized the Roman Army; we also see him incapable as a politician; he figures as the rough brutal demagogue whose violence stands in unpleasing contrast to the suave manners of Sulla; but whatever he may have been personally he represented definite political tendencies. The Marian party survived Marius, and found its most distinguished representative in the great Cæsar, who was a nephew of Marius. A significant fact about Marius is that he was not a Roman; he came from the small town of Arpinum. Technically he was a Roman citizen, for Arpinum was a community which had enjoyed for nearly a century the privileges of Roman citizenship; but his connexion with Rome was not the connexion of a Cornelius or an Æmilius. He was one of the many men from Italian towns who used their Roman citizenship to push a career at Rome; Cicero, also from Arpinum, and Pompeius from Picenum are well-known examples of the same class of men.