Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/59

71 B.C.] are points to be argued with the lawyer-like precision which the Romans carried into all their transactions whether with men or gods.

The power of this mercenary soldiery had been abundantly shown by Sulla, who revealed the fatal secret that with a victorious proconsul and a veteran army lay the last word in political contests. When Sulla had completed his work of restoration, it was from the same quarter that danger to his oligarchical constitution was most to be apprehended. Yet Sulla did nothing or little to guard against the peril. The best safeguard would have been a strong central executive in Rome, wielding the whole military force of the empire and strictly responsible to the Senate. But this seemed too hazardous an experiment. Sulla weakened the magistrates at the seat of government, lest they should be too strong for the Senate, and shut his eyes to the fact that he thus renounced control over the far more dangerous magistrates on the frontiers.

As yet the mercenary soldiery was only half conscious of its powers; nevertheless the fact that a new military force had grown up was one of the main elements in the political situation. The blind hopes and wishes of the soldiers needed a representative, and this representative was found in the person of the young commander Cnæus Pompeius Magnus. Born in the same year as Cicero, and son of the consul under whom Cicero had served in the Social War (p. 11), Pompey was twenty-three years of age when Sulla returned from the East in 83 B.C. By his own influence and reputation with the soldiers,