Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/578

Rh 550 M A R M A R plain, rough, though very able, soldier, without any of the intellectual culture which is indispensable to a statesman, and which the Gracchi, his political ancestors, possessed. As a politician he on the whole failed, though almost to the last he had the confidence of the popular party. But he unfortunately associated himself with low and vulgar demagogues, men probably more degraded than the worst of the senators and of the aristocracy, and thus, although perhaps he never quite sank to their level, he let himself be guilty of cruel and perfidious acts, which it is hard to reconcile with the character of a brave man and a hero. He was indeed appointed in 88 B.C., after a riot and partial revolution, to the command in the war in the East with Mithridates, but the triumph of Sulla and the aristocratical party almost immediately afterwards drove him as an outlaw from Eome, and he had to seek safety amid the marshes round Minturnse (Garigliano) in Latium. The Gallic trooper sent by the local authorities to strike off the old man s head quailed, it is said, before the fire of his eye, and fled with the exclamation, &quot; I cannot kill Cains Marius.&quot; Meantime, in the absence of Sulla, who had left Italy for the Mithridatic war, Cinna s sudden and violent revolution had put the senate at the mercy of the popular leaders, and Marius greedily caught at the opportunity of a bloody vengeance, which became in fact a reign of terror in which senators and nobles were slaughtered wholesale. He had himself elected consul, for the seventh time, in fulfilment of a prophecy given to him in early manhood. Thus, full of honours in one sense, but really hated and execrated, he closed his career, dying in the delirium of fever in 86 B.C.. at seventy years of age. Marius was not only a great and successful general, but also a great military reformer. A citizen militia was from his time exchanged for a professional soldiery, which had hitherto been as little liked by the Roman people as it was by our own ancestors. A standing army, their instincts told them, would be a ready tool of despotism ; and indeed the changes of which Marius was the author paved the way for the subsequent military imperialism. The Roman soldier was henceforth a man who found his home in the camp, and who had no trade but war. A great general could hardly fail to become the first and foremost man in the state. Marius, however, himself did not attempt to overturn the oligarchy, as Caesar afterwards did, by means of the army, but rather by such expedients as the constitu tion seemed to allow, though they had to be backed up by street riots and mob violence. He failed as a political reformer because the merchants and the moneyed classes, whom the more statesmanlike Gracchi tried to conciliate, feared that they would themselves be swept away by a revolution of which the mob and its leaders would be the ultimate controllers. The farmer s son, the rough blunt soldier, the saviour of his country in middle life, and its curse and pest in his old age, had a decided tinge of fanati cism and that vein of superstition which is often allied to such natures. In matters so important as canvassing fai ths consulship he would be guided by the counsels of an Etruscan soothsayer, and would be accompanied in his campaigns by a Syrian prophetess. The fashionable accom plishments of the day, and the new Greek culture, were wholly alien to his taste, and he was thus really disqualified for the political life of his time. When his military career was once ended, failure and disgrace became a certainty for him. For the life of Marius our original sources are a multitude of passages in Cicero s works, Sallust s Jugurthan War, the epitomes of the lost books of Livy, Plutarch s Lives, &c. In Smith s RiograpUical Dictionary the life is given at great length, and the details stated generally with great accuracy. In Mommsen s History of Rome, bk. iv. chaps. 6, 7, 8, a clear picture of the whole period is presented tons ; and l$zmi: s Lectures on Roman History ( Lectures 81-86) may be consulted with great advantage. MARIVAUX, PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN DE (1688-1763), novelist and dramatist, was born at Paris on the 4th February 1688. His father was a financier of Norman extraction, whose real name was Carlet, but who after the loose fashion of the period assumed the surname of Chamblain, and then, finding that others of his class had chosen the same, superadded that of Maiivaux. M. Carlet do Marivaux, however, was a man of good reputa tion, and he received the appointment of director of tho mint at Riom in Auvergne, where and at Limoges the young Pierre was brought up. It is said that he developed literary tastes early, and wrote his first play, the Pere Prudent et Equitable, when he was only eighteen ; it was not, however, published till 1712, when he was twenty- four. His chief attention in those early days was paid to novel writing, not the drama. In the three years from 1713 to 1715 he produced three novels Les Effets Surprenantes de la Sympathie, La Voiture Embourbce, and a book which had three titles Pharsamon, Les Folics Romanesques, and Le Don Quichotts Moderne. All these books were in a curious strain, not in the least resembling the pieces which long afterwards were to make his reputation, but following partly the Spanish romances and partly the heroic novels of the preceding century, with a certain intermixture of the marvellous. Then Marivaux s literary ardour took a new phase. He fell under the influence of La Motte, and thought to serve the cause of that ingenious paradoxer by travestying Homer, an ignoble task, which he followed up by performing the same office in regard to Fenelon. His friendship for La Motte, however, introduced him to the Mercure, the chief newspaper of France, where in 1717 he produced various articles of the &quot; Spectator &quot; kind, which were distinguished by much keenness of observation and not a little literary skill. It was at this time that the peculiar style called Marivaudage first made its appearance in him. The year 1720 and those immediately following were very important ones for Marivaux ; not only did he produce a comedy, now lost except in small part, entitled L Amour et la Verite, and another and far better one entitled Arlequin Polipar I Amour, but he wrote a tragedy, Annibal, which was and deserved to be unsuccessful. Meanwhile his worldly affairs underwent a sudden revolu tion. His father had left him a comfortable subsistence, but he was persuaded by friends to risk it in the Mississippi scheme, and after vastly increasing it for a time lost all that he had. His prosperity had enabled him to marry a certain Mademoiselle Martin, of whom much good is said, and to whom he was deeply attached, but who died very shortly. His pen now became almost his sole resource. He had a connexion with both the fashionable theatres, for his Annibal had been played at the Com6die Franchise and his Arlequin Poll at the Come die Italienne, where at the time a company who were extremely popular, despite their imperfect command of French, were established. He endeavoured too to turn his newspaper practice in the Mercure to more account by starting a weekly Spectateur Francais, to which he was the sole contributor. But his habits were the reverse of methodical ; the paper appeared at the most irregular intervals ; and, though it contained some excellent work, its irregularity killed it. For nearly twenty years the theatre, and especially the Italian theatre, was Marivaux s chief support, for bis pieces, though they were not ill received by the actors at the Francais, were rarely successful there. The best of a very large number of plays (Marivaux s theatre numbers between thirty and forty items) were the Surprise de V Amour (1722), the Triomphe de Plutus (1728), the Jeu de F Amour et du Hasard (1730), Les Fausses Confidences (1737), all produced at the Italian theatre, and Le Legs, produced at the French. Meanwhile