Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 1.djvu/60

 32 SOLDIERS AND SAILORS after year. The noble lords and their friends had killed the people in the Forurn. They were killed in turn by the soldiers of Marius. Fifty senators perished, not those who were specially guilty, but those who were most polit- ically marked as patrician leaders. With them fell a thousand equites, common- ers of fortune, who had thrown in their lot with the aris'tocracy. From retalia- tory political revenge the transition was easy to pillage and wholesale murder ; and for many days the wretched city was made a prey to robbers and cut-throats. So ended the year 87, the darkest and bloodiest which the guilty city had yet experienced. Marius and Cinna were chosen consuls for the year ensuing, and a witches' prophecy was fulfilled, that Marius should have a seventh consulate. But the glory had departed from him. His sun was already setting, redly, among crimson clouds. He lived but a fortnight after his inauguration, and he died in his bed on the I3th of January, at the age of seventy-one. "The mother of the Gracchi," said Mirabeau, "cast the dust of her mur- dered sons into the air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius." JULIUS CESAR BY E. SPENCER BEESLY, M.A. (100-44 B - c -) R' OME solved the great political prob- lem of the ancient world in the best practicable, if not in the best conceiv- able, way. To Caesar it fell to put the crowning stroke to that work. The several states of modern Europe have all contributed, though in different de- grees, to political progress, and therefore no one of them has the unique import- ance and glory that belongs to Rome. For the same reason, no modern states- man stands on a level with Caesar. He remains, in Shakespeare's phrase, " the foremost man of all this world." It was the high fortune of Rome that, in the principal crisis of her history, she pos- sessed a citizen so splendidly endowed in intellect, character, and heart. Free to an extraordinary degree from the prej- udices belonging to his age and country, with piercing and far-sweeping vision, he saw as from some superior height, the political situation of his own time in its