who were dwelling in all the peace and quietness they could command,
improving with their peaceful industry every acre where corn would ripen
or grass grow. It was by taxing and plundering the proceeds of this
industry that the generals and soldiers, the consuls and praetors, and
proconsuls and propraetors, filled their treasuries, and fed their
troops, and paid the artisans for fabricating their arms. With these
avails they built the magnificent edifices of Rome, and adorned its
environs with sumptuous villas. As they had the power and the arms in
their hands, the peaceful and the industrious had no alternative but to
submit. They went on as well as they could with their labors, bearing
patiently every interruption, returning again to till their fields after
the desolating march of the army had passed away, and repairing the
injuries of violence, and the losses sustained by plunder, without
useless repining. They looked upon an armed government as a necessary
and inevitable affliction of humanity, and submitted to its destructive
violence as they would submit to an earthquake or a pestilence. The
tillers of the soil manage better in this country at the present day.
They have the power in their own hands, and they watch very narrowly to
prevent the organization of such hordes of armed desperadoes as have
held the peaceful inhabitants of Europe in terror from the earliest
periods down to the present day.

[Sidenote: Julius Caesar.]
[Sidenote: Sylla's animosity against him.]
[Sidenote: Caesar refuses to repudiate his wife.]
[Sidenote: His flight.]

When Sylla returned to Rome, and took possession of the supreme power
there, in looking over the lists of public men, there was one whom he
did not know, at first what to do with. It was the young Julius Caesar,