more than the citizens in arms, called for the moment from their various
occupations, to return to them when the occasion for their services was
past. Marius had perceived that fewer men, better trained and disciplined,
could he made more effective and be more easily handled. He had studied
war as a science. He had perceived that the present weakness need be no
more than an accident, and that there was a latent force in the Roman
State which needed only organization to resume its ascendency. "He
enlisted," it was said, "the worst of the citizens," men, that is to say,
who had no occupation and who became soldiers by profession; and as
persons without property could not have furnished themselves at their own
cost, he must have carried out the scheme proposed by Gracchus, and
equipped them at the expense of the State. His discipline was of the
sternest. The experiment was new; and men of rank who had a taste for war
in earnest, and did not wish that the popular party should have the whole
benefit and credit of the improvements, were willing to go with him; among
them a dissipated young patrician called Lucius Sylla, whose name also was
destined to be memorable.

By these methods and out of these materials an army was formed such as no
Roman general had hitherto led. It performed extraordinary marches,
carried its water-supplies with it in skins, and followed the enemy across
sandy deserts hitherto found impassable. In less than two years the war
was over. The Moors to whom Jugurtha had fled surrendered him to Sylla,
and he was brought in chains to Rome, where he finished his life in a
dungeon.

So ended a curious episode in Roman history, where it holds a place beyond
its intrinsic importance, from the light which it throws on the character
of the Senate and on the practical working of the institutions which the
Gracchi had perished in unsuccessfully attempting to reform.