The panting Senate was thus able to breathe again. The war continued, but
under better auspices. Sound material could now be collected again for the
army. Marius being in the background, the chosen knight of the
aristocracy, Lucius Sylla, whose fame in the Cimbrian war had been only
second to that of his commander's, came at once to the front.

Sylla, or Sulla, as we are now taught to call him, was born in the year
138 B.C. He was a patrician of the purest blood, had inherited a moderate
fortune, and had spent it like other young men of rank, lounging in
theatres and amusing himself with dinner-parties. He was a poet, an
artist, and a wit, but each and everything with the languor of an amateur.
His favorite associates were actresses, and he had neither obtained nor
aspired to any higher reputation than that of a cultivated man of fashion.
His distinguished birth was not apparent in his person. He had red hair,
hard blue eyes, and a complexion white and purple, with the colors so ill-
mixed that his face was compared to a mulberry sprinkled with flour.
Ambition he appeared to have none; and when he exerted himself to be
appointed quaestor to Marius on the African expedition, Marius was
disinclined to take him as having no recommendation beyond qualifications
which the consul of the plebeians disdained and disliked.

Marius, however, soon discovered his mistake. Beneath his constitutional
indolence Sylla was by nature a soldier, a statesman, a diplomatist. He
had been too contemptuous of the common objects of politicians to concern
himself with the intrigues of the Forum, but he had only to exert himself
to rise with easy ascendency to the command of every situation in which he
might be placed. He had entered with military instinct into Marius's
reform of the army, and became the most active and useful of his officers.
He endeared himself to the legionaries by a tolerance of vices which did
not interfere with discipline; and to Sylla's combined adroitness and