courage Marius owed the final capture of Jugurtha.

Whether Marius became jealous of Sylla on this occasion must be decided by
those who, while they have no better information than others as to the
actions of men, possess, or claim to possess, the most intimate
acquaintance with their motives. They again served together, however,
against the Northern invaders, and Sylla a second time lent efficient help
to give Marius a victory. Like Marius, he had no turn for platform oratory
and little interest in election contests and intrigues. For eight years he
kept aloof from politics, and his name and that of his rival were alike
for all that time almost unheard of. He emerged into special notice only
when he was praetor in the year 93 B.C., and when he characteristically
distinguished his term of office by exhibiting a hundred lions in the
arena matched against Numidian archers. There was no such road to
popularity with the Roman multitude. It is possible that the little
Caesar, then a child of seven, may have been among the spectators, making
his small reflections on it all.

[Sidenote: B.C. 120.]
In 92 Sylla went as propraetor to Asia, where the incapacity of the
Senate's administration was creating another enemy likely to be
troublesome. Mithridates, "child of the sun," pretending to a descent from
Darius Hystaspes, was king of Pontus, one of the semi-independent
monarchies which had been allowed to stand in Asia Minor. The coast-line
of Pontus extended from Sinope to Trebizond, and reached inland to the
line of mountains where the rivers divide which flow into the Black Sea
and the Mediterranean. The father of Mithridates was murdered when he was
a child, and for some years he led a wandering life, meeting adventures
which were as wild and perhaps as imaginary as those of Ulysses. In later
life he became the idol of Eastern imagination, and legend made free with