themselves as cruel as they were worthless; and if public justice was
disposed to make an end of them, he saw no cause for interference.

Thus the familiar story repeated itself; wrong was punished by wrong, and
another item was entered on the bloody account which was being scored up
year after year. The noble lords and their friends had killed the people
in the Forum. They were killed in turn by the soldiers of Marius. Fifty
senators perished; not those who were specially guilty, but those who were
most politically marked as patrician leaders. With them fell a thousand
equites, commoners of fortune, who had thrown in their lot with the
aristocracy. From retaliatory 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 cutthroats.

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 witch's 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 13th of January, at
the age of seventy-one.

"The mother of the Gracchi," said Mirabeau, "cast the dust of her murdered
sons into the air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius." The Gracchi were
perhaps not forgotten in the retribution; but the crime which had been
revenged by Marius was the massacre in the Forum by Octavius and his
friends. The aristocracy found no mercy, because they had shown no mercy.
They had been guilty of the most wantonly wicked cruelty which the Roman
annals had yet recorded. They were not defending their country against a
national danger. They were engaged in what has been called in later years