by his transcendent services. The Italians feared naturally that they
would lose the liberties which they had won. The popular faction at Rome
was combined and strong, and was led by men of weight and practical
ability. No reconciliation was possible between Cinna and Sylla. They were
the respective chiefs of heaven and hell, and which of the two represented
the higher power and which the lower could be determined only when the
sword had decided between them. In Cinna lay the presumed lawful
authority. He represented the people as organized in the Comitia, and his
colleague in the consulship when the crisis came was the popular tribune
Carbo. Italy was ready with armies; and as leaders there were young
Marius, already with a promise of greatness in him, and Sertorius, gifted,
brilliant, unstained by crime, adored by his troops as passionately as
Sylla himself, and destined to win a place for himself elsewhere in the
Pantheon of Rome's most distinguished men.

Sylla had measured the difficulty of the task which lay before him. But he
had an army behind him accustomed to victory, and recruited by thousands
of exiles who had fled from the rule of the democracy. He had now a fleet
to cover his passage; and he was watching the movements of his enemies
before deciding upon his own, when accident came suddenly to his help.
Cinna had gone down to Brindisi, intending himself to carry his army into
Greece, and to spare Italy the miseries of another civil war, by fighting
it out elsewhere. The expedition was unpopular with the soldiers, and
Cinna was killed in a mutiny. The democracy was thus left without a head,
and the moderate party in the city who desired peace and compromise used
the opportunity to elect two neutral consuls, Scipio and Norbanus. Sylla,
perhaps supposing the change of feeling to be more complete than it really
was, at once opened communications with them. But his terms were such as
he might have dictated if the popular party were already under his feet.
He intended to re-enter Rome with the glory of his conquests about him,