year, when Marius was consul for the fourth time, the barbarians, repulsed from Spain, directed their march towards the Alps. Fortunately, they divided themselves into two masses—the Teutones taking one route, the Cimbri another. The former, amounting to about 300,000 men, were met by Marius, and slaughtered, all except 90,000, who were made prisoners, and sold as slaves. Meanwhile the Cimbri had been making progress in their route, and to oppose them, Marius was elected to a fifth consulship (B. C. 101). Another bloody field, in which about 140,000 were slain, and 60,000 taken prisoners, delivered Italy from its fears. Strange and affecting thought, that half a million of human beings, women and children, should be wandering through Europe for years, poor outcasts, with their little carts and cooking-kettles, and that a civilized nation should have been compelled, by the necessity of self-preservation, to take means to sweep them out of existence!
Marius was rewarded for his exertions with a sixth consulship (B. C. 100), which, there being now no enemy to call forth his military activity, he employed in political schemes for the humiliation of the aristocratic or senatorial party, to which, both by the accident of birth and on principle, he was a determined enemy. The efforts of the nobles, however, assisted by the violent conduct of the partisans of Marius, especially a tribune named Saturninus, occasioned a reaction; and on the expiry of his consulship, Marius withdrew from Rome, and undertook a journey to the East, where the Roman influence was extending itself. During the following ten years the political agitations were incessant, the liberal spirit of that party of which Marius was the head developing itself every year in fresh manifestations, and the aristocratic party becoming every year more fierce and dogged in their opposition. On the aristocratic side, the ablest and most earnest man, although not yet the most distinguished, was Sulla—the former quæstor of Marius, and who had since been employed in various capacities both military and civil. At length, in the year B. C. 90, a storm which had been long gathering burst out in that war which is denominated in history 'the Social or Marsic War,' or 'the War of Italian Independence.'
As early as the tribuneship of Caius Gracchus, a clamor had been raised for the emancipation of the various Italian states from the thraldom in which they were held by the Romans. The progress of time welding the various Italian nationalities into one common society, and giving to all parts of the peninsula a common interest, had made them sensible to the grievances arising from their subordinate condition. The system of a triple franchise—Roman, Latin, and Italian—inevitable perhaps at first, had now become a source of gross injustice. To put an end to this injustice, the Italians demanded the full Roman franchise. Caius Gracchus wished to bestow it on them; and from the time of his death, 'Italian emancipation' had been one of the watchwords of the liberal party. Despairing of effecting their end by agitation, and especially provoked by a recent persecution of the Italian tradesmen who had settled in Rome, the Italian nations had recourse to arms (B. C. 90). Ten of these—namely, the Piceni, the Vestinians, the Marrucenians, the Marsians, the Pelignians, the Samnites, the Frentanians, the Hirpinians, the Lucanians, and the Apulians, constituted themselves into a confederacy for the destruction of Rome, and the foundation of a new Commonwealth, of which Corfinium,
