As usual, the Senate are utterly unprepared, and this time there is an explosion of fury at Rome. No fleet, no army; the treasury empty; an aristocracy of millionaires and a bankrupt State; the interests of the Commonwealth sacrificed to fill the purses of the few. The panic-stricken Senate command Sulla to save the Republic. But the people remember who opened the Alps to the Germans; they know how much is to be expected from a continuance of "the accursed system." They insist on having Marius. Sulla asserts his claim by marching on Rome, and then goes away to that campaign by which, after four years, he brings Mithridates to sue for peace on his knees. No sooner is he gone than the democrats rise under Cinna. "Again, as so many times before, the supremacy of the aristocrats had been accompanied with dishonour abroad, and the lawless murder of political adversaries at home." Democracy has its bloody triumph under Marius; and then the triumph of aristocracy is signalised with still more horrible atrocities under Sulla.
The Senate now enters on a fresh phase of existence. As an administrative body, it had hopelessly broken down, Sulla gives it a new lease of life, and sends it forth on a new period of probation. The virtual effect of his reforms was to concentrate all independent power in the Senate; to give it the supreme control, legislative and executive; to make it "omnipotent and irresponsible." Once more it fails, and now the failure is final and decisive. When Cæsar was twenty-four years of age the
