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Roman to cross the Euphrates on a military mission. On the Tigris near Amida, Sulla found and warned Tigranes; then on the Euphrates at Zeugma he hosted a conference between himself, Tigranes and ambassadors from the King of the Parthians. A treaty was concluded whereby everything to the east of the Euphrates was to remain the concern of the Parthians and everything to the west of the Euphrates was to become the concern of Rome. Sulla was also the subject of a prophecy by a famous Chaldaean seer: he would be the greatest man between Oceanus Atlanticus and the Indus River, and would die at the height of his fame and prosperity.
    With Sulla was his son by the dead Julilla. This boy- in his middle teens-was the light of Sulla's life. But after Sulla's return to Rome (where he found the Senate indifferent to his deeds and to his magnificent treaty), Young Sulla died tragically. The loss of the boy was a terrible blow to Sulla, who severed the last vestige of his relationship with the Caesars, except for his sporadic visits to Aurelia. On these visits he now encountered her son, Young Caesar, who impressed Sulla.
    The Italian War broke out with a series of shattering defeats for Rome. At the beginning of 90 B.C. the consul Lucius Caesar took over the southern theater of war (in Campania), with Sulla as his senior legate. The northern theater (in Picenum and Etruria) was commanded by several men in turn, all of whom proved to be woefully inadequate.
    Gaius Marius hungered to command the northern theater, but his enemies in the Senate were still too strong. He was forced to serve as a mere legate, and to suffer many indignities at the hands of his commanders. But one by one these commanders went down in defeat (and, as in the case of Caepio, died), while Marius plodded on training the troops, very raw and timorous. Waiting his chance. When it came he seized it immediately, and in association with Sulla (loaned to him) won for Rome the first significant victory of the war. Then on the day following this victory Marius suffered his second stroke-far worse than his first-and was forced to withdraw from the conflict. This rather pleased Sulla, for Marius refused to take Sulla seriously as a general, though Sulla generaled all the victories in the southern theater-always in the name of someone else.
    In 89 B.C. the war took a better turn for Rome, especially in the southern theater. Sulla was awarded Rome's highest military decoration, the Grass Crown, by his troops before the city of Nola, and most of Campania and Apulia were subjugated. The two consuls of 89 B.C., Pompey Strabo and a Cato, fared very differently. Cato the Consul was murdered by Young Marius to avoid a military defeat; Marius procured his son's freedom by bribing the commander left in charge, Lucius Cornelius Cinna. Cinna, an honorable man despite this bribe, was to remain Marius's adherent ever after-and Sulla's enemy.
    The senior consul of 89 B.C., Pompey Strabo, had a seventeen-year-old son, Pompey, who adored his father and insisted on fighting at his side. In 90 B.C. they had besieged the city of Asculum Picentum, wherein the first atrocity of the Italian War had taken place. With them was the seventeen-year-old Marcus Tullius Cicero, a most inept and unwilling warrior whom Pompey sheltered from his father's wrath-and contempt. Cicero was never afterward to forget Pompey's kindness, which dictated much of his political orientation. When Asculum Picentum fell in 89 B.C., Pompey Strabo executed every male inhabitant and banished every female and child with no more than the clothes they wore on their backs; the incident stood out in the annals of a terrible war.
    But by 88 B.C., when Sulla was finally elected consul with a Quintus Pompeius Rufus as his colleague, Rome was victorious in the war against her Italian Allies. Not without yielding much she had gone to war to prevent: the Italians were-in name at least-given the full Roman franchise.
    Sulla's daughter by