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Julilla, Cornelia Sulla, was very much in love with her cousin Young Marius, but Sulla forced her to marry the son of his colleague in the consulship; she bore this young man a girl, Pompeia (later the second wife of the great Caesar), and a boy.
    Now ten years old, Young Caesar was sent by his mother to help his Uncle Marius recover from the effects of that maiming second stroke, and eagerly learned whatever he could from Marius about the art of war. Well aware of the prophecy, Marius's exposure to the boy only reinforced his determination to curtail Young Caesar's future military and political career.
    Angered by an innocuous remark made by his boring wife Aelia, Sulla suddenly divorced her–for barrenness. Old Scaurus had died, so Sulla then married his widow, Dalmatica. Most of Rome censured Sulla for his conduct toward Aelia (who was much admired), but Sulla didn't care.
    Knowing that Rome was fully occupied in her war against the Italian Allies, King Mithridates of Pontus invaded the Roman province of Asia in 88 B.C. and murdered every Roman and Italian man, woman and child living there. The death toll was eighty thousand, plus seventy thousand of their slaves.
    When Rome heard the news of this mass slaughter, the Senate met to discuss who would lead an army to the east to deal with King Mithridates. Deeming himself recovered from his stroke, Marius shouted that the command against Mithridates must be given to him. A peremptory demand which the Senate wisely ignored. Instead, that body awarded the command to the senior consul, Sulla. An affront Marius did not forgive; Sulla now joined the list of his declared enemies.
    Understanding that he was capable of defeating Mithridates, Sulla accepted the command with great content, and prepared to leave Italy. But the Treasury was empty and Sulla's funds far too slender, even after much public land around the Forum Romanum had been sold to pay for his army; the wealth Sulla needed to pay for his war was to come from plundering the temples of Greece and Epirus. Sulla's army was relatively tiny.
    In that same year, 88 B.C., another tribune of the plebs of enduring fame arose-Sulpicius. A conservative man, he turned radical only after the King of Pontus slaughtered the inhabitants of Asia Province-because he realized that a foreign king had not made any distinction between a Roman and an Italian-he had killed both. Sulpicius decided the Senate was to blame for Rome's unwillingness to grant the full citizenship to all Italians, and decided the Senate would have to go. There could be no difference between a Roman and an Italian if a foreign king could find no difference. So Sulpicius proceeded to pass laws in the Plebeian Assembly which expelled so many men from the Senate that it could no longer form a quorum. With the Senate rendered impotent, Sulpicius then proceeded to boost the electoral and political power of the new Italian citizens. But all this took place amid bloody riots in the Forum Romanum, and the young husband of Sulla's daughter, Cornelia Sulla, was killed.
    Riding high, Sulpicius then allied himself with Marius and got the Plebeian Assembly to pass another law-a law stripping the command in the war against Mithridates from Sulla and awarding it to Marius instead. Almost seventy years old and crippled by disease he might be, but Marius was not about to let anyone else go to war against Mithridates-especially Sulla.
    Sulla was in Campania organizing his army when he heard of the new legislation and his own disqualification. He then made a momentous decision: he would march on Rome. Never in her six hundred years of existence had any Roman done that. But Sulla would. His officers refused to support him except for his loyal quaestor, Lucius Licinius Lucullus, but his soldiers were fervently on his side.
    In Rome no one believed Sulla would dare to make war upon his own homeland, so when Sulla and his army arrived outside the city walls, panic ensued. Unable to lay their