It is the overwhelming victory over one of the Italian tribes that brings Sulla his highest honor (the Grass Crown). Meanwhile, in the Senate there is a movement to enfranchise the sophisticated neighboring Italians, a movement snapped off by an assassination and a polarizing of ruling powers-and, inevitably, there's war. The king will be faced down, and, some years later, Sulla, in a spectacular expedition over the Euphrates, will face him down again. By now (roughly 80's and 90's B.C.) Marius is in his 60s and escaping a ``dull'' Rome to scout Asia Minor and sniff out the purposes of the barbarian king Mithridates of Pontus. Here, the calamitous last hurrah of one and the violent pinnacle acts of the other twist through years of Italian wars, expeditions into Asia Minor, domestic trials and brief happinesses, terrible cruelties, and politics, always politics, in which sectors, families, and the famous fight for power-by diplomacy, manipulation, alliances, or the simple art of murder. The First in Rome (1990) initiated the chronicle of the edgy partnership of new-man-in-Rome Gaius Marius and aristocrat Lucius Cornelius Sulla during the German wars. Volume two of McCullough's triumphant Roman series.
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