another to
three women of wealth, who to him were but stepping stones to fortune, on
a day when he was preparing to give one of those festivals, the splendor
and the art of which he had learned from Mithridates, his third wife fell
ill. Death discourages Fortune. Sylla sent her a bill of divorce and
ordered her to be taken from the house, which was done, just in time, she
was dying. Sylla promptly remarried, then married again, and yet again.
Meanwhile, he had a daughter and an eye on the promising Pompey. His
daughter was married. So too was Pompey. He forced his daughter from her
husband, forced Pompey to repudiate his wife, and forced them to marry.

Sylla had brought with him from the East its curious cups in which blood
and passion mingled, and spilled them in the open streets. Crassus outdid
him in magnificence, and Lucullus eclipsed them both. Asia had yielded to
these men the fortune of her people, the honor of her children, the
treasure of her temples, the secrets of their sin. The Orientalisms which
they imported, their deluge of coin, their art of marrying cruelty to
pleasure, set Rome mad.

Among the maddest was Catiline. That tiger, in whose vestibule were
engraved the laws of facile love, affiliated women of rank, others of
none, soldiers and slaves, in his convulsive cause. Shortly, throughout
the Latin territory, a mysterious sound was heard. It was like the clash
of arms afar. The augurs, interrogated, announced that the form of the
State was about to change. The noise was the crackling of the
republic.[18]

Before it fell came Caesar. Sylla told him to repudiate his wife as Pompey
had. Caesar declined to be commanded. The house of Julia, to which he
belonged, descended, he declared, from Venus. Venus Pandemos, perhaps. But
the ancestry was typical. Cinna drafted a law giving him the right to
marry as often as he chose. After the episodes in Gaul, when he entered
Rome, his legions warned the citizens to have an eye to their wives.
Meanwhile, he had repudiated Pompeia, his wife, not to please Sylla but
himself, or rather because Publius Claudius, a young gallant, had been
discovered disguised as a woman assisting at the mysteries of the Bona
Dea, held on this occasion in Caesar's house. To these ceremonies men were
not admitted. The affair made a great scandal. Pompeia was suspected of
having helped Publius to be present. The suspicion was probably unfounded.
But Caesar held that his wife should be abo