and they thought it baser to attempt to win the soldiers'
favour than to fear their enemies. But the generals at this time, as
they acquired their rank by violence and not by merit, and had more
occasion to employ arms against one another than against the enemies
of Rome, were compelled to act the demagogue while they were in
command; and by purchasing the services of the soldiers by the money
which they expended to gratify them, they made the Roman state a thing
for bargain and sale, and themselves the slaves of the vilest wretches
in order that they might domineer over honest men. This is what drove
Marius into exile, and then brought him back to oppose Sulla; this
made Cinna the murderer of Octavius,[215] and Fimbria[216] the
murderer of Flaccus. And Sulla mainly laid the foundation of all this
by his profusion and expenditure upon his own soldiers, the object of
which was to corrupt and gain over to his side the soldiers of other
commanders; so that his attempts to seduce the troops of others and
the extravagance by which his own soldiers were corrupted, made money
always necessary to him; and most particularly during the siege of
Athens.

XIII. Now Sulla was seized with a violent and irresistible desire to
take Athens, whether it was that he was ambitious to contend against a
city which retained only the shadow of its former glory, or that he
was moved by passion to revenge the scoffs and jeers with which the
tyrant Aristion irritated him and his wife Metella, by continually
taunting them from the wall and insulting them. This Aristion was a
compound of lewdness and cruelty, who combined in himself all the
worst of the vices and passions of Mithridates, and now had brought as
it were a mortal disease in its last extremities upon a city which had
come safe out of so many wars and escaped from so many tyrannies and
civil commotions. For now when a medimnus[217] of wheat was selling
for a thousand drachmae in the Upper City, and men were obliged to eat
the parthenium[218] that grew about the Acropolis, and shoes and
oil-flasks, he was drinking all day long and amusing himself with
revels and pyrrhic dances, and making jokes at the enemy: he let the
sacred light of the goddess go out for want of oil; when the
hierophant sent to ask for the twelfth part of a medimnus of wheat, he
sent her as much pepper; and when the members of the Senate and the
priests entreated him to have pity on the city and come to terms with
Sul