as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs.  In this respect the coming forward of Marius was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted.  If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly-expressed will of the governing body.  Public opinion, unavailing in the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome.  We do not mean to say that Marius intended to play the pretender, at least at the time when he canvassed the people for the supreme command in Africa; but, whether he did or did not understand what he was doing, there was evidently an end of the restored aristocratic government when the comitial machine began to make generals, or, which was nearly the same thing, when every popular officer was able in legal fashion to nominate himself as general.  Only one new element emerged in these preliminary crises; this was the introduction of military men and of military power into the political revolution.  Whether the coming forward of Marius would be the immediate prelude of a new attempt to supersede the oligarchy by the -tyrannis-, or whether it would, as in various similar cases, pass away without further consequence as an isolated encroachment on the prerogative of the government, could not yet be determined; but it could well be foreseen that, if these rudiments of a second -tyrannis- should attain any development, it was not a statesman like Gaius Gracchus, but an officer that would become its head.  The contemporary reorganization of the military system—­which Marius introduced when, in forming his army destined for Africa, he disregarded the property-qualification hitherto required, and allowed even the poorest burgess, if he was otherwise serviceable, to enter the legion as a volunteer—­may have been projected by its author on purely military grounds; but it was none the less on that account a momentous political event, that the army was no longer, as formerly, composed of those who had much, no longer even, as in the most recent times, composed of those who had something, to lose, but became gradually converted into a host of people who had nothing but their arms and what the general bestowed on them.  The aristocracy ruled in 650 just as absolutely as in 620; but the signs of the impending catastrophe had multiplied, and on the political horizon the sword had begun to appear by the side of the crown.