conduct of the senators when the Gauls took Rome was really enacted, the theatrical display must have been cold comfort for those of his party on whom his incapacity brought ruin. [Sidenote:  Chief victims of the massacre.] [Sidenote:  The Caesars.] Among the latter were the brothers Caesar, Caius, who had sought to be consul before he was praetor, and had been denounced for it by Sulpicius, and Lucius, the conqueror at Acerrae and author of the Julian law. [Sidenote:  Publius Crassus.] Publius Crassus, consul in 97, and one of Caesar’s lieutenants in the Social War, fled with his son, and when overtaken first stabbed his son and then himself. [Sidenote:  Marcus Antonius.] Marcus Antonius, the great forensic orator, was so odious to Marius that the latter, on hearing that he was taken, wished, so the story runs, to go and kill him with his own hand.  Antonius was in hiding, and was betrayed by the indiscretion of a slave, who, being questioned by a wine-seller why he was buying more or better wine than usual, whispered to him that it was for Marcus Antonius.  On the soldiers coming to kill him, he pleaded so eloquently for his life that they wept and would not touch him.  But their officer, who was waiting below, impatiently came up and cut off his head with his own hand.  Lucius Merula opened his veins, and so bled to death.  His crime was that he had been made consul when Cinna was deposed.  His last act seems odd to us, but pathetically bespoke the man’s piety and recalls the last scene in the life of Demosthenes.  He wrote on a tablet that he had taken off his official cap when opening his veins, so as to avoid the sacrilege of a flamen of Jupiter dying with it on his head. [Sidenote:  Catulus.] Marius had behaved generously once to Q. Lutatius Catulus, his old colleague against the Cimbri; but Catulus had helped to drive him into exile, and there was to be no second mistake of that sort.  ‘He must die,’ he said, when the relatives of Catulus pleaded for his life.  It is not unlikely that disease, and drinking, and his late hardships had made the old man insane.  He had been occasionally good-natured in former days; now he seemed to gloat in carnage.  For every sneer cast at him, for every wrong done to him in past years, he took a horrible revenge.  When Cinna had summoned him, he had said that he would settle the question of enrolment in the tribes once for all.  He wished not to select victims, but to massacre all the leading optimates.  Sertorius begged Cinna to check the slaughter.  Cinna did try to curb the outrages of the slave bands; but he dared not break with Marius, whom he named as joint consul with himself for the year 86.  But as soon as his colleague was dead, he and Sertorius surrounded the ruffians and killed them to a man.