Gaius Marius's family had been in Arpinum for centuries, prided itself upon its Latinity. Was Marius a Volscian name, a Samnite name? Did it have an Oscan ring to it, just because there were Samnites and Volsci called Marius? No! Marius was Latin. He, Gaius Marius, was as good as any of those lofty-nosed, haughty nobles who so delighted in putting him down. In fact and this was what really hurt! he was much better than any of them. His feeling told him so. How could a man explain away a feeling? A feeling he hosted like a guest who refused to leave, no matter how inhospitably he behaved? It was a long, long time since that feeling had first moved inside his mind, time enough and more for the events of the ensuing years to have shown it its futility, prod it into moving out in despair. Yet it never had. It lived inside his mind today as vividly and indomitably as it had in the beginning, fully half a lifetime ago.

How strange the world was! thought Gaius Marius, looking closely into the glazed faces of the men wearing purple-bordered togas all around him in that dreary, mizzling hour after dawn. No, not a Tiberius or a Gaius Sempronius Gracchus among them! Pluck out Marcus Aemilius Scaurus and Publius Rutilius Rufus, and you were left with a gaggle of very little men. Yet all of them looked down on him Gaius Marius as a bumptious nobody with more gall than grace. Simply because they had the right blood in their veins. Any one of them knew if the right circumstances came into being, he might be entitled to call himself the First Man in Rome. Just as Scipio Africanus, Aemilius Paullus, Scipio Aemilianus, and perhaps a dozen others over the centuries of the Republic had been so called. The First Man in Rome was not the best man; he was the first among other men who were his equals in rank and opportunity. And to be the First Man in Rome was something far better than kingship, autocracy, despotism, call it what you would.