Women lost sanity, virtue, judgment over Sulla. They threw caution to the winds, outraged their husbands and fathers and brothers, gushed and giggled if he so much as glanced at them in passing. Such an able, intelligent man! A superlative soldier, an efficient administrator, brave as any man could hope to be, little short of perfection at organizing himself or others. And yet women were his downfall. Or so thought Publius Rutilius Rufus, whose nice but homely face and ordinary mousy coloring had never distinguished him from a myriad other men. Not that Sulla was a philanderer, or even an occasional ladykiller; as far as Rutilius Rufus knew, he behaved with admirable rectitude. But there was no doubt that a man who hungered to reach the top of the Roman political ladder stood a much better chance of doing so if he did not have a face like Apollo's; handsome men who were enormously attractive to women were generally mistrusted by their peers, dismissed as lightweights, or as effeminate fellows, or as potential cuckolders. Last year, thought Rutilius Rufus, his reminiscences meandering on, Sulla had run for election as a praetor. Everything seemed to be in his favor. His war record was splendid and well advertised, for Gaius Marius had made sure the electors knew how invaluable Sulla had been to him, as quaestor, tribune, and finally legate. Even Catulus Caesar (who had no real cause to love Sulla, the author of his embarrassment in Italian Gaul, when Sulla, by instigating a mutiny, had saved Catulus Caesar's army from annihilation) had come forth and praised his services in Italian Gaul, the year the German Cimbri had been defeated. Then, during the few short days when Lucius Appuleius Saturninus had threatened the State, it had been Sulla, tirelessly energetic and efficient, who had enabled Gaius Marius to put an end to the business.