and what he gave to every soldier, which was nine hundred and fifty drachmas each. After all which he nobly feasted the city and adjoining villages, or vici.
Being divorced from Clodia, a dissolute and wicked woman, he married Servilia, sister to Cato. This also proved an unfortunate match, for she only wanted one of all Clodia's vices, the criminality she was accused of with her brothers. Out of reverence to Cato, he for a while connived at her impurity and immodesty, but at length dismissed ber. When the senate expected great things from him, hoping to find in him a check to the usurpations of Pompey, and that with the greatness of his station and credit he would come forward as the champion of the nobility, he retired from business and abandoned public life ; either because he saw the State to be in a difficult and diseased condition, or, as others say, because he was as great as he could well be, and inclined to a quiet and easy life, after those many labors and toils which had ended with him so far from fortunately. There are those who highly commend his change of life, saying that he thus avoided that rock on which Marius split. For he, after the great and glorious deeds of his Cimbrian victories, was not contented to retire upon his honors, but out of an insatiable desire of glory and power, even in his old age, headed a political party against young men, and let himself fall into miserable actions, and yet more miserable sufferings. Better, in like manner, they say, had it been for Cicero, after Catiline's conspiracy, to have retired and grown old, and for Scipio, after his Numantine and Carthaginian conquests, to have sat down contented. For the administration of public affairs has, like other things, its proper term, and statesmen as well as wrestlers will break down, when strength and youth fail. But Crassus and Pompey, on
