SERTORIUS, Quintus. The life and career of the Roman Sertorius, a man of remarkable genius both as a general and as a statesman, may be said to be comprised between the years 105 and 72 b.c., a period of civil war and revolution in the Roman world, when every man of any mark had to be an adherent either of Sulla or of Marius. Sertorius, who came from a little Sabine village under the Apennines and was a self-made man, attached himself to the party of the latter, and served under him in 102 b.c. at the great battle of Aquae Sextiae (Aix), in which the Teutones were decisively defeated. Three years before he had witnessed the rout of a Roman army by the Cimbri on the Rhone. In 97 he was serving in Spain and thus had a good opportunity of making himself acquainted with the country with which his fame is chiefly associated. In 91 he was quaestor in Cisalpine Gaul, and on his return to Rome he met with such a hearty welcome that he would have been elected to the tribuneship but for the decided opposition of Sulla. He now declared himself for Marius and the democratic party, though of Marius himself as a man he had the worst opinion. He must have been a consenting party to those hideous massacres of Marius and Cinna in 87, though he seems to have done what he could to mitigate their horrors by putting a stop to the outrages perpetrated by the scum of Marius’s soldiery. On Sulla’s return from the East and the war with Mithradates in 83, Sertorius left Rome for Spain, where he represented the Marian or democratic party, but, it would appear, without receiving any definite commission or appointment. Here he passed the remainder of his life, with the exception of some cruises in the Mediterranean in conjunction with Cilician pirates, and of a campaign in Mauretania, in which ...