Hello and we'll welcome to this next episode of Epoch where I shall be continuing my narrative all about the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.

Now last time we left off talking about Marius and his successes on the battlefield against the Tutones and the Ambronies.

But I want to switch the story now to that of Sulla, Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

Now the stories, as I mentioned before, I believe, the stories, the lives of Marius and Sulla are

heavily entwined.

So it is actually a little bit difficult how best to tell the story whether to tell the

entire story of Marius until his death and then go back and recover a lot of the

ground with Sula where their stories overlap, but I'd be doubling up on the narrative at that point.

So I thought I'd leave the story specifically where I did with Marius.

And now let's go back and talk about the early life and career of Sulla.

And we'll catch up to Marius and the Romans with their battles against the Tetonis and the Kimbri and we'll go forward from there.

So Sula. Sula and Marius were very different men.

For a start I went to great length, all the sources and all the historians go to fairly great length.

So make sure you remember that Marius was a man of the people and certainly wasn't aristocratic.

Where now, Sula was, it was from one of those aristocratic families that didn't have any money.

Now, I'm from a family that's the furthest thing from aristocratic and we've never had any money so I've never

had to worry about this but apparently if you're from an aristocratic family with a

great name but you haven't got any money that sort of a burden to bear

that's across to bear and because you're supposed to live a certain lifestyle then

you just can't this story played out a lot with a lot of French aristocrats during the 18th century

and the run up to the French Revolution. But Sula was one of these families where in his past, centuries before before they'd been great men that had risen

to the top of Roman politics but now he had to grow up in just a relatively

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