Hello and welcome to this episode of Epox where I shall be doing part four my story all about Marius and Sulla and the decline and fall of the Roman Republic.

So last time I left off with Marius having concluded his war with Mithrodites and in the story Mithrodites is not done with.

There are actually three Mithradetic Wars.

That was only the first of the three.

So in the broader story of the decline of all of the Roman Republic,

Mithradates will still be on the scene.

So the lion, Cornelius Sulla, is on the way back to Rome to deal with his political

enemies. Remember Marius himself, the old Marius had died of natural causes. Quite a while ago now, Sula was out in the yeast for something in the order of five years and it's been a good couple of years since Marius has died, two, three years since Marius has died.

So there's a whole new faction of people, it's still, incidentally, it's still called the Marion

faction. And his son, also Gius Marius, Gius the younger, is one of the leaders, and he is young,

he's only about 26 in 83 BC which is the year that Sura actually returns

but the real leaders are sinner another guy called Carbo and another sometime console called Skippio not one of the more famous

revered Skippios but there's sort of Cinnar Carboo Skippio Marius younger, and a few others.

And the lion is returning from the east.

Carboe called him something between a lion and a fox.

And it's the half of Sula that is the fox that you need to worry about. He's both brave and strong and noble and fierce, but also very, very cunning and nimble.

It's the more cunning and nimble thing about him which is truly terrifying.

Now everyone knows that Sula is on his way back and they know this for a year or more and

apparently this throws Rome into all sorts of psychological turmoil.

Dan Carlin talked about, as some sort of analogy,

imagine if in a modern world we knew an asteroid was coming

and was certainly going to impact the Earth, a big one.

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