and people had indeed finally got that point. The senate’s members were well informed enough to know that strategically they were in a poor position, and politically aware enough to know that Etruria was trembling on the brink. The common people might have been more reluctant to share their prized citizenship, but here Marius had done the senate an inadvertent favour. By displaying the corpses of the war dead from the battle of Tolenus in Rome, he had forced the Roman people to confront the grim reality of what their obstinacy was costing the city. There was little senatorial or popular
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