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38. After his divorce from Clodia, who was a licentious and base woman, he married Servilia, a sister of Cato, but this, too, was an unfortunate marriage. For it lacked none of the evils which Clodia had brought in her train except one, namely, the scandal about her brothers. In all other respects Servilia was equally vile and abandoned, and yet Lucullus forced himself to tolerate her, out of regard for Cato. At last, however, he put her away.

[2] The Senate had conceived wondrous hopes that in him it would find an opposer of the tyranny of Pompey and a champion of the aristocracy, with all the advantage of great glory and influence; but he quitted and abandoned public affairs, either because he saw that they were already beyond proper control and diseased, or, as some say, because he had his fill of glory, and felt that the unfortunate issue of his many struggles and toils entitled him to fall back upon a life of ease and luxury. [3] Some commend him for making such a change, and thereby escaping the unhappy lot of Marius, who, after his Cimbrian victories and the large and fair successes which were so famous, was unwilling to relax his efforts and enjoy the honours won, but with an insatiate desire for glory and power, old man that he was, fought with young men in the conduct of the state, and so drove headlong into terrible deeds, and sufferings more terrible still. Cicero, say these, would have had a better old age if he had taken in sail after the affair of Catiline, and Scipio, too, if he had given himself pause after adding Numantia to Carthage; [4] for a political cycle, too, has a sort of natural termination, and political no less than athletic contests are absurd, after the full vigor of life has departed. Crassus and Pompey, on the other hand, ridiculed Lucullus for giving himself up to pleasure and extravagance, as if a luxurious life were not even more unsuitable to men of his years than political and military activities.

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