Or both?

Marius always fascinates me, because who will ever know how significant an impact he had on Julius Caesar, both for what to do, and what NOT to do, in politics and war. It's irresistable to imagine young Gaius sitting at Uncle's knee and listening to his stories of war. . . but I haven't read yet an intelligent critique of what, if anything, Marius himself (as opposed to Marius' cause) had in common with Julius. Offhand, I'd say they seem very distant politically . . . and I don't know enough to judge them militarily in terms of strategy and tactics.

One has to wonder, however, if in the end, the old man was totally insane. He deserves as much opprobrium as Sulla in many ways - he was the first, with Cinna to run amuck quite on a scale that would later become all too familiar, murdering hundreds, bloody severed heads on the Rostra, rampages through Rome's streets murdering political enemies on sight. Sulla's proscriptions just took a logical leaf from Marius and Cinna.

And during this period, young Caesar was between 13 and 15!! An impressionable age.

I've always thought that the secret of Julius Caesar lies in the years he grew up, roughly 100-78 BC - and for a Roman, it was a remarkably horrible time to be young. And Marius was so much a part of those disasters!