Patrician members of the gens Cornelia seem to have resisted this change and continued inhumating their dead until the first century BC. In 79 BC, the dictator Sulla was the first patrician Cornelius to be cremated, perhaps because he feared his body would be defaced by supporters of his arch-enemy, Gaius Marius. Toynbee describes the change from burial to cremation as generally starting, excepting a few noble families, by 400 BC. Bodel (2008) places the main transition as the 1st to 2nd century AD.