RETURN OF SULLA AND THE SULLAN CONSTITUTION
The Asiatic threat came from Mithradates VI, a dependent king who had expanded his original kingdom of Pontus around the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and southward into Cappadocia. Mommsen describes Mithradates as “an Oriental ruler of the ordinary stamp, coarse, full of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel, perfidious, and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, and so powerful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about him and his unshaken courage in resistance frequently look like talent, and sometimes even like genius.”
Knowing something of the power of Rome, Mithradates throughout his land-grabbing took pains to avoid an open break, but a rupture occurred late in 89 B.C. through the machinations of a greedy Roman official, Manius Aquillius. (Later, as Mithradates’ captive, his avarice was sated by molten gold poured down his throat.) Once the die was cast, Mithradates energetically prosecuted the war. The wholesale massacre of Roman business men in the Greek cities of Asia Minor was the act of a man determined to fight to the end. He strengthened his Armenian alliance, sought support from Greece, Crete, and Egypt, filled the Mediterranean with privateers, recruited a foreign legion (largely from Roman and Italian political refugees), and reportedly raised an army of 250,000 foot-soldiers and 40,000 horse. During 88 B.C. his troops overran practically all Asia Minor, and penetrated into Greece. Thus Sulla’s first objective was to free Greece.
Once landed, the comparatively small Sullan army of 30,000 easily defeated Mithradates’ general Archelaus and restored the bulk of the Greek mainland to Roman control. Archelaus held out in Athens, supplied by sea through the port of the Piraeus. A long siege was necessary, in which Sulla was severely handicapped by lack of a fleet. But Athens was finally stormed in March, 86 B.C., and soon afterward the Asiatic army in Greece was nearly annihilated.
In the meantime the new revolutionary Senate in Rome had ordered Sulla superseded in his command, and had sent Lucius Flaccus with two legions to Greece. Flaccus found Sulla’s troops stoutly attached to their victorious commander, and therefore continued to Asia Minor with only the forces he had brought from Italy. Shortly afterward he met death in an insurrection of the soldiers fomented by his own lieutenant, Gaius Fimbria, who then took over the command.
By the spring of 85 B.C., Mithradates’ general position had sharply deteriorated. His senseless cruelties and his subversion of the existing social order (freeing of slaves, general remission of debts, etc.) caused such cities as Smyrna, Ephesus, and Sardis to defect to the Romans. Sulla, now supported by a growing fleet recruited and organized by his able adjutant Lucius Lucullus, had invaded Asia Minor in the wake of Fimbria after clearing all Greece of enemy forces. The king therefore sued for peace, and Sulla, aware how endlessly the war could be protracted, and himself anxious to return to Italy, was willing to make terms which largely restored the former situation. The second Roman army, under the command of Fimbria, was easily taken over by encouraging the Fimbrian soldiers to defect to the Sullans. So successful was this solicitation that Fimbria, in despair, fell upon his sword.
Sulla wintered his victorious army in the rich cities of western Asia Minor. He laid a heavy indemnity on the communities that had supported Mithradates, and executed the more prominent partisans of the king. But he lacked time and means to make a thorough reorganization, and when he quit the province for Italy in 84 B.C., he left it ravaged by war and a prey to tax gatherers, moneylenders, and pirates.
Early in 83 B.C. he landed at Brundisium, with an army of veterans at his back who had no loyalty save to loot and to their commander. “His arrival,” remarks Mommsen, “was preceded by a report addressed to the Senate describing his campaigns in Greece and Asia, the writer of which appeared to know nothing of his deposition from command. It was the mute herald of the impending restoration.”
Sulla had much to restore. He had left the government in the hands of two hopelessly antagonistic consuls, the die-hard conservative Gnaeus Octavius and the rabble-rousing adventurer Lucius Cornelius Cinna. Scarcely had he turned his back in 87 B.C. than the revolution he had suppressed by force broke out with new vigor. Cinna reoffered the Sulpician law, and was driven out of the city after a street battle in which thousands of his partisans were killed. He successfully appealed to the soldiers at Capua, and with this force as a nucleus was able to raise money and recruits among the newly-enfranchised Italian allies. Marius, bitterly bent on revenge, returned from exile on Cinna’s invitation. By cutting off Rome’s food supply, they forced a surrender of the city. The stubborn Gnaeus Octavius, “true to his oft-expressed principle that he would rather die than concede one iota to his outlawed opponents, refused even now to flee. In his consular robes he awaited the assassin, who was not slow to appear.”
A reign of terror, instigated by Marius, immediately began. Measured by the number of its victims, it was less bloody than some previous political massacres, but the prominence and high public estimation of the men slain, and the cold brutality with which it was carried out, made it a horror for decades to come. At least five former consuls and countless other conservative notables were murdered under Marius’ personal supervision. “His revenge was not satisfied by the deaths of his victims: he forbade burial of the bodies; gave orders that the heads of slain senators be hung from the rostra in the Forum; ordered particular corpses to be dragged through the streets; . . . and publicly embraced the man who brought him, as he sat at table, the head of the former consul Marcus Antonius, whom he had with difficulty been restrained from seeking out in his hiding-place and slaying with his own hand.” Even after Marius died of a fever in January, 86 B.C., “loaded with the execration of all parties and the hatred of the whole nation,” the murders continued, until Quintus Sertorius wiped out the Marian executionary bands.
For fours years, 87-84 B.C., Cinna “governed” as consul—“not [Mommsen remarks] according to a possibly erroneous plan, but according to no political plan at all.” The Sullan laws were repealed, Sulla’s estates were laid waste, and only with difficulty did his wife and children escape to his Macedonian headquarters. But the revolutionary government’s most energetic single action during its four years’ tenure of power was the raising of 100,000 troops to oppose Sulla’s return.
Against this force Sulla could place in the scale only his five legions—probably scarcely 40,000 men, even including some contingents levied in Macedonia and Greece. True, this army during seven years’ warfare had been weaned from politics, and attached to its general (who pardoned debauchery, brutality, even mutiny in his soldiers, required nothing but bravery and loyalty toward their general, and promised them the most extravagant rewards from victory) with that kind of soldierly enthusiasm which is the more powerful because the noblest and meanest passions often combine to produce it. Sulla’s soldiers voluntarily swore to stand firmly by each other, and voluntarily brought their savings to the general as a contribution to the war’s cost. But despite the weight of this solid and select body of troops, Sulla saw that a united and resolute Italy could not be subdued with five legions. To settle accounts with the popular party and their incapable autocrats would not have been difficult; but united with that party was the whole mass of those who desired no oligarchic restoration, and above all the whole body of new citizens—both those whom the Julian law had deterred from taking part in the insurrection, and those whose revolt had brought Rome to the brink of ruin.
Surveying this situation, Sulla was far removed from the blind exasperation which characterized most of his party. While the state was in flames, his friends being murdered, his houses destroyed, and his family driven into exile, he had remained at his post till the Roman frontier was secured. He now treated Italian affairs with the same patriotic and judicious moderation, doing whatever he could to pacify the middle party and the new citizens, and to prevent the civil struggle from assuming the far more dangerous form of a fresh war between the Romans and their Italian allies.
The first letter which Sulla addressed to the Senate had expressly disclaimed a reign of terror. In harmony with its terms, he now offered unconditional pardon to all who would break with the revolutionary government, and caused his soldiers man by man to swear that they would treat the Italians as friends and fellow citizens. So binding were Sulla’s declarations guaranteeing the new citizens their political gains that the democratic leader Carbo demanded hostages from every civic community in Italy. (The proposal broke down under general indignation and the opposition of the Senate.) The chief difficulty of Sulla’s position was that, in view of the faithlessness and perfidy which prevailed, the new citizens had every reason to doubt whether he could make his party keep its word after victory.
In the spring of 83 B.C. Sulla landed his legions at Brundisium. On receiving the news, the Senate declared the commonwealth in danger, and granted the consuls unlimited powers; but these incapable leaders were surprised by a landing that might have been foreseen for years. The government’s army was still at Ariminum, the ports were not garrisoned, and (incredibly) there was not a man in arms along the whole southeastern coast. The consequences were soon apparent. Brundisium itself, a considerable community of new citizens, opened its gates to Sulla; all Messapia and Apulia followed its example; and the army marched through the area as through a friendly country, uniformly maintaining the strictest discipline.
From all sides the scattered conservative remnant flocked to the camp. Quintus Metellus came from Liguria (where he had gone after escaping from Africa) to resume as Sulla’s colleague the proconsular command withdrawn from him by the revolution, and Marcus Crassus appeared from Africa with a small band of armed men.1 More important, deserters began to appear from the democratic camp—for instance, the refined and respected Lucius Philippus, one of the few consulars who had come to terms with the revolutionary government. He was graciously received by Sulla, and given the honorable and easy task of occupying the province of Sardinia. Quintus Lucretius Ofella and other officers were likewise received and at once employed. Even Publius Cethegus, one of the senators banished by Sulla, obtained pardon and a position in the army.
Still more important was the gain of the Picenum district, substantially due to Strabo’s young son Gnaeus Pompeius [hereafter called Pompey]. The latter, like his father originally no conservative, had even served in Cinna’s army. But his father’s service against the revolution was not forgotten, and he found himself threatened with an indictment requiring him to give up the booty allegedly embezzled by his father after the capture of Asculum. The personal protection of the consul Carbo, plus the eloquence of the consular Lucius Philippus and the young Quintus Hortensius, averted financial ruin; but his dissatisfaction remained. On the news of Sulla’s landing he went to Picenum, where he had extensive possessions and the best municipal connections, and set up the standard of the Optimate party in Auximum. The district, mostly inhabited by old citizens, joined him; the young men, many of whom had served with him under his father, readily followed the courageous leader who at twenty-two was as much soldier as general, and who at the head of his cavalry vigorously assailed the enemy.
The Picenian corps soon grew to three legions. Three separate forces were dispatched from the capital against him, but the young general, dexterously using the dissensions that arose among them, had the skill to evade them or to beat them in detail and join Sulla’s main army. Sulla saluted him as Imperator 2 and showed him honors withheld from his other noble supporters—presumably thereby also rebuking them indirectly for their lack of energy.
Thus reinforced both morally and materially, Sulla and Metellus marched through the still insurgent Samnite districts towards Campania. The enemy force advanced toward the same district, and it seemed as if the issue would there be decided. The army of the consul Gaius Norbanus was already at Capua, where a new colony of citizens had just been installed with great ceremony, and the second consular army was likewise advancing along the Appian road. Before it arrived, however, Sulla was in front of Norbanus. A last attempt at mediation by Sulla led only to the arrest of his envoys. With fresh indignation his veteran troops assailed the enemy, and their first charge down from Mount Tifata broke the enemy ranks drawn up in the plain. Norbanus took the remnant of his force into Capua and the new colony of Neapolis, and allowed himself to be blockaded there.
By this victory Sulla’s troops replaced their apprehension about their weak numbers with a full conviction of their superiority. Instead of besieging the remains of the defeated army, Sulla invested the towns where they took shelter and advanced along the Appian highway against Teanum, where the consul Scipio was posted. To him also, before beginning battle, Sulla made fresh and apparently sincere proposals for peace. The weak Scipio entered into them; an armistice was concluded; the two generals, both members of the same noble gens, both men of culture and refinement and for many years colleagues in the Senate, met in personal conference; they discussed several questions; they made such progress that Scipio dispatched a messenger to Capua to procure his colleague’s opinion.
The Sullans, well supplied with money by their general, had no trouble in persuading the anxious recruits over their cups that it was better to have them as comrades than foes. In vain Sertorius warned his general to stop this dangerous intercourse. The agreement which had seemed so near was not effected, and Scipio denounced the armistice. But Sulla maintained that the agreement had been already concluded; whereupon Scipio’s soldiers, under the pretext that their general had wrongfully denounced the armistice, passed over en masse to the ranks of the enemy. The scene ended with universal embracing before the commanding officers of the revolutionary army. Sulla ordered the consul to resign his office—which he did—and offered to have him and his staff escorted to any point they desired. Scipio, however, was hardly at liberty when he resumed his office and began to collect fresh troops. Sulla and Metellus took up winter-quarters in Campania and, after the failure of a second attempt to come to terms with Norbanus, maintained the blockade of Capua during the winter.
Sulla’s achievements in the first campaign secured the submission of Apulia, Picenum, and Campania, the dissolution of one consular army, and the vanquishing and blockading of the other. The Italian communities, compelled to choose between oppressors, in numerous cases entered into negotiations with him, and caused the political rights which they had won from the opposition party to be guaranteed by the general in formal separate treaties. It was Sulla’s hope, as well as his boast, that he would overthrow the revolutionary government in the next campaign and again march into Rome.
But despair gave the revolution fresh energies. The consuls were two of its most vigorous leaders, Carbo and Gaius Marius the younger. (The fact that the latter, at age 20, could not legally hold the consulship was as little heeded as any other constitutional point.) Quintus Sertorius, who continued to prove an inconvenient critic, was ordered to raise new troops in Etruria and then to proceed to his province of Hither Spain. To replenish the treasury the Senate was obliged to decree the melting of the gold and silver vessels of the temples—a considerable quantity, as may be seen from the fact that after several months’ warfare there still remained nearly 14,000 pounds of gold and 6,000 pounds of silver.
In the large area of Italy which still voluntarily or under compulsion adhered to the revolution, warlike preparations went forward with vigor. Newly formed divisions of some strength came from Etruria, where the communities of new citizens were very numerous, and from the region of the Po. The veterans of Marius in great numbers answered the call of his son. But preparations for the struggle proceeded with greatest eagerness in insurgent Samnium and some Lucanian districts. It was certainly not from devotion to the revolutionary government that numerous Oscan contingents reinforced its armies; but it was well understood there that an oligarchy restored by Sulla would not acquiesce, like the lax Cinnan government, in the existing de facto independence of these lands. Therefore the age-old rivalry of Sabellian against Latin flamed afresh in the struggle against Sulla,3 and the campaign of 82 B.C. was begun on both sides with greater resources and increased hatred. The revolution in particular threw away the scabbard, outlawing (at Carbo’s suggestion) all senators who went over to Sulla’s camp. Sulla was silent. He probably thought that they were pronouncing sentence on themselves.
The army of the Optimates was divided, Metellus undertaking, with the support of the Picenian insurrection, to advance to Upper Italy, while Sulla marched from Campania against the capital. Carbo opposed the former, Marius choosing to encounter the main enemy army in Latium. Advancing along the Via Latina, Sulla met the Marian army not far from Signia. They retired before him as far as the so-called “Port of Sacer,” between Signia and the chief stronghold of the Marians, the strong Praeneste. There Marius drew up his force, about 40,000 strong, for battle. He was the true son of his father in savage fury and personal bravery, but his troops were not the trained veterans with which the latter had fought his battles, and still less could the inexperienced young man compare with the old master. His troops soon gave way, the defeat being hastened by a division which switched sides even during the battle. More than half the Marians were killed or captured, and the remnant, unable to keep the field or gain the other bank of the Tiber, was compelled to seek shelter in the nearby fortresses.
With the capital, which the democrats had neglected to provision, thus irrecoverably lost, Marius ordered the commanding praetor Lucius Brutus Damasippus to evacuate it, but before doing so to put to death all the outstanding Optimates who still survived. This injunction of the son, which even outdid the bestialities of his father, was carried into effect. Damasippus convoked the Senate under a pretext, and the marked men were struck down partly during the sitting and partly on their flight from the senate house. Notwithstanding the previous massacre there were still several victims of note, among them the two best legal orators of the day, the former aedile 4 Publius Antistius, who was also young Pompey’s father-in-law, and the former praetor Gaius Carbo, son of the well-known friend and subsequent opponent of the Gracchi. The slain also included the consular Lucius Domitius and even the venerable pontifex maximus, Quintus Scaevola, who had escaped the dagger of Fimbria only to bleed to death during these last throes of the revolution in the vestibule of the temple of Vesta entrusted to his guardianship. With speechless horror the multitude saw the corpses of these last victims dragged through the streets and thrown into the river.
The broken bands of Marius threw themselves into the strong neighboring cities of Norba and Praeneste, Marius entering the latter with the treasure and most of the fugitives. Sulla left an able officer, Quintus Ofella, before Praeneste just as he had done in the previous year before Capua, with instructions not to waste his strength in besieging the town, but by blockade to starve it into surrender. Sulla himself advanced from different sides upon the capital, which he found abandoned by the enemy, and occupied it without resistance. Barely taking time to ease the minds of the people by an address and to make the most necessary arrangements, he immediately set out for Etruria, that together with Metellus he might rid Northern Italy of the enemy.
Metellus had meanwhile encountered and defeated Carbo’s lieutenant Carrinas at the river Aesis, which separated the district of Picenum from the Gallic province, but had been obliged to forego any further advance when Carbo came up in person with his superior army. Carbo, however, became anxious about his communications upon learning of events near Rome. He retreated to the Flaminian road intending to set up headquarters at Ariminum, from whence he might hold the passes of the Apennines on the one hand and the valley of the Po on the other. In this retreat different divisions fell into the hands of the enemy, and Carbo’s rearguard was broken in a brilliant cavalry engagement by Pompey; nevertheless Carbo on the whole attained his object. The consular Norbanus took the command in the valley of the Po, while Carbo himself proceeded to Etruria.
The march of Sulla with his victorious legions to Etruria again altered the situation, as three Sullan armies from Gaul, Umbria, and Rome established communications with each other. Metellus with the fleet went past Ariminum to Ravenna, and at Faventia cut communications between Ariminum and the valley of the Po. Pompey and his contemporary and rival Crassus penetrated from Picenum by mountain paths into Umbria and gained the Flaminian road at Spoletium, where they defeated Carbo’s legate Carrinas and shut him up in the town. (He succeeded, however, in escaping from it on a rainy night and making his way, though not without loss, to the army of Carbo.) Sulla himself marched from Rome into Etruria with his army in two divisions, one of which advancing along the coast defeated the corps opposed to it at Saturnia; the second, led by Sulla in person, fell in with the army of Carbo in the valley of the Clanis, and sustained a successful conflict with his Spanish cavalry. But the pitched battle fought between Carbo and Sulla in the region of Clusium, though not properly decisive, was in favor of Carbo to the extent that Sulla’s victorious advance was checked.
In the vicinity of Rome events also appeared to take a favorable turn for the revolutionary party. For while the Optimates were concentrating all their energies on Etruria, the popular party put forth the utmost efforts to break the blockade of Praeneste. Even the governor of Sicily, Marcus Perpenna, set out for that purpose, though it does not appear that he reached Praeneste. Nor was the very considerable corps under Marcius, detached by Carbo, any more successful: assailed and defeated by enemy troops from Spoletium, demoralized by disorder, want of supplies, and mutiny, one portion went back to Carbo, another to Ariminum, and the rest dispersed.
But help in earnest came from Southern Italy. There the Samnites under Pontius of Telesia, and the Lucanians under their experienced general Marcus Lamponius, set out for Praeneste, nor was it possible to prevent their departure. They were joined in Campania by part of the democratic garrison of Capua, which swelled their troops to a reported 70,000 men. Thereupon Sulla, leaving behind a corps against Carbo, returned to Latium and took up a well-chosen position in the defiles in front of Praeneste, where he barred the route of the relieving army. In vain the garrison attempted to break through the lines of Ofella; in vain the relieving army attempted to dislodge Sulla. Both remained immovable in their strong positions, even after Damasippus at Carbo’s orders had reinforced the relieving army with two legions.
While the war thus stood still in Etruria and in Latium, matters came to a decision in the valley of the Po, where the general of the democracy, Gaius Norbanus, had hitherto maintained the upper hand. He had attacked Metellus’ lieutenant Marcus Lucullus with superior forces and shut him up in Placentia, and had at length turned against Metellus in person. He encountered the latter at Faventia, and immediately attacked late in the afternoon with his troops fatigued by their march. The consequence was the complete defeat and total breaking up of his corps, of which only about 1,000 men returned to Etruria. On the news of this battle Lucullus sallied forth and defeated the division left behind to oppose him. The Lucanian troops of Albinovanus deserted in a body, their leader making up for his hesitation by inviting the chief officers of the revolutionary army to banquet with him and causing them to be put to death. In general, everyone who could now concluded his peace. Ariminum with all its stores and treasures fell into the hands of Metellus, Norbanus embarked for Rhodes, the whole region between the Alps and Apennines acknowledged the government of the Optimates, and the troops hitherto employed there were freed to attack Etruria, the last province where their antagonists still kept the field.
When Carbo received this news in his camp at Clusium, he lost his nerve. Although he still had a considerable body of troops under his command, he fled from his headquarters secretly and embarked for Africa. Part of his abandoned troops followed their general’s example and went home, part of them were destroyed by Pompey, and Carrinas led the remainder to Latium to join the army at Praeneste. There no change had meanwhile taken place, and the final decision drew near. The troops of Carrinas were not numerous enough to shake Sulla’s position, and the vanguard of the oligarchic army was approaching under Pompey. In a few days the net would draw tight around the army of the democrats and the Samnites.
Its leaders then determined to abandon the relief of Praeneste and throw themselves on Rome, only a good day’s march distant. By so doing they were militarily ruined, for their line of retreat would fall into Sulla’s hands; and even if they got possession of Rome, they would inevitably be crushed within a city ill-suited for defense, and wedged between the far superior armies of Metellus and Sulla. Safety, however, was not an object. Revenge alone dictated their march, the last outbreak of fury in the passionate revolutionists and especially in the despairing Sabellians. Pontius of Telesia was in earnest when he proclaimed to his followers that, in order to get rid of the wolves which had robbed Italy of freedom, the forest which harbored them must be destroyed.
Never was Rome in more fearful peril than on the first of November, 82 B.C., when Pontius, Lamponius, Carrinas, and Damasippus advanced along the Latin road and encamped about a mile from the Colline gate. It was threatened with a day like July 20, 389 B.C., or June 15, A.D. 455—the days of the Celts and the Vandals. The time was gone by when a coup de main against Rome was a foolish enterprise, and the assailants could have no want of connections in the capital. The volunteers who sallied from the city, mostly youths of quality, were scattered like chaff. The only hope of safety rested on Sulla. The latter, on learning of the departure of the Samnite army for Rome, had likewise set out in all haste for the capital. The appearance of his foremost horsemen under Balbus during the morning revived the sinking courage of the citizens. About midday he appeared in person with his main force, and immediately drew up his ranks for battle at the temple of the Erycine Aphrodite before the Colline gate.
His lieutenants begged him not to send his exhausted troops into action at once; but Sulla took into consideration what the night might bring on Rome, and, late as it was in the afternoon, ordered the attack. The battle was obstinately contested and bloody. Sulla’s left wing, which he led in person, gave way as far as the city wall, so that it became necessary to close the city gates. Stragglers even brought accounts to Ofella that the battle was lost, but on the right wing Marcus Crassus overthrew the enemy and pursued him as far as Antemnae. This somewhat relieved the left wing, and an hour after sunset it in turn began to advance. The fight continued throughout the night and even into the following morning; and it was only the defection of a division of 3,000 men, who turned their arms against their former comrades, that put an end to the struggle and saved Rome.
The army of the insurgents, for which there was no retreat, was completely extirpated. The prisoners taken in the battle—between 3,000 and 4,000 in number, including the generals Damasippus, Carrinas, and the severely wounded Pontius—were brought by Sulla’s orders on the third day after the battle to the Villa Publica in the Campus Martius, and there were massacred to the last man, so that the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the neighboring temple of Bellona, where Sulla was holding a meeting of the Senate. It was a ghastly execution and ought not to be excused; but it is not right to forget that those very men who perished there had fallen like a band of robbers on the capital and its citizens, and, had they found time, would have destroyed them as far as fire and sword can destroy a city.
With this battle the war was effectively at an end. The garrison of Praeneste surrendered, when it learned the issue of the battle at Rome from the heads of Carrinas and other officers thrown over the walls. The leaders, the consul Gaius Marius and the son of Pontius, fell on each other’s swords after failing in an attempt to escape. The multitude cherished the hope that the victor would even now have mercy upon them, but the time for mercy was past. The more unconditionally had Sulla up to the last moment granted full pardon to those who came over to him, the more inexorable he showed himself toward the leaders and communities that had held out to the end. Of the Praenestine prisoners, 12,000 in number, most of the Romans and some individual Praenestines as well as the women and children were released. But the Roman senators, the great majority of the Praenestines, and all of the Samnites were disarmed and cut to pieces, and the rich city was given up to pillage.
After such an occurrence it was natural that the cities of new citizens which had not yet capitulated should continue their resistance with the utmost obstinacy. In the Latin town of Norba, for instance, when Aemilius Lepidus got into it by treachery, the citizens killed each other and set fire to their own homes in order to deprive their executioners of vengeance and of booty. In Lower Italy Neapolis had already been taken by assault, and Capua seems to have voluntarily surrendered; but Nola was not evacuated by the Samnites until 80 B.C. On his flight from Nola the last surviving leader of the Italians, the consul of the insurgents in the hopeful year of 90 B.C., Gaius Papius Mutilus, disowned by his wife to whom he had stolen in disguise and with whom he had hoped to find asylum, fell on his sword in Teanum before the door of his own house. As for the Samnites, the dictator declared that Rome would have no rest so long as Samnium existed, and that the Samnite name must therefore be extirpated from the earth. He verified these words in terrible fashion on the prisoners taken before Rome and in Praeneste, and he appears to have undertaken a raid for the purpose of laying waste the country, to have captured Aesernia, and to have converted that hitherto flourishing and populous region into the desert which it has since remained.
A longer resistance was offered by Populonium in Etruria and above all by the impregnable Volaterrae. The latter, garrisoned by an army of four legions gathered out of the remnants of the beaten party, stood a two years’ siege conducted first by Sulla in person and then by the former praetor Gaius Carbo, the brother of the democratic consul, till at length in 79 B.C., three years after the battle at the Colline Gate, the garrison capitulated on condition of free departure. But in this terrible time neither military law nor discipline could be trusted. The entering army raised a cry of treason and stoned its too humane general, and a troop of horse sent by the Roman government cut down the garrison as it withdrew according to the terms of the capitulation. The victorious Sullan army was distributed throughout Italy, and all the insecure townships were furnished with strong garrisons. Under the iron hand of the Sullan officers the last palpitations of the revolutionary and national opposition slowly subsided.
There was still work to be done in the provinces. Sardinia had been speedily wrested by Lucius Philippus from the democratic governor Quintus Antonius (82 B.C.), and Transalpine Gaul offered little or no resistance; but in Sicily, Spain, and Africa the cause of the popular party still seemed by no means lost. Sicily was held for them by the trustworthy Marcus Perpenna. Quintus Sertorius had the skill to win the support of the provincials in Hither Spain, and to form from among the Roman settlers a not inconsiderable army, which soon closed the passes of the Pyrenees. In this he gave fresh proof that he was at home wherever he was stationed, and amid all the incapables of the revolution he was the only really capable man.
In Africa the governor Hadrianus, who followed the path of revolution too zealously and began to free the slaves, had been attacked in his official residence and burnt with his attendants (82 B.C.) during a tumult instigated by the Roman merchants of Utica. Nevertheless the province adhered to the revolutionary government, and Cinna’s son-in-law, the young and able Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, was invested with the supreme command there. Propaganda had even been spread among the Numidian and Mauretanian protectorates. Their legitimate rulers, Hiempsal II son of Gauda, and Bogud son of Bocchus, apparently sided with Sulla. But with the aid of the Cinnans the former had been dethroned by the democratic pretender Hiarbas, and similar feuds agitated the Mauretanian kingdom. The consul Carbo, fleeing from Italy, tarried on the island of Cossyra (Pantellaria) between Africa and Sicily, apparently at a loss whether he should flee to Egypt or attempt to renew the struggle in one of the faithful provinces.
Sulla dispatched Gaius Annius as governor of Further Spain and Gaius Valerius Flaccus as governor of the Ebro province. They were spared the difficult task of forcing the passes of the Pyrenees, because the general sent thither by Sertorius had been killed by one of his own officers and his troops had thereafter melted away. Sertorius, much too weak to maintain an equal struggle, hastily collected the nearest divisions and embarked at New Carthage—for what destination he knew not himself, perhaps for the coast of Africa or for the Canary Islands; it mattered little, provided only Sulla’s arm could not reach him. Spain then willingly submitted to the Sullan magistrates (about 81 B.C.), and Flaccus fought successfully with the Celts and with the Spanish Celtiberians.
Pompey was sent as propraetor to Sicily, and, when he appeared on the coast with 120 sail and six legions, the island was evacuated by Perpenna without resistance. From there Pompey sent a squadron to Cossyra, and captured the Marian officers sojourning there. Marcus Brutus and the others were immediately executed; but Pompey ordered that the consul Carbo should be brought before him at Lilybaeum in order that he might personally hand him over to the executioner—disregarding the protection accorded to him during past perils by that very man.
Having been ordered to go on to Africa, Pompey with his superior army defeated the not inconsiderable forces collected by Ahenobarbus and Hiarbas, and, declining for the moment to be saluted as imperator, at once gave the signal for assault on the hostile camp. He thus be came master of the enemy in one day, Ahenobarbus being among the fallen. With the aid of King Bogud, Hiarbas was seized and slain at Bulla, and Hiempsal was reinstated in his hereditary kingdom. A general campaign against the inhabitants of the desert, among whom a number of Gaetulian tribes recognized as free by Marius were made subject to Hiempsal, removed the tarnish from the Roman name, and in forty days after Pompey’s landing all was at an end in Africa. The Senate instructed him to break up his army—an implied hint that he was not to be allowed a triumph, which according to precedent an extraordinary magistrate could not claim. The general murmured secretly, the soldiers loudly; and it seemed for a moment as if the African army would revolt against the Senate and Sulla would have to take the field against his son-in-law. But Sulla yielded, and allowed the young man to boast of being the only Roman who had become a triumphator before he was a senator (March 12, 79 B.C.). In fact, Sulla “the Fortunate” (not perhaps without a touch of irony) saluted the youth on his return from these easy exploits as “the Great.”
In the East also, after the embarkation of Sulla in the spring of 83 B.C., there had been no peace. The restoration of the old state of affairs and the subjugation of individual towns in Asia as in Italy cost various bloody struggles. Against the free city of Mytilene in particular Lucius Lucullus was finally obliged to bring up troops, after having exhausted all gentler measures; and even a military victory did not put an end to the obstinate resistance of the citizens.
Meanwhile the Roman governor of Asia, Lucius Murena, had again fallen athwart King Mithradates. Since signing the peace the latter had busied himself in strengthening his rule, which was shaken even in the northern provinces. After pacifying the Colchians by appointing his able son Mithradates as their governor, he had then done away with that son, and was now preparing for an expedition into his Bosporan kingdom. The assurances of Archelaus (who had been obliged to seek an asylum with Murena) that these preparations were directed against Rome induced Murena, under the pretext that Mithradates still kept possession of Cappadocian frontier districts, to move his troops toward the Cappadocian Comana and thus to violate the Pontic frontier.
Mithradates contented himself with complaining to Murena and, when this was in vain, to the Roman government. In fact, commissioners from Sulla made their appearance to dissuade the governor, but he did not submit. On the contrary he crossed the Halys and entered on undeniably Pontic territory, whereupon Mithradates resolved to repel force by force. His general Gordius had to detain the Roman army till the king came up with far superior forces and compelled battle. Murena was vanquished with great loss and driven back over the Roman frontier to Phrygia, and the Roman garrisons were expelled from all Cappadocia. Murena still had the effrontery to call himself the victor and to assume the title of imperator as a result of these exploits. But the sharp lesson and a second admonition from Sulla persuaded him to push the matter no further, and the peace between Rome and Mithradates was renewed. This foolish feud, while it lasted, had postponed the reduction of Mytilene. It was only after a long siege by land and by sea, in which the Bithynian fleet rendered good service, that Murena’s successor succeeded in taking the city by storm in 79 B.C.
Thus ended ten years’ revolution and insurrection in the West and in the East. The state once more had unity of government and peace within and without, and after the terrible convulsions of the last years even this relief was welcome. Whether it was to furnish more than a mere relief, whether the remarkable man who had succeeded in the difficult task of vanquishing the public foe, and in the more difficult work of subduing the revolution, would be able to accomplish the most difficult task of all—re-establishing the social and political order shaken to its very foundations—was soon to be decided.
About the time the first pitched battle was fought between Romans and Romans, on the night of July 6, 83 B.C., a venerable temple that had been erected by the kings, dedicated by the youthful republic, and spared by the storms of five hundred years—the temple of the Roman Jupiter on the Capitol—went up in flames. It was no augury, but rather a symbol of the status of the Roman constitution. It, too, lay in ruins and needed reconstruction. The revolution was no doubt vanquished, but victory was far from implying a routine restoration of the old government. The mass of the aristocracy certainly felt that now, after the death of the two revolutionary consuls, it would be enough to arrange for the ordinary supplemental election and leave it to the Senate to take any further steps for rewarding the victorious army, punishing the most guilty revolutionists, and possibly also for preventing similar outbreaks.
But Sulla, in whose hands the victory had for the moment concentrated all power, formed a more correct judgment of the situation. The aristocracy of Rome in its best days had not risen above an adherence—partly noble and partly narrow—to traditional forms: how could the clumsy government of old be in a position to carry out thoroughly and energetically a comprehensive reform of the state? At the present moment, after crisis had swept away almost all the Senate’s leading men, the vigor and intelligence requisite for such an enterprise were more lacking than ever. How useless was aristocratic blood alone, and how low was Sulla’s regard for it, is shown by the fact that, except for his relation-by-marriage Quintus Metellus, his chosen lieutenants were all from the middle party or deserters from the democratic camp—e.g., Lucius Flaccus, Lucius Philippus, Quintus Ofella, and Gnaeus Pompey.
Sulla was as keen on re-establishing the old constitution as the most vehement aristocrat. But he understood (though perhaps not fully, for how in that case could he have put his hand to the work at all?) better than his party the enormous difficulties of this work of restoration. Comprehensive concessions, so far as concession did not affect the essence of oligarchy, and the establishment of an energetic system of repression and prevention, he regarded as unavoidable; but he saw clearly that the existing Senate would refuse or mutilate every concession, ruin every systematic reconstruction. Since Sulla had done what he felt necessary after the Sulpician revolution without much thought of their advice, he was determined under far more critical circumstances to restore the oligarchy, not with the aid of but in spite of the oligarchs.
However, Sulla was not now consul as he had been then, but possessed merely proconsular—i.e., military—power. He needed an authority that was at once extraordinary and as constitutional as possible, in order to impose his reforms on friends and foes. Therefore, in a letter to the Senate he announced that it seemed essential to place the guidance of the state in the hands of one man with unlimited powers, and that he deemed himself called to this difficult task. This proposal, though disagreeable to many, was in effect a command. At the Senate’s direction Lucius Valerius Flaccus, as interim holder of the supreme power, proposed to the citizens that Sulla should receive blanket approval of all his past acts as consul and proconsul; that for the future he should be empowered without appeal to adjudicate on the life and property of the citizens, to deal at his pleasure with the public land, to alter the boundaries of Rome, of Italy, and of the state, to dissolve or establish urban communities in Italy, to dispose of the provinces and dependent states, to confer the supreme command, to nominate proconsuls and propraetors, and to regulate the state for the future by means of new laws; that he alone should judge when he had fulfilled his task and might deem it time to resign this extraordinary magistracy; and that during its continuance it should depend on his pleasure whether the ordinary supreme magistracy should exist side by side with his own or should remain in abeyance.
As a matter of course the proposal was adopted without opposition in November of 82 B.C., and the new master of the state, who as proconsul had avoided entering the capital, appeared for the first time within the walls of Rome. His new office derived its name from the dictatorship, which had been practically abolished since the Hannibalic war. But since he was preceded by twice as many lictors as the dictator of earlier times, this new “dictatorship for the making of laws and the regulation of the commonwealth” (as its official title ran) was in fact quite different from the earlier magistracy, which had been limited as to duration and powers, had not excluded appeal to the citizens, and had not annulled the ordinary magistracy. It much more resembled that of the decemviri legibus scribendis,5 who likewise came forward as an extraordinary government with unlimited fulness of powers superseding the ordinary magistracy, and practically at least administered their office as one which was unlimited in point of time. Or one might say that this new office, with its absolute power based on a decree of the people and restrained by no set term or colleague, was merely the old monarchy, which in fact rested only on the agreement of the citizens to obey one of their number as absolute lord.
It was urged even by contemporaries, in vindication of Sulla, that a king is better than a bad constitution; and as the former title of dictatorship implied a limited reassumption, so this new dictatorship involved a complete reassumption of the regal power. Thus Sulla’s course paralleled that which Gaius Gracchus had followed with so wholly different a design. Once more the conservatives had to borrow from their opponents. The protector of the oligarchic constitution had to come forward as a tyrant in order to avert the ever-threatening tyranny. There was not a little of defeat in this last victory of the oligarchy.
Sulla had neither sought nor desired this difficult and dreadful labor of restoration. But since his only choice was to leave it to utterly incapable hands or to undertake it himself, he set forth with remorseless energy. First of all came a settlement with the guilty. Sulla was personally inclined to pardon. Sanguine in temperament, he could indeed show violent rage, and well might they beware who saw his eye gleam and his cheeks color. But the vindictiveness which characterized Marius in his embittered old age was altogether foreign to Sulla’s disposition. Not only had he borne himself with comparatively great moderation after the revolution of 88 B.C.; even the second revolution, whose fearful outrages had affected him so personally and severely, had not disturbed his equilibrium. As the executioner was dragging the bodies of his friends through the streets of the capital, he had sought in the East to save the life of the blood-stained Fimbria; and when the latter died by his own hand, he had given orders for his decent burial. On landing in Italy he had earnestly offered to forgive and forget, and no one who came to make peace had been rejected. Even after his first successes he had negotiated in this spirit with Lucius Scipio. It was the revolutionary party which not only had broken off these negotiations, but had at the last moment before their downfall resumed the massacres more fearfully than ever, and had in fact conspired with their country’s inveterate foes for the destruction of Rome.
The cup was now full. Immediately after assuming the regency, Sulla outlawed all the civil and military officials who had actively aided the revolution after the convention with Scipio (which according to Sulla’s assertion was validly concluded), and such other citizens as had markedly aided its cause. Whoever killed one of these outlaws was not only exempt from punishment, but also was paid 12,000 denarii for the execution. Anyone who befriended an outlaw, even the nearest relative, was liable to the severest punishment. The property of those outlawed was forfeited to the state, and their children and grandchildren were excluded from a political career, though if of senatorial rank they were bound to assume their share of senatorial burdens. These last enactments also applied to the estates and the descendants of those who had died for the revolution—penalties never before inflicted on those who had borne arms against their fatherland. Most terrible of all was the vagueness of the proposed categories, which brought immediate remonstrance in the Senate, and which Sulla himself sought to remedy by directing the names of the proscribed to be publicly posted and fixing June 1, 81 B.C., as the date for closing the proscription lists.
Much as this bloody roll, swelling daily until it amounted to 4,700 names, excited the just horror of the multitude, at least it checked the caprice of the executioners. Sulla’s hatred was directed solely against the authors of the hideous massacres of 87 and 82 B.C. By his command the tomb of Gaius Marius was broken open, his ashes were scattered in the Anio, the monuments of his victories over Africans and Germans were overthrown, and, as death had snatched him and his son from Sulla’s vengeance, his adopted nephew Marcus Marius Gratidianus (twice praetor and a great favorite with the populace) was executed amid the crudest tortures at the tomb of Catulus, the most deservedly regretted of the Marian victims.
Death had already swept away many of Sulla’s most notable opponents. Among the leaders there survived only Gaius Norbanus, who killed himself at Rhodes while the town magistrates were deliberating on his surrender; Lucius Scipio, for whom insignificance and probably also noble birth procured permission to end his days in peace at his retreat in Massilia; and Quintus Sertorius, who was wandering about as an exile on the coast of Mauretania. But still the heads of slaughtered senators were piled up at one of the entrances into the Forum, where the dictator had ordered them publicly exposed; and among men of the second and third rank death reaped a fearful harvest. In addition to those placed on the list for their services in or on behalf of the revolutionary army—sometimes on account of money advanced to or relations of hospitality formed with one of its officers—retaliation fell specially on those capitalists (“the hoarders”) who had sat in judgment on senators and speculated in Marian confiscations. Altogether, about 1,600 of the equites were inscribed on the proscription list. In like manner the professional accusers, the worst scourge of the nobility, who made it their trade to bring senators before the equestrian courts, now had to suffer for it: “How comes it to pass,” an advocate asked, “that they have left the courts to us, when they were putting the accusers and judges to death?”
For many months the most savage and disgraceful passions raged without restraint throughout Italy. In the capital a Celtic band was primarily charged with the executions, and Sullan soldiers and officers traveled the districts of Italy for the same purpose. But every volunteer was also welcome, and the rabble high and low pressed forward both to earn the rewards of murder and to gratify their own vengeful or covetous designs under the cloak of political prosecution. It sometimes happened that the assassination preceded rather than followed the placing of the name on the execution list. One example shows the way in which these executions took place. At Larinum, a town of new citizens favorable to Marian views, one Statius Albius Oppianicus had fled to Sulla’s headquarters to avoid a charge of murder. He returned after the victory as the regent’s commissioner, deposed the town magistrates in favor of himself and his friends, and outlawed and killed the person who had threatened to accuse him, along with his nearest relatives and friends. Countless persons—including not a few stout friends of the oligarchy—fell as the victims of private hostility or of their own riches. The fearful confusion, and the culpable indulgence which Sulla displayed here as always toward those close to him, prevented punishment of even ordinary crimes perpetrated amid the disorder.
Confiscated property was dealt with similarly. For political reasons Sulla sought to induce the respectable citizens to buy it, and many pressed forward, none more zealously than the young Marcus Crassus. Under the circumstances extensive depreciation was unavoidable and was indeed to some extent the inevitable result of the Roman practice of selling confiscated property for a round sum payable in cash. Nor did the regent forget himself; his wife Metella and others close to him, even including freedmen and boon companions, were sometimes allowed to purchase without competition and sometimes had the purchase money wholly or partially remitted. One of his freedmen, for instance, is said to have purchased a property worth 6,000,000 sesterces for 2,000, and one of his subalterns is said to have acquired by such speculations an estate of 10,000,000 sesterces. Indignation was so great that even during Sulla’s regency an advocate asked whether the nobility had waged civil war solely to enrich their freedmen and slaves. But in spite of this depreciation the proceeds of the confiscated estates totaled 350,000,000 sesterces—which gives some idea of the enormous extent of the confiscations falling chiefly on the wealthiest portion of the citizenry.
It was altogether a fearful punishment. There was no longer legal appeal or pardon; mute terror lay on the land like a leaden weight; and free speech was silenced alike in the capital and in the country town. The oligarchic reign of terror bore a different stamp from that of the revolution. While Marius had glutted his personal vengeance in the blood of his enemies, Sulla seemed to regard terrorism in the abstract, so to speak, as a thing necessary in introducing the new despotism, and to organize and prosecute his massacres almost with indifference. But the Sullan reign of terror was the more horrible for its conservative sponsorship and its lack of passion. The commonwealth seemed all the more irretrievably lost, when the frenzy and the crime on both sides were equally balanced.
In regulating the relations of Italy with the capital, Sulla—although in general he treated as null all state acts done during the revolution except the transaction of current business—firmly adhered to the principle laid down by the revolutionary government that every citizen of an Italian community was thereby a Roman citizen as well. The distinctions between citizens and allies, between old citizens with more rights and new citizens with fewer, were abolished for good. In the case of the freedmen alone the unrestricted right of suffrage was again withdrawn, and for them the old state of things was restored. To the aristocratic ultras these might seem great concessions. Sulla perceived that it was necessary to wrest these mighty levers out of the hands of the revolutionary chiefs, and that the rule of the oligarchy was not materially endangered by increasing the number of citizens.
But this concession in principle was combined with a most rigid inquisition, conducted by special commissioners with the co-operation of the garrisons distributed throughout Italy, with regard to particular communities. Several towns were rewarded: for instance, Brundisium, the first community to join Sulla, obtained the customs exemption so important for a seaport. More were punished, the less guilty being required to pay fines, pull down their walls, and raze their citadels. Those guilty of the most obstinate resistance had a part or all of their territory confiscated—as according to law it might well have been, whether they were regarded as citizen-communities which had borne arms against their fatherland, or as allied states which had waged war with Rome contrary to their treaties of perpetual peace. In this case all the dispossessed citizens were deprived both of their municipal and of the Roman franchise, receiving instead the lowest Latin rights. Sulla thus avoided furnishing the opposition with a nucleus of Italian subject-communities with inferior rights, for the homeless dispossessed were necessarily soon lost in the mass of the proletariat.6
These arrangements gave the regent control both of those Roman public lands which had been handed over to the former allied communities, and the confiscated territories of the guilty communities. Sulla employed them for settling the soldiers of the victorious army. Most of these new settlements were established in Etruria, but some were set up in Latium and Campania, where Praeneste and Pompeii among other places became Sullan colonies. To repeople Samnium was, as we have said, no part of the regent’s design. A great part of these assignments took place according to the Gracchan plan, so that the settlers were attached to an already existing urban community. The extent of this settlement is shown by the number of land-allotments, which is set at 120,000. Some portions of land were used otherwise, such as the lands bestowed on the temple of Diana at Mount Tifata; others, such as the Volaterran domain and a part of the Arretine, remained undistributed; and still others, according to the old abuse legally forbidden but now revived, were seized by Sulla’s favorites.
Sulla aimed at various objects in this colonization. First, he redeemed the pledge given to his soldiers. Secondly, in so doing he adopted the idea of the reform party and the moderate conservatives which he himself had implemented as early as 88 B.C.—namely, augmenting the number of the small agricultural proprietors in Italy by breaking up the larger holdings. How seriously he wished this is shown by the renewed prohibition against combining allotments. Above all, he saw these settled soldiers as standing garrisons who would protect his new constitution along with their own property. For this reason, where the whole territory was not confiscated, as at Pompeii, the colonists were not amalgamated into the city community, but the old citizens and the colonists were constituted as separate bodies of citizens within the same enclosing wall.
In other respects these colonial foundations were based like the older ones on a decree of the people, but only in the sense that the regent acted according to a specific clause in the Valerian law. In reality they originated from the ruler’s extensive powers, and thus recalled the freedom with which the kings of old disposed of the state property. But to the extent that the Sullan colonies retained the contrast between the soldier and the citizen, which in other colonies did not exist, the Sullan colonies formed a kind of standing army of the Senate, and might be designated as military colonies in contrast to the older ones.
Along with this creation of an army for the Senate was the measure by which the regent selected from the slaves of the proscribed more than10,000 of the youngest and most vigorous men, and formed them into a body. These new Cornelians, whose freedom was linked to the legality of Sulla’s constitution, were designed as a sort of bodyguard to help the oligarchy control the city populace, on which in the absence of a garrison everything depended.
These extraordinary supports by which the regent shored up the oligarchy, weak and fragile though they might appear even to their author, were yet the only possible buttresses short of expedients (such as the formation of a standing army) which would have put an end to the oligarchy far sooner than the attacks of demagogues. The permanent foundation of the oligarchy’s governing power was of course the Senate, whose strength was so increased and concentrated that it might defy its unorganized opponents at every point of attack.
Forty years of compromise were at an end. The Gracchan constitution which had survived the first Sullan reform of 88 B.C. was completely set aside. Since the time of Gaius Gracchus the government had conceded the right of support to the proletariat of the capital, and bought it off by regular distributions of grain to the citizens domiciled there; Sulla abolished these largesses. Gaius Gracchus had organized and consolidated the capitalist order by selling in Rome the tax rights of the province of Asia; Sulla abolished the system of middlemen, and converted the former contributions of the Asiatics into fixed taxes, which were imposed on the several districts according to assessment rolls. Gaius Gracchus had yielded the capitalist class an indirect share in government by giving it control of the jury courts, which on occasion proved itself stronger than the official administration and government; Sulla abolished the equestrian and restored the senatorial courts. The Gracchan period had granted the equites a special place at the popular festivals, such as the senators had long possessed; Sulla relegated the equites to the plebeian benches. Thus the equestrian order shaped by Gaius Gracchus was deprived of its political existence by Sulla. The Senate was to exercise the supreme legislative, administrative, and judicial power unconditionally, indivisibly, and permanently, and was to be distinguished by outward tokens as not only a privileged but as the only privileged order.
For this purpose the Senate needed first to have its ranks filled and to be placed on a footing of independence. The number of senators had been fearfully reduced by the recent crises. Sulla doubtless allowed those exiled by the equestrian courts to return, such as the consular Publius Rutilius Rufus (who made no use of the permission) and Gaius Cotta the friend of Drusus. But this made only slight amends for the gaps created in the Senate’s ranks by the revolutionary and reactionary reigns of terror. Accordingly the Senate was extraordinarily reinforced by about 300 new senators, nominated by the popular assembly from the equestrian census, and selected, one may be sure, chiefly from the young men of senatorial houses and from Sullan officers and others brought into prominence by the last revolution. For the future also the mode of admission to the Senate was regulated a new and placed on an essentially different basis.
The original continues with a discussion in detail of Sulla’s other constitutional changes:
1. The political mobility of candidates for office was sharply reduced by requiring that candidates for the consulship serve first as quaestor, aedile, and praetor, with a gap of five years after the quaestorship, and two years after the other offices. Re-election to the same office was prohibited except after a lapse of ten years.
2. The tribunes, while still retaining their old veto power, were severely restricted in its exercise; they were in addition forbidden to propose legislation to the citizens’ assemblies without previous Senate consent; and after the tribuneship, they were barred from seeking higher office. This fettering of the tribunician power was the most important single measure for insuring the permanent preponderance of the Senate.
3. The civil and military authority was completely separated by requiring the consuls and praetors to serve two years, the first of which was to be spent in purely civil administration in Rome and Italy, and the second (as proconsul or propraetor) in a foreign military command.
4. The once important office of censor was reduced to comparative impotence.
5. The courts were expanded and completely reformed, with the regularization of criminal jurisdiction as distinct from civil suits to recover damages or redress injuries.
Such was the constitution which Lucius Cornelius Sulla gave to the commonwealth of Rome. The Senate and the equestrian order, the citizens and proletariat, Italians and provincials, accepted it as dictated, if not without grumbling, at any rate without rebelling. Not so the Sullan officers. The Roman army had totally changed its character. The Marian reform had certainly rendered it more ready for action and more useful militarily than when it shrank from combat before the walls of Numantia. But it had at the same time been converted from a citizen-army into a band of mercenaries with no fidelity to the state; it was a body faithful to its commander only if he had the personal skill to gain its attachment. The civil war had given fearful witness to this total change in the spirit of the army: six commanding generals—Albinus, Cato, Rufus, Flaccus, Cinna, and Gaius Carbo—had fallen at the hands of their own soldiers.
Sulla alone had been able to keep control of the dangerous crew, and only by indulging their wild desires as no Roman general had ever done before. If he thus earns the blame of destroying the old military discipline, the censure, while not entirely groundless, is still unjust. He was indeed the first Roman magistrate who could discharge his military and political task only by coming forward as a military adventurer. But he had not sought the military dictatorship for the purpose of abasing the state before the soldiery; his object had been rather the opposite one of compelling everything in the state, especially the army and its officers, to submit once more to the civil authority. When this became evident, opposition appeared among his own staff. The oligarchy might play the tyrant in respect to other citizens. But it seemed intolerable that the very generals whose good swords had earned the place of the overthrown senators should now be summoned to obey this same Senate.
The two officers in whom Sulla had placed most confidence resisted the new order of things. When Pompey, whom Sulla had entrusted with the conquest of Sicily and Africa and had selected for his son-in-law, received orders from the Senate to dismiss his army after accomplishing his task, he was so far from complying as to fall little short of open insurrection. Quintus Ofella, whose firm perseverance in front of Praeneste brought success in the last and most severe campaign, openly violated the new ordinances by becoming a candidate for the consulship before holding the inferior offices. With Pompey Sulla effected at least a compromise, if not a cordial reconciliation. He knew his man sufficiently not to fear him. He did not resent the impertinent Pompey’s remark to his face that more people worshiped the rising than the setting sun, and he gave the vain youth the empty marks of honor which he craved.
If in this instance he appeared lenient, he showed in the case of Ofella that he did not mean to let his marshals take advantage of him. When Ofella appeared unconstitutionally as a candidate, Sulla had him cut down in the market place, and then explained to the assembled citizens that he had ordered the deed, and gave his reason for doing it. Thus the opposition of his staff to the new order was silenced for the moment, but its continued existence furnished the practical commentary on Sulla’s remark that what he did on this occasion could not be done a second time.
One thing, perhaps the most difficult of all, still remained to bring the emergency situation into accord with the forms of the new or old laws. It was facilitated by the fact that Sulla never lost sight of the ultimate goal. Although the Valerian law gave each of his edicts the force of law, he had used the extraordinary prerogative only in the case of transient measures, especially the proscriptions, where participation would simply have compromised the Senate and the citizens needlessly. Normally he had himself observed those regulations which he prescribed for the future. That the people were consulted, we read in the law as to the quaestors which is still partly extant; and the same is attested of other laws, for example, those regarding the confiscation of public lands. In like manner the Senate was consulted on the more important administrative acts, such as the sending forth and recall of the African army and the conferring of the charters of towns. In the same spirit Sulla caused consuls to be elected even for 81 B.C., by which at least the odious custom of dating by the regency was avoided. Nevertheless the power still lay exclusively with the regent, and the election was directed so as to fall on secondary personages.
In the following year, however, Sulla revived the full constitution, and administered the state as consul together with his comrade-in-arms Quintus Metellus, retaining the regency but allowing it to lie dormant. He saw well how dangerous it was for his own institutions to perpetuate the military dictatorship. When the new state of things seemed likely to hold its ground, and the largest and most important portion of the new arrangements had been completed (although various matters, particularly in colonization, still remained to be done), he allowed completely free elections in 79 B.C., declined re-election to the consulship as incompatible with his own ordinances, and at the beginning of the year resigned the regency soon after the new consuls Publius Servilius and Appius Claudius had entered office.
Even callous hearts were impressed when the man who had dealt at his pleasure with the lives and property of millions, at whose nod so many heads had fallen, who had mortal enemies dwelling in every street of Rome and in every town of Italy, and who without an ally of equal standing or even, strictly speaking, a political party had brought to an end his work of reorganizing the state, a work offending a thousand interests and opinions—when this man appeared in the market place, voluntarily renounced his plenitude of power, discharged his armed attendants, dismissed his lictors, and bade the dense throng of citizens speak if anyone desired from him a reckoning. All were silent. Sulla descended from the rostra, and, attended only by his friends, returned home on foot through the midst of the very populace which eight years before had razed his house to the ground.
Posterity has not properly evaluated either Sulla the man or his work of reorganization, as indeed it is apt to misjudge those who swim against the current of their times. In fact, Sulla is one of the most remarkable—we may say unique—characters in history. Physically and mentally of easy temperament, blue-eyed, fair, of a complexion singularly light but blushing with every passion (though otherwise a handsome man with piercing eyes), he seemed unlikely to be of more moment to the state than his ancestors, who since the days of his great-great-grandfather Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul 290 and 277 B.C.), one of the most distinguished generals and conspicuous men of the times of Pyrrhus, had remained in second-rate positions.
He desired nothing from life but serene enjoyment. Reared in the cultivated luxury which was at that time common even in the less wealthy senatorial families of Rome, he speedily and adroitly possessed himself of all the fullness of sensuous and intellectual enjoyments which the combination of Hellenic polish and Roman wealth could secure. He was equally welcome as a pleasant companion in the aristocratic salon and as a good comrade-in-arms. His acquaintances high and low found in him a sympathetic friend and a ready helper in time of need, who gave his gold with far more pleasure to his embarrassed comrade than to his wealthy creditor. Passionate was his homage to the winecup, still more passionate to women: even in his later years he was no longer the regent when he took his place at table after the business of the day was finished.
A vein of irony, one might even say of buffoonery, pervaded his whole nature. Even when regent he gave orders, while conducting the public sale of the property of the proscribed, that a donation from the spoil should be given to the author of a wretched panegyric which was handed to him, on condition that the writer should promise never to sing his praises again. When he justified before the citizens the execution of Ofella, he did so by relating to the people the fable of the countryman and the lice. He delighted to choose his companions among actors, and was fond of sitting at wine not only with Quintus Roscius—the Roman Talma—but also with far inferior players. Indeed, he was himself not a bad singer, and even wrote farces for performance within his own circle.
Yet amid these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily nor mental vigor. In the rural leisure of his last years he still zealously followed the chase, and the fact that he brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome attests his interest in more serious reading. The typical Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of showing in the presence of the Greeks, or the pomposity of narrow-minded great men. On the contrary, he freely indulged his humor, appeared (doubtless to the scandal of many of his countrymen) in Greek towns in the Greek dress, and induced his aristocratic companions to drive their chariots personally at the games. He retained none of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes which in countries of free constitution lure young men of talent into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably felt at one time. In such a life as his, oscillating between passionate intoxication and more than sober awakening, illusions are speedily dissipated. Wishing and striving probably appeared to him folly in a world which was absolutely governed by chance, and in which, if men were to strive after anything at all, this chance could be the only aim of their efforts.
He followed the general tendency of the age in addicting himself at once to skepticism and superstition. His whimsical credulity was not the plebeian superstition of a Marius, who got a priest to prophesy to him for money and determined his actions accordingly; still less was it the fanatic’s sullen belief in destiny. It was that faith in the absurd, which necessarily appears in every man who has simply ceased to believe in a connected order of things—the superstition of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw the right number on each and every occasion. In practical questions Sulla understood very well how to satisfy ironically the demands of religion. When he emptied the treasuries of the Greek temples, he declared that the man whose chest was replenished by the gods themselves could never fail. When the Delphic priests reported to him that they were afraid to send the requested treasures, because the harp of the god emitted a clear sound when they touched it, he replied that they might now send them all the more readily since the god evidently approved his design.
Nevertheless he fondly flattered himself that he was the chosen favorite of the gods, especially Aphrodite, to whom he assigned a pre-eminence down to his last years. In his conversations as well in his autobiography he often prided himself on the intercourse which the immortals held with him in dreams and omens. Having more right than most men to be proud of his achievements, he was proud rather of his uniquely faithful fortune. He was fond of saying that improvised enterprises always turned out better with him than those systematically planned; and one of his strangest whims—that of regularly stating the number of those who had fallen on his side in battle as nil—was nothing but the childishness of a child of fortune. It was but the reflection of his natural disposition, when, having reached the culminating point of his career and seeing all his contemporaries at a dizzy depth beneath him, he assumed the designation of the Fortunate—Sulla Felix—as a formal surname, and bestowed corresponding appellations on his children.
Nothing lay further from Sulla than steadfast ambition. Unlike the average aristocrat of his time, he had too much sense to regard the inscription of his name in the roll of the consuls as the goal of his life. He was too indifferent, and not enough of an ideologue, to be disposed voluntarily to engage in the reform of the rotten structure of the state. He remained where birth and culture placed him, in the circle of genteel society, and passed through the usual routine of offices. He had no occasion to exert himself, and left such drudgery to the political working-bees, of whom there was in truth no lack. Thus in 107 B.C. on the allotment of the quaestorial places, accident brought him to Africa to the headquarters of Gaius Marius. The untried man-of-fashion from the capital was not very well received by the rough, boorish general and his experienced staff. Provoked by this reception Sulla, fearless and skilful as he was, rapidly mastered the profession of arms, and in his daring expedition to Mauretania first displayed that peculiar combination of audacity and cunning which led his contemporaries to say of him that he was half-lion and half-fox, and that the fox in him was more dangerous than the lion.
To the young, highborn, brilliant officer, who was confessedly the real means of ending the vexatious Numidian war, the most splendid career now lay open. He took part also in the Cimbrian war, and manifested his singular talent for organization in the management of the difficult task of providing supplies. Yet even now the pleasures of life in the capital had far more attraction for him than war or even politics. During the praetorship which he held in 93 B.C., after having failed in a previous candidacy, it once more chanced that in his province, the least important of all, there occurred the first victory over King Mithradates and the first treaty with the mighty Arsacids, as well as their first humiliation. The Social War followed. It was primarily Sulla who decided its first act (the Italian insurrection) in favor of Rome, and thus won for himself the consulship by his sword. It was also he who as consul suppressed the Sulpician revolt with energetic rapidity.
Fortune seemed to make it her special mission to eclipse the old hero Marius by means of this younger officer. The capture of Jugurtha and the defeat of Mithradates, both of which Marius had striven for in vain, were accomplished in subordinate positions by Sulla. In the Social War, in which Marius lost his renown as a general and was deposed, Sulla established his military repute and rose to the consulship. The revolution of 88 B.C., which was also above all a personal conflict between the two generals, ended with the outlawry and flight of Marius. Almost without desiring it, Sulla had become the most famous general of his time and the shield of the oligarchy. New and more formidable crises ensued—the Mithradatic war, the Cinnan revolution—yet the star of Sulla continued always in the ascendant. Like the captain who seeks not to quench the flames of his burning ship but continues to fire on the enemy, Sulla ignored the revolution raging in Italy and persevered in Asia till the public foe was subdued. Then, having done with that foe, he crushed anarchy and saved the capital from the firebrands of the desperate Samnites and revolutionists.
The moment of his return home was for Sulla an overpowering one in joy and in pain: he himself relates in his memoirs that during his first night in Rome he was not able to close an eye, and we may well believe it. But still his task was not at an end, for his star was destined to rise still higher. Absolute autocrat as any king, and yet constantly standing on the ground of formal right, he bridled the ultra-reactionary party, annihilated the Gracchan constitution which for forty years had hamstrung the oligarchy, and compelled first the capitalists and the urban proletariat, and ultimately the arrogant militarists nurtured in the bosom of his own staff, to yield once more to the law which he strengthened afresh. He established the oligarchy on a more independent footing than ever, placed the executive power in its hands, committed to it the legislation, the courts, and the supreme military and financial power, and furnished it with a sort of bodyguard in the liberated slaves and a sort of army in the military colonists. Lastly, when the work was finished, the creator bowed to his own creation, and the absolute autocrat became of his own volition once again a simple senator.
In all this long military and political career Sulla never lost a battle, was never compelled to retrace a step, and, led astray neither by friends nor foes, brought his work to the goal which he had himself proposed. He had reason, indeed, to thank his star. The capricious goddess of fortune seemed in his case to have exchanged caprice for steadfastness, and to have taken pleasure in loading her favorite with successes and honors whether he desired them or not. But history must be more just toward him than he was toward himself, and grant him a higher rank than mere favorite of fortune.
We do not mean that the Sullan constitution was a work of political genius, such as those of Gracchus and Caesar. There does not occur in it (as is implied in its very nature as a restoration) a single new idea in statesmanship. All its most essential features—admission to the Senate by the holding of the quaestorship, the abolition of the censor’s right to eject a senator from the Senate, the initiative of the Senate in legislation, the conversion of the tribunician office into an instrument of the Senate for fettering the imperium, the prolonging of the supreme office to two years, the transference of military command from the popularly elected magistrate to the senatorial proconsul or propraetor, and even the new criminal and municipal arrangements—were not created by Sulla, but were institutions which had previously grown out of the oligarchic government, and which he merely regulated and fixed. And even the proscriptions, confiscations, and other horrors attending his restoration, when compared with the doings of Nasica, Popillius, Opimius, Caepio, etc.—are they anything more than the customary oligarchic mode of getting rid of opponents?
On the Roman oligarchy of this period no judgment can be passed save one of inexorable and remorseless condemnation. Like everything else connected with it, the Sullan constitution is completely involved in that condemnation. To accord praise which the genius of a bad man bribes us into bestowing is to sin against the sacred character of history; but we may be allowed to bear in mind that Sulla was far less answerable for the Sullan restoration than the body of the Roman aristocracy, a centuries-old ruling clique which was yearly becoming more enervated and embittered, and that any hollowness and iniquity in that restoration is ultimately traceable to the aristocracy. Sulla reorganized the state not as the master of a house who puts his shattered estate in order according to his own lights, but as a temporary overseer who faithfully follows instructions. It is fallacious in such a case to transfer the ultimate responsibility from the master to the manager.
We estimate the importance of Sulla much too highly, or rather we dismiss too lightly those terrible proscriptions, ejections, and restorations—for which there never could be and never was any reparation—when we regard them as the work of a bloodthirsty tyrant placed by chance at the head of the state. These and the terrorism of the restoration were the deeds of the aristocracy, and Sulla was nothing more in the matter than, to use the poet’s expression, the executioner’s axe playing the unconscious instrument of the conscious thought. Sulla carried out his part with rare, in fact superhuman, perfection. Within the limits laid down for him, his work was not only grand but even useful. Never has any aristocracy in process of such extensive and continuing decay found a guardian so willing and able as Sulla to wield for it the sword of the general and the pen of the legislator without regard for personal power. There is no doubt a difference between the case of an officer who refuses the sceptre from public spirit and that of one who throws it away from a cloyed appetite. But in total absence of political selfishness (though in this one respect only) Sulla deserves to be ranked with Washington.
But the whole country, and not merely the aristocracy, was more indebted to him than posterity was willing to confess. Sulla definitely concluded the Italian revolution, insofar as it was based on the disabilities of individual less privileged districts as compared with others of broader rights. Thus, by compelling his party to recognize the equality of all Italians before the law, he became the real and ultimate author of the political unity of Italy—a gain not too dearly purchased by years of disorder and streams of blood. But Sulla did still more. For over half a century the power of Rome had been declining, and anarchy had been her normal condition. The government of the Senate under the Gracchan constitution was anarchy, and the government of Cinna and Carbo was a still worse example of a leaderless state (most clearly reflected in that equally confused and unnatural league with the Samnites), the most uncertain, intolerable, and mischievous of all conceivable political conditions—in fact, the beginning of the end. It is not too much to say that the long-undermined Roman commonwealth must necessarily have fallen to pieces, had not Sulla saved it by his intervention in Asia and Italy.
It is true that the Sullan constitution was as short-lived as that of Cromwell, and it was not difficult to see that his structure was far from solid. But it is arrant thoughtlessness to forget that without Sulla the very site of the building would probably have been swept away by the waves; and even the blame for its flimsiness does not fall primarily on Sulla. The statesman builds only what can be built in the sphere assigned to him. Sulla did whatever a conservative could do to save the old constitution. He himself had a foreboding that while he might erect a fortress, he could not create a garrison, and that the utter worthlessness of the oligarchs would defeat any attempt to save the oligarchy. His constitution resembled a temporary dike thrown into the raging breakers, and it was no reproach to the builder if some ten years later the waves swallowed up the artificial structure which was not even defended by those whom it sheltered. The statesman has no need to cite praiseworthy isolated reforms (for example, of the Asiatic revenue system and of criminal justice) to avoid summarily dismissing Sulla’s ephemeral restoration. He will admire it as a judiciously planned reorganization of the Roman commonwealth carried out under infinite difficulties, and he will place the deliverer of Rome and the father of Italian unity almost on a par with Cromwell.
However, it is not the statesman alone who may sit in judgment on the dead. The conscience of mankind will rightly never reconcile itself to what Sulla did or suffered others to do. Sulla not only established his despotic power by unscrupulous violence; in doing so he also called things by their right name with brutal frankness. Thus he has irreparably offended the great mass of the weak-hearted who are more revolted at the name than at the thing. But the cool and dispassionate character of his crimes makes him appear morally more revolting than the criminal who acts from passion. Outlawries, rewards to executioners, confiscations of goods, summary procedure against insubordinate officers—such things had occurred a hundred times without seriously offending the rudimentary political morality of ancient times. But it was unprecedented that the names of the outlaws should be publicly posted and their heads publicly exposed; that a set sum should be fixed for the bandits who slew them, and the sums duly entered in the public account books; that the confiscated property should be sold under the hammer in the public market like the spoil of an enemy; that the general should order a disobedient officer to be cut down on the spot, and acknowledge the deed before all the people. This public mockery of humanity was also a political error, contributing no little to envenom later revolutionary crises; and on that account a dark shadow even today deservedly darkens the memory of the author of the proscriptions.
Sulla may also be justly blamed that, while in all important matters he acted with remorseless vigor, in lesser and especially in personal questions he very frequently yielded to his sanguine temperament and dealt according to his likes or dislikes. Where he felt real hatred, as for example against the Marians, he let it rage unrestrained even against the innocent; and he himself boasted that no one had better repaid friends and foes. He did not disdain to use his unlimited power to accumulate a colossal fortune. The first absolute monarch of the Roman state, he verified the maxim of absolutism—that the laws do not bind the prince—forthwith in the case of those laws which he himself issued regarding adultery and extravagance.
But his lenience toward his own party and his own circle was more pernicious for the state than his indulgence toward himself. The laxness of military discipline, though partly enjoined by his political necessities, may be reckoned in this category; but far more pernicious was his indulgence toward his political adherents. The extent of his occasional forbearance is hardly credible. For instance, Lucius Murena was not only released from punishment for defeats which he sustained through arrant perversity and insubordination, but he was even allowed a triumph. Gnaeus Pompey, who had behaved still worse, was still more extravagantly honored by Sulla. The extent and the enormity of the proscriptions and confiscations probably arose not so much from Sulla’s own wish as from this spirit of indifference, which in his position indeed was hardly more pardonable. That Sulla with his intrinsically energetic and yet withal indifferent temperament should conduct himself sometimes with incredible indulgence, sometimes with inexorable severity, may readily be conceived. The oft-repeated saying that before his regency he was a good-natured, mild man, but when regent a bloodthirsty tyrant, carries in it its own refutation. If as regent he displayed the reverse of his earlier gentleness, it must rather be said that he punished with the same careless nonchalance with which he pardoned. This half-ironical frivolity pervades his whole political life. It is always as if the victor, just as it pleased him to credit his victory to good fortune, regarded the victory itself as worthless; as if he had some premonition of the vanity and transience of his own work; as if after the manner of a steward he preferred making repairs to pulling down and rebuilding, and allowed himself in the end to be content with a sorry plastering to conceal the flaws.
But whatever he was, this Don Juan of politics was a man of one mold. His whole life attests the stability of his nature, for Sulla remained unchangeably the same in the most diverse situations. The same temper which made him seek once more the idleness of the capital, after his brilliant successes in Africa, also made him find rest and refreshment in his Cumaean villa after possessing complete and absolute power. His saying that public affairs were a burden which he threw off as soon as he could was no mere phrase. After his resignation he remained himself entirely, without peevishness or affectation, glad to be rid of public affairs and yet interfering now and then when opportunity offered. Hunting, fishing, and the composition of his memoirs occupied his leisure hours, though as a diversion he arranged, at the request of the discordant citizens, the internal affairs of the neighboring colony of Puteoli as confidently and speedily as he had formerly arranged those of the capital. His last action on his sickbed related to the collection of a contribution for rebuilding the Capitoline temple, whose completion he was never to witness.
Little more than a year after retirement, in his sixtieth year and still vigorous in body and mind, he was overtaken by death: after a brief illness (he was writing at his autobiography only two days before his death) the rupture of a blood vessel carried him off in 78 B.C. His faithful fortune did not desert him even in death. He could have no wish to be sucked once more into the political vortex, and be obliged to lead his old warriors against a new revolution. Yet such was the state of affairs in Spain and in Italy that he could hardly have avoided this task had his life been prolonged. Even now, when it was suggested that he should have a public funeral in the capital, numerous voices silent during his lifetime were raised against showing this last honor to the dead tyrant. But his memory was still too fresh and the dread of his old soldiers too vivid, so it was resolved that the body should be conveyed to the capital for the last rites.
Italy never witnessed a grander funeral. In every place through which the deceased was borne in regal attire, with his well-known standards and fasces before him, the inhabitants and above all his old soldiers joined the mourning train. It seemed as if the whole army would once more meet round the dead hero who in his lifetime had often led it and always victoriously. When the endless procession reached the capital, where the courts kept holiday and all business was suspended, two thousand golden chaplets awaited the dead—the last honorary gifts of the faithful legions, of the cities, and of his more intimate friends.
Sulla, faithful to the usage of the Cornelian house, had ordered that his body should be buried without being burnt. Others were more mindful of what past days had done and future days might do: by command of the Senate, the corpse of the man who had disturbed the bones of Marius was committed to the flames. Headed by all the magistrates and the whole Senate, by the priests and priestesses in their official robes and the band of noble youths in equestrian armor, the procession arrived at the great market place. At this spot, filled by his achievements and almost by the sound of his dreaded words, the funeral oration was delivered over the deceased; thence the bier was borne on the shoulders of senators to the Campus Martius, where the funeral pyre was erected. While the flames yet blazed, the equites and the soldiers held their race of honor round the corpse. Then the ashes of the regent were deposited in the Campus Martius beside the tombs of the ancient kings, and the Roman women mourned him for a whole year.
1. Many of the aristocratic newcomers, Mommsen observes in the original, were of far less use.
2. In this case, an officer of equal rank See Glossary.
3. In a brief section here omitted, Mommsen notes the national character of the war for Samnium.
4. Lesser officials whose various duties included policing the capital, judging minor disputes, supervising public festivals, and the like. See Glossary.
5. Ten extraordinary officials chosen in the middle of the fifth century B.C. to act in place of the consuls, for the purpose of drafting a code of laws which would regularize the consuls’ powers. They produced the first legal code of the Roman republic, the law of the Twelve Tables.
6. In the original, Mommsen goes on to describe several communities whose lands were thus confiscated.