Sulla

Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix was born in 138 BCE into a patrician family, the Cornelii, whose branch had slipped into obscurity and relative poverty ^[1]. An ancestor, Publius Cornelius Rufinus, had reached the consulship in the early third century BCE before being expelled from the Senate, and the family never fully recovered its standing. Sulla grew up in Rome without the wealth that usually smoothed a young aristocrat's path into public life.

Ancient writers, above all Plutarch, record that the young Sulla spent his time among actors, musicians, and comic performers, company that respectable senators considered beneath a patrician ^[2]. He received a good education in Greek and Latin literature, and he kept a taste for theatrical friendships throughout his life. Two inheritances changed his fortunes: money left to him by his stepmother and by a woman named Nicopolis, which together gave him the property qualification needed to begin a senatorial career ^[2].

His appearance drew comment. Plutarch describes sharp blue eyes and a blotchy red and white complexion that a Greek wit compared to a mulberry sprinkled with meal ^[2]. Behind the sociable exterior sat a shrewd, patient, and unsentimental political mind. Anyone asking who was Sulla before his rise would have found an underfunded aristocrat in his late twenties with little to show and much to prove.

Sulla entered public life relatively late, winning election as quaestor for 107 BCE and joining the army of the consul Gaius Marius in the war against Jugurtha, king of Numidia ^[1]. Though he had little military experience, he proved a quick study and an effective cavalry officer. His moment came in 105 BCE, when he conducted the risky negotiations with King Bocchus of Mauretania that ended with Bocchus handing Jugurtha over to the Romans ^[3]. Marius, as commander, received the formal credit, but Sulla made sure people knew his role, even having the scene engraved on a signet ring. The episode planted a rivalry that would eventually tear the Republic apart.

He went on to serve with distinction in the wars against the Cimbri and Teutones, the Germanic peoples who threatened Italy between 104 and 101 BCE, holding commands under both Marius and Quintus Lutatius Catulus ^[1]. After a failed first attempt, he won the praetorship for 97 BCE and then governed Cilicia in Asia Minor, where he installed Ariobarzanes on the throne of Cappadocia and became the first Roman magistrate to receive an embassy from the Parthian empire ^[3].

The Social War of 91 to 88 BCE, Rome's brutal conflict with its Italian allies, made his reputation. Sulla's campaigns in Campania and Samnium, including the capture of the rebel stronghold of Bovianum, ranked among the most successful of the war, and his soldiers awarded him the grass crown, Rome's rarest military decoration ^[2]. On the strength of this record he was elected consul for 88 BCE and assigned the coveted command against Mithridates VI of Pontus, who had overrun Roman Asia and ordered the massacre of tens of thousands of Roman and Italian residents ^[4].

What happened next had no precedent. The tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus, allied with the aging Marius, pushed through a law transferring the Mithridatic command from Sulla to Marius ^[1]. Sulla went to his army at Nola, put the choice to his soldiers, and marched six legions on Rome itself, the first time a Roman commander had led citizen troops against the city ^[3]. His officers, apart from one quaestor, refused to follow him, but the rank and file did. Sulpicius was hunted down and killed, Marius fled to Africa, and Sulla pushed through laws to shore up senatorial control before leaving for the East in 87 BCE.

The war against Mithridates dominated the next four years. Sulla besieged Athens, which had joined the Pontic cause, and stormed it in March 86 BCE after a long blockade, permitting a sack that ancient sources describe as bloody even by Roman standards ^[4]. He then destroyed two large Pontic armies at Chaeronea and Orchomenus in Boeotia, victories won against numerically superior forces ^[3]. Cut off from Rome, where his enemies under Lucius Cornelius Cinna had taken power, declared him an outlaw, and killed his supporters, Sulla financed the war by seizing treasures from the sanctuaries of Delphi, Olympia, and Epidaurus ^[2].

In 85 BCE he met Mithridates at Dardanus in the Troad and granted surprisingly lenient terms: the king surrendered his conquests, paid an indemnity, and handed over ships, but kept his throne in Pontus ^[4]. Sulla wanted a free hand to deal with his enemies in Italy. He squeezed the province of Asia with heavy financial penalties for its disloyalty, wintered his army, and prepared to come home as an invader.

Sulla landed at Brundisium in 83 BCE with a veteran army and was quickly joined by ambitious young nobles, including Marcus Licinius Crassus and the twenty three year old Gnaeus Pompeius, later Pompey the Great ^[1]. The war against the Marian government, led by the consuls Carbo and the younger Marius, ran for over a year across Italy. It ended on 1 November 82 BCE at the Battle of the Colline Gate, just outside Rome's walls, where Sulla's forces destroyed a Samnite and Marian army in a night of desperate fighting ^[3].

Victory brought terror. Sulla introduced the proscriptions: lists posted in the Forum naming citizens who could be killed with impunity, their property confiscated and their sons and grandsons barred from office ^[5]. Ancient estimates of the dead vary, but the victims included senators, wealthy equestrians, and many whose only offense was owning property that a Sullan partisan wanted. The confiscated estates enriched his followers, Crassus notoriously among them, and land taken from hostile Italian communities settled tens of thousands of his veterans ^[5].

Late in 82 BCE a compliant assembly appointed Sulla dictator for the writing of laws and the settling of the constitution, with no time limit, reviving an office unused since the war against Hannibal over a century earlier ^[1]. He also took the surname Felix, meaning fortunate, advertising his lifelong belief that the gods, especially Venus, favored him ^[2].

As dictator, Sulla attempted the most sweeping reform of Roman government since the early Republic. His guiding aim was to entrench the Senate as the controlling force in the state and to block the routes by which men like Marius, or indeed like himself, had risen through popular politics ^[6]. He roughly doubled the Senate's membership to around 600 by enrolling equestrians and Italians loyal to his cause, and he transferred the juries of the permanent criminal courts from the equestrians back to senators ^[6].

His laws on careers were equally deliberate. The cursus honorum, the ladder of offices, was given fixed minimum ages and a required sequence: quaestor, then praetor, then consul, with intervals before repeat tenures ^[1]. He raised the number of quaestors to twenty and praetors to eight, tying entry to the Senate to the quaestorship. Most controversially, he gutted the tribunate of the plebs, the office that had powered a generation of popular reformers: tribunes lost most of their legislative initiative, their vetoes were curtailed, and anyone who held the office was barred from all further magistracies ^[6]. He also expanded the system of standing criminal courts, a reform with a long afterlife in Roman law.

Among Sulla achievements, contemporaries counted the restoration of order after decades of upheaval; among his failures, the speed with which the settlement unraveled. The tribunate recovered its powers within a decade, and the generals of the next generation, Pompey first among them, ignored the career rules entirely ^[6].

Sulla married five times. His fourth wife, Caecilia Metella, daughter of the pontifex maximus Metellus Delmaticus, linked him to one of the most powerful families in Rome and bore him twins, Faustus and Fausta ^[2]. When she fell fatally ill during his dictatorship, religious rules attached to his office obliged him to divorce her and remove her from his house before she died, though he gave her a lavish funeral in defiance of his own sumptuary laws. In 77 BCE circles of gossip still discussed his final marriage, to a young divorcee named Valeria who had approached him at the games ^[2].

His private habits never changed. Even at the height of his power he dined and drank with actors, dancers, and old theatrical friends, wrote his own memoirs in twenty two books (now lost except in fragments quoted by later writers), and cultivated an image of cheerful, dangerous unpredictability ^[2]. Plutarch, who used the memoirs, presents a man capable of charm and generosity toward friends and of complete pitilessness toward enemies.

He was a lifelong devotee of Venus and of Fortune. In the Greek East he styled himself Epaphroditos, favorite of Aphrodite, and his memoirs credited dreams and omens for key decisions ^[2]. Whether this piety was conviction, propaganda, or both remains one of the standing questions about his character.

Then came the act that baffled antiquity. Having held supreme power, Sulla resigned the dictatorship, most likely in 81 BCE, held the consulship of 80 BCE with Metellus Pius, and then withdrew into private life at his estate near Puteoli on the Bay of Naples ^[1]. Ancient writers noted with amazement that he walked in the Forum unguarded and offered to answer for his conduct to any citizen. He spent his retirement writing his memoirs, hunting, and drinking with his old companions, and he intervened in local politics at Puteoli shortly before his death. He died there in 78 BCE, aged about sixty, probably of a ruptured internal organ accompanied by a hemorrhage; hostile tradition embellished the illness into a repulsive tale of corruption of the flesh ^[2]. The Senate granted him a public funeral of unmatched scale, and his ashes were buried in the Campus Martius. His epitaph, as Plutarch reports it, claimed that no friend ever outdid him in kindness, and no enemy in harm ^[2].

The verdict of history has been harsh and divided. His constitutional settlement collapsed within a decade, but individual reforms, especially the enlarged Senate and the standing criminal courts, endured ^[6]. The deeper legacy was the example. Sulla demonstrated that a Roman army would follow its commander against the Republic itself, and that proscription and confiscation could be instruments of government. Julius Caesar, who as a young man narrowly escaped Sulla's proscriptions, is said to have remarked that Sulla did not know his political alphabet when he laid down the dictatorship, and Caesar's own perpetual dictatorship in 44 BCE drew the obvious contrast ^[7].

Among the durable Sulla facts is this paradox: he seized power illegally to defend, as he saw it, a legal order, and the tools he invented to save the Republic became the blueprint for destroying it. Modern historians, from Theodor Mommsen to Arthur Keaveney and more recent scholarship, continue to argue over whether he was a reactionary, a reformer, or simply the most clear sighted opportunist of his age ^[6].