A Lucky Life
Sulla was born in 138 B.C. to an obscure noble family. According to the ancient historian Plutarch, he lived in poverty in his youth. He displayed a tendency toward luxury and a taste for carousing and partying with actors and jesters. (He always loved the theater.)
Sulla fulfilled his role as quaestor during Marius’s campaign against King Jugurtha, whose father had aided the formidable Carthaginian general Hannibal—perhaps Rome’s greatest enemy ever—during the Second Punic War. Sulla used manipulation to capture Jugurtha, singlehandedly accomplishing the aim of the campaign—and simultaneously robbing his commander, Marius, of glory. So began a lifelong, bitter, and bloody rivalry between Sulla and Marius.
Upon the return to Rome, Sulla was praised for his actions. He liked it. In his “Lives,” Plutarch says that Sulla was vainglorious by nature, and his love of attention drove him to have a special ring made, engraved with a representation of the capture of Jugurtha. Marius resented this too. Buried in such frivolous competitions, however, lay the seed of civil war.
As Plutarch writes in the Dryden translation, “Slight and childish were the first occasions and motives of that enmity between them, which, passing afterwards through a long course of civil bloodshed and incurable divisions to find its end in tyranny, and the confusion of the whole state. ... Ambition ... [is] of all the higher Powers the most destructive.”
Sulla, too, continued to prosper, rising through the ranks through flattery and bribery. He earned the position of “praetor” (a military and civil rank just below consul) for the year 97 B.C. and then proconsul (second only to consul) in 92 B.C.
Sulla Takes A Chance
Opportunity beckoned once more when King Mithridates of Pontus invaded Roman provinces and attacked Roman legions. Sulla was granted command, but for once, his luck failed him when a tribune (a position that served as advocate of the people) named Publius Sulpicius Rufus vetoed the order and gave the command to Marius instead.This was too much for Sulla. He burned to take definite action against Marius and his political allies, and he knew that he held the army’s loyalty. One night, as Plutarch relates, Sulla had a dream in which a goddess appeared to him. “This same goddess, to his thinking, stood by him, and put into his hand thunder and lightning, then naming his enemies one by one, bade him strike them.” Encouraged by this, Sulla marched on Rome itself with 30,000 troops. There, he vented his rage, commanding his men to set fire to houses, “all which he did, not upon any plan, but simply in his fury.” Sulla was now in command of the city.
He passed a death sentence on his old rival, Marius, who fled to Africa. Sulpicius Rufus, the tribune who had denied Sulla command of the army, was less fortunate: Sulla had him executed. Obviously, all of this upheaval meant that Sulla was not the most popular figure. With the senate turning against him, Sulla wisely made himself scarce, occupying himself with the campaign against Mithridates.
In his absence, Marius returned to Rome and launched his own brief reign of plunder and murder. Rome had become a yo-yo, a toy jerked back and forth between the two rancorous generals and their feud. But Sulla’s fortune aided him again, when Marius died shortly after his appointment as consul, in 86 B.C., seemingly from natural causes. Marius’s faction tried to get Sulla to return for trial, but he refused.
When he did return, after successfully and brutally ending the Mithridatic War and a rebellion in Greece, it was on his own terms: as dictator. Sulla and his allies, including Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the famous future rival of Julius Caesar, crushed the last of Marius’s faction in Rome in a battle at the Colline Gates. It seemed to mark the twilight of the Republic. Almost 13,000 supporters of Marius were killed in the following days. The Tiber ran crimson. With his archnemesis dead and his ashes dishonorably thrown into the Tiber, Sulla’s power reached its zenith. Not even the Senate could check him. They conveniently annulled the decree that made Sulla an enemy of the state. He was, in effect, a dictator.
Dictatorial Decisions
Sulla, it seems, did not want to turn Rome into a monarchy or an empire, though he did want to curb the power of the “populares,” the party of the common people. Thus, he set about enacting reforms that would strengthen the Senate’s power. The role of dictator was not unheard of in Roman history—in fact, it was an accepted part of the constitution that in a time of crisis, one man could be granted unlimited power to deal with the emergency, but his term was for only six months. Sulla’s term, however, was limitless.One of Sulla’s most notable reforms was to severely limit the power of the tribunes, the advocates of the people. Perhaps Sulpicius Rufus’s veto of his command still stung him. Nevertheless, the tribunes really had amassed a great deal of power, such as when Tiberius Gracchus bypassed the Senate completely in his land reform project in 131 B.C. Under Sulla, tribunes lost their veto power and had to work with the senate.
Sulla’s other reforms aimed at preventing the quick rise of ambitious politicians or the concentration of power in one man’s hands—deeply ironic, considering his own story. He decreed that no one could hold a higher political office before serving in a lower one; no one could hold the same office in consecutive years (there had to be a two-year gap); and governors could not stay in their provinces too long, in order to prevent them from building personal armies and challenging Rome itself. Finally, Sulla doubled the size of the Senate. Then, in what may have been a surprise to onlookers, Sulla laid down the dictatorship and retired quietly to his villa in Campania to write his memoirs.
What was Sulla’s ultimate legacy? It’s still uncertain. As dictator, he set out to stabilize the Republic, restore the Senate, and prevent the rise of demagogues. Yet, he simultaneously took brutal vengeance on his enemies and let ambition steer his own political life. Even as he sought to restore the Republic, he set a precedent for and charted out the course by which the Republic could—and would—fall. His political story, so full of personal grievances, bitter and jealous rivalries, disrespect for the law, and the use of violence for political ends perfectly foreshadows the story of Caesar and the ultimate demise of the Republic.
