Lucius Cornelius Sulla

Education

He received a careful education, and was a devoted student of literature and art.

Career

His political advancement was slow, and he did not obtain the quaestorship until 107, when he served in the Jugurthine. war under Marius in Africa.

In this he greatly distinguished himself, and claimed the credit of having terminated the war by capturing Jugurtha himself.

From 104 to 101 he served again under Marius in the war with the Cimbri and Teutones and fought in the last great battle in the Raudian plains near Verona.

It was at this time that Marius's jealousy of his legate laid the foundations of their future rivalry and mutual hatred.

Sulla with a small army soon won a victory over the general of Mithradates, and Rome's client-king was restored.

The services of both Marius and Sulla were given; but Sulla was the more successful, or, at any rate, the more fortunate.

The question of the command of the army against Mithradates again came to the front.

Sulpicius was put to death, and Marius fled; and he and his party were crushed for the time. Sulla, leaving things quiet at Rome, quitted Italy in 87, and for the next four years he was winning victory after victory against the armies of Mithradates and accumulating boundless plunder.

Athens, the headquarters of the Mithradatic cause, was taken and sacked in 86; and in the same year, at Chaeroneia, the scene of Philip II of Macedon's victory more than two and a half centuries before, and in the year following, at the neighbouring Orchomenus, he scattered immense hosts of the enemy with trifling loss to himself.

Crossing the Hellespont in 84 into Asia, he was joined by the troops of C. Flavius Fimbria, who soon deserted their general, a man sent out by the Marian party, now again in the ascendant at Rome.

The same year peace was concluded with Mithradates on condition that he should be put back to the position he held before the war; but, as he raised objections, he had in the end to content himself with being simply a vassal of Rome. Sulla returned to Italy in 83, landing at Brundisium, having previously informed the senate of the result of his campaigns in Greece and Asia, and announced his presence on Italian ground.

He further complained of the ill-treatment to which his friends and partisans had been subjected during his absence.

But on Sulla's advance at the head of his 40, 000 veterans many of them lost heart and deserted their leaders, while the Italians themselves, whom he confirmed in their new privileges, were won over to his side.

Only the Samnites, who were as yet without the Roman franchise, remained his enemies, and it seemed as if the old war between Rome and Samnium had to be fought once again.

Palestrina) and then marched upon Rome, where again, just before his defeat of Marius, there had been a great massacre of his adherents, in which the learned jurist Q. Mucius Scaevola perished.

Rome was at the same time in extreme peril from the advance of a Samnite army, and was barely saved by Sulla, who, after a hard- fought battle, routed the enemy under Pontius Telesinus at the Colline gate of Rome.

After celebrating a splendid triumph for the Mithradatic War, and assuming the surname of " Felix " (" Epaphroditus, " " Venus's favourite, " he styled himself in addressing Greeks), he carried in 80 and 79 his great political reforms (see Rome: History, II " The Republic ").

Pozzuoli), where he died in the following year, probably from the bursting of a blood-vessel.

The story that he fell a victim to a disease similar to that which cut off one of the Herods (Acts xii.

23) is probably an invention of his enemies.

The " half lion, half fox, " as his enemies called him, the " Don Juan of politics " (Mommsen), the man who carried out a policy of " blood and iron " with a grim humour, amused himself in his last days with actors and actresses, with dabbling in poetry, and completing the Memoirs (commentarii, итго/лог/цага) of his eventful life (see H. Peter, Historicorum romanorum reliquiae, 1870).

Even then he did not give up his interest in state and local affairs, and his end is said to have been hastened by a fit of passion brought on by a remark of the quaestor Granius, who openly asserted that he would escape payment of a sum of money due to the Romans, since Sulla was on his death-bed.

Sulla sent for him and had him strangled in his presence; in his excitement he broke a blood-vessel and died on the following day.

He was accorded a magnificent public funeral, his body being removed to Rome and buried in the Campus Martius.

His monument bore an inscription written by himself, to the effect that he had always fully repaid the kindnesses of his friends and the wrongs done him by his enemies.

His military genius was displayed in the Social War and the campaigns against Mithradates; while his constitutional reforms, although doomed to failure from the lack of successors to carry them out, were a triumph of organization.

But he massacred his enemies in cold blood, and exacted vengeance with pitiless and calculated cruelty; he sacrificed everything to his own ambition and the triumph of his party. The ancient authorities for Sulla and his time are his Life by Plutarch (who made use of the Memoirs); Appian, Bell, civ. ; for the references in Cicero see Orelli's Onomasticon Tullianum.

Modern treatises by C. S. Zacharia, L. Cornelius S. als Ordner des romischen Freystaates (1834); T. Lau, Lucius Cornelius Sulla (1855); E. Linden, De bello ciyili Sullano (1896); P. Cantalupi, La Guerra civile Sullana in Italia (1892); C. W. Oman, Seven Roman Statesmen (1902); F. D. Gerlach, Marius und Sulla (1856); J. M. Sunden, " De tribunicia potestate a Lucio Sulla imminuta" in Skrifter utgifna af k. humanistika Vetenskapssamfundet i Upsala, v. , 1897, in which it is argued against Mommsen that Sulla did not deprive the tribunes of the right of proposing rogations.

See also Mommsen's History of Rome, vol.

His nephew (as some say, though the degree of relationship cannot be clearly established), Publius Cornelius Sulla was consul in 66 B. C. with P. Autronius Paetus.

There is little doubt that Sulla also was implicated; Sallust does not mention it, but other authorities definitely assert his guilt.

After the second conspiracy he was accused of having taken part in both conspiracies.

Sulla was defended by Cicero and Hortensius, and acquitted.

There is no doubt that, after his first conviction, Sulla remained very quiet, and, whatever his sympathies may have been, took no active part in the conspiracy.

When the civil war broke out, Sulla took the side of Caesar, and commanded the right wing at the battle of Pharsalus.

He died in 45.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sulla: The Last Republican

    ( In this second edition of Arthur Keaveney's classic bio...)

  • Lucius Cornelius Sulla: History and Tradition

    (Lucius Cornelius Sulla was an outstanding and complex per...)

  • Plutarch's life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

Religion

In the year 91, which brought with it the imminent prospect of sweeping political change, with the enfranchisement of the Italian peoples, Sulla returned to Rome, and it was generally felt that he was the man to lead the conservative and aristocratic party. Meanwhile Mithradates and the East were forgotten in the crisis of the Social or Italic War, which broke out in 91 and threatened Rome's very existence.

Connections

enemy:

Mithridates