THE PERSONAL RULE AND DEATH OF SULLA.
Sulla was to all intents and purposes a king in Rome. He harangued
the people on what he had achieved, and told them that if they were
obedient he would make things better for them, but that he would not
spare his enemies, and would punish everyone who had sided with them
since Scipio violated his covenant. [Sidenote: Reign of terror in
Rome.] Then began a reign of terror. Not only did he kill his enemies,
but gave over to his creatures men against whom he had no complaint to
make. At last a young noble, Caius Metellus, asked him in the Senate,
'Tell us, Sulla, when there is to be an end of our calamities. We do
not ask thee to spare those whom those hast marked out for punishment,
but to relieve the suspense of those whom thou hast determined to
save.' Sulla replied that he did not yet know. 'Then,' said Metellus,
'let us know whom thou intendest to destroy.' [Sidenote: Sulla's
proscriptions.] Sulla answered by issuing a first proscription list,
including eighty names. People murmured at the illegality of this, and
in two days, as if to rebuke their presumption, he issued a second of
220, and as many more the next day. Then he told the people from the
rostrum that he had now proscribed all that he remembered, and those
whom he had forgotten must come into some future proscription. Such
a speech would seem incredible if put into the mouth of any other
character it history; but it is in keeping with Sulla's passionless
and nonchalant brutality. The ashes of Marius he ordered to be dug up
and scattered in the Anio, the only unpractical act we ever read of
him committing. Death was ordained for every one who should harbour or
save a proscribed person, even his own brother, son, or parent. But
he who killed a proscribed man, even if it was a slave who slew his
master or a son his father, was to receive two talents. Even the son
and grandson of those proscribed were deprived of the privileges of
citizenship, and their property was confiscated. Not only in Rome but
in all the cities of Italy this went on. Lists were posted everywhere,
and it was a common saying among the ruffianly executioners, 'His fine
home was the death of such an one, his gardens of another, his hot
baths of a third,' for they hunted down men for their wealth more than
from revenge. [Sidenote: Story illustrative of the time.] One day a
quiet citizen came into the Forum, and out of mere curiosity read the
proscription list. To his horror he saw his own name. 'Wretch,' he
cried, 'that I am, my Alban villa pursues me!' and he had not gone far
when a ruffian came up and killed him. [Sidenote: Sulla and Julius
Caesar.] The famous Julius Caesar was one of those in danger. He would
not divorce his wife at the bidding of Sulla, who confiscated her
property if not his as well, being so far merciful for some reason
which we do not know. [Sidenote: Story of Roscius.] One case has been
made memorable by the fact that Cicero was the counsel for one of the
sufferers. Two men named Roscius procured the assassination of a
third of the same name by Sulla's favourite freedman, Chrysogonus,
who then got the name of Roscius put on the proscription list, and,
seizing on his property, expelled the man's son from it. He having
friends at Rome fled to them, and made the assassins fear that they
might be compelled to disgorge. So they suddenly charged the son with
having killed his father. The most frightful circumstance about the
case is not the piteous injustice suffered by the son, but the abject
way in which Cicero speaks of Sulla, comparing him to Jupiter who,
despite his universal beneficence, sometimes permits destruction, not
on purpose but because his sway is so world-wide, and scouting the
idea of its being possible for him to share personally in such wrongs.
It has been well said, 'We almost touch the tyrant with our finger.'
Cicero soon afterwards left Rome, probably from fear of Sulla.
[Sidenote: Wholesale punishment of towns.] It is said that the names
of 4,700 persons were entered on the public records as having fallen
in the proscriptions, besides many more who were assassinated for
private reasons. Whole towns were put up for auction, says one writer,
such as Spoletum, Praeneste, Interamna, and Florentia. By this we may
understand that they lost all their land, their privileges, and
public buildings, perhaps even the houses themselves. Others, such as
Volaterrae and Arretium, were deprived of all privileges except that
of Commercium or the right of trade.
[Sidenote: Sulla rewards his soldiers and establishes a permanent
party.] Sulla's friends attended such auctions and made large
fortunes. One of his centurions, named Luscius, bought an estate for
10,000,000 sesterces, or 88,540_l_. of our money. One of his freedmen
bought for 20_l_. 12_s_. an estate worth 61,000_l_. Crassus, Verres,
and Sulla's wife, Metella, became in this way infamously rich. In
spite of such nominal prices, the sale of confiscated estates produced
350,000,000 sesterces, or nearly 3,000,000_l_. of our money. Sulla
approved of such purchases, for they bound the buyers to his
interests, and ensured their wishing to uphold his acts after his
death. With the same view of creating a permanent Sullan party in
Italy, and at the same time to fulfil his pledges to the soldiers, he
allotted to them all public lands in Italy hitherto undistributed,
and all confiscated land not otherwise disposed of. In this way he
punished and rewarded at a stroke. No fewer than 120,000 allotments
were made and twenty-three legions provided for. There was in it a
plausible mimicry of the democratic scheme of colonies which Sulla
must have thoroughly enjoyed. Thus in Italy he provided a standing
army to support his new constitution. [Sidenote: The Cornelii.] In
Rome itself, by enfranchising 10,000 slaves whose owners had been
slain, he formed a strong body of partisans ever ready to do his
bidding; these were all named Cornelii. A man is known by his
adherents, and the worst men were Sulla's _protégés_.
[Sidenote: Catiline.] Catiline's name rose into notoriety amid these
horrors. He was said not only to have murdered his own brother, but,
to requite Sulla for legalising the murder by including this brother's
name in the list of the proscribed, to have committed the most
horrible act of the Civil War--the torture of Marcus Marius
Gratidianus. This man, because he was cousin of Marius, was offered
up as a victim to the manes of Catulus, of whom the elder Marius had
said, 'He must die.' This poor wretch was scourged, had his limbs
broken, his nose and hands cut off, and his eyes gouged out of their
sockets. Finally his head was cut off, and Cicero's brother writes
that Catiline carried it in his hands streaming with blood. But no one
would attach much importance to what the Ciceros said of Catiline, and
two circumstances combine to point to his innocence of such extreme
enormities. One is that it was the son of Catulus who begged as a boon
from Sulla the death of this Marius, and his name was very likely
confused with Catiline's in the street rumours of the time; and the
other and more direct piece of evidence is, that Catiline was tried in
the year 64 for murders committed at this time, and was acquitted. It
is a curious thing that the obloquy which has clung to Catiline's name
on such dubious reports has never attached in the same measure to the
undoubted horrors and abominations of Sulla's career.
Sulla, though he meant above all to have his own way, had no objection
to use constitutional forms where they could be conveniently employed.
He made the Senate pass a resolution approving his acts, and, as there
were no consuls in 82, after the death of Marius and Carbo, he retired
from Rome for a while and told the Senate to elect an Interrex, in
conformity with the prescribed usage under such circumstances. Then
he wrote to the Interrex and recommended that a Dictator should be
appointed, not for a limited time, but till he had restored quiet in
the Roman world, and, with a touch of that irony which he could not
resist displaying in and out of season, went on to say that he thought
himself the best man for the post. [Sidenote: Sulla's power.] Thus,
in November 82, he was formally invested with despotic power over
the lives and property of his fellow-citizens, could contract or
extend the frontiers of the State, could change as he pleased the
constitution of the Italian towns and the provinces, could legislate
for the future, could nominate proconsuls and propraetors, and could
retain his absolute power as long as he liked. He might have dispensed
with consuls altogether. But he did not care to do this. The consuls
whom he allowed to be elected for 81 were of course possessed of
merely nominal power. Twenty-four lictors preceded him in the streets.
He told the people to hail him as 'Felix,' declared that his
least deliberate were his most successful actions, signed himself
'Epaphroditus' when he wrote to Greeks, named his son and daughter
Faustus and Fausta, boasted that the gods held converse with him
in dreams, and sent a golden crown and axe to the goddess whom
he believed to be his patroness. Like Wallenstein, he mingled
indifference to bloodshed with extreme superstition and boundless
self-confidence. But, as the historian remarks, 'a man who is
superstitious is capable of any crime, for he believes that his gods
can be conciliated by prayers and presents. The greatest crimes have
not been committed by men who have no religious belief.' No doubt
to his mind there was a sort of judicial retribution in all this
bloodshed; and, as he tried to make himself out the favourite of the
gods, so by formally announcing the close of the proscription lists
for June 1, 81 B.C., he spread some veil of legality over his
shameless violence. [Sidenote: Peculiarly horrible nature of Sulla's
acts.] There is something particularly revolting in the business-like
and systematic way in which he went about his murderous work,
appointing a fixed time for it to end, a fixed list of the victims; a
fixed price to be paid per head, a fixed exemption for the murderers
from his own law 'De Sicariis.' Modern idolaters of a policy of blood
and iron may profane history by their glorification of human monsters;
but no sophistry can blind an independent reader to the real nature of
Sulla's character and acts. He organized murder, and filled Italy with
idle soldiers instead of honest husbandmen. He did so in the interests
of a class--a class whose incapacity for government he had discovered;
and yet, knowing that his re-establishment of this class could only
be temporary, he fortified it by every means in his power, and then,
after a theatrical finale, returned to the gross debaucheries in which
he revelled. Anything more selfish or cynical cannot be conceived, and
those who call vile acts by their plain names will not feel inclined
to become Sulla's apologists.
When he died he left behind him, it is said, what he may have meant as
his epitaph, an inscription containing the purport of three lines in
the 'Medea'--
Let no man deem me weak or womanly,
Or nerveless, but of quite another mood,
A scourge to foes, beneficent to friends.
Pompeius, the only man who had successfully bearded him, was the only
friend not mentioned in his will. If anything could palliate his
remorseless selfishness it is the candour with which he confessed it.
He had made a vast private fortune out of his countrymen's misery.
When he surrendered his dictatorship he offered a tenth of his
property to Hercules, and gave a banquet to the people on so profuse a
scale that great quantities of food were daily thrown into the Tiber.
Some of the wine was forty years old, perhaps wine of that vintage
which was gathered in when Caius Gracchus died. [Sidenote: He divorces
Metella and marries again.] In the middle of the banquet his wife
Metella sickened, and in order that, as Pontifex, he might prevent
his home being polluted by death he divorced her, and removed her to
another house while still alive. Soon afterwards he married another
wife, who at a gladiatorial show came and plucked his sleeve, in
order, as she said, to obtain some of his good fortune. [Sidenote: His
abdication.] The rest of his life was spent, near Cumae, in hunting,
writing his memoirs, amusing himself with actors, and practising all
sorts of debauchery. Ten days before he died he settled the affairs
of the people of Puteoli at their request, and was busy in collecting
funds to restore the Capitol up to the last. [Sidenote: His death.]
Some say he died of the disease which destroyed Herod. Some say that
there is no such disease. Others say that he broke a blood-vessel when
in a rage. He is described as having blue eyes, and a pale face so
blotched over that it was likened to a mulberry sprinkled with meal.
[Sidenote: Rivalry of Lepidus and Pompeius.] His death, 78 B.C., was
the signal for that break-up of his political institutions to which
he had wilfully shut his eyes. The great men at Rome began to wrangle
over his very body before it was cold. Lepidus, whom Pompeius, against
Sulla's wishes, had helped to the consulship, opposed a public
funeral. The other consul supported it. Sulla had with his usual
shrewdness divined the character of Lepidus, and told Pompeius that he
was only making a rival powerful. Pompeius opposed Lepidus now, for he
knew that the partisans of Sulla would insist on doing honour to his
memory. [Sidenote: Funeral of Sulla.] Appian describes the funeral at
length. 'The body was borne on a litter, adorned with gold and other
royal array, amid the flourish of trumpets, and with an escort of
cavalry. After them followed a concourse of armed men, his old
soldiers, who had thronged from all parts and fell in with the
procession as each came up. Besides these there was as vast a crowd of
other men as was ever seen at any funeral. In front were carried the
axes and the other symbols of office which had belonged to him as
dictator. But it was not till the procession reached Rome that the
full splendour of the ceremonial was seen. More than 2,000 crowns of
gold were borne in front, gifts from towns, from his old comrades in
arms, and his personal friends. In every other respect, too, the pomp
and circumstance of the funeral was past description. In awe of the
veterans all the priests of all the sacred fraternities were there in
full robes, with the Vestal Virgins, and all the senators, and all
the magistrates, each in his garb of office. Next, in array that
contrasted with theirs, came the knights of Rome in column; then all
the men whom Sulla had commanded in his wars, and who had vied
with each other in hastening there, carrying gilded standards
and silver-plated shields. There was also a countless host of
flute-players, making now most tender, now most wailing music. A cry
of benediction, raised by the senators, was taken up by the knights
and the soldiers, and re-echoed by the people, for some mourned his
loss in reality, and others feared the soldiers and dreaded him
in death as much as in life, the present scene recalling dreadful
memories. That he had been a friend to his friends they could not but
admit; but to the rest, even when dead, he was still terrible. The
body was exhibited before the rostra, and the greatest orator of the
time spoke the funeral oration; for Faustus, Sulla's son, was too
young to do so. Then some strong senators took up the litter on their
shoulders and bore it to the Campus Martius, where kings only were
wont to be buried. There it was placed on the funeral pyre; and the
knights and all the army circled round it in solemn procession. And
that was Sulla's ending.'
To the student of history the story of such a funeral seems like
the prostration of a nation of barbarians before the car of some
demon-god. If the strong personality of the man--with all that
dauntless bravery, that unerring sagacity, that trenchant
tongue--still after two thousand years fascinates attention, if we are
forced to own that for sheer power of will and intellect he stands in
the very foremost rank of men, yet we feel also that in the case of
such superhuman wickedness tyrannicide would, if it ever could, cease
to be a crime.
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