The Sullan Constitution
The Restoration
About the time when the first pitched battle was fought between
Romans and Romans, in the night of the 6th July 671, the venerable
temple, which 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 in the Capitol--perished in the flames.
It was no augury, but it was an image of the state of the Roman
constitution. This, too, lay in ruins and needed reconstruction.
The revolution was no doubt vanquished, but the victory was far
from implying as a matter of course the restoration of the old
government. The mass of the aristocracy certainly was of opinion
that now, after the death of the two revolutionary consuls, it would
be sufficient to make arrangements for the ordinary supplemental
election and to leave it to the senate to take such steps as should
seem farther requisite for the rewarding of the victorious army, for
the punishment of the most guilty revolutionists, and possibly also
for the prevention of similar outbreaks. But Sulla, in whose hands
the victory had concentrated for the moment all power, formed a
more correct judgment of affairs and of men. The aristocracy of
Rome in its best epoch had not risen above an adherence--partly
noble and partly narrow--to traditional forms; how should the clumsy
collegiate government of this period be in a position to carry out
with energy and thoroughness a comprehensive reform of the state?
And at the present moment, when the last crisis had swept away
almost all the leading men of the senate, the vigour and intelligence
requisite for such an enterprise were less than ever to be found there.
How thoroughly useless was the pure aristocratic blood, and how little
doubt Sulla had as to its worthlessness, is shown by the fact that,
with the exception of Quintus Metellus who was related to him by marriage,
he selected all his instruments out of what was previously the middle
party and the deserters from the democratic camp--such as Lucius
Flaccus, Lucius Philippus, Quintus Ofella, Gnaeus Pompeius.
Sulla was as much in earnest about the re-establishment of the old
constitution as the most vehement aristocratic emigrant; he understood
however, not perhaps to the full extent--for how in that case could
he have put hand to the work at all?--but better at any rate than
his party, the enormous difficulties which attended this work of
restoration. Comprehensive concessions so far as concession was
possible without affecting the essence of oligarchy, and the
establishment of an energetic system of repression and prevention,
were regarded by him as unavoidable; and he saw clearly that the senate
as it stood would refuse or mutilate every concession, and would
parliamentarily ruin every systematic reconstruction. If Sulla had
already after the Sulpician revolution carried out what he deemed
necessary in both respects without asking much of their advice, he
was now determined, under circumstances of far more severe and intense
excitement, to restore the oligarchy--not with the aid, but in spite,
of the oligarchs--by his own hand.
Sulla Regent of Rome
Sulla, however, was not now consul as he had been then, but was
furnished merely with proconsular, that is to say, purely military
power: he needed an authority keeping as near as possible to
constitutional forms, but yet extraordinary, in order to impose his
reform on friends and foes. In a letter to the senate he announced
to them that it seemed to him indispensable that they should place
the regulation of the state in the hands of a single man equipped
with unlimited plenitude of power, and that he deemed himself qualified
to fulfil this difficult task. This proposal, disagreeable as it was
to many, was under the existing circumstances a command. By direction
of the senate its chief, the interrex Lucius Valerius Flaccus the
father, as interim holder of the supreme power, submitted to the
burgesses the proposal that the proconsul Lucius Cornelius Sulla
should receive for the past a supplementary approval of all the
official acts performed by him as consul and proconsul, and should
for the future be empowered to adjudicate without appeal on the life
and property of the burgesses, to deal at his pleasure with the
state-domains, to shift at discretion 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 -imperium- instead of the people and to nominate proconsuls
and propraetors, and lastly to regulate the state for the future by
means of new laws; that it should be left to his own judgment to
determine when he had fulfilled his task and might deem it time to
resign this extraordinary magistracy; and, in fine, that during its
continuance it should depend on his pleasure whether the ordinary
supreme magistracy should subsist side by side with his own or should
remain in abeyance. As a matter of course, the proposal was adopted
without opposition (Nov. 672); and now the new master of the state,
who hitherto had as proconsul avoided entering the capital, appeared
for the first time within the walls of Rome. This new office derived
its name from the dictatorship, which had been practically abolished
since the Hannibalic war;(1) but, as besides his armed retinue 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 altogether
different from the earlier magistracy which had been limited in point
of duration and of powers, had not excluded appeal to the burgesses,
and had not annulled the ordinary magistracy. It much more resembled
that of the -decemviri legibus scribundis-, 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, we should rather say, this new office, with its absolute
power based on a decree of the people and restrained by no set term
or colleague, was no other than the old monarchy, which in fact just
rested on the free engagement of the burgesses 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,(2)
and presumably the title of dictator was only chosen to indicate
that, as the former dictatorship implied a reassumptionwith various
limitations,(3) so this new dictatorship involved a complete
reassumption, of the regal power. Thus, singularly enough,
the course of Sulla here also coincided with that on which Gaius
Gracchus had entered with so wholly different a design. In this
respect too the conservative party had to borrow from its opponents;
the protector of the oligarchic constitution had himself to
come forward as a tyrant, in order to avert the ever-impending
-tyrannis-. There was not a little of defeat in this last victory
of the oligarchy.
Executions
Sulla had not sought and had not desired the difficult and dreadful
labour of the work of restoration; out, as no other choice was left
to him but either to leave it to utterly incapable hands or to
undertake it in person, he set himself to it with remorseless energy.
First of all a settlement had to be effected in respect to the guilty.
Sulla was personally inclined to pardon. Sanguine as he was in
temperament, he could doubtless break forth into violent rage, and
well might those beware who saw his eye gleam and his cheeks colour;
but the chronic vindictiveness, which characterized Marius in the
embitterment of his old age, was altogether foreign to Sulla's easy
disposition. Not only had he borne himself with comparatively great
moderation after the revolution of 666;(4) even the second revolution,
which had perpetrated so fearful outrages and had affected him in
person so severely, had not disturbed his equilibrium. At the same
time that the executioner was dragging the bodies of his friends
through the streets of the capital, he had sought to save the life of
the blood-stained Fimbria, and, when the latter died by his own hand,
had given orders for his decent burial. On landing in Italy he had
earnestly offered to forgive and to forget, and no one who came to
make his peace had been rejected. Even after the first successes
he had negotiated in this spirit with Lucius Scipio; it was the
revolutionary party, which had not only broken off these negotiations,
but had subsequently, at the last moment before their downfall,
resumed the massacres afresh and more fearfully than ever, and had
in fact conspired with the inveterate foes of their country for the
destruction of the city of Rome. The cup was now full. By virtue
of his new official authority Sulla, immediately after assuming the
regency, outlawed as enemies of their country all the civil and
military officials who had taken an active part in favour of the
revolution after the convention with Scipio (which according to
Sulla's assertion was validly concluded), and such of the other
burgesses as had in any marked manner aided its cause. Whoever
killed one of these outlaws was not only exempt from punishment like
an executioner duly fulfilling his office, but also obtained for the
execution a compensation of 12,000 -denarii- (480 pounds); any one on
the contrary who befriended an outlaw, even the nearest relative, was
liable to the severest punishment. The property of the proscribed
was forfeited to the state like the spoil of an enemy; their children
and grandchildren were excluded from a political career, and yet,
so far as they were of senatorial rank, were bound to undertake their
share of senatorial burdens. The last enactments also applied to the
estates and the descendants of those who had fallen in conflict for
the revolution--penalties which went even beyond those enjoined by
the earliest law in the case of such as had borne arms against their
fatherland. The most terrible feature in this system of terror was
the indefiniteness of the proposed categories, against which there was
immediate remonstrance in the senate, and which Sulla himself sought
to remedy by directing the names of the proscribed to be publicly
posted up and fixing the 1st June 673 as the final term for closing
the lists of proscription.
Proscription-Lists
Much as this bloody roll, swelling from day to day and amounting
at last to 4700 names,(5) excited the just horror of the multitude,
it at any rate checked in some degree the mere caprice of the
executioners. It was not at least to the personal resentment of
the regent that the mass of these victims were sacrificed; his furious
hatred was directed solely against the Marians, the authors of the
hideous massacres of 667 and 672. By his command the tomb of the
victor of Aquae Sextiae was broken open and his ashes were scattered
in the Anio, the monuments of his victories over Africans and Germans
were overthrown, and, as death had snatched himself and his son from
Sulla's vengeance, his adopted nephew Marcus Marius Gratidianus,
who had been twice praetor and was a great favourite with the Roman
burgesses, was executed amid the most cruel tortures at the tomb
of Catulus, who most deserved to be regretted of all the Marian
victims. In other cases also death had already swept away the most
notable of his opponents: of the leaders there survived only Gaius
Norbanus, who laid hands on himself at Rhodes, while the -ecclesia-
was deliberating on his surrender; Lucius Scipio, for whom his
insignificance and probably also his noble birth procured indulgence
and 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 yet the heads of slaughtered senators were
piled up at the Servilian Basin, at the point where the -Vicus
Jugarius- opened into the Forum, where the dictator had ordered them
to be publicly exposed; and among men of the second and third rank in
particular death reaped a fearful harvest. In addition to those who
were placed on the list for their services in or on behalf of the
revolutionary army with little discrimination, sometimes on account of
money advanced to one of its officers or on account of relations of
hospitality formed with such an one, the retaliation fell specially on
those capitalists who had sat in judgment on the senators and had
speculated in Marian confiscations--the "hoarders"; about 1600 of
the equites, as they were called,(6) 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 men of the senatorial
order before the equestrian courts, had now to suffer for it--"how
comes it to pass," an advocate soon after asked, "that they have left
to us the courts, when they were putting to death the accusers and
judges?" The most savage and disgraceful passions raged without
restraint for many months throughout Italy. In the capital a Celtic
band was primarily charged with the executions, and Sullan soldiers
and subaltern officers traversed for the same purpose the different
districts of Italy; but every volunteer was also welcome, and the
rabble high and low pressed forward not only to earn the rewards
of murder, but also to gratify their own vindictive or covetous
dispositions under the mantle of political prosecution. It sometimes
happened that the assassination did not follow, but preceded, the
placing of the name on the list of the proscribed. One example shows
the way in which these executions took place. At Larinum, a town of
new burgesses and favourable to Marian views, one Statius Albius
Oppianicus, who had fled to Sulla's headquarters to avoid a charge
of murder, made his appearance after the victory as commissioner of
the regent, deposed the magistrates of the town, installed himself
and his friends in their room, and caused the person who had
threatened to accuse him, along with his nearest relatives and
friends, to be outlawed and killed. Countless persons--including
not a few decided adherents of the oligarchy--thus fell as the victims
of private hostility or of their own riches: the fearful confusion,
and the culpable indulgence which Sulla displayed in this as in every
instance towards those more closely connected with him, prevented
any punishment even of the ordinary crimes that were perpetrated
amidst the disorder.
Confiscations
The confiscated property was dealt with in a similar way. Sulla
from political considerations sought to induce the respectable
burgesses to take part in its purchase; a great portion of them,
moreover, voluntarily pressed forward, and none more zealously than
the young Marcus Crassus. Under the existing circumstances the
utmost depreciation was inevitable; indeed, to some extent it was the
necessary result of the Roman plan of selling the property confiscated
by the state for a round sum payable in ready money. Moreover, the
regent did not forget himself; while his wife Metella more especially
and other persons high and low closely connected with him, even
freedmen and boon-companions, were sometimes allowed to purchase without
competition, sometimes had the purchase-money wholly or partially
remitted. One of his freedmen, for instance, is said to have
purchased a property of 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds) for 2000
(20 pounds), and one of his subalterns is said to have acquired by
such speculations an estate of 10,000,000 sesterces (100,000 pounds).
The indignation was great and just; even during Sulla's regency an
advocate asked whether the nobility had waged civil war solely for the
purpose of enriching their freedmen and slaves. But in spite of this
depreciation the whole proceeds of the confiscated estates amounted to
not less than 350,000,000 sesterces (3,500,000 pounds), which gives
an approximate idea of the enormous extent of these confiscations
falling chiefly on the wealthiest portion of the burgesses. It was
altogether a fearful punishment. There was no longer any process or
any pardon; mute terror lay like a weight of lead on the land, and
free speech was silenced in the market-place alike of the capital and
of the country-town. The oligarchic reign of terror bore doubtless a
different stamp from that of the revolution; while Marius had glutted
his personal vengeance in the blood of his enemies, Sulla seemed
to account terrorism in the abstract, if we may so speak, a thing
necessary to the introduction of the new despotism, and to prosecute
and make others prosecute the work of massacre almost with indifference.
But the reign of terror presented an appearance all the more horrible,
when it proceeded from the conservative side and was in some measure
devoid of passion; the commonwealth seemed all the more irretrievably
lost, when the frenzy and the crime on both sides were equally balanced.
Maintenance of the Burgess-Rights Previously Conferred
In regulating the relations of Italy and of the capital, Sulla--
although he otherwise in general treated as null all state-acts done
during the revolution except in the transaction of current business--
firmly adhered to the principle, which it had laid down, that every
burgess of an Italian community was by that very fact a burgess also
of Rome; the distinctions between burgesses and Italian allies,
between old burgesses with better, and new burgesses with more
restricted, rights, were abolished, and remained so. In the case
of the freedmen alone the unrestricted right of suffrage was again
withdrawn, and for them the old state of matters was restored.
To the aristocratic ultras this might seem a great concession;
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 the burgesses.
Punishments Inflicted on Particular Communities
But with this concession in principle was combined a most rigid
inquisition, conducted by special commissioners with the co-operation
of the garrisons distributed throughout Italy, in respect to
particular communities in all districts of the land. Several towns
were rewarded; for instance Brundisium, the first community which
had joined Sulla, now obtained the exemption from customs so
important for such a seaport; more were punished. The less guilty
were required to pay fines, to pull down their walls, to raze their
citadels; in the case of those whose opposition had been most
obstinate the regent confiscated a part of their territory, in some
cases even the whole of it--as it certainly might be regarded in law as
forfeited, whether they were to be treated as burgess-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 burgesses--but these only--were
deprived of their municipal, and at the same time of the Roman,
franchise, receiving in return the lowest Latin rights.(7) Sulla
thus avoided furnishing the opposition with a nucleus in Italian
subject-communities of inferior rights; the homeless dispossessed
of necessity were soon lost in the mass of the proletariate.
In Campania not only was the democratic colony of Capua done away
and its domain given back to the state, as was naturally to be
expected, but the island of Aenaria (Ischia) was also, probably
about this time, withdrawn from the community of Neapolis. In Latium
the whole territory of the large and wealthy city of Praeneste and
presumably of Norba also was confiscated, as was likewise that of
Spoletium in Umbria. Sulmo in the Paelignian district was even
razed. But the iron arm of the regent fell with especial weight
on the two regions which had offered a serious resistance up to
the end and even after the battle at the Colline gate--Etruria and
Samnium. There a number of the most considerable communes, such
as Florentia, Faesulae, Arretium, Volaterrae, were visited with total
confiscation. Of the fate of Samnium we have already spoken; there
was no confiscation there, but the land was laid waste for ever, its
flourishing towns, even the former Latin colony of Aesernia, were left
in ruins, and the country was placed on the same footing with the
Bruttian and Lucanian regions.
Assignations to the Soldiers
These arrangements as to the property of the Italian soil placed
on the one hand those Roman domain-lands which had been handed
over in usufruct to the former allied communities and now on their
dissolution reverted to the Roman government, and on the other hand
the confiscated territories of the communities incurring punishment,
at the disposal of the regent; and he employed them for the purpose
of settling thereon the soldiers of the victorious army. Most of these
new settlements were directed towards Etruria, as for instance to
Faesulae and Arretium, others to 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 assignations took place after the Gracchan
mode, so that the settlers were attached to an already-existing urban
community. The comprehensiveness of this settlement is shown by the
number of land-allotments distributed, which is stated at 120,000;
while yet some portions of land withal were otherwise applied, as
in the case of 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; others in fine, according to
the old abuse legally forbidden(8) but now reviving, were taken
possession of on the part of Sulla's favourites by the right of
occupation. The objects which Sulla aimed at in this colonization
were of a varied kind. In the first place, he thereby redeemed
the pledge given to his soldiers. Secondly, he in so doing adopted
the idea, in which the reform-party and the moderate conservatives
concurred, and in accordance with which he had himself as early
as 666 arranged the establishment of a number of colonies--
the idea namely of augmenting the number of the small agricultural
proprietors in Italy by a breaking up of the larger possessions
on the part of the government; how seriously he had this at heart
is shown by the renewed prohibition of the throwing together of
allotments. Lastly and especially, he saw in these settled
soldiers as it were standing garrisons, who would protect his new
constitution along with their own right of property. For this
reason, where the whole territory was not confiscated, as at Pompeii,
the colonists were not amalgamated with the urban-community, but
the old burgesses and the colonists were constituted as two bodies
of burgesses associated within the same enclosing wall. In other
respects these colonial foundations were based, doubtless, like the
older ones, on a decree of the people, but only indirectly, in so
far as the regent constituted them by virtue of the clause of the
Valerian law to that effect; in reality they originated from the
ruler's plenitude of power, and so far recalled the freedom with
which the former regal authority disposed of the state-property.
But, in so far as the contrast between the soldier and the burgess,
which was in other instances done away by the very sending out of
the soldiers or colonists, was intended to remain, and did remain,
in force in the Sullan colonies even after their establishment,
and these colonists formed, as it were, the standing array of the
senate, they are not incorrectly designated, in contradistinction
to the older ones, as military colonies.
The Cornelian Freedmen in Rome
Akin to this practical constituting of a standing army for the senate
was the measure by which the regent selected from the slaves of the
proscribed upwards of 10,000 of the youngest and most vigorous men,
and manumitted them in a body. These new Cornelians, whose civil
existence was linked to the legal validity of the institutions of their
patron, were designed to be a sort of bodyguard for the oligarchy and
to help it to command the city populace, on which, indeed, in the
absence of a garrison everything in the capital now primarily depended.
Abolition of the Gracchan Institutions
These extraordinary supports on which the regent made the oligarchy
primarily to rest, weak and ephemeral as they doubtless might appear
even to their author, were yet its only possible buttresses, unless
expedients were to be resorted to--such as the formal institution
of a standing army in Rome and other similar measures--which would
have put an end to the oligarchy far sooner than the attacks of
demagogues. The permanent foundation of the ordinary governing
power of the oligarchy of course could not but be the senate,
with a power so increased and so concentrated that it presented a
superiority to its non-organized opponents at every single point
of attack. The system of compromises followed for forty years was
at an end. The Gracchan constitution, still spared in the first
Sullan reform of 666, was now utterly set aside. Since the time of
Gaius Gracchus the government had conceded, as it were, the right of
-'emeute- to the proletariate of the capital, and bought it off by
regular distributions of corn to the burgesses domiciled there;
Sulla abolished these largesses. Gaius Gracchus had organized and
consolidated the order of capitalists by the letting of the tenths
and customs of the province of Asia in Rome; Sulla abolished the
system of middlemen, and converted the former contributions of the
Asiatics into fixed taxes, which were assessed on the several
districts according to the valuation-rolls drawn up for the purpose
of gathering in the arrears.(9) Gaius Gracchus had by entrusting
the posts of jurymen to men of equestrian census procured for
the capitalist class an indirect share in administering and in
governing, which proved itself not seldom stronger than the official
adminis-tration and government; Sulla abolished the equestrian and
restored the senatorial courts. Gaius Gracchus or at any rate the
Gracchan period had conceded to the equites a special place at the
popular festivals, such as the senators had for long possessed;(10)
Sulla abolished it and relegated the equites to the plebeian benches.(11)
The equestrian order, created as such by Gaius Gracchus, was deprived
of its political existence by Sulla. The senate was to exercise
the supreme power in legislation, administration, and jurisdiction,
unconditionally, indivisibly, and permanently, and was to be
distinguished also by outward tokens not merely as a privileged,
but as the only privileged, order.
Reorganization of the Senate
Its Complement Filled Up by Extraordinary Election
Admission to the Senate through the Quaestorship
Abolition of the Censorial Supervision of the Senate
For this purpose the governing board had, first of all, to have its
ranks filled up and to be itself placed on a footing of independence.
The numbers of the senators had been fearfully reduced by the recent
crises. Sulla no doubt now gave to those who were exiled by the
equestrian courts liberty to return, for instance to the consular
Publius Rutilius Rufus,(12) who however made no use of the permission,
and to Gaius Cotta the friend of Drusus;(13) but this made only slight
amends for the gaps which the revolutionary and reactionary reigns
of terror had created in the ranks of the senate. Accordingly by
Sulla's directions the senate had its complement extraordinarily made
up by about 300 new senators, whom the assembly of the tribes had
to nominate from among men of equestrian census, and whom they
selected, as may be conceived, chiefly from the younger men of the
senatorial houses on the one hand, and from Sullan officers and
others brought into prominence by the last revolution on the other.
For the future also the mode of admission to the senate was
regulated anew and placed on an essentially different basis.
As the constitution had hitherto stood, men entered the senate
either through the summons of the censors, which was the proper and
ordinary way, or through the holding of one of the three curule
magistracies--the consulship, the praetorship, or the aedileship--
to which since the passing of the Ovinian law a seat and vote in
the senate had been de jure attached.(14) The holding of an inferior
magistracy, of the tribunate or the quaestorship, gave doubtless a
claim de facto to a place in the senate--inasmuch as the censorial
selection especially turned towards the men who had held such
offices--but by no means a reversion de jure. Of these two modes
of admission, Sulla abolished the former by setting aside--at least
practically--the censorship, and altered the latter to the effect
that the right of admission to the senate was attached to the
quaestorship instead of the aedileship, and at the same time
the number of quaestors to be annually nominated was raised to
twenty.(15) The prerogative hitherto legally pertaining to the
censors, although practically no longer exercised in its original
serious sense--of deleting any senator from the roll, with a
statement of the reasons for doing so, at the revisals which
took place every five years (16)--likewise fell into abeyance for
the future; the irremoveable character which had hitherto de facto
belonged to the senators was thus finally fixed by Sulla.
The total number of senators, which hitherto had presumably not
much exceeded the old normal number of 300 and often perhaps had
not even reached it, was by these means considerably augmented,
perhaps on an average doubled(17)--an augmentation which was rendered
necessary by the great increase of the duties of the senate through
the transference to it of the functions of jurymen. As, moreover,
both the extraordinarily admitted senators and the quaestors were
nominated by the -comitia tributa-, the senate, hitherto resting
indirectly on the election of the people,(18) was now based throughout
on direct popular election; and thus made as close an approach to a
representative government as was compatible with the nature of the
oligarchy and the notions of antiquity generally. The senate had in
course of time been converted from a corporation intended merely to
advise the magistrates into a board commanding the magistrates and
self-governing; it was only a consistent advance in the same direction,
when the right of nominating and cancelling senators originally
belonging to the magistrates was withdrawn from them, and the senate
was placed on the same legal basis on which the magistrates' power
itself rested. The extravagant prerogative of the censors to revise
the list of the senate and to erase or add names at pleasure was
in reality incompatible with an organized oligarchic constitution.
As provision was now made for a sufficient regular recruiting of its
ranks by the election of the quaestors, the censorial revisions became
superfluous; and by their abeyance the essential principle at the
bottom of every oligarchy, the irremoveable character and life-tenure
of the members of the ruling order who obtained seat and vote,
was definitively consolidated.
Regulations As to the Burgesses
In respect to legislation Sulla contented himself with reviving the
regulations made in 666, and securing to the senate the legislative
initiative, which had long belonged to it practically, by legal
enactment at least as against the tribunes. The burgess-body
remained formally sovereign; but so far as its primary assemblies
were concerned, while it seemed to the regent necessary carefully
to preserve the form, he was still more careful to prevent any real
activity on their part. Sulla dealt even with the franchise itself
in the most contemptuous manner; he made no difficulty either in
conceding it to the new burgess-communities, or in bestowing it on
Spaniards and Celts en masse; in fact, probably not without design,
no steps were taken at all for the adjustment of the burgess-roll,
which nevertheless after so violent revolutions stood in urgent
need of a revision, if the government was still at all in earnest
with the legal privileges attaching to it. The legislative functions
of the comitia, however, were not directly restricted; there was
no need in fact for doing so, for in consequence of the better-
secured initiative of the senate the people could not readily
against the will of the government intermeddle with administration,
finance, or criminal jurisdiction, and its legislative co-operation
was once more reduced in substance to the right of giving assent to
alterations of the constitution.
Co-optation Restored in the Priestly Colleges
Regulating of the Qualifications for Office
Of greater moment was the participation of the burgesses in the
elections--a participation, with which they seemed not to be able to
dispense without disturbing more than Sulla's superficial restoration
could or would disturb. The interferences of the movement party in
the sacerdotal elections were set aside; not only the Domitian law
of 650, which transferred the election of the supreme priesthoods
generally to the people,(19) but also the similar older enactments
as to the -Pontifex Maximus- and the -Curio Maximus-(20) were
cancelled by Sulla, and the colleges of priests received back the
right of self-completion in its original absoluteness. In the case
of elections to the offices of state, the mode hitherto pursued was
on the whole retained; except in so far as the new regulation of
the military command to be mentioned immediately certainly involved
as its consequence a material restriction of the powers of the
burgesses, and indeed in some measure transferred the right of
bestowing the appointment of generals from the burgesses to the
senate. It does not even appear that Sulla now resumed the previously
attempted restoration of the Servian voting-arrangement;(21) whether
it was that he regarded the particular composition of the voting-
divisions as altogether a matter of indifference, or whether it was
that this older arrangement seemed to him to augment the dangerous
influence of the capitalists. Only the qualifications were restored
and partially raised. The limit of age requisite for the holding
of each office was enforced afresh; as was also the enactment that
every candidate for the consulship should have previously held the
praetorship, and every candidate for the praetorship should have
previously held the quaestorship, whereas the aedileship was
allowed to be passed over. The various attempts that had been
recently made to establish a -tyrannis- under the form of a
consulship continued for several successive years led to special
rigour in dealing with this abuse; and it was enacted that at
least two years should elapse between the holding of one magistracy
and the holding of another, and at least ten years should elapse
before the same office could be held a second time. In this
latter enactment the earlier ordinance of 412 (22) was revived,
instead of the absolute prohibition of all re-election to the
consulship, which had been the favourite idea of the most recent
ultra-oligarchical epoch.(23) On the whole, however, Sulla left
the elections to take their course, and sought merely to fetter the
power of the magistrates in such a way that--let the incalculable
caprice of the comitia call to office whomsoever it might--the person
elected should not be in a position to rebel against the oligarchy.
Weakening of the Tribunate of the People
The supreme magistrates of the state were at this period practically
the three colleges of the tribunes of the people, the consuls and
praetors, and the censors. They all emerged from the Sullan
restoration with materially diminished rights, more especially
the tribunician office, which appeared to the regent an instrument
indispensable doubtless for senatorial government, but yet--
as generated by revolution and having a constant tendency to
generate fresh revolutions in its turn--requiring to be rigorously
and permanently shackled. The tribunician authority had arisen out
of the right to annul the official acts of the magistrates by veto,
and, eventually, to fine any one who should oppose that right and to
take steps for his farther punishment; this was still left to the
tribunes, excepting that a heavy fine, destroying as a rule a man's
civil existence, was imposed on the abuse of the right of intercession.
The further prerogative of the tribune to have dealings with the
people at pleasure, partly for the purpose of bringing up accusations
and especially of calling former magistrates to account at the bar
of the people, partly for the purpose of submitting laws to the vote,
had been the lever by which the Gracchi, Saturninus, and Sulpicius
had revolutionized the state; it was not abolished, but its exercise
was probably made dependent on a permission to be previously requested
from the senate.(24) Lastly it was added that the holding of
the tribunate should in future disqualify for the undertaking of
a higher office--an enactment which, like many other points in Sulla's
restoration, once more reverted to the old patrician maxims, and,
just as in the times before the admission of the plebeians to
the civil magistracies, declared the tribunate and the curule
offices to be mutually incompatible. In this way the legislator
of the oligarchy hoped to check tribunician demagogism and to keep
all ambitious and aspiring men aloof from the tribunate, but to
retain it as an instrument of the senate both for mediating
between it and the burgesses, and, should circumstances require,
for keeping in check the magistrates; and, as the authority of the
king and afterwards of the republican magistrates over the burgesses
scarcely anywhere comes to light so clearly as in the principle
that they exclusively had the right of addressing the people,
so the supremacy of the senate, now first legally established,
is most distinctly apparent in this permission which the leader
of the people had to ask from the senate for every transaction
with his constituents.
Limitation of the Supreme Magistracy
Regulation of the Consular and Praetorian Functions before--
The Time of Sulla
The consulship and praetorship also, although viewed by the
aristocratic regenerator of Rome with a more favourable eye than
the tribunate liable in itself to be regarded with suspicion, by
no means escaped that distrust towards its own instruments which is
throughout characteristic of oligarchy. They were restricted with
more tenderness in point of form, but in a way very sensibly felt.
Sulla here began with the partition of functions. At the beginning
of this period the arrangement in that respect stood as follows.
As formerly there had devolved on the two consuls the collective
functions of the supreme magistracy, so there still devolved on them
all those official duties for which distinct functionaries had not
been by law established. This latter course had been adopted with
the administration of justice in the capital, in which the consuls,
according to a rule inviolably adhered to, might not interfere, and
with the transmarine provinces then existing--Sicily, Sardinia, and
the two Spains--in which, while the consul might no doubt exercise
his -imperium-, he did so only exceptionally. In the ordinary course
of things, accordingly, the six fields of special jurisdiction--
the two judicial appointments in the capital and the four transmarine
provinces--were apportioned among the six praetors, while there devolved
on the two consuls, by virtue of their general powers, the management
of the non-judicial business of the capital and the military command
in the continental possessions. Now as this field of general powers
was thus doubly occupied, the one consul in reality remained at the
disposal of the government; and in ordinary times accordingly those
eight supreme annual magistrates fully, and in fact amply, sufficed.
For extraordinary cases moreover power was reserved on the one
hand to conjoin the non-military functions, and on the other hand
to prolong the military powers beyond the term of their expiry
(-prorogare-). It was not unusual to commit the two judicial offices
to the same praetor, and to have the business of the capital, which
in ordinary circumstances had to be transacted by the consuls,
managed by the -praetor urbanus-; whereas, as far as possible, the
combination of several commands in the same hand was judiciously
avoided. For this case in reality a remedy was provided by the
rule that there was no interregnum in the military -imperium-, so
that, although it had its legal term, it yet continued after the
arrival of that term de jure, until the successor appeared and
relieved his predecessor of the command; or--which is the same thing--
the commanding consul or praetor after the expiry of his term of
office, if a successor did not appear, might continue to act, and was
bound to do so, in the consul's or praetor's stead. The influence
of the senate on this apportionment of functions consisted in its
having by use and wont the power of either giving effect to the
ordinary rule--so that the six praetors allotted among themselves
the six special departments and the consuls managed the continental
non-judicial business--or prescribing some deviation from it; it
might assign to the consul a transmarine command of especial importance
at the moment, or include an extraordinary military or judicial
commission--such as the command of the fleet or an important criminal
inquiry--among the departments to be distributed, and might arrange
the further cumulations and extensions of term thereby rendered
necessary. In this case, however, it was simply the demarcation of
the respective consular and praetorian functions on each occasion
which belonged to the senate, not the designation of the persons to
assume the particular office; the latter uniformly took place by
agreement among the magistrates concerned or by lot. The burgesses
in the earlier period were doubtless resorted to for the purpose
of legitimising by special decree of the community the practical
prolongation of command that was involved in the non-arrival of
relief;(25) but this was required rather by the spirit than by the
letter of the constitution, and soon the burgesses ceased from
intervention in the matter. In the course of the seventh century
there were gradually added to the six special departments already
existing six others, viz. the five new governorships of Macedonia,
Africa, Asia, Narbo, and Cilicia, and the presidency of the standing
commission respecting exactions.(26) With the daily extending sphere
of action of the Roman government, moreover, it was a case of more
and more frequent occurrence, that the supreme magistrates were
called to undertake extraordinary military or judicial commissions.
Nevertheless the number of the ordinary supreme annual magistrates
was not enlarged; and there thus devolved on eight magistrates to
be annually nominated--apart from all else--at least twelve special
departments to be annually occupied. Of course it was no mere
accident, that this deficiency was not covered once for all by
the creation of new praetorships. According to the letter of
the constitution all the supreme magistrates were to be nominated
annually by the burgesses; according to the new order or rather
disorder--under which the vacancies that arose were filled up mainly
by prolonging the term of office, and a second year was as a rule
added by the senate to the magistrates legally serving for one year,
but might also at discretion be refused--the most important and
most lucrative places in the state were filled up no longer by the
burgesses, but by the senate out of a list of competitors formed by
the burgess-elections. Since among these positions the transmarine
commands were especially sought after as being the most lucrative,
it was usual to entrust a transmarine command on the expiry of
their official year to those magistrates whom their office confined
either in law or at any rate in fact to the capital, that is, to the
two praetors administering justice in the city and frequently also
to the consuls; a course which was compatible with the nature of
prorogation, since the official authority of supreme magistrates
acting in Rome and in the provinces respectively, although differently
entered on, was not in strict state-law different in kind.
Regulation of Their Functions by Sulla
Separation of the Political and Military Authority
Cisalpine Gaul Erected into a Province
Such was the state of things which Sulla found existing, and which
formed the basis of his new arrangement. Its main principles were,
a complete separation between the political authority which governed
in the burgess-districts and the military authority which governed in
the non-burgess-districts, and an uniform extension of the duration of
the supreme magistracy from one year to two, the first of which was
devoted to civil, and the second to military affairs. Locally the
civil and the military authority had certainly been long separated
by the constitution, and the former ended at the -pomerium-, where
the latter began; but still the same man held the supreme political
and the supreme military power united in his hand. In future the
consul and praetor were to deal with the senate and burgesses, the
proconsul and propraetor were to command the army; but all military
power was cut off by law from the former, and all political action
from the latter. This primarily led to the political separation of
the region of Northern Italy from Italy proper. Hitherto they had
stood doubtless in a national antagonism, inasmuch as Northern Italy
was inhabited chiefly by Ligurians and Celts, Central and Southern
Italy by Italians; but, in a political and administrative point of
view, the whole continental territory of the Roman state from the
Straits to the Alps including the Illyrian possessions--burgess,
Latin, and non-Italian communities without exception--was in the
ordinary course of things under the administration of the supreme
magistrates who were acting in Rome, as in fact her colonial
foundations extended through all this territory. According to Sulla's
arrangement Italy proper, the northern boundary of which was at the
same time changed from the Aesis to the Rubico, was--as a region now
inhabited without exception by Roman citizens--made subject to the
ordinary Roman authorities; and it became one of the fundamental
principles of Roman state-law, that no troops and no commandant
should ordinarily be stationed in this district. The Celtic
country south of the Alps on the other hand, in which a military
command could not be dispensed with on account of the continued
incursions of the Alpine tribes, was constituted a distinct
governorship after the model of the older transmarine commands.(27)
Lastly, as the number of praetors to be nominated yearly was raised
from six to eight, the new arrangement of the duties was such, that
the ten chief magistrates to be nominated yearly devoted themselves,
during their first year of office, as consuls or praetors to
the business of the capital--the two consuls to government and
administration, two of the praetors to the administration of civil
law, the remaining six to the reorganized administration of criminal
justice--and, during their second year of office, were as proconsuls
or propraetors invested with the command in one of the ten
governorships: Sicily, Sardinia, the two Spains, Macedonia, Asia,
Africa, Narbo, Cilicia, and Italian Gaul. The already-mentioned
augmentation of the number of quaestors by Sulla to twenty was
likewise connected with this arrangement.(28)
Better Arrangement of Business
Increase of the Power of the Senate
By this plan, in the first instance, a clear and fixed rule was
substituted for the irregular mode of distributing offices hitherto
adopted, a mode which invited all manner of vile manoeuvres and
intrigues; and, secondly, the excesses of magisterial authority were
as far as possible obviated and the influence of the supreme governing
board was materially increased. According to the previous
arrangement the only legal distinction in the empire was that drawn
between the city which was surrounded by the ring-wall, and the
country beyond the -pomerium-; the new arrangement substituted for
the city the new Italy henceforth, as in perpetual peace, withdrawn
from the regular -imperium-,(29) and placed in contrast to it the
continental and transmarine territories, which were, on the other hand,
necessarily placed under military commandants--the provinces as they
were henceforth called. According to the former arrangement the
same man had very frequently remained two, and often more years in
the same office. The new arrangement restricted the magistracies
of the capital as well as the governorships throughout to one year;
and the special enactment that every governor should without fail
leave his province within thirty days after his successor's arrival
there, shows very clearly--particularly if we take along with it the
formerly-mentioned prohibition of the immediate re-election of the
late magistrate to the same or another public office--what the
tendency of these arrangements was. It was the time-honoured maxim
by which the senate had at one time made the monarchy subject to
it, that the limitation of the magistracy in point of function
was favourable to democracy, and its limitation in point of time
favourable to oligarchy. According to the previous arrangement
Gaius Marius had acted at once as head of the senate and as
commander-in-chief of the state; if he had his own unskilfulness
alone to blame for his failure to overthrow the oligarchy by means
of this double official power, care seemed now taken to prevent
some possibly wiser successor from making a better use of the
same lever. According to the previous arrangement the magistrate
immediately nominated by the people might have had a military
position; the Sullan arrangement, on the other hand, reserved
such a position exclusively for those magistrates whom the senate
confirmed in their official authority by prolonging their term
of office. No doubt this prolongation of office had now become
a standing usage; but it still--so far as respects the auspices
and the name, and constitutional form in general--continued to be
treated as an extraordinary extension of their term. This was no
matter of indifference. The burgesses alone could depose the consul
or praetor from his office; the proconsul and propraetor were
nominated and dismissed by the senate, so that by this enactment
the whole military power, on which withal everything ultimately
depended, became formally at least dependent on the senate.
Shelving of the Censorship
Lastly we have already observed that the highest of all magistracies,
the censorship, though not formally abolished, was shelved in the
same way as the dictatorship had previously been. Practically it
might certainly be dispensed with. Provision was otherwise made
for filling up the senate. From the time that Italy was practically
tax-free and the army was substantially formed by enlistment, the
register of those liable to taxation and service lost in the main
its significance; and, if disorder prevailed in the equestrian roll
or the list of those entitled to the suffrage, that disorder was
probably not altogether unwelcome. There thus remained only the current
financial functions which the consuls had hitherto discharged when,
as frequently happened, no election of censors had taken place, and
which they now took as a part of their ordinary official duties.
Compared with the substantial gain that by the shelving of the
censorship the magistracy lost its crowning dignity, it was a matter
of little moment and was not at all prejudicial to the sole dominion
of the supreme governing corporation, that--with a view to satisfy
the ambition of the senators now so much more numerous--the number
of the pontifices and that of the augurs was increased from
nine,(30) that of the custodiers of oracles from ten,(31) to fifteen
each, and that of the banquet-masters from three(32) to seven.
Regulation of the Finances
In financial matters even under the former constitution the decisive
voice lay with the senate; the only point to be dealt with, accordingly,
was the re-establishment of an orderly administration. Sulla had found
himself at first in no small difficulty as to money; the sums brought
with him from Asia Minor were soon expended for the pay of his numerous
and constantly swelling army. Even after thevictory at the Colline gate
the senate, seeing that the state-chest had been carried off to Praeneste,
had been obliged to resort to urgent measures. Various building-sites
in the capital and several portions of the Campanian domains were exposed
to sale, the client kings, the freed and allied communities, were laid
under extraordinary contribution, their landed property and their
customs-revenues were in some cases confiscated, and in others new
privileges were granted to them for money. But the residue of nearly
600,000 pounds found in the public chest on the surrender of Praeneste,
the public auctions which soon began, and other extraordinary resources,
relieved the embarrassment of the moment. Provision was made for
the future not so much by the reform in the Asiatic revenues, under
which the tax-payers were the principal gainers, and the state chest
was perhaps at most no loser, as by the resumption of the Campanian
domains, to which Aenaria was now added,(33) and above all by the
abolition of the largesses of grain, which since the time of Gaius
Gracchus had eaten like a canker into the Roman finances.
Reorganization of the Judicial System.
Previous Arrangements
Ordinary Procedure
Permanent and Special -Quaestiones-
Centumviral Court
The judicial system on the other hand was essentially revolutionized,
partly from political considerations, partly with a view to
introduce greater unity and usefulness into the previous very
insufficient and unconnected legislation on the subject. According
to the arrangements hitherto subsisting, processes fell to be decided
partly by the burgesses, partly by jurymen. The judicial cases in
which the whole burgesses decided on appeal from the judgment of
the magistrate were, down to the time of Sulla, placed in the
hands primarily of the tribunes of the people, secondarily of the
aediles, inasmuch as all the processes, through which a person
entrusted with an office or commission by the community was brought
to answer for his conduct of its affairs, whether they involved
life and limb or money-fines, had to be in the first instance dealt
with by the tribunes of the people, and all the other processes in
which ultimately the people decided, were in the first instance
adjudicated on, in the second presided over, by the curule or plebeian
aediles. Sulla, if he did not directly abolish the tribunician
process of calling to account, yet made it dependent, just like
the initiative of the tribunes in legislation, on the previous
consent of the senate, and presumably also limited in like manner
the aedilician penal procedure. On the other hand he enlarged the
jurisdiction of the jury courts. There existed at that time two
sorts of procedure before jurymen. The ordinary procedure, which
was applicable in all cases adapted according to our view for a
criminal or civil process with the exception of crimes immediately
directed against the state, consisted in this, that one of the two
praetors of the capital technically adjusted the cause and a juryman
(-iudex-) nominated by him decided it on the basis of this adjustment.
The extraordinary jury-procedure again was applicable in particular
civil or criminal cases of importance, for which, instead of
the single juryman, a special jury-court had been appointed by
special laws. Of this sort were the special tribunals constituted
for individual cases;(34) the standing commissional tribunals, such
as had been appointed for exactions,(35) for poisoning and murder,(36)
perhaps also for bribery at elections and other crimes, in the course
of the seventh century; and lastly, the two courts of the "Ten-men"
for processes affecting freedom, and the "Hundred and five," or more
briefly, the "Hundred-men," for processes affecting inheritance,
also called, from the shaft of a spear employed in all disputes
as to property, the "spear-court" (-hasta-). The court of Ten-men
(-decemviri litibus iudicandis-) was a very ancient institution for
the protection of the plebeians against their masters.(37) The period
and circumstances in which the spear-court originated are involved in
obscurity; but they must, it may be presumed, have been nearly the
same as in the case of the essentially similar criminal commissions
mentioned above. As to the presidency of these different tribunals
there were different regulations in the respective ordinances
appointing them: thus there presided over the tribunal as to
exactions a praetor, over the court for murder a president specially
nominated from those who had been aediles, over the spear-court several
directors taken from the former quaestors. The jurymen at least for
the ordinary as for the extraordinary procedure were, in accordance
with the Gracchan arrangement, taken from the non-senatorial men
of equestrian census; the selection belonged in general to the
magistrates who had the conducting of the courts, yet on such a
footing that they, in entering upon their office, had to set
forth once for all the list of jurymen, and then the jury for an
individual case was formed from these, not by free choice of the
magistrate, but by drawing lots, and by rejection on behalf of the
parties. From the choice of the people there came only the "Ten-men"
for procedure affecting freedom.
Sullan -Quaestiones-
Sulla's leading reforms were of a threefold character. First, he
very considerably increased the number of the jury-courts. There
were henceforth separate judicial commissions for exactions; for
murder, including arson and perjury; for bribery at elections; for
high treason and any dishonour done to the Roman name; for the most
heinous cases of fraud--the forging of wills and of money; for
adultery; for the most heinous violations of honour, particularly
for injuries to the person and disturbance of the domestic peace;
perhaps also for embezzlement of public moneys, for usury and other
crimes; and at least the greater number of these courts were either
found in existence or called into life by Sulla, and were provided
by him with special ordinances setting forth the crime and form of
criminal procedure. The government, moreover, was not deprived of
the right to appoint in case of emergency special courts for
particular groups of crimes. As a result of these arrangements,
the popular tribunals were in substance done away with, processes
of high treason in particular were consigned to the new high treason
commission, and the ordinary jury procedure was considerably
restricted, for the more serious falsifications and injuries were
withdrawn from it. Secondly, as respects the presidency of the courts,
six praetors, as we have already mentioned, were now available for
the superintendence of the different jury-courts, and to these were
added a number of other directors in the care of the commission
which was most frequently called into action--that for dealing with
murder. Thirdly, the senators were once more installed in the
office of jurymen in room of the Gracchan equites.
The political aim of these enactments--to put an end to the share
which the equites had hitherto had in the government--is clear as
day; but it as little admits of doubt, that these were not mere
measures of a political tendency, but that they formed the first
attempt to amend the Roman criminal procedure and criminal law, which
had since the struggle between the orders fallen more and more into
confusion. From this Sullan legislation dates the distinction--
substantially unknown to the earlier law--between civil and criminal
causes, in the sense which we now attach to these expressions;
henceforth a criminal cause appears as that which comes before the
bench of jurymen under the presidency of the praetor, a civil cause
as the procedure, in which the juryman or jurymen do not discharge
their duties under praetorian presidency. The whole body of the
Sullan ordinances as to the -quaestiones- may be characterized
at once as the first Roman code after the Twelve Tables, and as
the first criminal code ever specially issued at all. But in
the details also there appears a laudable and liberal spirit.
Singular as it may sound regarding the author of the proscriptions,
it remains nevertheless true that he abolished the punishment
of death for political offences; for, as according to the Roman
custom which even Sulla retained unchanged the people only, and
not the jury-commission, could sentence to forfeiture of life or
to imprisonment,(38) the transference of processes of high treason
from the burgesses to a standing commission amounted to the abolition
of capital punishment for such offences. On the other hand, the
restriction of the pernicious special commissions for particular cases
of high treason, of which the Varian commission(39) in the Social war
had been a specimen, likewise involved an improvement. The whole
reform was of singular and lasting benefit, and a permanent monument
of the practical, moderate, statesmanly spirit, which made its author
well worthy, like the old decemvirs, to step forward between the
parties as sovereign mediator with his code of law.
Police Laws
We may regard as an appendix to these criminal laws the police
ordinances, by which Sulla, putting the law in place of the censor,
again enforced good discipline and strict manners, and, by
establishing new maximum rates instead of the old ones which
had long been antiquated, attempted to restrain luxury at banquets,
funerals, and otherwise.
The Roman Municipal System
Lastly, the development of an independent Roman municipal system
was the work, if not of Sulla, at any rate of the Sullan epoch.
The idea of organically incorporating the community as a subordinate
political unit in the higher unity of the state was originally
foreign to antiquity; the despotism of the east knew nothing of urban
commonwealths in the strict sense of the word, and city and state
were throughout the Helleno-Italic world necessarily coincident.
In so far there was no proper municipal system from the outset either
in Greece or in Italy. The Roman polity especially adhered to this
view with its peculiar tenacious consistency; even in the sixth
century the dependent communities of Italy were either, in order to
their keeping their municipal constitution, constituted as formally
sovereign states of non-burgesses, or, if they obtained the Roman
franchise, were--although not prevented from organizing themselves
as collective bodies--deprived of properly municipal rights, so that
in all burgess-colonies and burgess--municipia- even the administration
of justice and the charge of buildings devolved on the Roman praetors
and censors. The utmost to which Rome consented was to allow at
least the most urgent lawsuits to be settled on the spot by a
deputy (-praefectus-) of the praetor nominated from Rome.(40)
The provinces were similarly dealt with, except that the governor
there came in place of the authorities of the capital. In the free,
that is, formally sovereign towns the civil and criminal jurisdiction
was administered by the municipal magistrates according to the local
statutes; only, unless altogether special privileges stood in the
way, every Roman might either as defendant or as plaintiff request
to have his cause decided before Italian judges according to Italian
law For the ordinary provincial communities the Roman governor was
the only regular judicial authority, on whom devolved the direction
of all processes. It was a great matter when, as in Sicily, in the
event of the defendant being a Sicilian, the governor was bound by the
provincial statute to give a native juryman and to allow him to decide
according to local usage; in most of the provinces this seems to
have depended on the pleasure of the directing magistrate.
In the seventh century this absolute centralization of the public
life of the Roman community in the one focus of Rome was given up,
so far as Italy at least was concerned. Now that Italy was a
single civic community and the civic territory reached from the Arnus
and Rubico down to the Sicilian Straits,(41) it was necessary to
consent to the formation of smaller civic communities within that
larger unit. So Italy was organized into communities of full
burgesses; on which occasion also the larger cantons that were
dangerous from their size were probably broken up, so far as this
had not been done already, into several smaller town-districts.(42)
The position of these new communities of full burgesses was a compromise
between that which had belonged to them hitherto as allied states,
and that which by the earlier law would have belonged to them as
integral parts of the Roman community. Their basis was in general
the constitution of the former formally sovereign Latin community, or,
so far as their constitution in its principles resembled the Roman,
that of the Roman old-patrician-consular community; only care was
taken to apply to the same institutions in the -municipium- names
different from, and inferior to, those used in the capital, or,
in other words, in the state. A burgess-assembly was placed at
the head, with the prerogative of issuing municipal statutes and
nominating the municipal magistrates. A municipal council of a
hundred members acted the part of the Roman senate. The administration
of justice was conducted by four magistrates, two regular judges
corresponding to the two consuls, and two market-judges corresponding
to the curule aediles. The functions of the censorship, which
recurred, as in Rome, every five years and, to all appearance,
consisted chiefly in the superintendence of public buildings, were also
undertaken by the supreme magistrates of the community, namely the
ordinary -duumviri-, who in this case assumed the distinctive title
of -duumviri- "with censorial or quinquennial power." The municipal
funds were managed by two quaestors. Religious functions primarily
devolved on the two colleges of men of priestly lore alone known to
the earliest Latin constitution, the municipal pontifices and augurs.
Relation of the -Municipium- to the State
With reference to the relation of this secondary political organism
to the primary organism of the state, political prerogatives in
general belonged completely to the former as well as to the latter,
and consequently the municipal decree and the -imperium- of the
municipal magistrates bound the municipal burgess just as the
decree of the people and the consular -imperium- bound the Roman.
This led, on the whole, to a co-ordinate exercise of power by the
authorities of the state and of the town; both had, for instance,
the right of valuation and taxation, so that in the case of any
municipal valuations and taxes those prescribed by Rome were not
taken into account, and vice versa; public buildings might be
instituted both by the Roman magistrates throughout Italy and by
the municipal authorities in their own district, and so in other
cases. In the event of collision, of course the community yielded
to the state and the decree of the people invalidated the municipal
decree. A formal division of functions probably took place only in
the administration of justice, where the system of pure co-ordination
would have led to the greatest confusion. In criminal procedure
presumably all capital causes, and in civil procedure those more
difficult cases which presumed an independent action on the part
of the directing magistrate, were reserved for the authorities and
jurymen of the capital, and the Italian municipal courts were
restricted to the minor and less complicated lawsuits, or to those
which were very urgent.
Rise of the -Municipium-
The origin of this Italian municipal system has not been recorded
by tradition. It is probable that its germs may be traced to
exceptional regulations for the great burgess-colonies, which were
founded at the end of the sixth century;(43) at least several, in
themselves indifferent, formal differences between burgess-colonies
and burgess--municipia- tend to show that the new burgess-colony,
which at that time practically took the place of the Latin, had
originally a better position in state-law than the far older burgess-
-municipium-, and the advantage doubtless can only have consisted in a
municipal constitution approximating to the Latin, such as afterwards
belonged to all burgess-colonies and burgess--municipia-. The new
organization is first distinctly demonstrable for the revolutionary
colony of Capua;(44) and it admits of no doubt that it was first
fully applied, when all the hitherto sovereign towns of Italy had
to be organized, in consequence of the Social war, as burgess-
communities. Whether it was the Julian law, or the censors of 668,
or Sulla, that first arranged the details, cannot be determined:
the entrusting of the censorial functions to the -duumviri- seems
indeed to have been introduced after the analogy of the Sullan
ordinance superseding the censorship, but may be equally well
referred to the oldest Latin constitution to which also the
censorship was unknown. In any case this municipal constitution--
inserted in, and subordinate to, the state proper--is one of the
most remarkable and momentous products of the Sullan period, and
of the life of the Roman state generally. Antiquity was certainly
as little able to dovetail the city into the state as to develop
of itself representative government and other great principles of
our modern state-life; but it carried its political development
up to those limits at which it outgrows and bursts its assigned
dimensions, and this was the case especially with Rome, which in
every respect stands on the line of separation and connection between
the old and the new intellectual worlds. In the Sullan constitution
the primary assembly and the urban character of the commonwealth
of Rome, on the one hand, vanished almost into a meaningless form;
the community subsisting within the state on the other hand was
already completely developed in the Italian -municipium-. Down
to the name, which in such cases no doubt is the half of the matter,
this last constitution of the free republic carried out the
representative system and the idea of the state built upon the
basis of the municipalities.
The municipal system in the provinces was not altered by this
movement; the municipal authorities of the non-free towns continued--
special exceptions apart--to be confined to administration and
police, and to such jurisdiction as the Roman authorities did
not prefer to take into their own hands.
Impression Produced by the Sullan Reorganization
Opposition of the Officers
Such was the constitution which Lucius Cornelius Sulla gave to
the commonwealth of Rome. The senate and equestrian order, the
burgesses and proletariate, Italians and provincials, accepted it
as it was dictated to them by the regent, if not without grumbling,
at any rate without rebelling: not so the Sullan officers. The Roman
army had totally changed its character. It had certainly been
rendered by the Marian reform more ready for action and more
militarily useful than when it did not fight before the walls of
Numantia; but it had at the same time been converted from a burgess-
force into a set of mercenaries who showed no fidelity to the state
at all, and proved faithful to the officer only if he had the skill
personally to gain their attachment. The civil war had given fearful
evidence of this total revolution in the spirit of the army: six
generals in command, Albinus,(45) Cato,(46) Rufus,(47) Flaccus,(48)
Cinna,(49) and Gaius Carbo,(50) had fallen during its course by the
hands of their soldiers: Sulla alone had hitherto been able to
retain the mastery of the dangerous crew, and that only, in fact,
by giving the rein to all their wild desires as no Roman general
before him had ever done. If the blame of destroying the old
military discipline is on this account attached to him, the
censure is not exactly without ground, but yet without justice;
he was indeed the first Roman magistrate who was only enabled to
discharge his military and political task by coming forward as a
-condottiere-. He had not however taken the military dictatorship
for the purpose of making the state subject to the soldiery, but
rather for the purpose of compelling everything in the state, and
especially the army and the officers, to submit once more to the
authority of civil order. When this became evident, an opposition
arose against him among his own staff. The oligarchy might play
the tyrant as respected other citizens; but that the generals also,
who with their good swords had replaced the overthrown senators in
their seats, should now be summoned to yield implicit obedience to
this very senate, seemed intolerable. The very two officers in
whom Sulla had placed most confidence resisted the new order of
things. When Gnaeus Pompeius, whom Sulla had entrusted with the
conquest of Sicily and Africa and had selected for his son-in-law,
after accomplishing his task received orders from the senate to
dismiss his army, he omitted to comply and fell little short
of open insurrection.
Quintus Ofella, to whose firm perseverance in front of Praeneste
the success of the last and most severe campaign was essentially
due in equally open violation of the newly issued ordinances became
a candidate for the consulship without having held the inferior
magistracies. With Pompeius there was effected, if not a cordial
reconciliation, at any rate a compromise. Sulla, who knew his man
sufficiently not to fear him, did not resent the impertinent remark
which Pompeius uttered to his face, that more people concerned
themselves with the rising than with the setting sun; and accorded
to the vain youth the empty marks of honour to which his heart
clung.(51) If in this instance he appeared lenient, he showed on
the other hand in the case of Ofella that he was not disposed to
allow his marshals to take advantage of him; as soon as the latter
had appeared unconstitutionally as candidate, Sulla had him cut down
in the public market-place, and then explained to the assembled citizens
that the deed was done by his orders and the reason for doing it.
So this significant opposition of the staff to the new order of things
was no doubt silenced for the present; but it continued to subsist
and furnished the practical commentary on Sulla's saying, that what
he did on this occasion could not be done a second time.
Re-establishment of Constitutional Order
One thing still remained--perhaps the most difficult of all:
to bring the exceptional state of things into accordance with
the paths prescribed by the new or old laws. It was facilitated
by the circumstance, that Sulla never lost sight of this as his
ultimate aim. Although the Valerian law gave him absolute power
and gave to each of his ordinances the force of law, he had nevertheless
availed himself of this extraordinary prerogative only in the case of
measures, which were of transient importance, and to take part in
which would simply have uselessly compromised the senate and burgesses,
especially in the case of the proscriptions.
Sulla Resigns the Regency
Ordinarily 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 in part extant; and the
same is attested of other laws, e. g. the sumptuary law and those
regarding the confiscation of domains. In like manner the senate
was previously consulted in the more important administrative acts,
such as in the sending forth and recall of the African army and in
the conferring of the charters of towns. In the same spirit Sulla
caused consuls to be elected even for 673, through which at least
the odious custom of dating officially 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.
But in the following year (674) Sulla revived the ordinary constitution
in full efficiency, and administered the state as consul in concert
with his comrade in arms Quintus Metellus, retaining the regency, but
allowing it for the time to lie dormant. He saw well how dangerous
it was for his own very 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
the elections for 675 to have free course, declined re-election to
the consulship as incompatible with his own ordinances, and at the
beginning of 675 resigned the regency, soon after the new consuls
Publius Servilius and Appius Claudius had entered on office. Even
callous hearts were impressed, when the man who had hitherto dealt
at his pleasure with the life 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 and even, strictly speaking, without the support
of a fixed 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 of the capital, voluntarily
renounced his plenitude of power, discharged his armed attendants,
dismissed his lictors, and summoned the dense throng of burgesses to
speak, if any one desired from him a reckoning. All were silent: Sulla
descended from the rostra, and on foot, attended only by his friends,
returned to his dwelling through the midst of that very populace which
eight years before had razed his house to the ground.
Character of Sulla
Posterity has not justly appreciated either Sulla himself or his work
of reorganization, as indeed it is wont to judge unfairly of persons
who oppose themselves to the current of the times. In fact Sulla
is one of the most marvellous characters--we may even say a unique
phenomenon--in history. Physically and mentally of sanguine
temperament, blue-eyed, fair, of a complexion singularly white but
blushing with every passionate emotion--though otherwise a handsome
man with piercing eyes--he seemed hardly destined to be of more
moment to the state than his ancestors, who since the days of his
great-great-grandfather Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul in 464, 477),
one of the most distinguished generals and at the same time the
most ostentatious man of the times of Pyrrhus, had remained in second-
rate positions. He desired from life nothing but serene enjoyment.
Reared in the refinement of such cultivated luxury as was at that
time naturalized even in the less wealthy senatorial families of
Rome, he speedily and adroitly possessed himself of all the fulness 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 saloon and as a good comrade
in the tented field; his acquaintances, high and low, found in him a
sympathizing 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 wine-cup, still
more passionate to women; even in his later years he was no longer
the regent, when after the business of the day was finished he
took his place at table. A vein of irony--we might perhaps 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 burgesses 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 amidst these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily
nor mental vigour, in the rural leisure of his last years he was
still zealously devoted to the chase, and the circumstance that he
brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome
attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific
type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing
of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of
displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of
narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his
humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen,
in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic
companions to drive their chariots personally at the games.
He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes,
which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent
into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably
at one time felt. In such a life as his was, oscillating between
passionate intoxication and more than sober awaking, illusions are
speedily dissipated. Wishing and striving probably appeared to him
folly in a world which withal 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 unbelief and
to superstition. His whimsical credulity was not the plebeian
superstition of Marius, who got a priest to prophesy to him for money
and determined his actions accordingly; still less was it the sullen
belief of the fanatic in destiny; it was that faith in the absurd,
which necessarily makes its appearance in every man who has out and
out ceased to believe in a connected order of things--the superstition
of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw
on each and every occasion the right number. 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 could never fail whose chest was replenished
by the gods themselves. When the Delphic priests reported to him
that they were afraid to send the treasures which he asked, because
the harp of the god emitted a clear sound when they touched it,
he returned the reply that they might now send them all the more
readily, as the god evidently approved his design. Nevertheless
he fondly flattered himself with the idea that he was the chosen
favourite of the gods, and in an altogether special manner of that
goddess, to whom down to his latest years he assigned the pre-
eminence, Aphrodite. In his conversations as well as in his
autobiography he often plumed himself on the intercourse which
the immortals held with him in dreams and omens. He had more right
than most men to be proud of his achievements he was not so, but he
was proud of his uniquely faithful fortune. He was wont to say that
every improvised enterprise turned out better with him than those
which were 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 utterance 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,
Sulla's Political Career
Nothing lay farther from Sulla than systematic ambition. He had too
much sense to regard, like the average aristocrats of his time, the
inscription of his name in the roll of the consuls as the aim of his
life; he was too indifferent and too little 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 exertion
to the political working bees, of whom there was in truth no lack.
Thus in 647, 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
made himself master of the profession of arms, and in his daring
expedition to Mauretania first displayed that peculiar combination
of audacity and cunning with reference to which his contemporaries
said of him that he was half lion 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 his
praetorship, which office he held in 661 after having failed in a
previous candidature, it once more chanced that in his province,
the least important of all, the first victory over king Mithradates
and the first treaty with the mighty Arsacids, as well as their first
humiliation, occurred. The Civil war followed. It was Sulla
mainly, who decided the first act of it--the Italian insurrection--
in favour of Rome, and thus won for himself the consulship by his
sword; it was he, moreover, who when consul suppressed with
energetic rapidity the Sulpician revolt. Fortune seemed to make
it her business to eclipse the old hero Marius by means of this
younger officer. The capture of Jugurtha, the vanquishing 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 666, which was at the same time and 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; 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, while
the revolution was raging in Italy, persevered unshaken in Asia
till the public foe was subdued. So soon as he had 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 had
not been able to close an eye, and we may well believe it.
But still his task was not at an end; his star was destined to
rise still higher. Absolute autocrat as was ever any king, and
yet constantly abiding on the ground of formal right, he bridled
the ultra-reactionary party, annihilated the Gracchan constitution
which had for forty years limited the oligarchy, and compelled first
the powers of the capitalists and of the urban proletariate which
had entered into rivalry with the oligarchy, and ultimately the
arrogance of the sword which had grown up 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 magisterial power as a ministering instrument in its
hands, committed to it the legislation, the courts, the supreme
military and financial power, and furnished it with a sort of
bodyguard in the liberated slaves and with a sort of army in the
settled military colonists. Lastly, when the work was finished,
the creator gave way to his own creation; the absolute autocrat
became of his own accord once more a simple senator. In all this
long military and political career Sulla never lost a battle, was
never compelled to retrace a single step, and, led astray neither
by friends nor by 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 for once to
have exchanged caprice for steadfastness, and to have taken a
pleasure in loading her favourite with successes and honours--
whether he desired them or not. But history must be more just
towards him than he was towards himself, and must place him in a
higher rank than that of the mere favourites of fortune.
Sulla and His Work
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, indeed, 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 censorial 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 duration of the supreme
office to two years, the transference of the 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 as to the horrors attaching
to his restoration, the proscriptions and confiscations--are they,
compared with the doings of Nasica, Popillius, Opimius, Caepio and
so on, anything else than the legal embodiment of 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; and, 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, which had ruled as a clique for centuries and had
every year become more enervated and embittered by age, and that all
that was hollow and all that was nefarious therein is ultimately
traceable to that aristocracy. Sulla reorganized the state--not,
however, as the master of the house who puts his shattered estate
and household in order according to his own discretion, but as
the temporary business-manager who faithfully complies with his
instructions; it is superficial and false in such a case to devolve
the final and essential responsibility from the master upon the
manager. We estimate the importance of Sulla much too highly, or
rather we dispose of those terrible proscriptions, ejections, and
restorations--for which there never could be and never was any
reparation--on far too easy terms, when we regard them as the work
of a bloodthirsty tyrant whom accident had placed 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 following
the conscious thought as its unconscious instrument. Sulla carried
out that part with rare, in fact superhuman, perfection; but within
the limits which it laid down for him, his working was not only
grand but even useful. Never has any aristocracy deeply decayed
and decaying still farther from day to day, such as was the Roman
aristocracy of that time, 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 any regard to the gain of power for himself.
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, so far as concerns the total absence
of political selfishness--although, it is true, in this one respect
only--Sulla deserves to be named side by side with Washington.
Value of the Sullan Constitution
But the whole country--and not the aristocracy merely--was more
indebted to him than posterity was willing to confess. Sulla
definitely terminated the Italian revolution, in so far as it was
based on the disabilities of individual less privileged districts
as compared with others of better rights, and, by compelling himself
and his party to recognize the equality of the rights of all
Italians in presence of the law, he became the real and final
author of the full political unity of Italy--a gain which was
not too dearly purchased by ever so many troubles and streams
of blood. Sulla however did more. For more than half a century
the power of Rome had been declining, and anarchy had been her
permanent condition: for the government of the senate with the
Gracchan constitution was anarchy, and the government of Cinna and
Carbo was a yet far worse illustration of the absence of a master-
hand (the sad image of which is most clearly reflected in that
equally confused and unnatural league with the Samnites), the most
uncertain, most intolerable, and most mischievous of all
conceivable political conditions--in fact the beginning of the
end. We do not go too far when we assert that the long-undermined
Roman commonwealth must have necessarily fallen to pieces, had not
Sulla by his intervention in Asia and Italy saved its existence.
It is true that the constitution of Sulla had as little endurance
as that of Cromwell, and it was not difficult to see that his
structure was no solid one; but it is arrant thoughtlessness to
overlook the fact that without Sulla most probably the very site of
the building would have been swept away by the waves; and even the
blame of its want of stability does not fall primarily on Sulla.
The statesman builds only so much as in the sphere assigned to him
he can build. What a man of conservative views could do to save the
old constitution, Sulla did; and he himself had a foreboding that,
while he might doubtless erect a fortress, he would be unable to
create a garrison, and that the utter worthlessness of the oligarchs
would render any attempt to save the oligarchy vain. His constitution
resembled a temporary dike thrown into the raging breakers; it was
no reproach to the builder, if some ten years afterwards the waves
swallowed up a structure at variance with nature and not defended
even by those whom it sheltered. The statesman has no need to be
referred to highly commendable isolated reforms, such as those of
the Asiatic revenue-system and of criminal justice, that he may not
summarily dismiss Sulla's ephemeral restoration: he will admire it
as a reorganization of the Roman commonwealth judiciously planned
and on the whole consistently carried out under infinite difficulties,
and he will place the deliverer of Rome and the accomplisher of Italian
unity below, but yet by the side of, Cromwell.
Immoral and Superficial Nature of the Sullan Restoration
It is not, however, the statesman alone who has a voice in
judging the dead; and with justice outraged human feeling will
never reconcile itself to what Sulla did or suffered others to do.
Sulla not only established his despotic power by unscrupulous violence,
but in doing so called things by their right name with a certain cynical
frankness, through which he has irreparably offended the great mass
of the weakhearted who are more revolted at the name than at the
thing, but through which, from the cool and dispassionate character
of his crimes, he certainly appears to the moral judgment more
revolting than the criminal acting from passion. Outlawries, rewards
to executioners, confiscations of goods, summary procedure with
insubordinate officers had occurred a hundred times, and the obtuse
political morality of ancient civilization had for such things
only lukewarm censure; but it was unexampled that the names of
the outlaws should be publicly posted up and their heads publicly
exposed, that a set sum should be fixed for the bandits who slew them
and that it should be duly entered in the public account-books, that
the confiscated property should be brought to the hammer like the spoil
of an enemy in the public market, that the general should order a
refractory officer to be at once cut down and acknowledge the deed
before all the people. This public mockery of humanity was also
a political error; it contributed not a little to envenom later
revolutionary crises beforehand, and on that account even now
a dark shadow deservedly rests on the memory of the author
of the proscriptions.
Sulla may moreover be justly blamed that, while in all important
matters he acted with remorseless vigour, in subordinate and more
especially in personal questions he very frequently yielded to
his sanguine temperament and dealt according to his likings or
dislikings. Wherever he really felt hatred, as for instance against
the Marians, he allowed it to take its course without restraint even
against the innocent, and boasted of himself that no one had better
requited friends and foes.(52) He did not disdain on occasion of
his plenitude of 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 as to adultery and
extravagance. But his lenity towards his own party and his own
circle was more pernicious for the state than his indulgence towards
himself. The laxity of his military discipline, although it was
partly enjoined by his political exigencies, may be reckoned as
coming under this category; but far more pernicious was his indulgence
towards his political adherents. The extent of his occasional
forbearance is hardly credible: for instance Lacius Murena was not only
released from punishment for defeats which he sustained through arrant
perversity and insubordination,(53) but was even allowed a triumph;
Gnaeus Pompeius, who had behaved still worse, was still more
extravagantly honoured by Sulla.(54) The extensive range and
the worst enormities 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 very variously, sometimes with
incredible indulgence, sometimes with inexorable severity, may readily
be conceived. The saying repeated a thousand times, that he was before
his regency a good-natured, mild man, but when regent a bloodthirsty
tyrant, carries in it its own refutation; if he as regent 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 action. It is always as if the victor, just as it
pleased him to call his merit in gaining victory good fortune,
esteemed the victory itself of no value; as if he had a partial
presentiment of the vanity and perishableness 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.
Sulla after His Retirement
But, such as he was, this Don Juan of politics was a man of one
mould. His whole life attests the internal equilibrium of his
nature; in the most diverse situations Sulla remained unchangeably
the same. It was the same temper, which after the brilliant
successes in Africa made him seek once more the idleness of the
capital, and after the full possession of absolute power made him
find rest and refreshment in his Cuman villa. In his mouth the
saying, that public affairs were a burden which he threw off so
soon as he might and could, was no mere phrase. After his resignation
he remained entirely like himself, without peevishness and without
affectation, glad to be rid of public affairs and yet interfering
now and then when opportunity offered. Hunting and fishing and
the composition of his memoirs occupied his leisure hours; by way
of interlude he arranged, at the request of the discordant citizens,
the internal affairs of the neighbouring colony of Puteoli as
confidently and speedily as he had formerly arranged those of
the capital. His last action on his sickbed had reference to the
collection of a contribution for the rebuilding of the Capitoline
temple, of which he was not allowed to witness the completion.
Death of Sulla
Little more than a year after his retirement, in the sixtieth year
of his life, while yet vigorous in body and mind, he was overtaken by
death; after a brief confinement to a sick-bed--he was writing at his
autobiography two days even before his death--the rupture of a blood-
vessel(55) carried him off (676). His faithful fortune did not
desert him even in death. He could have no wish to be drawn once
more into the disagreeable vortex of party struggles, and to be
obliged to lead his old warriors once more against a new revolution;
yet such was the state of matters at his death in Spain and in
Italy, that he could hardly have been spared 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 there, which had been
silent in his lifetime, were raised against the last honour which it
was proposed to show to the tyrant. But his memory was still too
fresh and the dread of his old soldiers too vivid: it was resolved
that the body should be conveyed to the capital and that the obsequies
should be celebrated there.
His Funeral
Italy never witnessed a grander funeral solemnity. 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 hero in death, who had in life
led it so often and never except to victory. So the endless
funeral procession reached the capital, where the courts kept
holiday and all business was suspended, and 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; but others were more
mindful than he was 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 from their rest in the grave 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 armour, the procession
arrived at the great market-place; at this spot, filled by his
achievements and almost by the sound as yet of his dreaded words,
the funeral oration was delivered over the deceased; and thence the
bier was borne on the shoulders of senators to the Campus Martius,
where the funeral pile was erected. While the flames were blazing,
the equites and the soldiers held their race of honour round
the corpse; the ashes of the regent were deposited in the Campus
Martius beside the tombs of the old kings, and the Roman women
mourned him for a year.