The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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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.
Chapter XI
The Commonwealth and Its Economy
External and Internal Bankruptcy of the Roman State
We have traversed a period of ninety years--forty years of profound
peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most
inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps
were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction,(1) and the
Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic
Ocean(2) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the
Danube;(3) but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were
barren. The circle of the "extraneous peoples under the will,
sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,"(4) was not
materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a
better age and to bring the communities, annexed to Rome in laxer
forms of dependence, more and more into full subjection. Behind
the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very
sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization
was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state,
and embodied there in forms of more general validity, the nations
excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond
the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle-
fields of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, of Chaeronea and Orchomenus,
were heard the first peals of that thunderstorm, which the Germanic
tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo-
Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached
almost to our own times. But in internal development also this
epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses
irretrievably. The Roman commonwealth was planned as an urban
community, which through its free burgess-body gave to itself
rulers and laws; which was governed by these well-advised rulers
within these legal limits with kingly freedom; and around which
the Italian confederacy, as an aggregate of free urban communities
essentially homogeneous and cognate with the Roman, and the body
of extra-Italian allies, as an aggregate of Greek free cities and
barbaric peoples and principalities--both more superintended, than
domineered over, by the community of Rome--formed a double circle.
It was the final result of the revolution--and both parties, the
nominally conservative as well as the democratic party, had co-
operated towards it and concurred in it--that of this venerable
structure, which at the beginning of the present epoch, though full
of chinks and tottering, still stood erect, not one stone was at
its close left upon another. The holder of sovereign power was
now either a single man, or a close oligarchy--now of rank, now
of riches. The burgesses had lost all legitimate share in the
government. The magistrates were instruments without independence
in the hands of the holder of power for the time being. The urban
community of Rome had broken down by its unnatural enlargement.
The Italian confederacy had been merged in the urban community.
The body of extra-Italian allies was in full course of being
converted into a body of subjects. The whole organic classification
of the Roman commonwealth had gone to wreck, and nothing was left
but a crude mass of more or less disparate elements.
The Prospect
The state of matters threatened to end in utter anarchy and in
the inward and outward dissolution of the state. The political
movement tended thoroughly towards the goal of despotism; the only
point still in dispute was whether the close circle of the families
of rank, or the senate of capitalists, or a monarch was to be the
despot. The political movement followed thoroughly the paths that
led to despotism; the fundamental principle of a free commonwealth--
that the contending powers should reciprocally confine themselves
to indirect coercion--had become effete in the eyes of all parties
alike, and on both sides the fight for power began to be carried on
first by the bludgeon, and soon by the sword. The revolution, at
an end in so far as the old constitution was recognized by both
sides as finally set aside and the aim and method of the new
political development were clearly settled, had yet up to this
time discovered nothing but provisional solutions for this problem
of the reorganization of the state; neither the Gracchan nor the
Sullan constitution of the community bore the stamp of finality.
But the bitterest feature of this bitter time was that even hope
and effort failed the clear-seeing patriot. The sun of freedom
with all its endless store of blessings was constantly drawing
nearer to its setting, and the twilight was settling over the
very world that was still so brilliant. It was no accidental
catastrophe which patriotism and genius might have warded off;
it was ancient social evils--at the bottom of all, the ruin of
the middle class by the slave proletariate--that brought destruction
on the Roman commonwealth. The most sagacious statesman was in the
plight of the physician to whom it is equally painful to prolong or
to abridge the agony of his patient. Beyond doubt it was the
better for the interests of Rome, the more quickly and thoroughly
a despot set aside all remnants of the ancient free constitution,
and invented new forms and expressions for the moderate measure
of human prosperity for which in absolutism there is room: the
intrinsic advantage, which belonged to monarchy under the given
circumstances as compared with any oligarchy, lay mainly in the
very circumstance that such a despotism, energetic in pulling
down and energetic in building up, could never be exercised by
a collegiate board. But such calm considerations do not mould
history; it is not reason it is passion alone, that builds for
the future. The Romans had just to wait and to see how long their
commonwealth would continue unable to live and unable to die, and
whether it would ultimately find its master and, so far as might
be possible, its regenerator, in a man of mighty gifts, or would
collapse in misery and weakness.