The Storm Before the Storm

by Michael Duncan

  The proscriptions soon reached beyond Italy as many of Sulla’s principal enemies had fled the peninsula. Norbanus was located in Rhodes. Agents of Sulla demanded the city hand him over or face grave consequences. As the Rhodians debated what to do, Norbanus did them all a favor by going down to the marketplace and committing suicide. Sulla also dispatched Pompey to personally hunt down Carbo. Following intelligence that Carbo was on an island off the coast of Sicily, Pompey sailed for Sicily. Upon arrival Pompey convened summary tribunals to identify and execute known anti-Sullan partisans. When the people of Messana protested that the tribunals were illegal, Pompey snapped, “Cease quoting laws to us that have swords.” Carbo was soon tracked down and dragged before the tribunal. Though Carbo was still tecÚically consul of Rome, Pompey paid the sanctity of the office no mind. He ordered Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, three-time consul of Rome, executed on the spot.12

  In the final stage of the proscriptions, the killing became indiscriminate. Because this was ancient Rome and not the digital age, no one really knew what a proscribed man actually looked like. When a proscription gang had trouble tracking down the real victim, they seized random people off the street. These anonymous heads were then presented to Sulla as if they were real men from the list. Sulla asked few questions and always paid the bounty. The idea that there was any rationality or morality to the proscriptions became a cruel joke: “The whole state was now plunging headlong into ruin… avarice furnished a motive for ruthlessness; the magnitude of one’s crime was determined by the magnitude of his property; he who possessed riches became a malefactor and was in each case the prize set up for his own murder. In short nothing was regarded as dishonorable that brought profit.”13

  As the weeks passed and the killing continued, some effort was finally made to end the terror. Sulla announced that no more names would be proscribed after June 1, 82. In the meantime, men already on the list might use friends influential with Sulla to get their names off the list, the most famous case of this sort being nineteen-year-old Gaius Julius Caesar—the Gaius Julius Caesar. In addition to the crime of being Marius’s nephew, Caesar had also married Cinna’s daughter. Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce his wife, but Caesar refused. So Caesar’s name went on the proscription list and he was forced into hiding. But the young man had friends deep in Sulla’s inner circle, and after a few weeks they secured him a pardon. Sulla did not grant the pardon without reservation, however, and said, “Have your way and take him; only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.”14

  The sweeping orgy of terror finally wound itself down after the June 1 deadline came and went. Guilty men could still be tracked down and killed, but the worst was now over. A final accounting will never be possible, but at a minimum about a hundred senators and over one thousand Equestrians were killed in the Sullan proscriptions—with the total death toll possibly as high as three thousand. But good to his word, Sulla and his assassins mostly left the lower classes of Italy alone; not only were they spared for noble reasons, but also because they had no property that was liable to make them “guilty.” As the killing wound down, it was time for Sulla to embark on the rejuvenation of the Republic made possible by his purge of his enemies.15

  WHILE HIS AGENTS prowled the streets, Sulla himself had not yet found a way to enter Rome without losing his constitutional authority. The best option would be to secure election as consul, but technically the consuls for the year were still Carbo and Marius the Younger. With Carbo dead in Sicily and Marius the Younger’s head rotting in the Forum, they were not available to convene elections. So Sulla had to get more creative.

  While Sulla fretted over his sovereignty, the remaining rump of the Senate took steps to legitimize his actions. They accepted his report on the Mithridatic War and confirmed all the settlements he had made in Asia. They repealed the decree making him an enemy of the state. They even ordered a large statue of Sulla be erected in the Forum bearing an inscription of Sulla’s own devising: LUCIUS CORNELIUS SULLA FELIX. The title “Felix” now entered his official propaganda; it meant Sulla the Fortunate. But all of those decrees still left Sulla on the other side of the walls. So Sulla offered a radical suggestion: revive the ancient Dictatorship.16

  It had been 120 years since Rome gave itself over to the hands of a dictator. Once a ubiquitous office in the early days of the Republic, the Dictatorship had been abandoned in the triumphant era of the Republican Empire. Even recent existential emergencies like the Cimbrian Wars and the Social War had not triggered a revival of the office, nor had the violent unrest of the Gracchi and Saturninus. From his headquarters on the Campus Martius, Sulla composed a long letter to the Senate proposing they make him dictator. He said that Italy was devastated, the Republic gutted by the fire of a brutal civil war. There was no aspect of social, political, or economic life that had not been upended by the events of the last decade. If Sulla was to fulfill his destiny and restore the Republic to its former glory, he needed more than consular authority. He need absolute and unquestioned authority.17

  Sulla’s suggestion was a shocking deviation from all accepted custom, but what was the Senate to do? Say no? It was like asking the legions surrounded in Numantia in 137 if they wanted to be slaughtered. So they complied with Sulla’s request. To bridge the constitutional gap now that both sitting consuls were dead, the Senate revived the ancient office of interrex. The Republic had occasionally used an interrex to oversee consular elections if the consuls were dead or so indisposed that they could not return to Rome. Since this was obviously the case, the interrex convened the Assembly and presented a bill to make Sulla dictator legibus faciendis et reipublicae constitienae: “Dictator for the making of laws and settling of the constitution.” The Assembly passed the bill unanimously.18

  With plenty of legal advisers on hand, and with a decent grasp of constitutional law himself, Sulla ensured his new title came with all requisite powers to act without constraint. As dictator, Sulla now had the power of life and death over all Romans. He had sole discretion over declarations of war and peace. He could appoint or remove senators. He could confiscate property at will. He could found new cities and colonies. He could punish and destroy existing cities. He had the final say in all matters in the provinces, the treasury, and the courts. Most importantly the dictator’s every decree automatically became law. The enormous constitutional force of the Assembly now existed at Sulla’s mere word.19

  Despite the irregular way Sulla entered the Dictatorship, this was all mostly in keeping with the ancient powers of the office. He even appointed a Master of the Horse, the traditional partner of the dictator who answered to no one but the dictator. But there was a large and unprecedented omission from the law naming him dictator: an expiration date. Old Roman dictators never served terms longer than six months, a limit literally written into the law that created their dictatorship. But Sulla conveniently left that part out. After hinting to the Senate that six months might not be enough to restore the Republic, Sulla implied his dictatorship was to be held in perpetuity. With no legal obligation to ever set his vast array of powers aside, Lucius Cornelius Sulla was now Dictator for Life.20

  Despite all the constitutional reforms he was about to unveil to restore the proper order of the Old Republic in the next generation, the mundane rules of republican order paled in comparison to the example of a single man holding unlimited power indefinitely. And it would be the Dictatorship of Sulla, not the Republic of Sulla, that would be his lasting legacy.

  SULLA HAD ALREADY revealed much of what he planned for the Republic after his first march on Rome. Before leaving to take command of the Mithridatic War, he carried laws to expand the power of the Senate, including moving all voting to the less democratic Centuriate Assembly, expanding the rolls of the Senate, and requiring the Senate’s consent before a bill could be presented to the Assembl
y. After Cinna took over Rome these reforms were canceled, but now they returned as a part of Sulla’s final constitutional settlement. To his original kernel of reforms, the dictator Sulla introduced a package of new laws to place the Senate back at the center of the Republic.21

  With the tribunate so often used to lob antisenatorial bombs, Sulla severely curtailed their power. Originally designed to protect the individual rights of plebeians, the office had morphed into a dangerous instrument of demagogues and tyrants. So in addition to requiring a tribune to seek permission from the Senate before introducing a bill, Sulla also abolished the all-purpose, all-powerful veto. A tribune could now only levy a veto in matters pertaining to individual requests for clemency. But more important than these procedural restrictions, Sulla decreed that men elected tribune were barred from all other magistracies. This prohibition ensured that ambitious young leaders would never seek the office again. What once had been a springboard into politics was now a dead end.22

  The tribunes contained, Sulla then formalized the rest of the republican list of magistracies. Until now, rules of progression up the cursus honorum from quaestor to consul had always been vague and unspoken. Sulla formalized the path. He also expanded the ranks of offices, doubling the number of quaestors to twenty and adding two more praetors. Rome was long overdue to add more official administrative posts to match their expanded empire. Sulla also decreed that two years had to elapse in between offices no matter what, and ten years had to pass before a man could run for the same office. There would not be repeat consulships in Sulla’s republic.23

  Sulla did not want repeated governorships either. With eight praetors and two consuls now serving annually, there would be no need to keep men in provinces for more than a year or two. But this was not about improving provincial administration. Provincial assignments gave men access to wealth, connections, and power. Keeping a high rate of turnover in the provinces did nothing to help Roman provincials, but it helped maintain the balance of power back in the Senate. It went without saying that all provincial assignments would be also controlled by the Senate. The Assembly would have nothing to do with it.24

  To match the expanded cursus honorum, Sulla also doubled the rolls of the Senate from three hundred to six hundred. As dictator, Sulla naturally took the liberty to assign all the new senators. The course of the civil wars had dwindled the number of living senators below two hundred anyway, so over the course of his dictatorship he regularly elevated loyal officers and virtuous friends into the Senate. But even Sulla did not personally know four hundred worthy candidates; he took suggestions from various parties and created a whole cohort of grateful senators, loyal not just to Sulla, but to the reformed Republic he created.25

  With an expanded Senate now filling up, Sulla could also restore control of the courts. The fight that had been ongoing back to the days of the Gracchi would now be settled once and for all. The jury pool for permanent courts would be the Senate. The decree enlarging the Senate was partly meant to give the Senate sufficient manpower to dispense justice in the array of permanent courts Sulla now established.26

  The first permanent court the Romans established was the Extortion Court way back in 149. Over the years, other courts had been created to serve various needs: almost certainly a court to try cases of electoral fraud, and most famously Saturninus’s treason court that had been established in 103. Sulla now proposed to clean up and systematize the hodgepodge of tribunals and courts with seven new permanent courts for murder, counterfeiting and forgery, electoral fraud, embezzlement, treason, personal injury, and provincial extortion. Some of these already existed, some were new, and others were altered from previous iterations. Saturninus’s treason court, which originally resembled a revolutionary tribunal, was now limited to a few explicit crimes. There would be no revolutionary tribunals in Sulla’s republic.27

  Sulla also used his dictatorial power to address the always-vital question of land distribution. The chaos of the civil wars—and Sulla’s ultimate victory—opened up wide new swaths of land in Italy for settlement for the first time in thirty years. Tons of Italian land already lay vacant thanks to the upheavals of the past few years, and Sulla also doled out heavy punishment to regions that had opposed him. Etruria, Umbria, and Samnium—deep wells of anti-Sullan resistance—were targeted for mass seizure of property and redistribution to Sulla’s own veterans.28

  Sulla’s run of reforms was designed to roll the Republic back to its roots as a senatorial aristocracy. Almost all authority now emanated from the Senate. The tribunes were stripped of their power, the autonomy of the Assembly curtailed. Equestrians and publicani returned to a state of political and economic subservience. He even made an attempt at passing sumptuary laws to limit expenses on games, banquets, and personal finery, but as usual these came to nothing—Sulla himself ignored his own limits routinely. But it would be unfair to say that Sulla’s head was stuck in the past: he believed he was building a regime to address specific problems of the present that had plagued the Republic, and with his reforms they might not plague the Republic in the future.29

  One of the biggest problems that could not be solved by looking to the past was the fate of the Italians. Looking to the past would have meant going back to the old confederal hierarchy of citizenship, but Sulla never considered breaking his word to honor civitas and suffragium. When the next census arrived, the number of citizens on the rolls doubled, and from that point on the Italian question was never heard again. Just as they had always feared, the old Romans lost influence and Italians gained a larger voice. But so what? There was no longer any reason to treat a man born in Latium any different than a man born in Picenum; the voice of the Roman citizen was not lost, it simply changed pitch with the addition of new voices. Rome now belonged to everyone.30

  DESPITE HIS DICTATORIAL power being held in perpetuity, Sulla never intended to stay in the Dictatorship indefinitely. He considered himself a unique and special lawgiver, but he was at heart a republican, not a king. He meant exactly what he said when he assumed the Dictatorship: he was going to make laws and settle the constitution. Not being a petty tyrant, Sulla had no intention of infinitely delaying when the constitution would be declared “settled.” He was there to do the job he believed the gods wanted him to do, and then resign.

  Sulla began the process of shedding power about a year after he assumed office. In mid-81, he announced that he would be a candidate for consul alongside Metellus Pius. Still scrupulously treated as a near-equal, Sulla considered Pius’s continued partnership with his regime one of the last great examples of Fortuna’s favor. Pius could have made a great deal of trouble for the dictator, but instead accepted the transformation Sulla promised to inaugurate. Their shared consulship would be a sign not only of continued friendship, but also Sulla’s intention to not remain dictator for life.31

  But though this was all going great for Sulla, and he was ready to start playing the part of a republican again, one of his subordinates stepped forward to make a nuisance of himself. The election for 80 was supposed to be a stage-managed affair, but instead one of Sulla’s praetors got it into his head to take a crack at the consulship. Sulla had sent word round forbidding such distractions, but out of inexplicable bravado the man entered his name anyway. Even after he was explicitly told to stand down, the oblivious praetor returned to the Forum to canvass for votes. Sulla had no choice but to order the man killed where he stood.32

  This unpleasant business concluded, Sulla called for a mass meeting to address all the citizens of Rome. As he had done so many times before, Sulla was ready to share his plans to create an honest bond of trust between them all. He planted himself in the Forum and announced he was resigning the Dictatorship; he now stood before them as a citizen of Rome and was ready to answer all questions or challenges. Then he dismissed his official bodyguards and walked out into the streets. He was no longer dictator of Rome. He was simply citizen Sulla. But in an amusing coda to his voluntary renunciation of power, w
hen Sulla departed the Forum he was followed by a boy who heckled him mercilessly. Entering his house and leaving the obnoxious jeers behind, Sulla wryly quipped, “This young man will prevent any future holder of such power from laying it down.”33

  But Sulla was himself serious about shedding power. He and Pius were elected consuls for 80, but after this further year governing Rome not as dictator but as consul, Sulla was ready to move on. When the Assembly returned Sulla as consul for 79, he declined to serve. He accepted an almost honorary proconsulship in Cisalpine Gaul but never visited the province. Instead, he moved down to a country villa in Campania. There he lived at the center of a country court that signaled a freewheeling embrace of his old carefree ways. He hosted his old friends in the theater community, intellectuals from across the Mediterranean, and the political elite from across the known world. Sulla never stopped paying close attention to Roman politics—and Roman politics never stopped paying attention to Sulla—but the Sullan era was truly over.34

  Back in Rome, the Sullan faction was for the most part united around Sulla’s constitutional reforms, but that did not mean they were united in purpose. Their allegiance to one another had come from a shared allegiance to Sulla. Now that he was withdrawing, everyone was free to pursue their own factional backbiting. Metellus Pius was too imperious. Pompey too arrogant. Crassus too greedy. Sulla’s republic may have tried to confine these disputes to a healthy give-and-take in the political arena, but that did not mean there would be harmony.

  In between drinking sessions, Sulla spent much of his time composing an enormous memoir that would explain and justify everything he had ever said or done. He filled it with detailed accounts of every campaign he fought in, every office he held, every piece of public business he had transacted, why his friends were his friends and why his enemies were his enemies. This memoir was meant to paint a clear picture of Sulla as the chosen son of Fortuna who was guilty only of courage, fidelity, patriotism. Sulla’s final plan to control events was a masterful success, as later historians relied heavily on the memoir as a primary source. Our own understanding of Sulla some two thousand years later is still very often his version of events.35