Sulla aimed to build as well as destroy. Even as the streets of Rome ran red he talked loudly of restoring the Republic to full health. As ever with him, opportunism was the obverse of an icy conviction. The cycle of wars and revolutions through which he had hacked his way so savagely had done nothing to diminish his deeply held conservatism. Sulla had the true patrician’s contempt for innovation. Far from wishing to impose some radical new model of autocracy on his fellow citizens, he looked to the past for solutions to the crisis facing Rome.
Most urgently of all, he faced the need to regularise his own position. Even with his enemies proscribed, Sulla still refused to submit himself to the judgement of the voters. Fortunately, a precedent for this lay conveniently close to hand. The Republic’s ancient history did indeed provide examples of citizens who had wielded absolute power without being elected. In moments of particular crisis the authority of the consuls had sometimes been suspended and a single magistrate nominated to take control of the state. Such an office fitted Sulla’s requirements perfectly. The fact that it was a constitutional fossil worried him not in the slightest. By dropping heavy and menacing hints, he persuaded the Senate to dust down the antiquated office, and appoint him to it. The result was not only to legalise his supremacy, but to give it the patina of tradition. After all, how could the Romans consider themselves threatened by a magistracy as authentically Republican as the dictatorship?
In fact, though, it had always been regarded with suspicion. Unlike the consulship, split as it was between two citizens of equal rank, the unified powers of the dictatorship were inherently offensive to Republican ideals. This was why the office had fallen into abeyance. Even back in the dark days of the war against Hannibal, citizens had been appointed to it only for very short, fixed periods. Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous. Sulla, however, who enjoyed alcohol and power equally, was proud of his head for both. He refused to accept a limit on his term of office. Instead, he was to remain dictator until the constitution had been ‘revised’.11 What this might mean he would judge for himself.
A consul had twelve lictors. Sulla had twenty-four. Each one bore on his shoulders not only the fasces, but also, bundled up with the scourging rods and symbolising a dictator’s powers of life and death, an axe. Nothing could better have indicated the disproportion in status now existing between Sulla and his fellow magistrates. He was quick to ram home the message. No sooner had he been appointed dictator than he ordered consular elections to be held. Both the candidates were selected by himself. When one of his own generals, the war hero who had captured Praeneste, no less, attempted to stand, Sulla warned him to back off, and then, when he refused, had him murdered publicly in the Forum. More than anyone, Sulla had reason to appreciate just how dangerous war heroes might be.
It was an irony that shadowed the entire programme of his reforms. Sulla’s task as dictator was to ensure that in the future no one would ever again do as he had done and lead an army on Rome. Yet it is doubtful whether Sulla himself would have regarded this as a paradox. If, as his propaganda relentlessly insisted, he was guiltless of provoking civil war, then the fault had to lie elsewhere. And if, as his propaganda also insisted, ambition had tempted Marius and Sulpicius into endangering the Republic, then it was the corruption of the Republic’s own institutions that had permitted them to thrive. Sulla was too much of a Roman to imagine that a desire to be the best might ever in itself be a crime. He certainly had no intention of suppressing his countrymen’s inveterate thirsting after glory. Instead, he aimed to channel it, so that once again, rather than tearing the state to shreds, it might serve the greater glory of Rome.
The complexities, the ambivalences and the paradoxes of the constitution all infuriated the new dictator. Sulla interpreted them as loopholes, and worked hard to close them. No openings were to be left that a future Marius might exploit. Instead, ambition was to be strictly regulated. Each magistracy was to have an age threshold. Sulla, who had spent his own twenties chasing after whores, must have relished the chance to discriminate against youthful over-achievers.
Under his legislation, no one under the age of thirty would be permitted to seek election to even the most junior magistracy. This, the quaestorship, entitled a successful candidate to serve for a year as an assistant to one of the more senior magistrates, and to learn from the example of the older man. Some quaestors might even be given independent responsibilities, managing the Republic’s finances, habituating themselves to the disciplines and duties of power. This was important training, for the citizen who had served as quaestor would be entitled, once he had reached his thirty-ninth birthday, to aim for a further, even more prestigious honour: the praetorship. If elected to this office, he would now, for a year, be junior in rank only to the consuls themselves. A praetor had awesome responsibilities and privileges: charged as he was with the weighty task of administering the Republic’s laws, he also had the right to convene a session of the Senate, and preside over its debates. Under Sulla’s new scheme of things, however, the real attraction of the praetorship was that it now served as an obligatory step on the ladder that led, rung after ordered rung, towards the consulship itself. This remained the top, the glittering prize. As always, only a few would ever win it, but the goal of Sulla’s reforms was to ensure that, in the future, the victors would prove worthy of their rank. There were to be no more scandals like the career of the younger Marius. From quaestorship to praetorship to consulship, only a single path to power, and no short cuts.
The deliberate effect of this legislation was to place a premium on middle age. In this it accorded with fundamental Roman instincts. Statesmen were expected to be middle aged. Greek rulers may have portrayed themselves as preternaturally young, but the portraiture of the Republic suggests a positive relish for wrinkles, thinning hair and sagging jowls. It was no coincidence that the traditional ruling body of Rome, the Senate, derived its name from ‘ senex’ – ‘old man’ – nor that senators liked to dignify themselves with the title of ‘Fathers’. The ideal of an assembly rich in experience and wisdom, acting as a brake on such irresponsible elements as the young or indigent poor, was one dear to every conservative’s heart. In the mythology of the Republic it was the Senate that had guided Rome to greatness, prevailing over Hannibal, breaking kings, conquering the world. Sulla, despite having trampled over the Senate at every opportunity, made the restoration of its authority the major goal of his career.
Repair work was urgently required. Civil war and proscriptions had left the august body in a parlous state. Sulla, having played a major part in the reduction of its numbers from three hundred to barely one hundred, promoted newcomers with such assiduity that by the time he had finished the Senate was larger than at any time in its history. Equestrians from all walks of life – businessmen, Italians, plunder-rich officers – were hurriedly crammed into the Senate House. Simultaneously, the opportunities for self-advancement within the Senate were also broadened. Under Sulla’s reforms, the number of praetorships on offer in any one year was increased from six to eight, and of quaestorships from eight to twenty – a conscious attempt to ensure that the upper reaches of power would be regularly infused with fresh blood. The established nobility, not surprisingly, were appalled by such measures. Roman snobbery, however, was skilled at keeping newcomers in their place. Senators, like everyone else in the Republic, were bound by ironclad rules of hierarchy. Rank structured the order in which they were called upon to speak, and junior senators rarely had the chance to speak at all. Even men who had once been outspoken critics of the Senate were no sooner promoted to the body than they found themselves silenced. Sulla, not known for his generosity towards enemies, appears to have decided that there were certain opponents it was wisest to co-opt.
Some, of course, still remained beyond the pale. The aspirations of the mob Sulla regarded with contempt. Those who represented them he regarded with naked loathing. Even as he built up the power of the Senate, Sulla emasculated the tribunate with the vindictiveness that characterised all his vendettas. He never forgot that Sulpicius had been a tribune. Each snipping away of the tribunate’s powers was a delicate act of personal revenge. To ensure that tribunes could never again propose bills attacking a consul, as Sulpicius had done, Sulla barred them from proposing bills altogether. To prevent the tribunate from attracting ambitious trouble-makers in the future, he throttled it of all potential to advance a career. With carefully nuanced malice, Sulla banned anyone who had held the office from seeking further magistracies. Quaestors and praetors might dream of the consulship, but not tribunes, not any more. Their office was to be a rung on a ladder leading nowhere. Revenge, as ever with Sulla, was sweet.
One of the ancient pillars of the constitution now lay in rubble. Even Sulla’s conservative supporters in the Senate appear to have been shocked.12 No one had ever before attempted such a work of demolition. The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic. It spread everywhere that Sulla cared to look. It could be seen in the very appearance of Rome herself. Sulla, whose invariable response to provocation was to launch a single, rapid killer-blow against it, quickly proved himself as impatient with the urban fabric as he had been with the Marians or the tribunate. Frustrated by the city’s congestion, he simply pushed back the pomerium, the first man to do so in the whole of Roman history. Just as coolly, he levelled the cramped but venerable Senate House, and rebuilt it to suit the proportions of his own new, inflated Senate. Not that the senators themselves displayed much gratitude. Decades later they were still mourning the original building, sanctified as it had been by the Republic’s historic heroes, and complaining that ‘its enlargement appeared to have shrunk it’.13 Sulla could afford to dismiss all such moaning with a contemptuous shrug. Only on the Capitol was he inhibited by the sanctions of custom. The temple of Jupiter might have been burned to the ground, but its outline still remained. As a new temple rose from the ashes, the gigantic columns that Sulla had conveniently plundered from Athens gleamed from within the confines of the original, sacrosanct structure. Monumentalism squatted awkwardly on archaic foundations. Sulla’s dictatorship could hardly have raised a more fitting memorial to itself.
Long before the completion of Jupiter’s great temple, however, Sulla had resigned his office. One morning, some time late in 81 BC, he suddenly appeared in the Forum without his lictors. The man responsible for the deaths of more citizens than any Roman in history had laid aside the sanctions of supreme power, ‘fearing neither the people at home nor the exiles abroad … Such was the extent of his daring and good luck.’14 Once again his nerve was justified. Sulla remained a figure of dread. Only on a single occasion did anyone dare to criticise him to his face, a young man who cat-called him in the Forum; then, having failed to get a rise, he jeered him all the way home. Otherwise, the terror of Sulla’s name held good.
The year after he resigned his dictatorship Sulla served as a consul; the year after that he stood down from office altogether. Relieved of formal responsibilities, he returned to the wild living of his youth. It was a lifestyle for which he had never lost his talent. As dictator, he had thrown the largest parties in Rome’s history. Everyone in the city had been invited. Spit-roasts had sizzled in the streets, vintage wines had flowed from public fountains. The citizens had gorged themselves, and then, when no one had been able to eat or drink another thing, whole sides of meat had been slung with delirious wastefulness into the Tiber. As a private citizen, Sulla’s parties were inevitably more intimate affairs. Whole days would be spent in drinking bouts with his old bohemian set. Dizzyingly high though he had risen, Sulla remained as loyal in his friendships as he was implacable in his feuds. Actors, dancers, down-at-heel hacks, all had been tossed crumbs from the estates of the proscribed. Those without talent had been given money never to perform again. Those who did have talent were cherished, however much they might have passed their prime. Brutal cynic though he was, Sulla would still flatter and cosset a fading drag-queen. ‘Metrobius, the female impersonator, had seen better days, but Sulla never ceased to insist that he was in love with him all the same.’15
Certainly, there was none of Marius’ muscle-bound need to prove himself a man: no workouts on the Campus Martius for Sulla. When he retreated to his villa in Campania, he gloried in his retirement. He had restored the Republic, and the fruit of his work was peace. The crisis was over. Who could doubt, seeing Sulla in his Greek tunic, strolling with other tourists through the back streets of Naples, that the good times were back?
Yet in Italy, as in Rome, the good times had been founded on savagery and bloodshed. Not far beyond Sulla’s estate rose the hills of Samnium, harrowed in a policy of deliberate extirpation. All around it, dotted across the Plain of Campania, stood cities still scarred by their resistance to Sulla. Even Naples had been stormed by his legions. Nola too, eventually, had fallen. Besieged for almost a decade, the rebel stronghold had held out until 80 BC, steeled by the same spectacle of atrocities that had persuaded other towns to incinerate themselves rather than surrender. To punish Nola, and to provide a permanent occupying force, Sulla had planted a colony of his veterans in the city, one of numerous similar settlements imposed all over Campania and Samnium. Triumphant even in his enemies’ most obdurate stronghold, Sulla had celebrated by giving Nola a new and humiliating name – Colonia Felix. Only one other act of appropriation can have given him more pleasure. Just down the coast from his own estate stood Marius’ celebrated villa, raised on its promontory like a military camp, a shrine to the old soldier’s glory and masculine pride. Sulla sold it cheap to his daughter, Cornelia. He had always believed in rubbing salt into open wounds.
This streak of cruelty would never be forgotten, nor forgiven. Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one. This was a discovery that could never be unmade. After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequence of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies, but for her citizens themselves. What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: ‘Sulla could do it. Why can’t I?’16
The generation that succeeded him would have to give their own answer to that question. In doing so they would serve to define how Sulla himself was best to be judged: had he been the saviour or destroyer of the constitution? Terrible though he had proved himself to be, the dictator had also laboured hard to restore the Republic, to ensure that he would have no successor. Historians of future generations, inured to perpetual autocracy, found fantastical the idea that anyone should voluntarily have laid down supreme power. Yet Sulla had done it. No wonder that his own contemporaries found him such a baffling and contradictory figure. When he died – most probably of liver failure – no one could even agree how to dispose of his body. One consul wanted to award him a state funeral, the other to deprive him of funereal honours altogether. Fittingly, it was the threat of violence that served to resolve the debate. A huge escort of veterans assembled to bring their dead general from Campania, and the people of Rome found themselves ‘as terrified of Sulla’s army and his corpse as if he were still alive’.17 No sooner had the body been laid on a huge pyre in the Campus Martius than a strong wind came gusting across the plain, whipping up the flames. And no sooner had the corpse been consumed than it started to rain.
Sulla stayed lucky to the very end.