Part 36

Sulla himself marched upon Rome. As yet, he displayed great moderation; nay, had it not been for the infatuation of his opponents, he would perhaps have made up his mind to settle affairs without bloodshed: but these were quite drunk with rage; for there was a fanaticism among them, just as there was at the destruction of Jerusalem. Even in the last days of the rule of Cinna’s party, the prætor Damasippus had all the partisans of Sylla, whether open or suspected, put to death,

## particularly the senators: among those who were thus murdered, was the

venerable _pontifex maximus_, Q. Mucius Scævola, who, being conscious of his innocence, had not left the city. But as this fury after all did not give them strength to defend the city, the leaders made their escape. Rome opened her gates to Sylla, and he promised moderation; but his moderation had a terrible meaning. He first went to Etruria, where Carbo was: on the side of the Etruscans, the war was truly a national one, as Sylla took away from them the rights of citizenship which had been granted them: the details of this campaign are shrouded in impenetrable darkness. Carbo had posted himself near Clusium, from whence he made two vain attempts to relieve Præneste; he also engaged in other expeditions which were equally unsuccessful, as, for instance, that against Picenum, in which Carinas was concerned. The troops of the Marian party dwindled to nothing under his hands, desertion spreading more and more among them. Of this there were many cases which are quite inconceivable. Even at the very outset, P. Cethegus, one of the twelve who were outlawed with Marius, had surrendered himself to the mercy of Sylla; and Albinovanus, to make his peace with him likewise, now murdered his colleagues and legates at a banquet.

The last effort was made by Pontius Telesinus, whose brother commanded with Marius the Samnites in Præneste. He and the Lucanian M. Lamponius, had tried to relieve Præneste, and had failed; after which, believing Sylla to be out of the way, they marched in all haste to surprise Rome: but Sylla heard of it, and came up just in time to ward off the danger. Had they been successful, they would have destroyed Rome; but the very fear of this must have roused the Romans to exert themselves to the utmost. There were said to have been forty thousand Samnites and Lucanians; the dread of such allies led many a partisan of Marius to fight under the banners of Sylla. The terrible battle near the Porta Collina now followed, by which the fate of the world was decided; and it was only after fortune had long wavered, and had often been in favour of the Samnites, that Sylla in the evening of the day broke through the ranks of the enemy: so great was their defeat, that Telesinus died by his own hand. After such a blow, Marius also, and the younger Telesinus in Præneste, gave themselves up for lost. They tried to escape from the town by passages under ground which led into the open fields; but the outlets were guarded, and so they both killed each other. Of the son of Marius, we cannot say as we did of the father, “he was a great man:” he was rather a dreadful man; he had the faults of his father, without any of his great qualities but that of perseverance, in which, under such circumstances, there is nothing so very wonderful. Carbo also soon fled from his men to Africa. Unless perhaps in Spain, the party had no longer an army; and in Italy, although single towns still held out, the war was virtually at an end.

Eight thousand Samnites had been taken prisoners in the battle before the Colline gate; and Sylla had them surrounded with troops in the Campus Martius, and cut down to a man. When also, after the death of the younger Marius, Præneste surrendered at discretion, he caused the Roman citizens, the Prænestines, and the Samnites, to be divided into three bodies: to the first he granted their lives; but the Prænestines and Samnites he ordered to be shot down with javelins. The Etruscan towns yielded to him one after another, and met with the same fate as Præneste, besides being razed to the ground. Thus also fared Clusium, Aretium, Populonia, and Volaterræ; the latter after a two years’ siege. So perished likewise all the larger towns of Etruria; with the exception perhaps of Fæsulæ, which, however, may also have been rebuilt afterwards.

At Rome, Sylla now held absolute sway, and although until then had been humane, he all at once showed himself at length a bloodthirsty monster. For he gave for the first time the example of a proscription; that is to say, he made out a list of all those whom not only any one might kill with impunity, but on whose head moreover a price was set. There were among his victims few indeed who were to be compared to those whom Marius and Cinna massacred; but in the extent of suffering inflicted, nothing could surpass the revenge of Sylla, who visited even whole peoples with his wrath. That proscription affected the lives of several thousands; two thousand four hundred knights[101] are said to have been in it: that so many had been on the list, seems doubtful. Twenty-three (according to another, but probably incorrect statement, forty-three,) legions had military colonies allotted them. The first colonies of Rome were settlements, in which one of every _gens_ was placed to garrison the conquered towns; these men had a third part of the land, and, of course, they kept themselves under arms. The Latin colonies were divided between the Romans and Latins: very likely, every one who belonged to them had served as a soldier; but this was only an accidental circumstance, that colonisation being no special reward for military service. After the second Punic war, we meet with the first instances of the _ager publicus_ being assigned to superannuated soldiers; and in Bononia alone there are signs of a still continuing obligation to serve in war, a difference being made there between the lots given to horsemen, centurions, foot-soldiers, &c. Sylla’s are the first true military colonies, a system by which the inhabitants of some

## particular town were stripped of the whole of their land, and some

legion or other, which was now discharged, was to form the population there: should the territory of the town not be sufficient, there was added to it from the adjoining districts as much as was required. Thus the soldiers gained a right of having land assigned to them, a right to which in former days plebeianism only could give a title. According to an old and extremely plausible Florentine tradition,--which cannot indeed be traced to any classic author, but which is all but proved by an old reading in the orations of Cicero against Catiline,[102]--we may say that Florence has risen as such a military colony out of the old Fæsulæ; thus it was also with New Aretium and several places of Etruria, with Præneste and other towns, of which, however, few only can be ascertained by satisfactory evidence; in these cases, the inhabitants had almost everywhere been murdered. These legions were the corner-stone of Sylla’s power. Something of the same kind was done in places where the old inhabitants were not exterminated: the new comers became κληροῦχοι, whilst the old residents had to pay a land tax for the allotments which they still retained. This was especially the fate of the old Latin colonies. Those which did not fare thus, had by the _lex Julia_ become _municipia_, and remained as such; those, on the other hand, which Sylla had proscribed, were now called _coloniæ_, not, however _Latinæ_, but _Romanæ militares_,--Sylla’s military colonies. These are the _coloniæ_ of which Pliny[103] speaks, and which always have been mistaken. This matter was an obscure one even for the ancients: Asconius Pedianus, a writer of first-rate historical learning, did not in his time understand how Cicero could have called Placentia a colony, when it had become a _municipium_.[104] Nearly the whole of Etruria became a wilderness, and the towns which had not been turned into military colonies, lay in ruins as late as in the days of Augustus. The Samnite nation he had all but rooted out, the whole of the Hirpinian country being laid waste: all that had been made _ager publicus_, was left by him to his favourites.

A marked feature of Sylla is a sort of fantastic activity. He looked upon himself as born to be the achiever of great things, especially as a reformer: he was aware of the disorganized condition of the nation; but he did not know that when what is old is worn out, the only thing to be done, is to create, in the spirit of the ancient institutions, new ones which are suited to the age. What Sylla wanted to do, could have been of no avail whatever: it was the restoring of what was dead, the return to a state of things which had fallen away because the life had fled from it;--he recalled the old forms of the republic into existence, and believed that they had strength enough to stand. He thought (as in Tieck’s World Turned Upside Down) that he could push the world back to the point at which in his opinion it ought to have stopped. Moreover, he deemed himself called upon to rule; and therefore he stuck at nothing, as he held that he was above all these forms, so that they did not affect him in the least.

He reorganised the senate, which was fearfully diminished after the many executions. It might have been expected that he would have tried to restore it from the ranks of the old nobility; yet instead of doing so, he selected the new senators--with a remarkable inconsistency, which shows that notwithstanding all his arbitrary rule, he was swayed by circumstances--not only from the knights, but also from his own low-born centurions, who were ready, it is true, to lay down their lives for him. He had not the elements of an aristocracy at hand: the party, which really had vitality, influence, and refinement of mind and manners, being that of the monied classes, the knights and the Italian _municipia_. These he hated and wanted to crush; and as in such cases, one has usually recourse to the rabble, thus Sylla, true to the example of all oligarchs and counter-revolutionists, filled up with the lowest of the people his senate which was a mere skeleton, and ought most naturally to have been recruited from the rich class of the _equites_; this was just as in the year 1799 at Naples, when the dregs of the populace were armed. Whilst wishing to save the republic by forms, he began by departing from them himself.

As long as his influence lasted, even for four years running, a patrician and a plebeian were regularly made consuls; before that plebeians alone had often been chosen for four or five years in succession: beyond this Sylla durst not go, as all the leaders of his party were plebeians. This was indeed quite a childish arrangement.

The tribuneship he brought back to its original state, as it was before the Publilian law of the year 283; which was as much as going back four hundred years. For he took away from the tribunes the right of bringing bills into the assembly of the people, and revived the old way of making laws: these were now proposed by the consuls, and passed by the senate and the centuries. One might wonder at his not having restored the curies; yet he could not do this, as they were so changed that he would have had in them a democratical assembly. As he neglected every means which ought to have been tried for raising the state again to a healthy condition, he despaired of all gradual improvement, and therefore he rushed headlong into violent measures and all kinds of makeshifts. Much might be said for his changes in the tribuneship, as at that time the office could no longer be made available for good: it had become a nuisance, every one cried out against it; and so the tribunes were henceforth to be only _ad auxilium ferendum_. No tribune of old could have been allowed to have a curule office, as he was a plebeian; and therefore Sylla, wishing in this respect also to retrograde, lessened the influence of the tribunes by enacting that no tribune, after having laid down his magistracy, should fill any office which was a stepping-stone to the senate.

To secure himself still further, he deprived the children of those who had been proscribed, of part of their rights as citizens, that is to say, of eligibility to hold office. This unjust law remained many years in force until Cæsar repealed it.

The administration of justice he gave back to the senators. The knights had employed the power which they had acquired by the exercise of such jurisdiction, entirely against the nobility. The senators should now have taken some care to do away with the old reproaches made against them, by judging righteously; but the courts were never as venal as they were then. Sylla’s faction so basely and infamously abused the advantages which they had gained, that they cut their own throats; and had it not been for the military colonies, a heavy vengeance would soon have been wreaked upon them.

Sylla was a very active legislator, nor are every one of his enactments to be found fault with. For though he showed great want of sense in his constitutional measures, in those which were administrative, as in criminal legislation, he did things which prove that he had excellent advisers; in fact, he was the first who placed these matters on even a tolerable footing. And for the management also of criminal trials, his regulations were real improvements. He likewise made a _lex annalis_ to settle the order in which the different offices were to be held.

Moreover, it is one of Sylla’s changes that there was a considerable increase in the number of the magistracies and priesthoods. In the earliest times, the pontificate consisted of four members, two from each of the oldest tribes, besides the _pontifex maximus_: so it was with the augurs. Afterwards, the number of the pontiffs was, by the addition of four plebeian ones,[105] raised to nine, in which the _Pontifex Maximus_ was included, his office being common to both orders; the augurs were also increased, as it was still intended in those days that the two orders should share the priestly dignities alike. It cannot be stated with certainty, when this was no longer done; yet it must have been before the _Lex Domitia_. Sylla himself thought no more of dividing these between the patricians and plebeians; so much did the power of circumstances prevail over the crotchets which he otherwise used to form! He suspended the _lex Domitia_; restored to the priestly colleges the right of co-optation; and raised the number of the pontiffs[106] and augurs to fifteen.

This had no material influence on the state; but certainly the great increase of the prætors and quæstors had. By his reforms of the criminal law, he assigned to the prætors the _quæstiones perpetuæ_; and because the vast extent of the commonwealth had now made many more accountants necessary, he raised the establishment of quæstors to twenty. Thus there was a considerable multiplication of curule and other dignities. The senate he enlarged to six hundred;[107] and now every year, more as a matter of course than by any wish of his, the twenty quæstors came into it, forming the thirtieth part of the whole body. As no one was quæstor more than once, its numbers were almost always full, and thus the censors all but lost their power of choosing the members. Thus the question whether the senate was elective, is placed in quite a different light. The senate is never to be looked upon as a representative body, unless it were in the very earliest times, when it was elected directly by the curies; its being filled up by the quæstors, makes it indeed an elective assembly.

Sylla had a body-guard of freedmen whom he called Cornelians, and these soon became most powerful people. That at that time, anybody in the country towns who had either interest or connexions with these Cornelians, especially with Chrysogonus, Sylla’s favourite, might do whatever he listed, and even commit murder; is borne out by the evidence of Cicero’s orations _pro Sexto Roscio Amerino_ and _pro Cluentio_. The state of things in those days, was horrible and shocking beyond description.

Sylla gave all these laws as dictator, which, after the deaths of Marius and Carbo, he had caused himself to be made for an indefinite period by the interrex L. Valerius Flaccus. It was thought that he would never again lay down the dictatorship; but he held it only two years. He was tired of every thing around him: he would either have had to wage wars abroad, for which perhaps he felt that he was too old, and for which he had no longer any taste; or he must have gone on with reforms at home, though he thought that this had been done already as far as it was practicable.[108] For this reason he resigned the dictatorship, a step which was not by any means so very bold as it would seem; for the condition of the republic, the utter prostration of the enemy, and his military colonies insured his safety. He went to Puteoli, where he was attacked by that most dreadful of all diseases, the phthiriasis: his whole body became full of boils which bred vermin. This in all likelihood is no romance: the chief cases of this disorder are those of tyrants, like Philip II., Herod the king of the Jews, Antiochus Epiphanes, and of land-owners who have ground down their peasants; but the philosopher Pherecydes likewise had it. Though Sylla’s strength was wasted away by this sickness, his death was brought on by an accident, and it was most lucky for him that he died before the whole of the machinery which he had created fell to pieces. He thought, that in Puteoli he might even lead history astray, and make posterity believe that all his measures had only been overthrown by the bad management of those who came after him; yet he still ruled the state, even from thence, by means of his trembling creatures who could not do without him. He amused himself at Puteoli with the legislation of the place, wishing to seem as if he were nothing more than a plain citizen, yet for all that his will was to be law: being contradicted one day, he got into such a rage that he broke a blood vessel and died, at the age of sixty. Even if his death had happened ten years later, his last days would have been peaceful: the party against him was crushed, the tribunes were paralysed, and the whole of Italy was occupied by military colonies on whose devotion he could rely. His body was brought to Rome; and the pomp of his burial, which was not inferior to that of Augustus, shows that his rule was not dependent on his person, nor on the circumstances of the moment.

LITERATURE. MANNERS AND MODE OF LIVING.

With the consulship of Lepidus and Catulus began the History of Sallust, the loss of which, to judge from the fragments, is one of the most painful of all those which we have to mourn over in Roman literature, not only on account of the matter in it, but above all, because of its value as a work of art. The history of the Social War was written by Sisenna, who was in some measure a forerunner of Sallust: he was also an earlier acquaintance of Cicero’s, who does not speak over favourably of the literary merits of his writings. Yet I am inclined to think that here we should not blindly follow the opinion of Cicero: for Sisenna’s manner was one which he did not like; it was the _horridum_ of the ancients, an imitation of Clitarchus.[109] He wrote quite differently from his predecessors, in reading whose fragments we can hardly believe that any one could ever have written in such a way. At that time, the whole style of literature was changed. It was as in Germany about the period of the Seven Years’ War; and just as there were then some stragglers in our republic of letters, thus was it also in Rome. Among these I class Claudius Quadrigrarius, who has still the stiff, uncouth, quaint manner: the want of refinement in the whole of his performances is quite astonishing.