The 80s BC was one of the most violent decades in the history of the Roman Republic. The rivalry between Marius and Sulla, two Roman senators and generals, which began over who would lead the campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus, ultimately resulted in a civil war so destructive that it laid the foundation for Julius Caesar’s eventual coup four decades later. Sulla’s proscriptions, lists of names posted in the forum of those sentenced to death, allowed him to destroy his political opposition, contributing to his portrayal as a cruel dictator.
Following Sulla’s exceptional achievements during the Social War, a period of conflict between Rome and her Italian allies, he was predictably elected consul in 88 BC. At first, the senate decided that Sulla should be the one to lead the campaign against Mithridates, who was making forays into Rome’s provinces in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, as Sulla was gathering his army at Nola, the tribune Sulpicius transferred the command of the campaign to Marius by plebiscite. Sulla was taken by shock but nevertheless managed to persuade his legions to accept him as rightful commander by playing on their fears of being cut off from the plunder in the East.
Thus, Sulla, unhappy with Marius’ meddling, gathered these legions and began his march on the city of Rome, an action forbidden both by law and tradition. With his army in the city, Sulla’s power was unconstrained. He proceeded to outlaw Marius and Sulpicius and passed various reforms on the tribunate before reaffirming his appointment to command in the campaign against Mithridates. Therefore, with this final action confirmed, Sulla marched eastwards with his troops.
The two consuls elected the following year, Cinna and Octavius, represented the growing division in Rome, being staunch supporters of Marius and Sulla respectively. Soon, fighting broke out between consuls. Cinna was expelled from the city and began raising an army in Italy. Despite being outlawed by Sulla, Marius had escaped and soon returned from exile in Africa to join Cinna. With the help of other powerful exiles, Cinna surrounded Rome with a large force. At the same time, Marius captured the port of Ostia, giving him control of Rome’s grain-supply. The senate, unable to repel them, realised that resistance was doomed and that Rome would starve since Marius now controlled the city’s principal grain-supply, agreeing to terms allowing Marius and Cinna to enter the city. They subsequently ousted Octavius, making themselves consuls for the following year, and killing many of Sulla’s leading supporters.
However, Marius died soon after, leaving Cinna as sole controller of Rome while L. Valerius Flaccus was appointed suffect consul and governor of the Roman province of Asia to replace Sulla. But as he approached the province, his army mutinied at the orders of Fimbria, a subordinate. Flaccus was then murdered at Nicomedia, being replaced as commander by Fimbria. Fimbria’s legions, however, were greatly outnumbered by Sulla’s. Seeing that the situation was dire for them, many of his soldiers decamped to Sulla who could now afford to turn his attention to Fimbria following his own successful negotiation of a peace settlement with Mithridates. Sulla was then able to begin his journey back to Rome without a fight when Fimbria committed suicide.
Cinna and Gnaeus Carbo declared themselves consuls once more for 84 BC and frantically began gathering troops to prepare for war against Sulla. However, the situation was worsening for Cinna and Carbo: Cinna was murdered in a mutiny while Carbo’s quaestor decamped to Sulla with a large sum of money. As Sulla began his slow march to Rome, joined by several allies such as the young Pompey, he was able to destroy the main resisting army led by Marius the Younger, forcing him to take refuge. When the Samnites, a local Italian tribe, unexpectedly decided to march on Rome, the returning Sulla arrived in time to crush the enemy, ordering the massacre of at least 3,000 prisoners in the battle of the Colline Gate.
With most of his military opposition defeated, Sulla was now the supreme ruler of Rome. Nevertheless, his legal status was in doubt. Therefore, a law was accordingly passed that declared him dictator with absolute control. Plutarch, in his Life of Sulla, writes that further acts were passed granting him immunity for all his past and future actions as well as the right to confiscate, colonise and found or demolish entire cities as he pleased – “this gave even the dullest Roman to understand that in the matter of tyranny, there had been an exchange but not a deliverance.” Indeed, Sulla immediately turned his attention to the destruction of his political enemies. After circus games and Sulla’s delayed triumph celebrating his victory over Mithridates, Rome watched in horror as a period of protracted violence and purging ensued.
The most distinctive feature of Sulla’s time as dictator was his infamous proscriptions. It was a period of unbridled massacre in which Sulla only seemed to take pleasure. His supporters simply took their cue from their leader, deciding that their own enemies also deserved to die. The dangers of such a system are evident: the distinction between public enemies (hostes) and private enemies (inimici) was breaking down since there was no criteria to judge who a hostis was.
Even Sulla realised that this had to end. According to one account, an influential senator protested that it was immoderate for Sulla’s supporters to be allowed to murder at will, arguing that the guilty should not be spared but that at least Sulla say who the guilty were. Now came the infamous proscriptions, lists of men judged to be public enemies. Plutarch remarks in his account that Sulla in the first set proscribed eighty people. This number was then allegedly increased to two hundred and twenty the day after and as many more on the third day. As part of these grim catalogues, the rank and file would be left alone, but all those who served in a high capacity against Sulla should expect to die.
Sulla was finally quenching his desire for revenge. Mentioned on these lists were consuls, praetors, quaestors, and other magistrates. In addition to magistrates, anybody who lent support of any kind – including material – to Cinna was judged as a public enemy. Furthermore, friends and relatives of those proscribed were soon in danger as anyone who harboured or saved a proscribed person was in turn proscribed as well. Plutarch claims that Sulla even took away the civil rights of the sons and grandsons of those who had been proscribed and confiscated their property.
Sulla did not only punish his enemies in Rome. During the Civil War, many Italian towns had pledged their allegiance to either Marius or Sulla; as a result, those that favoured the former were accordingly made to pay for their misplaced loyalty. Entire communities suffered as destruction and violence up and down Italy became the order of the day. Some towns had their citadels and walls demolished. Others were made to pay steep fines. For instance, Sulla ruthlessly punished the Samnites who had joined forces with Marius the Younger in hostilities. Plutarch describes the massacre in detail: Sulla gathered 12,000 of the inhabitants and gave orders for them to be slaughtered without trial. According to historical tradition, only one man who hosted Sulla years before was granted immunity; however, he joined his countrymen voluntarily to be slain with them.
Sulla also provided certain incentives for his supporters to carry out the proscriptions, chiefly the possibility of cheaply buying up the goods of victims. Consequently, assassins scrambled to proscribe certain wealthy individuals regardless of the strength of their opposition to Sulla. Perhaps because of this, there is evidence of a large purge of the equites, a wealthy class below only those of senatorial rank in the Roman social hierarchy. For instance, a certain eques, Q. Aurelius, whom Plutarch describes as “a quiet and inoffensive man”, one day walked into the forum to see his name on the proscription list; he later exclaimed, “my Alban estate is prosecuting me”.
Furthermore, Sulla gave a bounty to anyone who brought him the head of a proscribed person, allowing much scope for fraud. For instance, since often Sulla did not know the victim personally, he handed over the reward to the assassin without checking whether the correct person had been brought to him. Additionally, in other cases, some were killed before they knew they had been proscribed; someone could also be killed without their name on the proscription list which would be added retrospectively.
The scale of the proscriptions allowed Sulla to seize a large amount of property. Since he regarded it as enemy spoil no different than the property taken in any other war, he used it as he pleased. The primary use of the property located in the countryside was to provide land for many of his loyal veterans of war, conveniently allowing him to fulfil his promises to these men. Thus, the proscriptions served two purposes: to destroy his opponents and to provide land for his veterans. Moreover, many of Sulla’s loyal allies benefited from his generosity and were gifted the large estates of those proscribed.
Sulla has been presented in most Roman accounts as a savage dictator, and no act has been more useful to paint this portrayal than the proscriptions of his enemies. The future generation living in the Republic would see Sulla as a figure to be feared. The young Marcus Porcius Cato, who would become a staunch defender of the old Republic, allegedly had to be restrained from voicing his opposition to Sulla. Plutarch writes in his Life of Cato the Younger that Cato was confused why no one had the courage to murder Sulla; his tutor replied that, “men fear him more than they hate him.” Sulla’s reputation for cruelty and abuse of power owing to his proscriptions was used as an example to warn contemporary and future leaders of the Republic not to overstep.
Nonetheless, perhaps Sulla deserves more credit than is traditionally given to him. Sulla was not merely the savage ruler that he became known as through the proscriptions. Indeed, nothing from his previous career would suggest that he would go on to give such orders. As a military general, he was a model of moderation. Only after the battle of the Colline Gate and his entrance into Rome did he seem to transform into a different person.
This dichotomous personality has been pondered over by scholars and various theories have been proposed. First, it might be the case that Sulla had always possessed a cruel side but that it was hidden beneath a guise of benevolence. As dictator, he no longer needed to uphold this façade. Or, his taste of supreme power corrupted him, bringing about a fundamental change in his character. More simply, Sulla could just have been exceptionally loyal to his friends but cruel to his enemies. This is a view that finds evidence in the engraving of his epitaph on the Campus Martius.
As Melissa Dowding points out, current scholarship has focused more on Sulla’s darker side, dismissing, for instance, stories of his clemency as the product of pro-Sullan propaganda, while accepting the stories of his cruelty as accurate. Furthermore, though Sulla’s proscriptions were certainly ruthless, the exact number of those killed in Rome was likely not more than one or two thousand, with the death toll of comparable purges like the French Reign of Terror being considerably higher than this.
An argument can be made for the proscriptions being an integral part of Sulla’s goal of restoring order to the Republic. The Republic had been destabilised for years following the illegal insurgency of Marius and Cinna as well as their successive – and indeed un-Republican – consulships. Sulla therefore needed to ensure the smooth running of the Republic in the future. This aim is supported by Sulla’s program of comprehensive reform to reorganise the state. Sulla perhaps saw himself as a new Romulus. As part of his reforms, Sulla fully integrated the Italians into the state by allowing them to retain their citizenship; through various means, he restored the traditional superiority and power of the senate, while simultaneously curbing the power of the assemblies, and he eliminated the political power of the equites by depriving them of their privileges.
Most tellingly of all, as soon as Sulla felt that his work safeguarding the Republic was complete, he immediately set about dismantling his own special powers. Thus, he laid down his dictatorship and retired to private life, the final act needed to restore the Republic. Therefore, while Sulla’s infamous proscriptions will continue to build a picture of him as a brutal ruler since they marked a period of terrible bloodshed in Rome, they should be viewed in the broader context of his efforts to repair the Republic.
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Wilson, M. (2021). Dictator: The evolution of the roman dictatorship. University of Michigan press.
Marin, P. (2009). Blood in the forum the struggle for the Roman Republic. Continuum.
Plutarch, Life of Marius
Plutarch, Life of Sulla
Melissa Barden Dowling. (2000). The Clemency of Sulla. Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, 49(3), 303–340. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4436584