Among his first conquests was the wealthy widow Nicopolis.
Her favours were notoriously accessible to virtually any young man who wanted them; it was said that she had resolved to give her body to all men but her heart to none. By all accounts, Sulla fell genuinely and deeply in love with her. At first she scoffed at his devotion, but ultimately his persistence and charm undid her resolve, and she found herself in love at the age of fifty with a youth less than half her age. "When she died of a fever she left everything to Sulla. His good fortune had begun.
Another legacy came from his stepmother, his father's second wife, who in her widowhood had inherited a considerable sum from her own family. She died leaving Sulla her only heir, thus establishing him with a moderate fortune.
Having conquered the mysteries of flesh and gold, Sulla decided to enter politics through military service. Marius had just been elected to the first of his seven consulships; Sulla got himself appointed quaestor and became the great populist's protege. In Africa to fight Jugurtha, Sulla engaged in marital derring-do, espionage, and the diplomacy of the perfectly timed double cross. The tortuously complicated details are all in his Memoirs, the first volumes of which are already circulating around Rome in purloined copies. The vanquished Jugurtha was brought to the city naked and chained and died shortly after in his dungeon cell, half-crazy from torture and humiliation. Marius had overseen the campaign, but it was Sulla, at the risk of his own life, who had persuaded the King of Numidia to betray his doomed son-in-law. Marius was afforded a triumphal parade, but many whispered that it was Sulla who deserved the credit.
Praise for Sulla rankled the old populist, and though Marius continued to use Sulla, elevating his rank with each campaign, soon the old man's jealousy drove Sulla to seek other patrons. Taking command of the troops of the consul Catulus, Sulla subdued the wild tribes of the Alps. When premature winter storms trapped the legions in the foothills without adequate food, Sulla did an expert job of rerouting and supplying fresh provisions — not only to his own troops, but also to those of Marius, who became livid with indignation. The long, withering rivalry between Sulla and Marius, which was ultimately to cause so much grief and chaos in Rome, began with such incidents of petty jealousy.
Sulla travelled east, where Fortune led him to further victories in Cappadocia. On diplomatic business he ventured as far as the
Euphrates, and became the first Roman official ever to hold friendly discourse with that kingdom that owns the rest of the world, the Parthians. His charm (or else his blind arrogance) must have worked a wicked spell upon the Parthian ambassador, who actually allowed himself to be seated on a lower dais than Sulla, as if he were a suppliant of a Roman overlord. Afterwards the King of Parthia put the ambassador to death — having lost face, the man subsequently lost his head, a joke Sulla never tired of repeating.
Every powerful man must have omens of greatness attached to his legend — stars fell from the firmament at the birth of Alexander, Hercules strangled a snake in his cradle, eagles battled overhead when Romulus and Remus were torn from their mother's womb. It was while entertaining the Parthian retinue that Sulla's career begins to take on the patina of legend. Truth or fiction, only Sulla now knows for certain, but the story goes that a Chaldean savant attached to the Parthian retinue performed a study of Sulla's face, plumbing his character by using principles of science unknown in the West. Probably he was searching for weaknesses he could report to his Parthian masters, but instead the wise man drew back in astonishment. Sulla, never guilty of false modesty, recounts the old Chaldean's reaction word for word in his Memoirs: 'Can a man be so great and not be the greatest of all men on earth? It astounds me — not his greatness, but the feet that even now he abstains from taking his place as first in all things above his fellow men!'
When Sulla returned to Rome, Marius was not happy to see him.
The bone of contention snapped when a statue arrived from the friendly King of Numidia, commemorating the end of the African war and Jugurtha's downfall. Beneath the outstretched wings of Victory the gilded figures depicted the King handing over the chained Jugurtha to the King's great friend, Sulla. Marius was nowhere depicted. Marius nearly went out of his mind in a jealous rage at the idea of Sulla stealing his glory, and threatened to destroy the statue with his own hands unless the Senate passed legislation to remove it from the Capitol. The rhetoric on either side escalated until the breach between the two men was irreparable. Violence would surely have followed, but at that moment all private feuds were abruptly postponed by the eruption of the Social War between Rome and her Italian allies.
The scale of the Social War was unprecedented on Italian soil, as was the suffering and disruption it caused. But finally compromises were reached, intransigent rebels were mercilessly punished, and Rome endured, but not all Roman politicians fared equally well. Marius, well over sixty, his military powers faded and his health erratic, accomplished practically nothing in the war. Sulla, in the prime of his manhood and riding the crest of good fortune, was everywhere at once, making his reputation as hero, saviour, destroyer, currying the favour of the legions and amassing political prestige.
When it was over, Sulla had his first consulship at the respectable age of fifty. Rome, like a patient in violent throes, having just survived one great spasm, was about to undergo another.
Marius's populist movement reached its peak. His right-hand man was the radical tribune and demagogue Sulpicius, the elected representative of the masses, whose every move mocked the power and prestige of the noble establishment. Under Sulpicius, Roman citizenships were sold at auction to ex-slaves and aliens in the Forum, an act of impiety that drove the old nobility to apoplexy. More insidiously, Sulpicius gathered a private army of three thousand swordsmen from the equestrian class, ambitious and ruthless young men ready for anything. From these he culled an elite bodyguard of six hundred who milled constantly about the Forum. Sulpicius called them his Anti-Senate.
Abroad, Mithridates was ravaging Rome's eastern possessions, including Greece. The Senate voted to send Sulla to reclaim them, a duty which his previous service had earned and which should have fallen to him by right as consul. The command would be extraordinarily lucrative; there is nothing like a successful Eastern campaign to raise immense revenues through tributes, taxes, and outright looting. It would also give its commanding general immense power; in the old days Roman armies were loyal to the Senate, but now they follow the man who leads them. Sulpicius's Anti-Senate decided that the command should go to Marius. Chaos erupted in the Forum. The Senate was pressured into transferring the command from Sulla to Marius, and Sulla barely escaped being murdered in the streets.
Sulla fled Rome to take his appeal directly to the army. When the common soldiers heard what had happened, they pledged themselves to Sulla and stoned their staff officers (appointed by
Marius) to death. Marius's followers reacted in Rome by attacking members of the Sullan party and looting their property. In a panic, people changed from one side to the other, fleeing from Rome to Sulla's camp or from the camp to Rome. The Senate capitulated to whatever Marius and Sulpicius demanded. Sulla marched on the capital.
The unthinkable came to pass. Rome was invaded by Romans.
On the night before, Sulla dreamed. Behind him stood Bellona, whose cult had been brought to Rome from the East, whose ancient temples Sulla himself had visited in Cappadocia. She placed thunderbolts in his hands. She named his enemies one by one, and as she named them they appeared through a mist like tiny figures seen from a hilltop. The goddess told Sulla to strike them He cast the thunderbolts. His enemies were blasted asunder. He awoke, his Memoirs tell us, feeling invigorated and supremely confident.
"What kind of man has such a dream? Is he mad? Or a genius? Or simply a child of Rome blessed by Fortune, sent a reassuring message of success by the power that guides his destiny?
Before dawn, as the army assembled, a lamb was sacrificed. By the smoky torchlight the soothsayer P
ostumius read the entrails. He rushed to Sulla and knelt, offering up his hands as if for shackles. He begged Sulla to keep him bound as a prisoner so that he might be summarily executed if his visions were false, so certain was he of Sulla's triumph. So the legend tells us. There is something about a man like Sulla that makes savants and soothsayers clamour to grovel at his feet.
Sulla attacked from the east with a force of 35,000. There are sections of the Esquiline Hill that still bear the blackened scars of his advance. The walls were breached. The unarmed populace resisted with a bombardment of tiles and rubble cast from rooftops. Sulla himself was the first to take a torch in hand and set fire to a building where the people had gathered to resist. Archers shot fire-arrows onto rooftops. Whole families were burned alive; others were left homeless and ruined. The flames made no distinction between the guilty and the innocent, friend and foe. All were consumed.
Marius was driven back to the Temple of Tellus. Here his radical populism reached its apex: in return for their support, he offered freedom to the slaves of Rome. It says something for the prescience of the slaves or for the decline of Marius's reputation that only three slaves came forward. Marius and his supporters fled the city and scattered. The tribune Sulpicius, master of the Anti-Senate, was betrayed by one of his own slaves and put to death. Sulla first rewarded the treacherous slave by granting him freedom, then punished him as a free man by having him huried to his death from the Tarpeian Rock.
My thoughts, having wandered their own way on the wings of Metrobius's song, returned abruptly to the present. Echoing up from below us, Metrobius's voice affected a childish singsong with an atrociously crude Greek accent:
Sulla's face is a mulberry; Sulla's wife is a whore.
Sulla's face is red and purple; Sulla's wife is a bore.
Mottled and splotched with bumps that must itch—
Is it Sulla's face — or the breasts of his bitch?
The crowd gasped. A few in the room tittered nervously. Chrysogonus suppressed his golden smile. Sulla's face was a blank. Rufus looked disgusted. Hortensius had just put something into his mouth and was looking about the room, uncertain whether he should swallow. The ruined young poet looked nauseated — literally nauseated, pale and sweaty, as if something on the table had disagreed with him and he might vomit at any moment.
The lyre fell silent and Metrobius froze for a long moment. The lyre struck a twanging note. Metrobius cocked his head. 'Well,' he said archly, 'it may not be Sophocles, or even Aristophanes — but I like it'
The tension broke. The room erupted in laughter; even Rufus smiled. Hortensius finally swallowed and reached for his goblet The young poet staggered up from his couch and rushed from the room, clutching his belly.
The lyre player strummed and Metrobius took a deep breath. The song recommenced.
Sulla resumed his term as consul. Marius was outlawed. His enemies exiled, the Senate pacified, and the populace dazed, Sulla set out for Greece to win glory and drive back Mithridates.
Afterwards, critics complained that his sweeping eastern campaign was the most expensive military expedition in the history of Rome.
For the Greeks the price was devastating. Always in the past the great Roman conquerors of Greece and Macedonia had paid homage to the local shrines and temples, endowing them with offerings of gold and silver — respecting, if not the present inhabitants, then at least the memories of Alexander and Pericles. Sulla treated the temples differently. He looted them. The statues at Epidaurus were stripped of their gilding. The sacred offerings at Olympia were melted for coin. Sulla wrote to the keepers of the Oracle at Delphi and requested their treasure, saying that in his hands it would be safer from the vagaries of war, and that if he did have occasion to spend it he would certainly replace it. Sulla's envoy, Caphis, arrived at Delphi, entered the inner shrine, heard the music of an invisible lyre, and burst into tears. Caphis sent word to Sulla, begging him to reconsider. Sulla wrOte back, telling him that the sound of the lyre was surely a sign, not of Apollo's anger, but of approval. The portable treasures were carried away in sacks. The great silver urn was cut into pieces and carted off on a wagon. The Oracle fell silent. In a hundred generations the Greeks will not forget.
The Greeks, — especially the Athenians, had welcomed Mithridates, happy to cast off the Roman yoke. Sulla punished them. If the Greeks could create another Euripides, a poet of agony and terror, he might find a theme in Sulla's devouring lust to vanquish Athens — except that in Sulla's life story there is no hubris, only the never-ending caress of Fortune, as steady as the waves of the sea. The siege was bitter and relentless. The populace, driven to starvation, kept up their spirits by composing crude ditties slandering Sulla. The tyrant Aristion railed at the Romans from the city walls, hurling down insults against Sulla and his wife (the fourth, Metella), accompanied by a broad and complicated vocabulary of obscene gestures, many of which the Romans had never seen before but which were subsequently imported and are now fashionable among the street gangs and idle youth of the city. Many of these gestures have facetious names, mostly on the theme of Sulla raping Athena, to the chagrin of his wife.
When the walls were scaled and the gates opened, the slaughter was appalling. It is said that the blood in the enclosed marketplace was literally ankle-deep. Once the fury had subsided, Sulla put a stop to the pillage, ascending to the Acropolis to say a few words of praise for the ancient Athenians, followed by his famous utterance. 'I forgive the few for the sake of the many, the living for the sake of the dead,' a quotation frequently cited as an example either of his profound wisdom or his very dry wit.
Meanwhile, civil war simmered and bubbled in Rome as if her walls were the rim of a cauldron. The Italian allies grumbled over the slow dispensation of citizenships promised at the end of the Social War; the conservatives in the Senate grumbled that the privileges of citizenship were being disastrously diluted; the exiled Marius wandered to Africa and back, like Ulysses pursued by harpies. The anti-Sullan consul Cinna, another radical demagogue, welcomed Marius back to Rome and outlawed Sulla instead. Amid chaos and bloodshed Marius attained his seventh consulship only to die seventeen days later.
Having driven Mithridates back to Pontus, Sulla summarily declared the Eastern campaign a total success and made his way back to Italy with all speed. Here the legends and Memoirs recount further encounters with fawning soothsayers and soaring dreams, but why repeat them? The goddess Bellona supplied fresh thunderbolts and Sulla dispensed them to his loyal generals, Pompey and Crassus foremost among them, who cast them all over Italy and Africa, taming Sulla's enemies to ash. Fortune never ceased to smile for an instant. At Signia, Sulla was engaged by the army of Marius the son of Marius. Twenty thousand of Marius's men were killed, eight thousand were taken prisoner; Sulla lost only twenty-three soldiers.
The second siege of Rome was not so easy. Sulla and Crassus approached from the north, Pompey from the south. The left wing under Sulla was annihilated, and he himself barely missed being killed by a spear; he later attributed his salvation to the tiny golden image of Apollo he had stolen from Delphi, which he always carried into battle, often holding it to his lips and murmuring prayers and whispered adorations like a lover. Rumours of Sulla's death spread on both sides, even infecting Pompey's army with despair. Finally, after dark, word came to Sulla that the right wing under Crassus had destroyed the enemy.
Once in Rome, Sulla had the disarmed remnants of the defending army, six thousand Samnites and Lucanians, rounded up and herded like cattle into the Circus Maximus. Meanwhile, he called a meeting of the Senate, and even as he began his address the slaughter in the Circus commenced The din of the massacred was audible all over the city; the noise echoed in the Senate chamber like the wailing of ghosts. The senators were dumbfounded. Sulla continued to speak in a perfectly even tone of voice, as if nothing unusual were happening. The senators grew distracted and began to mill about and murmur among themselves, until Sulla stamped his foot and shouted at them to
listen to what he was saying. 'Ignore the noise from outside,' he told them. 'By my orders, some criminals are receiving correction.'
By consent of the Senate, Sulla proclaimed himself dictator, a constitutional seizure of authority that no one else had dared to attempt for more than a hundred years. As dictator, Sulla destroyed all opposition and rewarded his faithful generals. He was granted immunity for all his past actions. He reordered the constitution to strip the encroaching power of the populist tribunes and the masses and to restore the privileges of the nobles. "When his original, legal term of one year as dictator expired, the Senate obliged him with an unprecedented and constitutionally questionable extension, 'to complete his vital work for the salvation of the state.'
For a time Sulla ruled with an even hand, and the city breathed a sigh of relief as if spring had arrived after a long, hard winter. But Sulla was not satisfied with his almost total triumph. Perhaps a soothsayer warned him of danger. Perhaps in a dream Bellona issued him more thunderbolts.
The proscriptions began with the original List of Eighty. The next day a second list of more than two hundred names appeared. On the third day another list appeared, again with more than two hundred names.
Sulla was as witty as ever. On the fourth day he made a public speech defending the killings. When he was asked if a fourth list was yet to come, he explained that at his age his memory had begun to fail. 'So far we've posted the names of all the enemies of the state that I can remember. As more enemies occur to me, we'll post more names.' Eventually the lists numbered into the thousands.
The son of an emancipated slave was accused of having hidden one of the original Eighty. The penalty for concealing the proscribed was death. On his way to the Tarpeian Rock the wretch passed Sulla's retinue in the street and reminded him they had once lived in the same tenement. 'Don't you remember?' the man said. 'I lived upstairs and paid two thousand sesterces. You lived in the rooms under me and paid three thousand.' From the grin on his face no one could tell whether the man was joking or not. For once Sulla did not seem amused; perhaps he was not in a mood to be reminded of his humble origins. "Then you'll appreciate the Tarpeian Rock,' he told the man. 'The rent costs nothing and the view is unforgettable.' And with that he passed on, deaf to the man's pleas for mercy.
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