Sublime

His motives have been debated ever since. Was he a brutal and calculating autocrat? Or was he making a last-ditch attempt to restore order in Rome? The point is that, whatever lay behind Sulla’s actions (and that is as irrecoverable now as it ever was), the violence was much more widespread than could possibly be put down to the influence of one

“self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.” This is the ego, as the writer Cyril Connolly warned, that “sucks us down like the law of gravity.”

Sulla and Spartacus

Sulla introduced a programme of reform on an even bigger scale than Gaius Gracchus. He cancelled some of the recent popular measures, including the subsidised corn ration. And he introduced a series of legal procedures and rules and regulations for office holding, many of which reasserted the central position of the senate as a state institution.

Sulla was the first dictator in the modern sense of the term. Julius Caesar would be the second. That particular version of political power is…

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Before the Social War was over, one of its commanders, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a consul in 88 BCE, became the first Roman since the mythical Coriolanus to lead his army against the city of Rome. Sulla was forcing the hand of the senate to give him command in a war in the East, and when he returned from that victorious four years later, he marched