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 ma

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. H

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 o

Sulla’s sadism was part of the story. Where his enemies a few years earlier had started the gory practice of pinning up the heads of their victims on the rostra in the Forum, Sulla was rumoured to have gone one worse, installing them as trophies in the atrium (or hall) of his house – a nasty parody of the Roman tradition of displaying the portrait

The underlying issue was brutally straightforward. Would Caesar, with more than 40,000 troops at his disposal only a few days from Italy, follow the example of Sulla or of Pompey?

“That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.”

On ne laisse envahir ses champs par qui que ce soit ; au plus mince différend sur les limites, on a recours aux pierres et aux armes ; mais sur sa vie on laisse empiéter qui le veut ; bien plus : soi-même on introduit les usurpateurs.