Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
7 Core Traits of Authentic People
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
... See moreMary Beard • SPQR
“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.”
Ryan Holiday • Ego Is the Enemy
Sulla and Spartacus
Mary Beard • SPQR
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.
... See moreMary Beard • SPQR

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…
Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
Mary Beard • SPQR
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
... See moreMary Beard • SPQR
