Sublime

Relying on the emergency powers decree, and on the vociferous support of many senators, Cicero had the men summarily executed, with not even a show trial. Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, ‘they have lived’ – that is, ‘they’re dead’.

Yet out of all this came an extraordinary, radically conservative attempt to rewrite Roman politics: wholesale change masquerading as an exercise in putting the clock back. Once re-established in the city in 82 BCE, Sulla engineered his own election as ‘dictator for making laws and restoring order to the res publica’. The dictatorship was an old