Sulla

Lucius Cornelius Sulla, known by the surname Felix, "the fortunate", was a Roman general and politician who lived from 138 to 78 BC. He was the first Roman commander to lead an army against Rome itself, won the civil war that followed, and ruled as dictator before voluntarily giving up his powers. His bloody proscriptions and his example of seizing power by force shaped the final decades of the Roman Republic.

Sulla came from an old patrician family that had sunk into poverty; no member had reached the consulship for generations. He spent his youth among actors and musicians in Rome, though he was well educated and spoke fluent Greek. According to Plutarch, inheritances from his stepmother and from a mistress named Nicopolis gave him the fortune needed for a public career. He became quaestor in 108 BC, aged about thirty.

Serving under Gaius Marius in the campaign against Jugurtha, king of Numidia, Sulla negotiated with King Bocchus of Mauretania, who in 106 BC betrayed Jugurtha into Roman hands. Sulla's role in the capture fed a lasting quarrel with Marius over the credit. He fought again in the wars against the Cimbri and Teutones, then became praetor in 97 BC. As governor of Cilicia he restored a Roman ally to the throne of Cappadocia and became the first Roman official to deal with an embassy from the Parthian Empire. In the Social War against Rome's Italian allies he commanded in the south in 89 BC, took Pompeii and other towns, and won the grass crown, Rome's highest military honour.

Elected consul for 88 BC, Sulla was given command of the war against Mithridates VI of Pontus. The tribune Sulpicius then passed a law handing the command to Marius. Sulla's troops at Nola followed him to Rome, though almost all of his officers refused. He took the city, had Marius and eleven others declared outlaws, and then left for Greece. In his absence Marius and Cinna seized Rome and declared him a public enemy.

In 86 BC Sulla stormed Athens on 1 March and sacked it, plundered major Greek sanctuaries for funds, and defeated the armies of Mithridates at Chaeronea and Orchomenus. Ancient figures for enemy numbers and losses are inflated. Eager to return to Italy, he made a fairly mild peace with Mithridates at Dardanus in 85 BC.

Sulla landed at Brundisium in 83 BC and was joined by younger men such as Pompey and Crassus. After a hard campaign against the consuls Carbo and the younger Marius, he won the battle of the Colline Gate outside Rome on 1 November 82 BC. The next day thousands of Samnite prisoners were slaughtered within hearing of the Senate. He then published lists of "proscribed" men who could be killed without trial and whose property was confiscated; several lists named hundreds of victims, and many were added for private revenge or their estates. The young Julius Caesar was perhaps spared through the intercession of friends.

Appointed dictator without time limit to rewrite the laws, Sulla enlarged the Senate, gave it control of the criminal courts, increased the number of praetors and quaestors, and stripped the tribunes of the plebs of the right to propose laws. He settled his veterans on confiscated land.

Sulla gave up the dictatorship, held a regular consulship in 80 BC, and retired to his villa near Puteoli, where he wrote his memoirs. He died there in 78 BC and received a grand public funeral in Rome. Many of his reforms were overturned within a decade. Later Roman writers mostly portrayed him as a cruel tyrant, and his march on Rome became a precedent that Pompey and Caesar would follow.

Our 100 BC map shows the Roman Republic and its neighbours in the Mediterranean world in which Sulla made his career.