The History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen [good english books to read txt] 📗

been rendered by the Marian reform more ready for action and more militarily useful than when it did not fight before the walls of Numantia; but it had at the same time been converted from a burgess- force into a set of mercenaries who showed no fidelity to the state at all, and proved faithful to the officer only if he had the skill personally to gain their attachment. The civil war had given fearful evidence of this total revolution in the spirit of the army: six generals in command, Albinus,(45) Cato,(46) Rufus,(47) Flaccus,(48) Cinna,(49) and Gaius Carbo,(50) had fallen during its course by the hands of their soldiers: Sulla alone had hitherto been able to retain the mastery of the dangerous crew, and that only, in fact, by giving the rein to all their wild desires as no Roman general before him had ever done. If the blame of destroying the old military discipline is on this account attached to him, the censure is not exactly without ground, but yet without justice; he was indeed the first Roman magistrate who was only enabled to discharge his military and political task by coming forward as a -condottiere-. He had not however taken the military dictatorship for the purpose of making the state subject to the soldiery, but rather for the purpose of compelling everything in the state, and especially the army and the officers, to submit once more to the authority of civil order. When this became evident, an opposition arose against him among his own staff. The oligarchy might play the tyrant as respected other citizens; but that the generals also, who with their good swords had replaced the overthrown senators in their seats, should now be summoned to yield implicit obedience to this very senate, seemed intolerable. The very two officers in whom Sulla had placed most confidence resisted the new order of things. When Gnaeus Pompeius, whom Sulla had entrusted with the conquest of Sicily and Africa and had selected for his son-in-law, after accomplishing his task received orders from the senate to dismiss his army, he omitted to comply and fell little short of open insurrection.

Quintus Ofella, to whose firm perseverance in front of Praeneste the success of the last and most severe campaign was essentially due in equally open violation of the newly issued ordinances became a candidate for the consulship without having held the inferior magistracies. With Pompeius there was effected, if not a cordial reconciliation, at any rate a compromise. Sulla, who knew his man sufficiently not to fear him, did not resent the impertinent remark which Pompeius uttered to his face, that more people concerned themselves with the rising than with the setting sun; and accorded to the vain youth the empty marks of honour to which his heart clung.(51) If in this instance he appeared lenient, he showed on the other hand in the case of Ofella that he was not disposed to allow his marshals to take advantage of him; as soon as the latter had appeared unconstitutionally as candidate, Sulla had him cut down in the public market-place, and then explained to the assembled citizens that the deed was done by his orders and the reason for doing it. So this significant opposition of the staff to the new order of things was no doubt silenced for the present; but it continued to subsist and furnished the practical commentary on Sulla's saying, that what he did on this occasion could not be done a second time.

Re-establishment of Constitutional Order

One thing still remained—perhaps the most difficult of all: to bring the exceptional state of things into accordance with the paths prescribed by the new or old laws. It was facilitated by the circumstance, that Sulla never lost sight of this as his ultimate aim. Although the Valerian law gave him absolute power and gave to each of his ordinances the force of law, he had nevertheless availed himself of this extraordinary prerogative only in the case of measures, which were of transient importance, and to take part in which would simply have uselessly compromised the senate and burgesses, especially in the case of the proscriptions.

Sulla Resigns the Regency

Ordinarily he had himself observed those regulations, which he prescribed for the future. That the people were consulted, we read in the law as to the quaestors which is still in part extant; and the same is attested of other laws, e. g. the sumptuary law and those regarding the confiscation of domains. In like manner the senate was previously consulted in the more important administrative acts, such as in the sending forth and recall of the African army and in the conferring of the charters of towns. In the same spirit Sulla caused consuls to be elected even for 673, through which at least the odious custom of dating officially by the regency was avoided; nevertheless the power still lay exclusively with the regent, and the election was directed so as to fall on secondary personages. But in the following year (674) Sulla revived the ordinary constitution in full efficiency, and administered the state as consul in concert with his comrade in arms Quintus Metellus, retaining the regency, but allowing it for the time to lie dormant. He saw well how dangerous it was for his own very institutions to perpetuate the military dictatorship. When the new state of things seemed likely to hold its ground and the largest and most important portion of the new arrangements had been completed, although various matters, particularly in colonization, still remained to be done, he allowed the elections for 675 to have free course, declined re-election to the consulship as incompatible with his own ordinances, and at the beginning of 675 resigned the regency, soon after the new consuls Publius Servilius and Appius Claudius had entered on office. Even callous hearts were impressed, when the man who had hitherto dealt at his pleasure with the life and property of millions, at whose nod so many heads had fallen, who had mortal enemies dwelling in every street of Rome and in every town of Italy, and who without an ally of equal standing and even, strictly speaking, without the support of a fixed party had brought to an end his work of reorganizing the state, a work offending a thousand interests and opinions—when this man appeared in the market-place of the capital, voluntarily renounced his plenitude of power, discharged his armed attendants, dismissed his lictors, and summoned the dense throng of burgesses to speak, if any one desired from him a reckoning. All were silent: Sulla descended from the rostra, and on foot, attended only by his friends, returned to his dwelling through the midst of that very populace which eight years before had razed his house to the ground.

Character of Sulla

Posterity has not justly appreciated either Sulla himself or his work of reorganization, as indeed it is wont to judge unfairly of persons who oppose themselves to the current of the times. In fact Sulla is one of the most marvellous characters—we may even say a unique phenomenon—in history. Physically and mentally of sanguine temperament, blue-eyed, fair, of a complexion singularly white but blushing with every passionate emotion—though otherwise a handsome man with piercing eyes—he seemed hardly destined to be of more moment to the state than his ancestors, who since the days of his great-great-grandfather Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul in 464, 477), one of the most distinguished generals and at the same time the most ostentatious man of the times of Pyrrhus, had remained in second- rate positions. He desired from life nothing but serene enjoyment. Reared in the refinement of such cultivated luxury as was at that time naturalized even in the less wealthy senatorial families of Rome, he speedily and adroitly possessed himself of all the fulness of sensuous and intellectual enjoyments which the combination of Hellenic polish and Roman wealth could secure. He was equally welcome as a pleasant companion in the aristocratic saloon and as a good comrade in the tented field; his acquaintances, high and low, found in him a sympathizing friend and a ready helper in time of need, who gave his gold with far more pleasure to his embarrassed comrade than to his wealthy creditor. Passionate was his homage to the wine-cup, still more passionate to women; even in his later years he was no longer the regent, when after the business of the day was finished he took his place at table. A vein of irony—we might perhaps say of buffoonery—pervaded his whole nature. Even when regent he gave orders, while conducting the public sale of the property of the proscribed, that a donation from the spoil should be given to the author of a wretched panegyric which was handed to him, on condition that the writer should promise never to sing his praises again. When he justified before the burgesses the execution of Ofella, he did so by relating to the people the fable of the countryman and the lice. He delighted to choose his companions among actors, and was fond of sitting at wine not only with Quintus Roscius—the Roman Talma—but also with far inferior players; indeed he was himself not a bad singer, and even wrote farces for performance within his own circle. Yet amidst these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily nor mental vigour, in the rural leisure of his last years he was still zealously devoted to the chase, and the circumstance that he brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen, in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic companions to drive their chariots personally at the games. He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes, which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably at one time felt. In such a life as his was, oscillating between passionate intoxication and more than sober awaking, illusions are speedily dissipated. Wishing and striving probably appeared to him folly in a world which withal was absolutely governed by chance, and in which, if men were to strive after anything at all, this chance could be the only aim of their efforts. He followed the general tendency of the age in addicting himself at once to unbelief and to superstition. His whimsical credulity was not the plebeian superstition of Marius, who got a priest to prophesy to him for money and determined his actions accordingly; still less was it the sullen belief of the fanatic in destiny; it was that faith in the absurd, which necessarily makes its appearance in every man who has out and out ceased to believe in a connected order of things—the superstition of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw on each and every occasion the right number. In practical questions Sulla understood very well how to satisfy ironically the demands of religion. When he emptied the treasuries of the Greek temples, he declared that the man could never fail whose chest was replenished by the gods themselves. When the Delphic priests reported to him that they were afraid to send the treasures which he asked, because the harp of the god emitted a clear sound when they touched it, he returned the reply that they might now send them all the more readily, as the god evidently approved his design. Nevertheless he fondly flattered himself with the idea that he was the chosen favourite of the gods, and in an altogether special manner of that goddess, to whom down to his latest years he assigned the pre- eminence, Aphrodite. In his conversations as well as in his autobiography he often plumed himself on the intercourse which the immortals held with him in dreams and omens. He had more right than most men to be proud of his achievements he was not so, but he was proud of his uniquely faithful fortune. He was wont to say that every improvised enterprise turned out better with him than those which were systematically planned; and one of his strangest whims— that of regularly stating the number of those who had fallen on his side in battle as nil—was nothing but the childishness of a child of fortune. It was but the utterance of his natural disposition, when, having reached the culminating point of his career and seeing all his contemporaries at