Sulla's Dictatorship (82-79 BC): Proscriptions and Reforms

Sulla’s dictatorship was the period from late 82 to 79 BC when the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, fresh from victory in a civil war, ruled Rome with unlimited legal authority. He used it to destroy his enemies through the proscriptions, a system of officially sanctioned killing and confiscation, and to rebuild the Republic’s constitution around the Senate. Then, unusually, he gave power back. His rule showed every later Roman strongman both what an army could achieve in politics and how fragile the old order had become.

Background: from the march on Rome to civil war

Sulla had already broken one great taboo. In 88 BC, stripped of his command against Mithridates VI of Pontus in favour of Gaius Marius, he led his legions into Rome itself, an episode described in Sulla’s March on Rome. He then left for the East to fight the Mithridatic Wars.

In his absence his enemies returned. Lucius Cornelius Cinna and Marius took Rome in 87 BC, killed many of Sulla’s supporters and declared him a public enemy. Marius died in January 86 BC, but Cinna and his allies held power for several years.

Sulla made peace with Mithridates at Dardanus in 85 BC and landed at Brundisium (Brindisi) in spring 83 BC with a battle-hardened army. Young commanders such as Gnaeus Pompeius, later called Pompey the Great, and Marcus Licinius Crassus raised troops and joined him. The war that followed, in 83-82 BC, was fought across Italy against the consuls and armies of the Marian faction, with many Italians, especially the Samnites, on the other side. Wounds from the recent Social War still shaped who fought for whom.

What happened: the Colline Gate and the seizure of power

The decisive battle came on 1 November 82 BC outside the Colline Gate on the north-eastern edge of Rome. A largely Samnite army under Pontius Telesinus, together with Marian forces, nearly broke Sulla’s left wing, which he commanded himself, while Crassus won on the right. By the next morning the enemy was destroyed and Telesinus was dead.

Prisoners taken in the battle, several thousand of them, were killed in or near the Villa Publica on the Campus Martius. Ancient writers report that Sulla was addressing the Senate in the nearby Temple of Bellona at the time and calmly told the senators to ignore the cries. Praeneste, where Marius the Younger was besieged, surrendered soon afterwards, and Marius took his own life.

With both consuls dead, an interrex (a temporary official chosen when the consulships were vacant), Lucius Valerius Flaccus, carried a law appointing Sulla dictator “for making laws and settling the constitution”. The traditional Roman dictatorship lasted six months and had not been used for over a century. Sulla’s version had no fixed term and gave him power to legislate, to pass judgment and to dispose of land and lives.

The proscriptions

Within days of his victory Sulla began posting lists of names in the Forum. A proscribed man lost all legal protection. Anyone who killed him could claim a reward, those who sheltered him were themselves punished, his property was confiscated and auctioned, and his sons and grandsons were barred from holding office.

The first lists, according to Appian, named about 40 senators and some 1,600 equestrians, wealthy men of the order just below the Senate. Further names followed. The total is unknown: the writer Valerius Maximus, two generations later, gives 4,700, and modern estimates range from several hundred to a few thousand. Many more people died in reprisals in Italian towns that had backed the losing side.

The system invited abuse. Men were added to the lists for their land or their houses, and supporters of Sulla grew rich at auctions. Crassus in particular laid the foundations of his famous fortune in this way. Freed slaves of the proscribed, reportedly around 10,000, took Sulla’s family name as the “Cornelii” and became a personal following in Rome. The killings were formally declared at an end on 1 June 81 BC.

Some escaped narrowly. The young Gaius Julius Caesar, nephew by marriage of Marius and son-in-law of Cinna, refused Sulla’s order to divorce his wife Cornelia and went into hiding; he was spared only after relatives and the Vestal Virgins interceded for him.

Sulla’s reforms

Sulla’s laws, known as the Leges Corneliae, aimed to make the Senate the unchallenged centre of government and to stop any future general or tribune from doing what Marius, the reformer Publius Sulpicius Rufus and Sulla himself had done.

• A larger Senate. He roughly doubled the Senate to around 600 members, adding men from the equestrian order, and raised the number of quaestors (junior financial officials) to 20, each of whom entered the Senate automatically.
• Weakened tribunes. The tribunes of the plebs lost most of their power to propose laws without Senate approval, their veto was restricted, and anyone who held the office was barred from higher magistracies, making it unattractive to ambitious men.
• Ordered careers. He fixed the sequence and minimum ages of the magistracies, raised the number of praetors to eight and required a ten-year gap before anyone could be consul again.
• Courts. Juries of the standing criminal courts were taken back from the equestrians and given wholly to senators, and new courts were set up for crimes such as treason, murder and forgery.
• Provinces and armies. Governors were forbidden to leave their province or lead an army beyond it without authorisation, a rule meant to prevent another march on Rome.

He also settled large numbers of his veterans, perhaps 80,000 to 120,000 men by modern estimates, on land confiscated from hostile Italian communities. Pompeii, for example, became a Roman colony with Sullan settlers.

Abdication and death

Sulla held the consulship in 80 BC alongside Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, while apparently still dictator; exactly when he laid down the dictatorship is uncertain, with late 81 BC and 80 BC both argued. By 79 BC he had retired as a private citizen to his estate near Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, where he worked on his memoirs.

He died in 78 BC, probably around the age of 60, after a short illness. He received a lavish state funeral on the Campus Martius. Plutarch reports that his epitaph boasted that no friend had ever done him a service and no enemy an injury that he had not repaid in full.

Legacy

Sulla’s reforms did not long survive him. In 70 BC the consuls Pompey and Crassus, both of whom had risen under Sulla, restored the powers of the tribunes, and a law of the same year shared the jury courts between senators and other wealthy groups. The Senate he had strengthened proved unable to control the great commanders of the next generation.

His example lasted far longer than his laws. He had shown that an army loyal to its general could take the city, that a dictatorship could be revived without limit of time, and that political enemies could be legally hunted down. Caesar, who as dictator chose clemency instead, reportedly mocked Sulla for resigning; the Second Triumvirate revived the proscriptions in 43 BC on the Sullan model.

Historians still disagree about Sulla himself. Some see a conservative trying to rescue the traditional Republic, others a ruthless faction leader who dressed revenge in legal form. Both views can draw on the same evidence.

Timeline

• 88 BC: Sulla marches on Rome to recover his command against Mithridates.
• 87 BC: Cinna and Marius take Rome and outlaw Sulla’s supporters.
• 85 BC: Sulla makes peace with Mithridates at Dardanus.
• 83 BC, spring: Sulla lands at Brundisium and civil war begins in Italy.
• 82 BC, 1 November: Sulla wins the Battle of the Colline Gate.
• 82 BC, November-December: The proscriptions begin and Sulla is appointed dictator.
• 81 BC, 1 June: The deadline set for ending the proscriptions.
• 80 BC: Sulla serves as consul with Metellus Pius.
• 79 BC: Sulla retires to Campania as a private citizen.
• 78 BC: Sulla dies and receives a state funeral in Rome.

Why it matters

Sulla’s dictatorship was the first time a Roman general won a full-scale civil war and then rebuilt the state by decree. Its methods, especially the proscriptions, became a grim precedent, and its failure to last showed that the Republic’s problems could not be solved simply by giving the Senate more power.