The Historians' History of the World 05

The establishment of military colonies was one of the most important measures of the dictator. Besides satisfying claims he dared not disregard, he might hope to make these establishments the bulwark of his reforms. If so, we shall presently see how much he miscalculated their effect. But the change they produced in the social and political aspect of Italy was neither light nor transient. One hundred and twenty thousand legionaries, as has been said, received lands in the most fertile parts of the peninsula, and with them, of course, the franchise of the city, if they did not already possess it. This was carrying out an Agrarian law more sweeping and far more arbitrary than the Gracchi had even ventured to conceive. But these same legionaries, thus pampered and enriched, became the most restless and dangerous members of the body politic. Scattered broadcast over the face of the land, they became the prolific seed of disturbance and revolution.

SULLA’S LEGISLATION

Sulla’s legislation, besides its grand political bearings, descended to many minute particulars of social and civil economy. His enemies had revelled in the enjoyment of many successive consulships; he forbade any magistrate to fill the same office twice within a period of ten years. Casting a jealous eye on the proconsular imperium, the foundation of his own extraordinary power, he enacted a law of treason (maiestas

), which defined the crimes of leaving the province, leading forth the legions, and attacking a foreign potentate without express command of the senate and people. Like other statesmen of antiquity, he was fully possessed with the notion that the moral character of a nation can be reformed and maintained by sumptuary laws. Accordingly, he sought to restrict the luxuries of the wealthy, in which the imitation of foreign tastes caused, perhaps, more scandal than the actual excess. He fixed the precise sums which might be expended on the pleasures of the table, and assigned three hundred sesterces, about sixty shillings, for suppers on the Calends, Ides, and Nones, and certain of the most solemn festivals of the year. He went even further in the same delusive path, in fixing the prices of articles by arbitrary enactment. Such laws could not outlast even the brief rule of the imposer himself, and Sulla seems, indeed, to have set the example of disregarding them in person. Nevertheless the same ineffective legislation continued to be frequently repeated at later periods.

Among other precautions for guarding the morality of the people, Sulla had denounced the vengeance of the law against the crimes of murder and adultery. But he lived himself in a course of notorious profligacy, and besides the guilt of the proscriptions, he showed that no law could deter him from shedding blood to gratify a momentary passion, or, at least, to confirm his enactments by terror. Lucretius Ofella, the officer who had so long blockaded Præneste, ventured to disregard the dictator’s provision for confining the suit for the consulship to persons who had been already prætors. Sulla admonished him to desist; nevertheless he persisted in his claim. A centurion poniarded him in the middle of the Forum. When the people dragged the assassin to the dictator’s tribunal, he commanded them to let the man go, avowing that he had acted by his own orders; and he proceeded, with the rude humour which he affected, to relate a story, how a labourer, being annoyed by vermin, twice stopped from his work to pluck them off; the third time he cast them without mercy into the fire. “Twice,” said Sulla, “I have conquered and spared you; take care lest, a third time, I consume you utterly.”

ABDICATION OF SULLA

[79-78 B.C.]

Such acts and such language were, however, rather ebullitions of a spoiled and vicious temper than any deliberate expression of contempt for law, or the assertion of an unlimited despotism. The reigning principle of Sulla’s actions was still an affectation of legality. He pretended, at least, to consider the oligarchical constitution of the early republic the only legitimate model for its renovation. The success of his schemes of ambition, the overthrow of all his opponents, the complete restoration, as he imagined, of the principles to which he had devoted himself, all combined to work upon a mind prone to superstition and addicted to fatalism, and changed him from a jealous partizan into an arrogant fanatic. Sulla claimed to be the favourite of fortune, the only divinity in whom he really believed. His reforms were complete, his work accomplished, his part performed; he feared to tempt his patroness by trespassing another moment on her kindness. By resigning his power he sought to escape the Nemesis which haunted his dreams.

A Lictor