Lucius Cornelius 138-78 Sulla

SULLA, LUCIUS CORNELIUS (138-78 B.c.), surnamed FELIX, Roman general, politician and dictator, belonged to a minor and impoverished branch of the famous patrician Cornelian gens. He was quaestor in 107 under Marius, for whom he com manded the cavalry in the Jugurthian war. The surrender of Jugurtha was made to Sulla, and was the beginning of the rivalry with Marius. Sulla won the enthusiastic devotion of his troops. From 104 to ioi he served again under Marius in the war with the Cimbri and Teutons and fought in the last great battle in the Raudian plains near Verona. In 93 he was elected praetor after a lavish squandering of money and he delighted the populace with an exhibition of a hundred lions from Africa. Next year (92) he went as propraetor of Cilicia with special authority from the senate to make Mithradates VI. of Pontus restore Cappadocia to Ario barzanes, one of Rome's dependants in Asia. This he did, subse quently receiving an embassy from the Parthians asking alliance with Rome. In 91 he returned to Rome, now one of the leading men on the senatorial side. He outshone Marius in the Social War by defeating the Samnites and taking Bovianum.

Consul.

Sulla was consul in 88, and finished the revolt by the, capture of Nola. Meanwhile he had obtained by lot the command against Mithradates, Marius wanted that, and in order to get it entered into a coalition with Sulpicius Rufus, who had a plan of revolutionary legislation to carry out. Sulpicius, quite unconsti tutionally, transferred the command to Marius by vote of the assembly. Rioting took place at Rome at the prompting of the popular leaders, Sulla narrowly escaping to his legions in Cam pania, whence he marched on Rome, being the first Roman who entered the city at the head of a Roman army. Sulpicius was put to death, and Marius fled. Sulla, leaving things quiet at Rome, quitted Italy in 87, and for the next four years he was winning victory after victory against the armies of Mithradates and accumulating boundless plunder. Athens, the headquarters of the

Mithradatic cause, was taken and sacked in 86 ; and in the same year, at Chaeroneia, the scene of Philip II. of Macedon's victory more than two and a half centuries before, and in the year follow ing, at the neighbouring Orchomenus, he scattered immense hosts of the enemy with trifling loss to himself. Crossing the Hellespont in 84 into Asia, he was joined by the troops of C. Flavius Fimbria, who soon deserted their general, a man sent out by the Marian party, now again in the ascendant at Rome. The same year peace was concluded with Mithradates.

Sulla returned to Italy in 83, landing at Brundisium. Marius had died in 86, and the revolutionary party, specially represented by L. Cornelius Cinna, Cn. Papirius Carbo and the younger Marius, had massacred Sulla's supporters wholesale, confiscated his property, and declared him a public enemy. They had large forces ready to meet him, but Sulla's declaration that he did not intend to deprive the Italians of the franchise cut the ground from under their feet, and only the Samnites remained in arms.

In the following year (82) he won a decisive victory over the younger Marius near Praeneste (mod. Palestrina) and then marched upon Rome, where again, just before his defeat of Marius, there had been a great massacre of his adherents, in which the learned jurist Q. Mucius Scaevola perished. Rome was at the same time in extreme peril from the advance of a Samnite army, and was barely saved by Sulla, who, after a hard f ought battle, routed the enemy under Pontius Telesinus at the Colline gate of Rome. With the death of the younger Marius, who killed himself after the surrender of Praeneste, the civil war was at an end, and Sulla was master of Rome. Then came the memorable "proscription," when for the first time in Roman history a list of men declared to be outlaws and public enemies was exhibited in the forum, so starting a reign of terror.