Lucius Cornelius 138-78 Sulla

Dictator.

The title of "dictator" was revived and Sulla was in fact emperor of Rome. After celebrating a splendid triumph for the Mithradatic War and assuming the surname of "Felix" he carried in 8o and 79 his great political reforms (see ROME : His tory). Their effect was to establish the senate by law in the posi tion which it had held unchallenged by custom until the Gracchi, to systematise the provincial arrangements, and to set up a per manent organization for the courts of justice. The mainstay of his political system was to be the military colonies which he had established with grants of land throughout every part of Italy, to the final ruin of Italian agriculture.

In 79 Sulla resigned his dictatorship and retired to Puteoli (mod. Pozzuoli), where he died in the following year, probably, from the bursting of a blood-vessel in a fit of passion. The "half lion, half fox," as his enemies called him, the "Don Juan of poli tics" (Mommsen), the man who carried out a policy of "blood and iron" with a grim humour, amused himself in his last days with actors and actresses, with dabbling in poetry and completing his Memoires (see H. Peter, Historicorum romanorum reliquiae).

He was accorded a magnificent public funeral, his body being removed to Rome and buried in the Campus Martius. His monu ment bore an inscription written by himself, to the effect that he had always fully repaid the kindnesses of his friends and the wrongs done him by his enemies. His reforms, mechanically ex

cellent, were all falling to pieces before his death, except the quaestiones perpetuae, which became the basis of Roman criminal justice. He tried in vain to put the clock back.

ancient authorities for Sulla and his time are his Life by Plutarch (who made use of the Memoirs) ; Appian, Bell. civ.; for the references in Cicero see Orelli's Onomasticon Tullianum. Modern treatises by C. S. Zacharia, L. Cornelius S. als Ordner des romischen Freystaates (1834) ; T. Lau, Lucius Cornelius Sulla (1855) E. Linden, De bello civili Sullano (1896) ; P. Cantalupi, La Guerra civile Sullana in Italia (1892) ; C. W. Oman, Seven Roman Statesmen (1902) ; F. D. Gerlach, Marius and Sulla (1856) ; J. M. Sunden, "De tribunicia potestate a Lucio Sulla imminuta" in Skrifter utgifna of k. humanistika Vetenskapssamfundet i Uppsala, v., 1897, in which it is argued against Mommsen that Sulla did not deprive the tribunes of the right of proposing rogations. See also Mommsen's History of Rome, vol. iii., bk. iv., ch. 8, 9 ; Drumann, Geschichte Roms, 2nd ed. by Groebe, ii. 364-432 ; Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyklopiidie, iv.