But the most wicked and unjust act of all was that, he deprived the sons, and son’s sons of them whom he had killed, of all credit and good name, and besides that had taken all their goods as confiscate. And this was not only done in Rome, but also in all the cities of Italy throughout; and there was no temple of any god whatsoever, no altar in anybody’s house, no liberty of hospital, nor father’s house, that was not imbrued with blood and horrible murder. For the husbands were slain in their wives’ arms, and the children on their mothers’ laps: and yet they which were slain for private hatred and malice, were nothing in respect of those that were murdered only for their goods. And they that killed them might well say, his goodly great house made that man die, his goodly fair garden the other; and his hot baths another.
But besides so many murders committed, yet were there other things also that grieved the people marvellously. For he proclaimed himself dictator, which office had not been of six score years before in use, and made the senate discharge him of all that was past, giving him free liberty afterwards to kill whom he would, and to confiscate their goods; to destroy cities, and to build up new as he listed; to take away kingdoms, and to give them where he thought good. And furthermore, he openly sold the goods confiscate, by the crier, sitting so proudly and stately in his chair of state, that it grieved the people more to see those goods packed up by them, to whom he gave and disposed them, than to see them taken from those that had forfeited them. For sometimes he would give a whole country, or the whole revenues of certain cities, unto women for their beauty, or unto pleasant jesters, minstrels, or wicked slaves made free; and unto some, he would give other men’s wives by force, and make them to be married against their wills.[c]
The people crouched beneath the brandished sword of the conqueror, and the acclamations of the nobles, who relied upon his stern resolution to crush the insolence of the tribunes and repel the advance of democracy. Even the narrow limit of six months which the law had been wont to assign to the duration of this extraordinary despotism was now disregarded. Sulla was required to reform and reconstitute the commonwealth; he was allowed to determine for himself the period so arduous an enterprise would demand, nor less the principles and the means he should think fit to adopt. The Romans solemnly divested themselves of all their political rights, so long as the great reformer should deem it expedient to exercise autocratic control over them. To Sulla they committed without limit or question the power of life and death over citizens and subjects, of amercing his enemies and rewarding his friends, of building cities or destroying them, of giving away kingdoms or incorporating them in the empire. In order perhaps to mark more conspicuously the pre-eminence of this sovereign power above the legitimate dictatorship of ancient times, Sulla required that the consulship should coexist with it in a state of degrading subordination. He allowed the centuriate assembly to elect M. Tullius Decula and Cneius Dolabella for the year 81. In the following year he assumed the consular fasces himself in conjunction with Metellus Pius, while still retaining the ensigns of the dictatorship. He was elected a second time for the year 79; but his ambition was by this time satisfied and he declined the proffered title.
Proscription and massacre had cleared the ground for the social edifice which Sulla proposed to construct. With a blind and arrogant predilection for the traditionary forms of the ancient Roman municipality, he resolved to restore, as far as circumstances could be moulded thereto, by the harshest exercise of his prerogative, the civil ascendency of the old Roman families. To re-enact indeed the letter of the old oligarchical constitution, as it had existed before the days of plebeian encroachment, was impossible; but he hoped at least to reanimate its spirit. The temper however of the dictator was too impetuous and vehement for an undertaking requiring the most delicate management. His reforms were bold and decisive, they were conceived on a single great idea, and executed with consistency and vigour; but they were not adopted with any consideration for the genuine tendencies of society, and accordingly they struck no root in the mind of the people. Sulla, we have seen, had cut off two hundred senators with the sword of the proscriptions; Marius had probably slaughtered an equal number. The remnant had been decimated on the field of battle. To replenish this frightful void the dictator selected three hundred from the equestrian order; but however respectable in birth and rank these new senators may have been, they could hardly restore the lustre of the great council of the state, which had formerly owed its chief authority to the personal distinction of its members. We may conjecture that the numbers of the body thus reconstructed amounted to about six hundred. The vacancies which thenceforth occurred were probably more than supplied by the regular succession to the benches of the senate of the men who had filled certain high offices. Twenty quæstors were elected annually, and passed into it in due rotation.
The principle of hereditary succession to the senate was never recognised under the Roman Republic, but the practical restriction of the great offices from which it was replenished to one or two hundred families, allowed none of the chief Roman houses to remain unrepresented in the great council of the nation. To these houses Sulla wished to confine the entire legislation of the commonwealth. He repealed the lex Hortensia, by which the resolutions of the tribes were invested with the force of law, and gave to the senate alone the initiation of all legal enactments. To the senate he transferred once more the exclusive possession of the judicia, while he extended the authority of the quæstiones perpetuæ, or standing commissions for the trial of political offences, to a large class of criminal cases, which had hitherto fallen under the cognisance of the popular assemblies. Nothing however so much advanced the influence of the senate as the limitations Sulla placed upon the functions of the tribunate. He deprived the champions of the people of the right of proposing measures in the assembly of the tribes,[97] forbade them to exercise their arbitrary veto upon the legislation of the curia, and restricted their protectorate of the plebs to the relief of individuals in a few trifling cases of civil or criminal process. Whatever shadow of authority the office of tribune might still retain, a stigma was cast upon it by the decree which declared its holder incapable of succeeding to any of the chief magistracies of the state. Ambitious men disdained an office condemned to silence and obscurity. By the disparagement of its leaders the assembly of the tribes lost all its real power [though it could make laws with the senate’s consent and elect certain inferior magistrates]. As for the assembly by centuries, Sulla seems to have felt the impossibility of restoring the complicated machinery by which the citizens were enrolled in classes, according to their means, and the numbers of the lower ranks balanced by an artificial adjustment. If he could not restore in this popular assembly the preponderance which the Servian constitution had secured to property, the superiority he conferred upon the senate in the matter of legislation might suffice to keep the comitia in due subordination. The assembly of the centuries retained the election to the higher magistracies; the dictator relied on the influence of wealth, rank, and dignity, in breaking down the independence of the electors, already sapped by the prevalent dissolution of manners and degeneracy of public feeling. Nevertheless, he took from the people the appointment to the college of pontiffs, and placed the great political engine of the state religion in the hands of a self-elective corporation of the noblest members of the aristocracy.
The senate thus planted one foot on the neck of the knights, the other on that of the commons. Having, as we have seen, almost re-created it by one enormous draft from an inferior order, Sulla wished to insure the permanence of its constitution, and he would have looked, we may suppose, with jealousy on the independent action of the censorship, which ought to have called all its members to account every fifth year, and summarily ejected the unworthy. Accordingly he allowed no censors to execute their functions during his retention of power, nor was their venerable office revived for several years afterwards. The slaughter of the civil wars had caused a frightful reduction in the old Roman population. It was necessary to take measures for recruiting it, and on this account, perhaps, more than from any regard for the promises he had made at an earlier period, the dictator abstained from closing the franchise against the Italians.[98] He showed his contempt for the needy and venal populace by the enfranchisement at one blow of ten thousand slaves, the miserable remnant of the families of proscribed and murdered citizens. Left without masters they would have endangered the tranquillity of the commonwealth, but enrolled among the citizens they might become themselves masters in their turn, and help to keep the oppressed and discontented in subjection, both at home and abroad. They might at least devote themselves to the policy of the dictator.
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.