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
In the year 79 Sulla abdicated the dictatorship. He could say that it had been conferred upon him for the reconstitution of the commonwealth, and having done what he was appointed to do, it was no longer his to enjoy. But if the Romans were amazed at this act of sublime self-sacrifice, it was with a feeling akin to awe that they beheld the tyrant descend from his blood-stained tribunal and retire with unmoved composure to the privacy of a suburban villa. Aged and infirm,[99] and sated perhaps with pleasure as well as ambition, it is not too much to believe that such a man as Sulla was indifferent to life, and little troubled by the risk to which he might thus expose himself from the daggers of his enemies. But in truth, while his veteran colonists were sworn to maintain his policy, his person was not unprotected, by bands of armed attendants. When the magistrate of a neighbouring town, in the expectation of the old man’s death, delayed paying the local contribution to the restoration of the Capitol, for the completion of which Sulla was anxious, as the only thing wanting to complete his career of prosperity, he could send men to seize the defaulter and even inflict death upon him. Sulla was evidently secure against the vengeance of his victim’s relatives. It may also be remarked that such vengeance would have been foreign to the habits of the Romans. However little they scruple to use the dagger to cut off a political enemy in the midst of his career, there is no instance perhaps in their history of exacting personal retribution from one who had ceased to possess the power of injuring.
There was, moreover, in Sulla a haughty contempt for mankind, and consequently for its highest aims and pleasures. Even while devoting his utmost energies to the pursuit of political eminence and the achievement of a national revolution, he could smile with grim moroseness at the vanity of his own exploits, and the hollowness of his triumphs. He paused in the midst of his career to break the toy with which he had so long amused himself. He had commenced life as a frivolous sensualist; he wished for nothing better than to finish it as a decrepit débauché. At the moment of laying down his office he made an offering of the tenth of his substance to Hercules, and feasted the people magnificently; so much, indeed, did the preparations made exceed what was required, that vast heaps of the superfluous supplies were thrown with ostentatious prodigality into the river.
In the midst of these entertainments, lasting several days, Metella, the consort to whom he was most permanently attached, fell sick and died. As the favourite and perhaps the priest of Venus, his house might not be polluted by the presence of death, and he was required to send her a divorce, and cause her to be removed while still breathing. The custom he observed strictly, through superstition; but the law which limited the cost of funerals, though enacted by himself, he violated in the magnificence of her obsequies. Retiring to his villa at Cumæ he finally relinquished the reins of government. Surrounded by buffoons and dancers, he indulged to the last in every sensual excess which his advancing years and growing infirmities permitted. Nevertheless he did not wholly abandon literature. He amused himself with reading Aristotle and Theophrastus, and dictating memoirs of his own life, upon which he was employed, it is said, only two days before his decease. In those pages he recorded how astrologers had assured him that it was his fate to die after a happy life, at the very height of his prosperity. Stained with the blood of so many thousand victims, and tormented with a loathsome disease—for his bowels corrupted and bred vermin, and neither medicines nor ablutions could mitigate the noisome stench of his putrefaction—in this faith he persisted to the last, and quitted the world without a symptom either of remorse or repining. He believed that a deceased son appeared to him in a dream, and entreated him to rest from his troubles, and go with him to rejoin his lost Metella and dwell with her in eternal peace and tranquillity. Fearful perhaps of the fate of Marius, he directed that his body should be burned; whereas it had ever been the custom of his house to inter the remains of their dead. A monument was erected to him in the Campus Martius, which was standing in the time of Plutarch, after the lapse of two centuries and the events of several revolutions. It bore an inscription, ascribed to Sulla himself, which said that none of his friends ever did him a kindness and none of his foes a wrong without being largely requited. Sulla survived his abdication about twelve months, and died in the year 78, at the age of sixty.