In its blending of superstition with the flaunting of naked power this was a vintage Sullan performance. There was no one in the Senate willing – or foolish enough – to stand up to it. Even Sulla’s bitterest enemies had little choice but to acknowledge the unprecedented scale of his triumph. To Sulla himself, success had always been the surest proof of Fortune’s blessing. This was why he chose to downplay his own role in the victory at the Colline Gate, and overplay that of Crassus: not because he was modest, but because, on the contrary, he wished to portray himself as Fortune’s favourite – a man of destiny. Ancient writers were unclear whether to attribute this to conviction or cynicism – although in Sulla’s case the two appear always to have been perfectly compatible. What is certain, however, is that by casting his victory as god-given, the man who had been the first to march on Rome, and who had devastated Italy with ‘war, fire and slaughter’,8 aimed to absolve himself of all blame for the Republic’s woes. This was why Sulla’s exhumation of Marius’ ashes, and his scattering of them into the River Anio, was an act of calculated propaganda as well as petty revenge. The death-struggle with his great rival, the very feud that had brought the Republic to its perilous pass, was reconstituted as a war in the Republic’s defence. In this way alone could Sulla justify the position of supremacy that he had wrested for himself. Even Marius, in the grim insanity of his final months, had taken care to cloak himself in the tattered legitimacy of his seventh consulship. Sulla, however, was too shrewd to attempt a similar sham. He knew that there was no point in picking up the shreds of a conventional magistracy. If he were to conceal the nakedness of his power, then he would have to look elsewhere for a fitting disguise.
Before he could do that, however, he had to make absolutely certain of his victory. Leaving Rome, he headed directly for the neighbouring town of Praeneste, final stronghold of the Marian cause. On the way, the news reached him that the city had surrendered and Marius’ son was dead. Rome was now without consuls. The fact that it was Sulla who had destroyed the two heads of state only served to emphasise the constitutional anomaly of his position. Sulla himself was too exultant with self-belief to care. He celebrated the scotching of his enemy’s bloodline by awarding himself the title of Felix – ‘The Fortunate One’. This had always been a cherished private nickname, but now Sulla decided to broadcast it publicly. By doing so, he signalled that there would be no herding of voters into the Ovile to validate his rule. Luck had brought Sulla to power, and luck – Sulla’s famous luck – would save the Republic in turn. Until her favourite’s work was done, and the constitution restored, Fortune was to rule as the mistress of Rome.
Her reign would prove to be savage. The casting down of the great, the raising up of the insignificant, these were the dramas in which Fortune most delighted. So too, of course, in its own way, did the Republic. Yet the constitution, subtle and finely modulated as it was, had evolved to restrain any violent change. Not for the Romans the mass executions and asset-stripping of opponents that had periodically engulfed Greek cities. Sulla, capturing Athens, had overthrown a regime dependent on precisely such tactics. Now, having captured Rome in turn, he prepared to copy them. In the practice of political terror as in so much else Athens, ‘the school of Greece’, could still inspire.
The death squads had fanned out through Rome even as the Samnites were being butchered in the Villa Publica. Sulla himself made no attempt to restrain them. Even his supporters, inured to bloodshed, were appalled by the resulting carnage. One of them dared to ask when the murderers would be reined in. Or at least, he added hurriedly, ‘let us have a list of all those you want punished’.9 Sulla, sardonically obliging, duly posted a list in the Forum. It featured the entire leadership of the Marian regime. All were condemned to death. Their properties were declared forfeit, and their sons and grandsons barred from standing for office. Anyone who helped to protect them was likewise condemned to death. An entire swath of Rome’s political elite was summarily nominated for annihilation.
Further lists followed. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of names appeared. In a grotesque parody of the census, the names of men without Marian sympathies, but whose wealth and status made them tempting targets, began to be sneaked in. Ghouls who gathered in the Forum to inspect the lists might easily find their own names featured. Villas, pleasure gardens, swimming pools, all were now potential death warrants. Everywhere, bounty-hunters tracked down their prey. The severed heads of victims would be brought back to Rome, and Sulla, once he had inspected them and released the promised fee, might keep particularly prized specimens as trophies in his house.
Such a grisly system of accounting was easy to abuse. No one exploited it more profitably than Crassus, who had the nose for gain of a man who had suffered from confiscations himself. As the general who had saved Sulla at the Colline Gate, he was in a privileged position to throw his weight about. Gifts were duly extorted, estates snapped up cheap. At length, however, when Crassus added the name of an innocent millionaire just a little too flagrantly on to a proscription list, Sulla lost patience. In the resulting scandal relations between the two men broke down irreparably, and Sulla withdrew his favour from his former lieutenant. Crassus was already so rich that he could afford not to care.
As for Sulla, ever the master strategist, he picked quarrels only as a matter of policy. By slapping down his own ally so publicly, he could represent himself as the selfless cleanser of the Republic, washing it in blood without thought of personal gain. For all the ostentation of his shock at Crassus’ avarice, however, there were few who were convinced by it. Sulla’s policy had always been to cut down his enemies and build up his friends. Crassus was far too powerful and ambitious to serve as anyone’s parasite, but those whom Sulla did not regard as threats were duly rewarded. Often, he would personally sell on properties at ludicrously knock-down prices. His policy was a deliberate one of ruining his opponents by enriching his supporters. ‘Not until Sulla had glutted all his followers with wealth did the slaughter at last come to an end.’10
Generous though he was, however, the man who profited most from the proscriptions was Sulla himself. The pauper who had once been forced to doss in squalid flop-houses was now richer than any Roman in history. It so happened that during the course of the proscriptions a senator who had been condemned to death was found hiding in the house of one of his former slaves. The freedman was duly brought before Sulla to be condemned. The two men recognised each other at once. Both, long before, had shared lodgings in the same apartment block, and the freedman, even as he was hauled away to his execution, yelled at Sulla that there had once been little difference between them. He meant it as a taunt, a scream of defiance, but Sulla is unlikely to have interpreted it as such. Nothing could have better illustrated the distance he had travelled. Nothing could have better demonstrated that he was ‘Felix’ indeed.
Sulla Dictator
Sulla aimed to build as well as destroy. Even as the streets of Rome ran red he talked loudly of restoring the Republic to full health. As ever with him, opportunism was the obverse of an icy conviction. The cycle of wars and revolutions through which he had hacked his way so savagely had done nothing to diminish his deeply held conservatism. Sulla had the true patrician’s contempt for innovation. Far from wishing to impose some radical new model of autocracy on his fellow citizens, he looked to the past for solutions to the crisis facing Rome.