One of the ancient pillars of the constitution now lay in rubble. Even Sulla’s conservative supporters in the Senate appear to have been shocked.12 No one had ever before attempted such a work of demolition. The dictator himself cast his reforms as a restoration, the sweeping away of clutter. Yet clutter was the essence of the Republic. It spread everywhere that Sulla cared to look. It could be seen in the very appearance of Rome herself. Sulla, whose invariable response to provocation was to launch a single, rapid killer-blow against it, quickly proved himself as impatient with the urban fabric as he had been with the Marians or the tribunate. Frustrated by the city’s congestion, he simply pushed back the pomerium, the first man to do so in the whole of Roman history. Just as coolly, he levelled the cramped but venerable Senate House, and rebuilt it to suit the proportions of his own new, inflated Senate. Not that the senators themselves displayed much gratitude. Decades later they were still mourning the original building, sanctified as it had been by the Republic’s historic heroes, and complaining that ‘its enlargement appeared to have shrunk it’.13 Sulla could afford to dismiss all such moaning with a contemptuous shrug. Only on the Capitol was he inhibited by the sanctions of custom. The temple of Jupiter might have been burned to the ground, but its outline still remained. As a new temple rose from the ashes, the gigantic columns that Sulla had conveniently plundered from Athens gleamed from within the confines of the original, sacrosanct structure. Monumentalism squatted awkwardly on archaic foundations. Sulla’s dictatorship could hardly have raised a more fitting memorial to itself.
Long before the completion of Jupiter’s great temple, however, Sulla had resigned his office. One morning, some time late in 81 BC, he suddenly appeared in the Forum without his lictors. The man responsible for the deaths of more citizens than any Roman in history had laid aside the sanctions of supreme power, ‘fearing neither the people at home nor the exiles abroad … Such was the extent of his daring and good luck.’14 Once again his nerve was justified. Sulla remained a figure of dread. Only on a single occasion did anyone dare to criticise him to his face, a young man who cat-called him in the Forum; then, having failed to get a rise, he jeered him all the way home. Otherwise, the terror of Sulla’s name held good.
The year after he resigned his dictatorship Sulla served as a consul; the year after that he stood down from office altogether. Relieved of formal responsibilities, he returned to the wild living of his youth. It was a lifestyle for which he had never lost his talent. As dictator, he had thrown the largest parties in Rome’s history. Everyone in the city had been invited. Spit-roasts had sizzled in the streets, vintage wines had flowed from public fountains. The citizens had gorged themselves, and then, when no one had been able to eat or drink another thing, whole sides of meat had been slung with delirious wastefulness into the Tiber. As a private citizen, Sulla’s parties were inevitably more intimate affairs. Whole days would be spent in drinking bouts with his old bohemian set. Dizzyingly high though he had risen, Sulla remained as loyal in his friendships as he was implacable in his feuds. Actors, dancers, down-at-heel hacks, all had been tossed crumbs from the estates of the proscribed. Those without talent had been given money never to perform again. Those who did have talent were cherished, however much they might have passed their prime. Brutal cynic though he was, Sulla would still flatter and cosset a fading drag-queen. ‘Metrobius, the female impersonator, had seen better days, but Sulla never ceased to insist that he was in love with him all the same.’15
Certainly, there was none of Marius’ muscle-bound need to prove himself a man: no workouts on the Campus Martius for Sulla. When he retreated to his villa in Campania, he gloried in his retirement. He had restored the Republic, and the fruit of his work was peace. The crisis was over. Who could doubt, seeing Sulla in his Greek tunic, strolling with other tourists through the back streets of Naples, that the good times were back?
Yet in Italy, as in Rome, the good times had been founded on savagery and bloodshed. Not far beyond Sulla’s estate rose the hills of Samnium, harrowed in a policy of deliberate extirpation. All around it, dotted across the Plain of Campania, stood cities still scarred by their resistance to Sulla. Even Naples had been stormed by his legions. Nola too, eventually, had fallen. Besieged for almost a decade, the rebel stronghold had held out until 80 BC, steeled by the same spectacle of atrocities that had persuaded other towns to incinerate themselves rather than surrender. To punish Nola, and to provide a permanent occupying force, Sulla had planted a colony of his veterans in the city, one of numerous similar settlements imposed all over Campania and Samnium. Triumphant even in his enemies’ most obdurate stronghold, Sulla had celebrated by giving Nola a new and humiliating name – Colonia Felix. Only one other act of appropriation can have given him more pleasure. Just down the coast from his own estate stood Marius’ celebrated villa, raised on its promontory like a military camp, a shrine to the old soldier’s glory and masculine pride. Sulla sold it cheap to his daughter, Cornelia. He had always believed in rubbing salt into open wounds.
This streak of cruelty would never be forgotten, nor forgiven. Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one. This was a discovery that could never be unmade. After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequence of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies, but for her citizens themselves. What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: ‘Sulla could do it. Why can’t I?’16
The generation that succeeded him would have to give their own answer to that question. In doing so they would serve to define how Sulla himself was best to be judged: had he been the saviour or destroyer of the constitution? Terrible though he had proved himself to be, the dictator had also laboured hard to restore the Republic, to ensure that he would have no successor. Historians of future generations, inured to perpetual autocracy, found fantastical the idea that anyone should voluntarily have laid down supreme power. Yet Sulla had done it. No wonder that his own contemporaries found him such a baffling and contradictory figure. When he died – most probably of liver failure – no one could even agree how to dispose of his body. One consul wanted to award him a state funeral, the other to deprive him of funereal honours altogether. Fittingly, it was the threat of violence that served to resolve the debate. A huge escort of veterans assembled to bring their dead general from Campania, and the people of Rome found themselves ‘as terrified of Sulla’s army and his corpse as if he were still alive’.17 No sooner had the body been laid on a huge pyre in the Campus Martius than a strong wind came gusting across the plain, whipping up the flames. And no sooner had the corpse been consumed than it started to rain.