The murders complete, the remaining anti-Sullan partisans evacuated Rome for the north. When they decamped they left only the frightened plebs urbana behind. The inhabitants of Rome had only recently joined the anti-Sullan coalition, and they had only joined out of fear of what Sulla might do when he came back. Now they would find out what their punishment would be. Sulla’s legions appeared on the road and methodically surrounded Rome. Eventually, the entourage of Sulla himself appeared, swinging around the city and arriving at the Campus Martius. Determining that death by starvation was worse than a quick death by the sword, the citizens of Rome opened the gates.37
But the plebs urbana were in for a pleasant surprise. After bracing for a bloody purge, they instead got word that Sulla had called a mass meeting to address the people of Rome and make his objectives clear. When the people assembled on the Campus Martius, Sulla announced that he planned to be a surgeon, not a butcher. While he would of course reclaim his own property and punish a few select enemies, the rest of the population had nothing to fear. Then, leaving behind a few trusted officers with a small garrison, Sulla departed for the north as quickly as he had come.38
Sulla’s first swing through Rome was calculated to soothe fears and induce men to lie down rather than stand up. And so far nothing in his career led anyone to believe it was not sincere. As Plutarch says, “Sulla had used his good fortune moderately, at first, and like a statesman, and had led men to expect in him a leader who was attached to the aristocracy, and at the same time helpful to the common people.” But the next time Sulla came to Rome—when the war was finished and there was no one left to challenge him—it would be quite a different story: “His conduct fixed a stigma upon offices of great power, which were thought to work a change in men’s previous characters, and render them capricious, vain, and cruel.”39
UP IN THE north, the war continued to go badly for Carbo and his remaining forces. While Sulla led the drive up the Via Latina, Metellus Pius and Pompey charged up the Adriatic coast to secure Pompey’s home territory of Picenum. After inducing the defection of Asiaticus’s legions, the Sullan generals sent an army north into Cisalpine Gaul and another west into Etruria to attack Carbo’s last strongholds.40
But though darkness was closing in, Carbo still led enough legions to hold his own. He made a base on the Adriatic coast and tried to block Pius’s attempt to take Ravenna, but without a proper navy, there was nothing he could do. So he headed back into the interior and soon ran into Sulla himself, who was advancing north after the swing through Rome. Since almost all of the most hard-core anti-Sullan partisans were in Carbo’s army, there would be no defections this time. So instead of another bloodless victory, Sulla had to fight. Far from caving, Carbo’s legions held their own all day, and nightfall ruled the battle a draw. The war was still far from over.41
But now the dynamic of the war had changed. The original plan laid out by Cinna was to harness the full resources of Italy to overwhelm Sulla and his five legions, to make their position untenable in the long run by limiting access to reinforcements. Now the situation was reversed. But by the summer of 82, it was Sulla who could draw on manpower reserves and Carbo who was isolated. When Crassus and Pompey invaded Umbria, Carbo was forced to send detachments to reinforce his bases there. But the reinforcements were ambushed by a detachment of Sulla’s army, costing Carbo some five thousand men—men he could not afford to lose.42
The real downfall of the anti-Sullan forces, though, was the loss of Marius the Younger’s legions in the south. Instead of Sulla feeling pressure from two fronts, his armies could now surround Carbo. Recognizing that the siege of Praeneste had to be lifted, Carbo withdrew back to the Adriatic coast and peeled off vital forces to relieve the city. If they were successful, the balance of the war would shift again. But the first relief army never even made it to Praeneste. They were jumped and destroyed by Pompey en route. The defeated soldiers ran off in every direction. Most never came back.43
With resistance to Sulla collapsing, the Samnites and Lucanians got together and raised one last great army. Having never been defeated in the Social War, these men bore a particular hostility to Sulla. Mostly on their own initiative, they raised tens of thousands of men to relieve the siege of Praeneste. Sulla knew as well as Carbo that everything hinged on relieving the siege, so he positioned his own army near the city. Despite a strong push by the Samnite and Lucanian army, Sulla’s legions beat back the attempt. The siege of Praeneste held.44
