When Sulla’s legions returned to Praeneste bearing the heads of the Samnite generals, the inhabitants of the city gave up and opened the gates. Marius the Younger tried to escape through an underground tunnel, but when he found all exits guarded he committed suicide rather than accept capture. When Sulla himself arrived at the defeated city, he ordered the inhabitants divided up into three groups: Romans, Samnites, and Praenestians. He said the Romans deserved to die but that he would be merciful in victory and pardon them. The Samnites and Praenestians, on the other hand, were surrounded and massacred. Sulla then allowed the forces that had been prosecuting the siege to brutally sack Praeneste. The head of Marius the Younger was carried back to Rome. After his head was posted in the Forum, it became an object lesson in the folly of youth. The laughing Romans quoted Aristophanes: “First learn to row, before you try to steer.”51
WITH ALL HIS enemies now defeated, Sulla himself returned to Rome. When he arrived the inhabitants of the city found him a very different man than the one who had addressed them a few months earlier. As the historian Cassius Dio later wrote:
Sulla up to the day that he conquered the Samnites… was believed to be a very superior man both in humaneness and piety… But after this event he changed so much that one would not say his earlier and his later deeds were those of the same person. Thus it would appear that he could not endure good fortune. For he now committed acts which he had censured in other persons while he was still weak, and a great many others still more outrageous. Thus Sulla, as soon as he had conquered the Samnites and thought he had put an end to the war… changed his course, and leaving behind his former self, as it were, outside the wall on the field of battle, proceeded to outdo Cinna and Marius and all their successors combined.52
* Pompey would attempt the same trick with Julius Caesar in 49.
The republic is nothing, a mere name without body or form.
JULIUS CAESAR1
IN THE AFTERMATH OF HIS DECISIVE VICTORY AT THE COLLINE Gate, Sulla set up a headquarters on the Campus Martius. Though he was the master of Rome, at the moment he held no official magistracy. He was not a consul, or a praetor, or a legate, or even a quaestor. His only claim to constitutional sovereignty came from his proconsular assignment to the Mithridatic War. That appointment was now five years old and concerned a war that had already been won, but it was all Sulla had. By law, a provincial governor’s sovereignty expired when he crossed the sacred Pomerium and reentered Rome. In the routine course of empire this was a mere formality as men entered and exited office, but for Sulla, it trapped him outside of Rome. If he crossed the city limits, he would lose all his sovereign authority.
Despite ignoring the Pomerium so brazenly during his first march on Rome, Sulla now elected to maintain this strange façade of constitutional scruples. So he called the Senate to assemble at the Temple of Bellona outside the walls rather than cross the sacred boundary. When the Senate assembled, Sulla did not discuss the Civil War, but instead presented an account of his actions in the Mithridatic War. After he listed his accomplishments in the east, he requested the right to enter the city in triumph. It was as if the last two years hadn’t happened.2
But there was a dark backdrop to this charade. Before addressing the Senate, Sulla ordered six thousand Samnite prisoners herded into the adjacent Circus Flaminius. The Samnites had been told they were going to be counted and processed as prisoners of war, but they soon learned the truth. As Sulla began reading his report on the Mithridatic War to the Senate, his men surrounded the six thousand prisoners in the Circus Flaminius and methodically massacred them. Their screams were impossible to ignore inside the Temple of Bellona, and the dumbfounded senators were horrified. But Sulla bade them to please continue to listen to his remarks and “not concern themselves with what was going on outside, for it was only that some criminals were being admonished.”3
When the killing was done, and the disturbed senators departed, Sulla called an open meeting to address the people of Rome. He reiterated that only his enemies need fear his wrath. For the first time, Sulla specifically said the defection of Asiaticus’s army was the dividing line. Those who had exercised wisdom and joined him before that point could expect peace and friendship. Those who had remained under arms after that point were to be liquidated as enemies of the state. But he also pointedly said that the plebs urbana and common soldiers had nothing to fear from him. Sulla scrupulously allowed that these men had merely followed wicked leaders—and it was the leaders, not the followers, who should pay.4
