Sulla’s ashes were laid in his ancestral tomb, and a monument to him was erected in the Campus Martius. His enduring credo was emblazoned on the monument for all time: “No friend ever surpassed him in kindness, and no enemy in wickedness.”39
THE SULLAN CONSTITUTION did not survive. In the first years of the new regime, the senior Sullan leaders who took over Rome—Metellus Pius, Pompey, and Crassus chief among them—scrupulously followed Sulla’s constitution. But as the memory of Sulla faded and new political rivalries emerged, these leaders abandoned the Sullan decrees whenever expedient. In the end, it turned out Sulla’s “final” settlement was just another milestone on the Republic’s road to ruin.
One of the reasons Sulla’s constitution fared so poorly was that those who supported it did so mildly, and those who hated it did so passionately. Sulla’s proscriptions had left a mob of enemies in their wake. After the killing was over, the dictator Sulla barred their sons and grandsons from running for office. These families were among the most prominent in Rome, and cutting off their access to public office sewed permanent resentment. Many of them joined an aborted revolt against Sulla’s constitution, led by the consul Lepidus in 78. The revolt was quickly suppressed, but it showed how tenuous the peace really was. Even when the ban on the proscribed families was lifted and they were allowed to return to public life, it was certainly not with the same veneration for republican morality—and certainly with no respect for Sulla’s constitution.40
The law curtailing the power of the tribunes lasted barely a decade. Despite Sulla’s efforts, the populare path to power was still a viable option, and leaders curried favor with the people throughout the 70s by promising to restore the tribunes to their full dignity. The men who finally capitalized on this popular promise were Pompey and Crassus, who restored the ancient power of the tribunes during their shared consulship in 70. In that same year, the praetor Lucius Aurelius Cotta passed a law undoing Sulla’s judicial laws and opening the jury pool to both the Senate and Equestrians. Sulla’s attempt at Italian land redistribution fared no better. Just as had happened with the Gracchan program, within a generation Sulla’s veterans had mostly sold their land to rich magnates, and the end result was the Italian peninsula being dominated by large estates like never before. The provisional reorganization was similarly inadequate. Even with Sulla’s expanded roster of magistracies, the Roman Empire was still only run by perhaps a hundred men. It was not until the Augustan settlements that something resembling a permanent bureaucracy stabilized the corrupt and inadequate provisional administration.41
No one was more to blame for the failure of the Sullan constitution than Sulla himself. The facts of Sulla’s career spoke louder than his constitutional musings. As a young man he had flouted traditional rules of loyalty and deference to spread his own fame. When insulted, he marched legions on Rome. While abroad, he ran his own military campaigns and conducted his own diplomacy. When challenged back in Rome, he launched a civil war, declared himself dictator, killed his enemies, and then retired to get drunk in splendid luxury. The biography of Sulla drowned out the constitution of Sulla, and the men who followed him paid attention to what
In the final analysis, Sulla’s attempt to restore the Republic was doomed because he misdiagnosed the problem. In Sulla’s estimation the political upheavals that wracked Rome from the time of his birth in 138 until his death in 78 were the result of the Senate losing their dominant position. But what he did not realize is that the senatorial domination he had grown up with was a recent development. In fact, that domination was a leading
As would be predicted by Polybius’s constitutional theory, the restored domination of the senatorial oligarchy provoked populare demagogues, leading to an even more ferocious series of civil wars in the 40s and 30s. But Polybian theory did not hold for long. The fall of the senatorial oligarchy was precipitated by rhetorical populists, but their aim was never democracy, nor did democracy follow. Instead, weary of a generation of civil war, the Romans moved directly to the stable hand of an enlightened monarch. Unlike Sulla, however, when Augustus ascended to sole power he did not retire. So in the end, Sulla’s constitution did not lead to the permanent triumph of the aristocratic element, but rather the permanent triumph of the monarchical element. Though there never would be another king of Rome, there would be emperors. And they would rule Rome for a very long time.
