But Vopiscus was trying to cut in line. He had never served as praetor and was thus ineligible. With the elections approaching, the old optimate faction in the Senate sought to block Vopiscus, who was a notoriously unstable populare. To deny Vopiscus the consulship, they turned to newly enrolled tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus. Sulpicius seemed like the perfect guy for the job: “a man of eloquence and energy, who had earned situation by his wealth, his influence, his friendships, and by the vigor of his native ability and his courage, and had previously won great influence with the people by honorable means.” Sulpicius had grown up at the feet of the Metellan optimates and was one of the young students present for the dialogue at Crassus’s villa in September 91. Sulpicius vetoed Vopiscus’s request for a dispensation. But since the word of a tribune wasn’t what it used to be, it took a few rounds of street clashes before Vopiscus conceded defeat.18
Sulla and Pompeius won the consulship and Sulla received the eastern command—one of the signs he took to mean that fortune favored his every undertaking. Far from allowing his pride to reject the idea that his accomplishments were the result of luck, Sulla embraced Fortuna as his personal deity: “Being well endowed by nature for Fortune rather than for war, he seems to attribute more to Fortune than to his own excellence, and to make himself entirely the creature of this deity.” Shortly after his election he received another fortunate break—securing a new marriage to Metella, the widow of Scaurus. With this marriage, Sulla took the reins of the old Metellan faction and began to re-form it in his own image.19
BUT AFTER PAVING the way for the election of Sulla and Pompeius, the tribune Sulpicius turned on his optimate friends. The old Metellan faction seemed to be entering permanent eclipse. Crassus had died in 91. Scaurus died in 89. And of course, the cohort of six Metellan cousins had now come and gone, leaving behind only their uneven sons to carry the mantle. Despite the recent marriage of Sulla and Metella that might revive the family’s fortunes, Sulpicius decided to throw in his lot with Marius. Where once Sulpicius had followed the optimate path to power, he now embraced the populares.20
For this betrayal, Sulpicius is roundly denounced in the sources “so that the question was not whom else he surpassed in wickedness, but in what he surpassed his own wickedness. For the combination of cruelty, effrontery, and rapacity in him was regardless of shame and of all evil.” Cicero later wailed, “For why should I speak of Publius Sulpicius? Whose dignity, and sweetness, and emphatic conciseness in speaking was so great that he was able by his oratory to lead even wise men into error, and virtuous men into pernicious sentiments.” But it would not be until the early months of 88 that Sulpicius’s betrayal revealed itself.21
Sulpicius’s turn against the optimate was not entirely unpredictable. He was known to be an “admirer and an imitator of Saturninus, except that he charged him with timidity and hesitation in his political measures.” Any man who believed Saturninus timid must have had a ferocious spirit. But in Sulpicius’s final analysis, it was not courage that Saturninus lacked, but organization. The Gracchi, Saturninus, and Drusus had all relied on random mobs raised in an emergency to fight their battles. So Sulpicius’s great contribution to Roman politics was the invention of the professional street gang. Surrounding himself with three hundred armed men of Equestrian rank whom he called the Anti-Senate, Sulpicius also kept thousands of mercenary swordsmen on retainer. If Sulpicius gave the word they would be ready to fight.22
But beyond his alliance with Marius, Sulpicius saw that his real path to power went through the Italians. In early 88, he proposed a law to recall the men exiled by the anti-Italian Varian Commission. And with the question of civitas for the Italians settled, Sulpicius announced his intention to give them full
