But as soon as the envoys left Sulla told his men to suit up for battle. Word had already reached him that his friends inside the city were turning up dead. He also learned that Marius and Sulpicius were arming their supporters, promising freedom to slaves and gladiators who fought for them. The tales coming out of the city were more exaggerated than Sulla realized at the time. The call for slaves to join turned up a pitiful response; six veteran legions were marching on Rome—any slave who joined Marius would likely enjoy his freedom for all of five minutes before dying in the service of another man’s ambitions. But not knowing how weak the Marians really were, Sulla wanted to quickly secure a decisive victory. He ordered one of his legions forward to capture and hold the Esquiline Gate.37
Marius and Sulpicius were alerted that Sulla’s men were moving and they prepared their own forces for battle. The two sides clashed in the forum of the Esquiline Hill. Marian partisans beat back the encroaching legionaries and pelted them from rooftops with tiles. Appian says that after a generation of street fights, this was “the first fought in Rome with bugle and standards in full military fashion, no longer like a mere faction fight. To such extremity of evil had the recklessness of party strife progressed among them.” With fighting under way, Sulla turned up personally with reinforcements and used archers with flaming arrows to drive the Marians off the roofs.38
The Marians could hold against a single legion but never six, and they fell back as Sulla entered the city. Marius took temporary refuge in the Temple of Tellus and called for the citizens of Rome to join him in this patriotic defense against Sulla’s treacherous invasion—but his call went unheeded. To the plebs urbana, this was a grudge match between nobles that they wanted no part of. With Sulla seizing control of the main streets, Marius, Sulpicius, and their chief accomplices fled the city.39
SULLA MARCHED THROUGH Rome following the path of Roman triumphs toward the Capitoline Hill. With a last clutch of Marians having captured the Capitoline Hill, Sulla led an entire legion across the Pomerium, the sacred inner boundary of Rome, within which no citizen was to bear arms. One of the last and most sacred lines of mos maiorum had been crossed.40
Sulla was now left in the awkward position of being the first Roman to ever conquer Rome. He went out of his way to deflect the odium, singling out men under his command caught looting and punishing them for all to see. After a nervous night during which both he and Pompeius stayed up until dawn crisscrossing the city to make sure everything was under control, Sulla called for a public meeting the next morning in the Forum.41
When the crowd assembled, Sulla told them that his anger was only directed at a few select enemies. To prove his point, he announced the names of just twelve men he now considered enemies of the state. Marius and Sulpicius were at the top of the list. As public enemies, these twelve could now be killed on sight. But Sulla stressed that other than those twelve men, the rest of the population could expect no further trouble—even if they had taken part in the fighting. Sulla just wanted things to go back to normal.42
But by “normal” Sulla did not just mean the way things had been the day before. He wanted the Romans to return to their roots. He said that the Republic had fallen into a terrible state of disrepair and needed to return to the virtuous constitution of their elders. A bill presented to the Assembly should first gain approval from the Senate. Voting should be heavily tilted toward major landowners. Taking a page from Drusus’s reforms, Sulla proposed adding three hundred Equestrians to the Senate to bulk up their numbers and make the institution robust and powerful again. But before he got those wider reforms dispensed, Sulla addressed more specific business. He announced that every law passed since Sulla and Pompeius declared the holiday was null and void. Sulla and Pompeius would still be consuls. Sulla would still have the eastern command. The plan to disperse the Italians throughout the thirty-one rural tribes would disappear into thin air.43
Under the watchful eye of the Sullan legions, the Assembly turned Sulla’s suggestions into law. But after the reforms passed, Sulla sent his men back to Nola to prove that he was not a tyrant or a king. The Senate was, by now, convulsed with mixed emotions. Sulla was clearly acting as their savior and benefactor, but they bristled at Sulla’s pretensions to now be the patron of the Senate—as if they were now his clients. And crossing the Pomerium with an entire army was unforgivable sacrilege.44
