Sulla, LUCIUS CORNELIUS, surnamed by himself FELIX, a scion of the illustrious house of the Cornelii, was born in 138 B.C. His limited patrimony was sufficient to secure him a good education, and his youth was spent not more in the pursuit of pleasure than in the study of the Greek and Roman authors. The liberality of his step- mother increased his slender means, and enabled him to aspire to the honours of the state. As quaestor in 107 under Marius in Africa he crowned a series of important successes by inducing Bocchus, the Mauritanian king, to surrender Jugurtha, whom he brought in chains to the Roman camp (106). The war of the Cimbri and Teutones (104-101) saw Sulla again serving under Marius, whose jealousy, however, drove him to take a command under the other consul, Quintus Catulus. In 93 he was praetor, and in 92 proprætor in Cilicia, where the senate sent him with special orders to restore Ariobarzanes to the throne of Cappadocia, from which he had been expelled by Mithridates. After achieving a complete success, Sulla returned to Italy in 91. The private hatred of Marius and Sulla began now to take on a political aspect, as the aristocratic tendencies of the latter grew prominent. Their long-smouldering animosity was on the point of bursting forth, when the breaking out of the Social War hushed all private quarrels for the time. The aged Marius had now the deep mortification of finding his military achievements thrown into the shade by the brilliant successes of his rival. The expectations of Marius were dashed to the ground when the senate bestowed on Sulla, after his consulship in 88, supreme command in the Mithridatic war. Marius rushed headlong into treason and civil strife. Then followed the expulsion of Sulla from Rome, his triumphant return at the head of his devoted legions, the overthrow of the Marian party, and the first proscription. By the beginning of 87 Sulla was able to embark for the East. During the four years he spent there he won the victories of Chæronea (86) and Orchomenus (84) against Archelaus, the general of Mithridates. Next he crossed the Hellespont, crushed Fimbria, who had obtained the command of the army sent out by the Marian party (which, in Sulla's absence, had again got the upper hand in Italy), forced Mithridates to sue for peace, then sailed for Italy and landed at Brundisium (83). The victory over the Samnites and Lucanians at the Colline gate brought the struggle to a close (82), and Sulla was now master of Rome and Italy. Then followed his dictatorship, and the period of the proscriptions (81)—a virtual reign of terror, in which of senators were slain perhaps from one to two hundred, of knights between two and three thousand. During the next two years several very important constitutional reforms were carried, mostly reactionary, and tending to increase the authority of the senate. The restoration of the judicia to the senate, the abolition of the functions of the comitia tributa, the withdrawal from the tribunes of the right to summon the comitia, the doubling of the number of the senate, the annual election of twenty quaestors, the enactments that no man should be praetor without having been quaestor, or consul without having been praetor, and that tribuni plebis should be eligible for no other office, the institution of quaestiones without appeal confined to special classes of crimes—these were some of the provisions of a legislation, with a few exceptions, doomed to fall within ten years. In 79 Sulla resigned the dictatorship and retired to his estate at Puteoli, where, surrounded by buffoons and dancers, he indulged to the last in every sensual excess of which his exhausted frame was capable. He died in 78, at the age of sixty. His monument in the Campus Martius bore an inscription, attributed to Sulla himself, which said that none of his friends ever did him a kindness, and none of his foes a wrong, without being largely requited.
Sulla's manners were haughty and morose, though not devoid of a certain sensibility, for he was easily moved, it is said, even to tears, by a tale of sorrow. His keen observation enabled him to see in young Cæsar, in spite of a careless temper and dissipated habits, what would yet prove 'more than one Marius.' His eyes, we are told, were of a piercing blue, and his complexion was disfigured by pimples and blotches, compared by the raillery of the Greeks to a mulberry sprinkled with meal.