Meanwhile Mithradates and the East were forgotten in the crisis of the Social or Italic War, which broke out in 91 and threatened Rome’s very existence. The services of both Marius and Sulla were needed, and were given; but Sulla was the more successful, or, at any rate, the more fortunate. Of the Italian peoples Rome’s old foes the Samnites were the most formidable; these Sulla thoroughly vanquished, and took their chief town, Bovianum. But his victories were, after all, followed by the concession of the franchise to the Italian towns and communities generally, though an arrangement which made them vote in separate tribes greatly diminished their political power and became a further source of irritation. It was clear that Rome was on the eve of yet further troubles and revolutionary changes. Her armies, now recruited from the very scum of the population, had not the loyal and honourable spirit of former days, and cared only for licence and plunder. On every side it seemed that public life was demoralized and politics degraded. In 88 Sulla was consul; the revolt of Italy was at an end; and again the question came to the front—who was to go to the East and encounter the warlike king of Pontus, against whom war had been declared. The tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus moved that Marius should have the command; there was fearful rioting and bloodshed at Rome at the prompting of the popular leaders, Sulla narrowly escaping to his legions in Campania, whence he marched on Rome, being the first Roman who entered the city at the head of a Roman army. Marius now had to fly; and he and his party were crushed for the time.

Sulla, leaving things quiet at Rome, quitted Italy in 87 for the East, taking Greece on his way, and for the next four years he was winning victory after victory against the armies of Mithradates and accumulating boundless plunder. Athens, the headquarters of the Mithradatic cause, was taken and sacked in 86, and Sulla possessed himself of a library which contained Aristotle’s works. In the same year at Chaeroneia, the scene of Philip of Macedon’s memorable victory more than two and a half centuries before, and in the year following, at the neighbouring Orchomenus, he scattered like chaff, with hardly any loss to himself, immense hosts of the enemy. Crossing the Hellespont in 84 into Asia, he was joined by the troops of Fimbria, who soon deserted their general, a man sent out by the Marian party, now again in the ascendant at Rome. The same year peace was concluded with Mithradates on condition that he should resign all his recent conquests, give up all claim to meddle with Rome’s Asiatic dependencies, and pay a considerable indemnity. In fact the king was to be put back to the position he held before the war; but, as he raised cavils and Sulla’s soldiers wanted better terms and more spoil, he had in the end to content himself with being on the same footing as the other princes of Asia,—simply a vassal of Rome.

Sulla returned to Italy in 83, landing at Brundusium, having previously informed the senate in an official despatch of the result of his campaigns in Greece and Asia, and announced his presence on Italian ground. He complained, too, of the ill-treatment to which his friends and partisans had been subjected during his absence. The revolutionary party, specially represented by Cinna, Carbo, and the younger Marius, had massacred them wholesale, confiscated his property, and declared him a public enemy. They felt they must resist him to the death, and with numerous bodies of troops scattered throughout Italy, and the support of the newly enfranchised Italians, to whom it was understood that Sulla was bitterly hostile, they counted confidently on success, but on Sulla’s advance at the head of his 40,000 veterans many of them lost heart and deserted their leaders, while for the most part the Italians themselves, whom he confirmed in the possession of their new privileges, were won over to his side. Only the Samnites, who were as yet without the Roman franchise, remained his enemies, and it seemed as if the old war between Rome and Samnium had to be fought once again. Several Roman nobles, among them Cneius Pompeius (Pompey the Great), Metellus Pius, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Lucullus, joined Sulla, and in the following year (82) he won a decisive victory over the younger Marius near Praeneste (Palestrina), and then marched straight upon Rome, where again, just before his defeat of Marius, there had been a great massacre of his adherents, in which the famous and learned jurist Mucius Scaevola perished. Rome was at the same time in extreme peril from the advance of a Samnite army, and was barely saved by Sulla, who, after a bloody and very hard-fought battle, routed the enemy before the walls of Rome. With the death of the younger Marius, who killed himself after the surrender of Praeneste to one of Sulla’s officers, the civil war was at an end and Sulla was master of Rome and of the Roman world. Then came, with the object of breaking the neck of the Marian or popular party, the memorable “proscription,” when for the first time in Roman history a list of men declared to be outlaws and public enemies was exhibited in the forum, and a reign of terror— a succession of wholesale murders and confiscations throughout Rome and Italy—made the name of Sulla for ever infamous. The title of “dictator” was revived after a long period and conferred upon him; Sulla was in fact emperor of Rome, with absolute power over the life and fortunes of every Roman citizen. There were of course among them some really honest well-meaning men who looked up to him as the “saviour of society.” After celebrating a splendid triumph for the Mithradatic War, and assuming the surname of “Felix” (“Epaphroditus,” “Venus’s favourite,” he styled himself in addressing Greeks), he carried in 80 and 79 his great political reforms (see Rome, vol. XX. pp. 761-762). Of these the main object was to invest the senate, the thinned ranks of which he had recruited with a number of his own creatures, with full control over the state, over every magistrate and every province, and the mainstay of his political system was to be the military colonies which he had established with grants of land throughout every part of Italy, to the injury and ruin of the old Italian freeholders and farmers, who from this time dwindled away, leaving whole districts waste and desolate. Sulla’s work had none of the elements of permanence; it was a mere stop-gap purchased at the cost of infinite misery and demoralization.

In 79 Sulla resigned his dictatorship and retired to Puteoli, where he died in the following year, probably from the bursting of a blood-vessel, though there is a story that he fell a victim to a particularly loathsome disease similar to that which cut off one of the Herods (Acts xii. 23). The half lion, half fox, as his enemies called him, the “Don Juan of politics,” to quote Mommsen’s happy phrase, the man who carried out a policy of “blood and iron” with a grim humour, amused himself in his last days with actors and actresses, with dabbling in poetry, and completing the Memoirs of his strange and eventful life.

For Sulla and his times, there is his Life by Plutarch, who had his Memoirs for one of his authorities, and there are very numerous references to him in Cicero’s writings. The best and fullest modern account of him is that of Mommsen (vol. iii,, bk. iv. ch. 8, 9,)∙

He had married a second time, and anecdote is not complimentary to his second wife, while his daughter, who married the great duke of Rohan, also had a not unblemished reputation. Sully, however, who, though deprived of (and indeed resigning) all control of public affairs after Henry’s death, retained great wealth, lived in what was almost a caricature of the stately fashions of the time, aud busied himself in the composition of memoirs which are among the most curious in form, and not the least interesting in contents, of the kind. He instructed his secretaries to draw the book up in the form of an elaborate address to himself: “you then did this”; “you said as follows”; “as you have been good enough to inform us, the affair went on this wise”; and so forth. And he not only had the book executed in this extraordinary fashion but had it read out to him. Its title is as odd as other things about it and runs thus: Mémoires des Sages et Royales (Economies d'Estat, domestiques, politiques, militaires de Henry le Grand, l’Exemplaire des Roys, le Prince des Vertus, des Armes, et des Loix, et le Pere en effet de ses Peuples François. Et des servitudes utiles, obéissances convenables, et administrations loyales de Maximilian de Béthune, l’un des plus confidans, familiers, et utiles soldats et serviteurs du grand Mars des François. Dedieés à la France, à tous les bons soldats, et tous peuples François. Two folio volumes were splendidly printed, nominally at Amsterdam, but really under Sully’s own eye at his château, in 1634; the other two did not appear till twenty years after his death. As his wealth, his im- perious and grumbling temper, the favour which he had enjoyed and his subsequent loss of it, joined to attract odium, his character and his book were rather roughly handled in his lifetime. Marbault secretary to Du Plessis-Mornay, Sully’s chief rival, wrote a very caustic criticism of the Memoirs, from which, though it remained in MS. till the 19th century, Tallemant des Réaux, the insatiable scandal-monger, compiled a not unamusing but distinctly calumnious article on Sully. Most of the stories it contains may be unhesitatingly disbelieved. At the same time Sully was by no means the ideally wise and good minister that he has not unfrequently been represented as being. He was as faithful as a dog, and as surly. He grasped wealth and place to an extent not quite compatible with the idea of pure devotion to his king or his country, and his jealousy of all other ministers and all other favourites was extravagant and unceasing. Still there is no doubt that he was an excellent man of business, that, if not exactly what would be now called an incorruptible minister, he made no gains not sanctioned by the customs of the time, that he was inexorable in interfering with peculation and malversation on the part of others, that he opposed the ruinous personal expenditure which was the bane of almost all European monarchies in his day, and that he did much both as a man of war and as a man of peace to make France strong, united, and happy. His literary power, moreover, was far from small. Although the fantastic form of his Memoirs, after being diverting for a time, grows not a little wearisome, they have phrases and passages of great vivacity, which it is reasonable to attribute to Sully himself rather than to his spokesmen, and they show much grasp of administrative business.

The arrangement of the Memoirs so shocked the 18th century that in 1745 the abbé de l’Écluse re-edited or rather rewrote them in the ordinary form of narrative. This text has of course no interest; the proper version with the commentary of Marbault may be found in the collection of Michaud and Poujoulat (vols. xvi. and xvii.).