Sulla's civil war

• 1. Introduction

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  Sulla's civil war tore the Roman Republic apart in the years 83 to 82 BC, a conflict that would end not merely with one side defeated but with one man seizing the highest office in the state. The victorious general Lucius Cornelius Sulla declared himself dictator after his forces crushed the Marian faction just outside the walls of Rome itself. The war pitted Sulla against the heirs of a regime that had formed in his absence: the followers of Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Cinna, men who had taken Rome by force while Sulla was occupied fighting Mithridates in the east. What emerges from this conflict is not just a story of rival armies but of broken promises, mass executions, and a city that changed hands more than once. How did a general's absence from Rome ignite a civil war? What happened at the decisive battle that ended it? And what did Sulla do with absolute power once he held it?

• 2. Absence and Usurpation

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  Gaius Marius returned to Rome with an army while Sulla was fighting in the east, and what followed was a systematic purge. Based on Marius's orders, his soldiers swept through the city killing Sulla's leading supporters, including Gnaeus Octavius, who had been holding Rome for the Sullan faction. The severed heads of the murdered were displayed in the Forum. After five days of violence, Cinna ordered his more disciplined troops to kill Marius's rampaging soldiers, but by then roughly a hundred Roman nobles had been murdered.

  Marius moved quickly to consolidate power. He declared Sulla's reforms and laws invalid, had Sulla officially exiled, and arranged for himself and Cinna to be elected consuls for 86 BC. He also claimed Sulla's eastern command for himself. Marius died a fortnight after taking office, leaving Cinna in sole control.

  The Marians then dispatched Lucius Valerius Flaccus eastward with an army to strip Sulla of his command. Flaccus's second in command was Gaius Flavius Fimbria, whom ancient sources describe as a man of few virtues. According to Plutarch's biography of Sulla, Fimbria eventually agitated against Flaccus and incited the troops to murder their commanding officer in 84 BC. Sulla, encamped nearby, had in the meantime encouraged Flaccus's men to desert, a tactic that thinned the opposing force before the murder even occurred. When Cinna himself died in a mutiny at Ancona, Sulla resolved to march back to Rome.

• 3. The Landing and Rallying of Allies

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  In the spring of 83 BC, Sulla brought his army ashore in two divisions in southern Italy: one at Brundisium and one at Tarentum. At Tarentum he offered sacrifices to the gods before advancing inland. The outlawed nobles and former Sullan supporters who had survived the Marian-Cinna years immediately flocked to his cause.

  Among the most prominent were Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and Lucius Marcius Philippus. Metellus and Crassus each arrived at the head of independently raised armies. Philippus was then governing Sardinia and secured the island for Sulla without a fight.

  Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the man history knows as Pompey, raised three legions from his father's veterans in his home territory of Picenum. He defeated and outmaneuvered the Marian forces blocking his path and marched south to join Sulla. When the two men finally met, Pompey greeted Sulla with the title Imperator. Even Publius Cornelius Cethegus, who had been a firm Marian supporter, now switched sides.

• 4. Battles of 83 BC

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  Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, consul of 85 BC, sent two newly elected consuls to stop Sulla's advance. Gaius Norbanus moved first, blocking the road to Capua in Campania. Sulla sent envoys to negotiate, but Norbanus rejected them. At the Battle of Mount Tifata the two armies clashed, and Sulla inflicted a crushing defeat: Norbanus lost six thousand men while Sulla reported only seventy casualties. Norbanus withdrew to Capua.

  Sulla pursued him but was checked by the other consul, Scipio Asiagenus, encamped nearby. Scipio agreed to negotiate; his legate Quintus Sertorius distrusted Sulla and urged a decisive battle instead. Sertorius was overruled and sent to inform Norbanus of the armistice. On his way, Sertorius captured the town of Suessa, which had gone over to the Sullans. Sulla complained of this breach; Scipio responded by returning the hostages Sulla had given as a sign of good faith. That gesture outraged Scipio's own soldiers, who were already reluctant to fight battle-hardened Sullan veterans. They made a private deal with Sulla and defected en masse. Scipio and his son were found hiding in their tents and brought before Sulla, who released them after extracting a promise never to fight for Carbo again. Scipio broke the promise immediately and went straight back to Carbo in Rome.

  By the end of the 83 BC campaigning season, one of Sulla's legates, Marcus Lucullus, defeated a force of fifty cohorts with only sixteen cohorts of his own at Fidentia.

• 5. Collapse of the Marian Cause

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  The new consuls for 82 BC were Carbo, serving his third term, and Gaius Marius the Younger, who was only 26 to 28 years old. The Marians spent the winter refilling their ranks: Sertorius levied troops in Etruria, old veterans of the elder Marius came back to fight under his son, and the Samnites rallied behind Carbo, hoping to settle scores with the man who had defeated them in the Social War.

  The decisive engagement in the south came at Sacriportus, near Signia, where Marius the Younger's army met Sulla's veterans. After an initial skirmish, Sulla began making camp. While his men were still digging the ditch and raising earthworks, Marius launched a surprise attack. Sulla's veterans drove their throwing spears into the ground to form a makeshift barricade and drew their swords. When they had organized their lines, they counter-attacked. Five cohorts of infantry and two of cavalry deserted to Sulla mid-battle, triggering a general rout. Marius lost 28,000 men killed, captured, or fled; Sulla claimed to have lost only 23.

  Marius survived and retreated with 7,000 men to the fortified city of Praeneste. The gates were open for the first arrivals, but as Sullan cavalry closed in, the terrified townspeople shut the gates. Marius himself had to be hauled up over the wall on a rope; hundreds of Marians trapped outside were massacred. Sulla left his lieutenant Lucretius Afella to maintain the siege and advanced on the now-undefended capital.

  Before Sulla could reach Rome, Marius sent a message to the praetor Lucius Junius Brutus Damasippus ordering the murder of any remaining Sullan sympathizers. Damasippus called a meeting of the Senate and had the marked men cut down inside the Curia itself. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was killed on the senate steps as he fled. The Pontifex Maximus, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, was murdered in the Temple of Vesta; the bodies were thrown into the Tiber. Rome's people, hearing that Sulla surrounded the city, opened the gates and let him enter without a fight.

• 6. The Colline Gate

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  With Rome in Sullan hands, most of southern Italy under his control, and Carbo's forces battered in the north, the war's final act gathered around the siege of Praeneste. The Samnite general Pontius Telesinus and the Lucanian general Marcus Lamponius commanded a large combined force trying to break through to Marius the Younger. Sulla moved his army into a strong defensive position in their path, forcing them to change plans.

  Damasippus, Censorinus, and Carrinas joined their remaining men with the Samnites and Lucanians. Together they chose to march directly on Rome, gambling that Sulla would have to abandon his blocking position. Sulla found out and immediately gave chase. Outside the walls of Rome, before the Colline Gate, the final battle of the civil war was fought. It was a hard-fought, drawn-out engagement. When it was over, an estimated 50,000 men had lost their lives on the battlefield.

  Damasippus, Carrinas, and Censorinus were brought before Sulla the following day and executed. Their heads, along with those of Lamponius and Telesinus, were sent to Praeneste and displayed to Marius the Younger as proof the relief was never coming.

  Sulla entered Rome presenting himself as the city's savior from the ancient Samnite enemy. A Senate meeting was convened in the Temple of Bellona. While Sulla addressed the senators, screams reached them from the Campus Martius. Sulla told the Senate those were merely some criminals receiving correction. What the senators heard was 8,000 prisoners who had surrendered the day before being executed on Sulla's orders. Not one captured man was spared.

• 7. Proscriptions and Power

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  Marius the Younger attempted to escape Praeneste through the city's drains but failed and took his own life. The city surrendered; Sulla executed most of the defenders but spared the lives of the Roman citizens among them. Sulla's legions then fanned out across Italy, destroying the remaining Marian strongholds: Aesernia, Norba, and Volaterrae were all wiped out.

  Once supreme power was formally his, Sulla launched the proscriptions, a program of targeted killing combined with property seizure. He began by posting eighty names with no consultation. After a day he added two hundred and twenty more, and on the third day added as many again. He told the Roman people that he had listed everyone he could recall, and that names which escaped him now would be added later. In total, Sulla ordered the execution of some 1,500 nobles including senators and equites, though estimates of the actual death toll run as high as 9,000. Helping a proscribed person was a capital offence; killing one was rewarded. Family members were not immune from punishment, and slaves were not excluded from the rewards. The proceeds from auctioning the confiscated property more than covered the cost of the reward payments, leaving Sulla wealthier than before. To guard against future retaliation, Sulla barred the sons and grandsons of the proscribed from holding political office, a restriction that would remain in force for more than thirty years.

  The young Gaius Julius Caesar, as Cinna's son-in-law, found himself on Sulla's list and fled Rome. His relatives, several of them Sulla's supporters, secured his pardon. Sulla reportedly noted in his memoirs that he regretted letting Caesar live because of the young man's notorious ambition. The historian Suetonius records that when Sulla finally agreed to spare Caesar, he warned those pleading Caesar's case: "In this Caesar there are many Mariuses."

• 8. Reshaping the Republic

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  Sulla used his dictatorship to rebuild Roman government around the Senate and the patrician class, reversing decades of populist gains. He required senatorial approval before any bill could be submitted to the Plebeian Council, and he restored the older Servian organization to the Centuriate Assembly.

  Sulla's relationship with the Tribunate was personal as well as political. A tribune's scheming had cost him his eastern command, and he moved to render the office powerless and unattractive. Tribunes lost the power to initiate legislation. Anyone who served as tribune was barred from holding any further office, which meant ambitious men would stop seeking the post. Sulla also revoked the tribunes' power to veto acts of the Senate, though he preserved their authority to protect individual citizens.

  To expand the Senate from 300 to 600 members, Sulla increased the number of magistrates elected each year and granted automatic Senate membership to every newly elected quaestor. Transferring control of the courts from the equestrian class back to senators reinforced aristocratic authority still further. He also formalized the cursus honorum, requiring candidates to meet minimum ages and experience levels before standing for any given office, and reaffirmed that no individual could hold the same office within a ten-year window.

  Near the end of 81 BC, having reshaped the constitution, Sulla resigned his dictatorship, disbanded his legions, and restored normal consular government. He stood for consul alongside Metellus Pius and won the election. He then dismissed his bodyguard of lictors and walked unprotected in the Forum, inviting any citizen to call him to account. The historian Suetonius records that Julius Caesar later mocked this act of resignation, judging it a display of arrogance rather than restraint.