Sulla marches on Rome

In 88 BC a Roman consul led Roman legions into Rome. Nobody had ever done that. The man who did it believed he was saving the Republic.

Two old comrades

Lucius Cornelius Sulla came from an old family that had fallen on hard times. As an officer under Marius in Africa, he talked a neighboring king into handing Jugurtha over. Marius got the triumph. Sulla had the surrender engraved on his signet ring. The two men never liked each other again.

In 91 BC Rome's Italian allies, who had fought in every Roman war without a vote, rebelled to demand citizenship. Rome won this Social War partly by granting what they asked. Sulla came out of it a consul for 88.

The command

That year Mithridates VI of Pontus overran Rome's province of Asia, in western Turkey, and had tens of thousands of Romans and Italians there massacred on a single day. A war against him promised enormous plunder, and the Senate gave it to Sulla.

A tribune, Publius Sulpicius, then had the assembly transfer the command to Marius, who was nearly seventy and hungry for one more campaign. Sulla went to his army in Campania and told the soldiers that Marius would take a different army east, and the plunder with it. The soldiers urged him to lead them to Rome. According to Appian, every officer but one refused and walked away. The soldiers followed anyway.

Sulla took the city, had Sulpicius killed, and declared Marius a public enemy. Marius escaped to Africa. He had built armies that looked to their general, and his rival had just shown what such an army would do.

Revenge, then revenge

With Sulla gone, Marius and the consul Cinna took Rome back by force in 87 and killed their enemies. Heads went up on the speakers' platform in the Forum. Marius died in January 86, days into his seventh consulship.

Sulla came back from the East in 83 and fought his way up Italy. After winning outside Rome's Colline Gate in 82, he had himself named dictator. Nobody had held the office in 120 years, and it had always come with a six-month limit. Sulla's had none. His title said he was there to write laws and set the state in order.

The lists

Then he posted names in the Forum. Anyone on the list could be killed by anyone, and the killer collected a reward. The victim's property was auctioned, and his sons and grandsons were barred from office. Ancient counts run from about 500 names to more than 4,000. Plutarch tells of a man who found his own name and said, "My farm at Alba is hunting me." Crassus got very rich at those auctions. A young Julius Caesar, Marius's nephew by marriage, went into hiding until friends talked Sulla into sparing him.

The man who quit

Sulla used his power to strengthen the Senate and gut the tribunes. Then he gave up the dictatorship, and by 79 he had retired to the country as a private citizen. He died the next year. Why he quit is still argued over.

He meant to restore the old Republic. What Romans remembered was the method. In 49 BC, Cicero wrote that Pompey kept saying, "Sulla could do it. Why can't I?"

Play the sequence or scrub between events. Follow how a disputed command became a precedent for taking Rome by force.