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number of several thousands. The same fate had already befallen the captives taken at the Colline gate; 8000 of them-all save the Roman rank and file-were slain in the Circus Maximus, which had been utilised as their prison. The Senate, sitting hard by in the Temple of Bellona, heard the groans and shrieks of the victims, and showed signs of terror. But Sulla bid them "stick to their business and not allow themselves to be distracted; it was only some malefactors who were suffering the reward of their crimes."

There was still much fighting to be done in Italy: Carbo deserted his army in Etruria and fled over-seas, but his partisans held out for some time in isolated bands. Norba and Nola stood long sieges, and Volaterrae held out for the incredible length of two years. But the main war in Italy practically came to an end with the victory of the Colline gate and the fall of Praeneste. The struggle after that date mainly consisted of the savage harrying of Samnium and Etruria, the two districts where the Democratic party had made itself most strong.

Leaving the completion of this guerilla warfare to his lieutenants, Sulla had set himself to the great work of his latter years, the remodelling of the Roman constitution on an oligarchical basis. With this object he had himself appointed dictator in November 82. But a dreadful preliminary to his political work was his great "Proscription," the formal revenge for what Marius and Cinna had done in B.C. 87-86. "Down to the moment of his victory," it was said, "he showed himself far more moderate and humane than could have been expected; after it was won, he was more cruel than could have been believed possible." He spared indeed the rank and file of the Roman Democrats, but he systematically cut off every man of note in their party. It seemed that he

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was determined that not one leader should survive to rally the partisans of the lost cause. He started his operations by issuing three long lists of persons on whose heads a price was set; the first contained 80 names, the second and third 220 each. He then coolly gave notice that he had condemned every one whom he could remember, but that those whom he had forgotten should be put into supplementary catalogues. These dreadful appendices kept coming out for many weeks, and not till they ceased could any Roman who had not taken the Optimate side feel himself secure. Many comparatively obscure names crept into the lists, for the generals and favourites of Sulla often got him to insert their personal enemies among the executed. He himself seems to have been as impervious to corruption as to pity, but those about him were not, and all sorts of old grudges were paid off under a pretence of political vengeance. In all, some 50 senators, 1600 equites, and at least 2000 private persons were executed in the Sullan proscriptions. The heads of the fallen were exhibited in the Forum, according to the disgusting custom which had begun at the death of Sulpicius. Their property was confiscated, and their children and grandchildren were declared of tainted blood and incapable of holding any public office. The "sons of the proscribed " formed a well-known group of malcontents during the next generation, on account of this disability which was now laid upon them.

1

But the Proscription was only, in Sulla's estimation, a necessary preliminary to the great work of reconstruction which he had taken in hand. He had resolved to rearrange the whole constitution, with the definite

1 As Mommsen has clearly shown, the larger numbers given by Appian, i. 103, Eutropius, v. 9, and others, include all those who fell in the civil war, not those who were regularly proscribed and executed.

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object of transferring the sovereignty of the state from the people to the Senate.

We have already pointed out that in the Roman politics of the last fifty years the main difficulty that lay at the bottom of all disputes was the quarrel for sovereignty. Should the Senate, according to recent usage, or the tribes, according to ancient constitutional theory, be the body that really ruled the city and the empire? Senatus Populusque Romanus was a sounding phrase, but neither Optimates nor Democrats had any love for the mutual interdependence which the words postulated.

Now Sulla thought that all the troubles of the time came from the fact that neither Senate nor people had full sovereignty; and, as a consistent oligarch and a conscientious party-man, he was determined to put the balance of power to an end, by conferring complete autocratic authority on his own senatorial order. The Optimates had, during the last fifty years, suffered from three different sorts of foes-from unruly tribunes galvanising into spasmodic life the cumbrous but all-powerful machinery of the Comitia; from over-great magistrates, like Marius or Cinna, who renewed their power from year to year and kept an army at their backs; and from the newly created Equestrian Order, the body of financiers, fighting for their own interests by the power of the purse, however sordid and anti-national these interests might be.

Sulla's laws, so far as they dealt with things political, resolve themselves into an ingenious and systematic attempt to break down the power of all these three enemies of the Senate-the Comitia Tributa and its tribunes, the great magistrates, and the equites. If all three were politically annihilated, there would be for the future no check on the omnipotence of the Senate. The dictator's object was to combine the maximum of real

with the minimum of formal change; for though he was himself completely emancipated from that slavish respect for the letter of the constitution which swayed the average Roman, he knew that this was the case neither with his friends nor with his enemies.

The hardest blows were aimed at the most powerful enemies, the tribunes and the Comitia Tributa, whose power of issuing and repealing any laws that they pleased had been the greatest danger of the Senate. As long as any Democratic tribune could bring forward whatever bills he chose, and as long as such bills, when passed by the Plebeian assembly, became binding on the state, there was no security against a reaction that might annul the whole of the Cornelian Laws the moment that their author should have passed away.

Sulla's action against the Comitia was very ingenious. He made no pretence of abolishing it, or of abrogating the omnipotence of such bills as it might pass. He only determined that no dangerous bill should ever come before it. This was accomplished by reviving and making indisputably valid the old claim of the Senate that every law should of right be laid before them and receive their auctoritas, or certificate of legality, before the tribune introduced it to the assembly. Now, obviously, such bills as the Senate would pass on as harmless and useful, would be measures that did not cut short their own authority or clash with their ideas of expediency. Sulla therefore compelled the Comitia to pass a law which made the grant of a senatus auctoritas a necessary preliminary for the production of a law before the people. Henceforth, as he hoped, there would be no chance of tiresome and dangerous bills for land distributions, or corn-doles, or grants of abnormal powers to magistrates, being passed by the assembly. All such schemes, if broached in the Senate, would be stifled there and go no farther. No measure of

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a Democratic complexion would ever reach the Comitia. All that the people would be able to do would be to reject bills sent down to them with the senatorial sanction, if they had the pluck to contradict the governing power in the state. Their power of initiative would be gone. Thus reduced to impotence, the assembly was no longer an object of dread to Sulla; and for that reason he did not think it worth while to abolish it, or even to turn out from it the hordes of Italians whom Cinna had thrust into the midst of the old citizens.

He made no attempt either to confine them to a few tribes or to suspend their franchise. Thus he kept to the letter the promise which he had made to the new citizens when he landed at Brundisium. Personally, as an old aristocrat, Sulla probably felt much less contempt for the Italians than for the original Plebs Urbana. What he thought of the freedmen, who were so prominent a feature in that body, may be guessed from the fact that he not only put them all back into the four city tribes, but actually foisted in among them in a single day no less than 10,000 voters of the lowest class, enfranchised slaves of those who had fallen in his own proscription. They all took him as their patron, and adopted his name of Cornelius, which was henceforth one of the commonest appellations in the slums.

To destroy completely the powers of the Plebeian assembly as an element in the constitution, it was necessary not merely to subordinate its legislative functions to those of the Senate, but to cut short the dangerous and anarchical privileges of its presiding magistrates, the tribunes. Some legislators would have abolished the tribunate altogether; and considering the way in which Tiberius Gracchus and Saturninus had used it, there would have been a fair excuse for so doing. Sulla, however, merely resolved that he would invent rules which should for the future keep