senate was his main object. With this purpose he had already, 666. when consul in 88, made the senatus auctoritas legally necessary for proposals to the assembly. He now as dictator[1] followed this up by crippling the power of the magistracy, which had been the most effective weapon in the hands of the senate's opponents. The legislative freedom of the tribunes was already hampered by the necessity of obtaining the senate's sanction; in addition, Sulla restricted their wide powers of interference (intercessio) to their original purpose of protecting individual plebeians,[2] and discredited the office by prohibiting a tribune from holding any subsequent office in the state.[3] The control of the courts (quaestiones perpetuae) was taken from the equestrian order and restored to the senate.[4] To prevent the people from suddenly installing and keeping in high office a second Marius, he re-enacted the old law against re-election,[5] and made legally binding the custom which required a man to mount up gradually to the consulship through the lower offices.[6] His increase of the number of praetors from six to eight,[7] and of quaestors to twenty,[8] though required by administrative necessities, tended, by enlarging the numbers and further dividing the authority of the magistrates, to render them still more dependent upon the central direction of the senate. Lastly, he replaced the pontifical and augural colleges in the hands of the senatorial nobles, by enacting that vacancies 650. in them should, as before the lex Domitia (104), be filled up by co-optation.[9] It cannot be said that Sulla was successful in fortifying the republican system against the dangers which menaced it from without. He accepted as an accomplished fact the enfranchisement of the Italians,[10] but he made no provision to guard against the consequent reduction of the comitia to an absurdity,[11] and with them of the civic government which rested upon them, or to organize an effective administrative system for the Italian communities.[12] Of all men, too, Sulla had the best reason to appreciate the dangers to be feared from the growing independence of governors and generals in the provinces, and from the transformation of the old civic militia into a group of professional armies, devoted only to a successful leader, and with the weakest possible sense of allegiance to the state. He had himself, as proconsul of Asia, contemptuously and successfully defied the home government, and he, more than any other Roman general, had taught his soldiers to look only to their leader, and to think only of booty.[13] Yet, beyond a few inadequate regulations, there is no evidence that Sulla dealt with these burning questions, the settlement of which was among the greatest of the achievements of Augustus.[14] One administrative reform of real importance must, lastly, be set down to his credit. The judicial procedure first established in 149 for the trial of cases of magisterial 605-673. extortion in the provinces, and applied between 149 and 81 to cases of treason and bribery, Sulla extended so as to bring under it the chief criminal offences, and thus laid the foundations of the Roman criminal law.[15]
The Sullan system stood for nine years, and was then overthrown—as it had been established—by a successful soldier. Overthrow of the Sullan constitution, 70 = 684. It was the fortune of Cn. Pompeius, a favourite officer of Sulla, first of all to violate in his own person the fundamental principles of the constitution re-established by his old chief, and then to overturn it. In Spain the Marian governor Q. Sertorius (see Sertorius) had defeated one after another of the proconsuls sent out by the senate, and was already in 77 master of all Hither Spain. To meet the crisis, Pompey, who was not yet thirty, and had never held even the quaestorship, was sent out to Spain with proconsular authority.[16] Still Sertorius held out, until in 73 he was 681. 683. 681. foully murdered by his own officers. The native tribes who had loyally stood by him submitted, and Pompey early in 71 returned with his troops to Italy, where, during his absence in Spain, an event had occurred which had shown Roman society with startling plainness how near it stood to revolution. In 73 Spartacus,[17] a Thracian slave, escaped with seventy others from a gladiators' training school at Capua. In an incredibly short time he found himself at the head of 70,000 runaway slaves, outlaws, brigands and impoverished peasants, and for two years terrorized Italy, routed the legions sent against him, and even threatened Rome. He was at length defeated and slain by the praetor, M. Licinius Crassus, in Apulia. In Rome itself the various 676. classes and parties hostile to the Sullan system had, ever since Sulla's death in 78, been incessantly agitating for the repeal of his most obnoxious laws, and needed only
- ↑ For Sulla's dictatorship as in itself a novelty, see App. i. 98; Plut. Sulla, 33; Cic. Ad Att. 9, 15; Cic. De Legg. i. 15, 42.
- ↑ Cic. De Legg. iii. 9, 22, “injuriae faciendae potestatem ademit, auxilii ferendi reliquit.” Cf. Cic. Verr. i. 60, 155; Livy, Epit. lxxxix.
- ↑ Cic. Pro Cornel. fr. 78; Ascon. In Corn. pp. 59, 70; Appian i. 100.
- ↑ Vell. ii. 32; Tac. Ann. xi. 22; Cic. Verr. Act. i. 13, 37.
- ↑ App. B.C. i. 100; cf. Livy vii. 42 (342 B.C.), “ne quis eundem magistratum intra decem annos caperet.”
- ↑ The custom had gradually established itself. Cf. Livy xxxii. 7. The “certus ordo magistratuum” legalized by Sulla was—quaestorship, praetorship, consulate; App. i. 100.
- ↑ Pompon. De orig. juris (Dig. i. 2, 2, 32); Vell. ii. 89. Compare also Cicero, In Pison. 15, 35 with Cic. Pro Milone, 15, 39. The increase was connected with his extension of the system of quaestiones perpetuae, which threw more work on the praetors as the magistrates in charge of the courts.
- ↑ Tac. Ann. xi. 22. The quaestorship henceforward carried with it the right to be called up to the senate. By increasing the number of quaestors, Sulla provided for the supply of ordinary vacancies in the senate and restricted the censors' freedom of choice in filling them up. Fragments of the lex Cornelia de XX quaestoribus survive. See C.I.L. i. 108; Bruns, Fontes juris Romani (ed. 6), p. 91.
- ↑ Dio xxxvii. 57; Ps. Ascon. 102 (Orelli). He also increased their numbers; Livy, Epit. lxxxix.
- ↑ He did propose to deprive several communities which had joined Cinna of the franchise, but the deprivation was not carried into effect; Cic. Pro domo, 30, 79.
- ↑ The inadequacy of the comitia as a representative body was increased by the unequal distribution of the new citizens amongst the thirty-five tribes, each of which formed a single voting unit. Some tribes represented only a thinly populated district in the Campagna with one or two outlying communities, others included large and populous territories. See Mommsen, Staatsr. iii. 187; Hermes, xxii. 101 sqq.
- ↑ Sulla does not appear to have passed any general municipal law; the necessary resettlement of the local constitutions after the Social War was seemingly carried out by commissioners. The fragment of a municipal charter found at Tarentum (Ephem. epigr. ix. 1, Dessau, Inscr. Lat. sel. 6086) is probably a specimen of such leges datae.
- ↑ Sall. Cat. 11. “L. Sulla exercitum, quo sibi fidum faceret, contra morem majorum luxuriose nimisque liberaliter habuerat.”
- ↑ There was a lex Cornelia de provinciis ordinandis, but only two of its provisions are known; (1) that a magistrate sent out with the imperium should retain it till he re-entered the city (Cic. Ad Fam. i. 9, 25), a provision which increased rather than diminished his freedom of action; (2) that an outgoing governor should leave his province within thirty days after his successor's arrival (Cic. Ad Fam. iii. 6. 3). A lex Cornelia de majestate contained, it is true, a definition of treason evidently framed in the light of recent experience. The magistrate was forbidden “exire de provincia, educere exercitum, bellum sua sponte gerere, in regnum injussu populi ac senatus accedere,” Cic. Pis. 21, 50. Sulla also added one to the long list of laws dealing with extortion in the provinces. But the danger lay, not in the want of laws, but in the want of security for their observance by an absolutely autocratic proconsul. The present writer cannot agree with those who would include among Sulla's laws one retaining consuls and praetors in Rome for their year of office and then sending them out to a province. This was becoming the common practice before 81. After 81 it is invariable for praetors, as needed for the judicial work, and invariable but for two exceptions in the case of consuls; but nowhere is there a hint that there had been any legislation on the subject, and there are indications that it was convenience and not law which maintained the arrangement. Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, iv. 118 sqq.; Marquardt, Staatsverw. i. 518; cf. also Cic. Att. 8, 15; “consules, quibus more majorum concessum est vel omnes adire provincias.”
- ↑ For this, the most lasting of Sulla's reforms, see Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, iv. 127 q.; Rein, Criminal-Recht; Zumpt, Criminal-Prozess d. Römer; Greenidge, Legal Procedure of Cicero's Time, p. 415 sqq.
- ↑ Plut. Pomp. 17; Livy, Epit. xci. For Pompey's earlier life, see Pompey.
- ↑ For the Slave War, see Spartacus.
