among them Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great), Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Licinius Lucullus, joined Sulla, and in the following year (82) he won a decisive victory over the younger Marius near Praeneste (mod. Palestrina) and then marched upon Rome, where again, just before his defeat of Marius, there had been a great massacre of his adherents, in which the learned jurist Q. 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 hard-fought battle, routed the enemy under Pontius Telesinus at the Colline gate of Rome. With the death of the younger Marius, who killed himself after the surrender of Praeneste, the civil war was at an end, and Sulla was master of Rome and of the Roman world. Then came 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 began throughout Rome and Italy. The title of “dictator” was revived and Sulla was in fact emperor of Rome. After celebrating a splendid triumph for the Mithradatic War, and assuming the surname of “Felix” (“Epaphroditus,” “Venus’s favourite,”[1] he styled himself in addressing Greeks), he carried in 80 and 79 his great political reforms (see Rome: History, II. “The Republic”). The main object of these was to invest the senate, which he recruited with a number of his own party, 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 ruin of the old Italian freeholders and farmers, who from this time dwindled away, leaving whole districts waste and desolate.
In 79 Sulla resigned his dictatorship and retired to Puteoli (mod. Pozzuoli), where he died in the following year, probably from the bursting of a blood-vessel. The story that he fell a victim to a disease similar to that which cut off one of the Herods (Acts xii. 23) is probably an invention of his enemies. The “half lion, half fox,” as his enemies called him, the “Don Juan of politics” (Mommsen), 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 (commentarii, ὑπομνήματα) of his eventful life (see H. Peter, Historicorum romanorum reliquiae, 1870). Even then he did not give up his interest in state and local affairs, and his end is said to have been hastened by a fit of passion brought on by a remark of the quaestor Granius, who openly asserted that he would escape payment of a sum of money due to the Romans, since Sulla was on his death-bed. Sulla sent for him and had him strangled in his presence; in his excitement he broke a blood-vessel and died on the following day. He was accorded a magnificent public funeral, his body being removed to Rome and buried in the Campus Martius. His monument bore an inscription written by himself, to the effect that he had always fully repaid the kindnesses of his friends and the wrongs done him by his enemies. His military genius was displayed in the Social War and the campaigns against Mithradates; while his constitutional reforms, although doomed to failure from the lack of successors to carry them out, were a triumph of organization. But he massacred his enemies in cold blood, and exacted vengeance with pitiless and calculated cruelty; he sacrificed everything to his own ambition and the triumph of his party.
The ancient authorities for Sulla and his time are his Life by Plutarch (who made use of the Memoirs); Appian, Bell. civ.; for the references in Cicero see Orelli’s Onomasticon Tullianum. Modern treatises by C. S. Zachariä, L. Cornelius S. als Ordner des römischen Freystaates (1834); T. Lau, Lucius Cornelius Sulla (1855); E. Linden, De hello civili Sullano (1896); P. Cantalupi, La Guerra civile Sullana in Italia (1892) ; C. W. Oman, Seven Roman Statesmen (1902); F. D. Gerlach, Marius und Sulla (1856); J. M. Sunden, “De tribunicia potestate a Lucio Sulla imminuta” in Skrifter utgifna af k. humanistika Vetenskapssamfundet i Upsala, v., 1897, in which it is argued against Mommsen that Sulla did not deprive the tribunes of the right of_ proposing rogations. See also Mommsen’s History of Rome, vol. St., bk. iv., ch., 8, 9; Drumann, Geschichte Roms, 2nd ed. by Groebe, ii. 364-432; Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie, iv. 1522–1566 (Frohlich).
His nephew (as some say, though the degree of relationship cannot be clearly established), Publius Cornelius Sulla was consul in 66 B.C. with P. Autronius Paetus. Both were convicted of bribery, and Paetus subsequently joined Catiline in his first conspiracy. There is little doubt that Sulla also was implicated; Sallust does not mention it, but other authorities definitely assert his guilt. After the second conspiracy he was accused of having taken part in both conspiracies. Sulla was defended by Cicero and Hortensius, and acquitted. There is no doubt that, after his first conviction, Sulla remained very quiet, and, whatever his sympathies may have been, took no active part in the conspiracy. When the civil war broke out, Sulla took the side of Caesar, and commanded the right wing at the battle of Pharsalus. He died in 45.
See Cicero, Pro Sulla, passim (ed. J. S. Reid, 1882); Ad Fam. ix. 10, xv. 17; Dio Cassius xxxvi. 44, xxxvii. 25; Suetonius, Caesar, 9; Caesar, Bell civ., iii. 51, 89; Appian, Bell. civ. ii. 76.
SULLIVAN, SIR ARTHUR SEYMOUR (1842–1900), English musical composer, was born in London on the 13th of May 1842, being the younger of the two sons of Thomas Sullivan, a cultivated Irish musician who was bandmaster at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from 1845 to 1856, and taught at the Military School of Music at Kneller Hall from 1857 till his death in 1866. His mother, née Mary Coghlan (1811–1882), had Italian blood in her veins. Arthur Sullivan was brought up to music from boyhood, and he had learnt to play every wind instrument in his father’s band by the age of eight. He was sent to school at Bayswater till he was twelve, and then, through Sir George Smart, he was, at his own persistent request, made a Chapel Royal chorister, and entered Mr Helmore’s school for Chapel Royal boys in Cheyne Walk. He had a fine treble voice, and sang with exceptional taste. In 1856 the Mendelssohn Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music was thrown open for the first time for competition, and was won by Sullivan, his nearest rival being Joseph Barnby. At the Academy he studied under Sterndale Bennett, Arthur O’Leary and John Goss, and did so well that he was, given an extension of his scholarship for two years in succession. In 1858, his voice having broken, he was enabled by means of his scholarship to go to study at the conservatorium of Leipzig. There he had for teachers Moscheles and Plaidy for pianoforte, Hauptmann for counterpoint, Rietz and Reinecke for composition, and F. David for orchestral playing and conducting. Among his fellow-students were Grieg, Carl Rosa, Walter Bache, J. F. Barnett and Edward Dannreuther. Instead of the Mendelssohn cultus which represented orthodoxy in London, German musical interest at this period centred in Schumann, Schubert and the growing reputation of Wagner, whilst Liszt and Von Bulow were the celebrities of the day. Sullivan thus became acquainted for the first time with master-pieces which were then practically ignored in England. He entered enthusiastically into the spirit of the place, and after two years' hard study returned to London in April 1861. Before doing so, however, he had composed his incidental music for The Tempest, which he had begun as a sort of diploma work. Sullivan set himself to find converts in London to the enthusiasms he had imbibed at Leipzig. He became acquainted with George Grove, then secretary of the Crystal Palace, and August Manns, the conductor there; and at his instigation Schumann’s First Symphony was introduced at one of the winter concerts. Early in 1862 Sullivan showed Grove and Manns his Tempest music, and on the 5th of April it was performed at the Crystal Palace. The production was an unmixed triumph, and Sullivan’s exceptional gifts as a composer were generally recognized from that moment. He had hitherto been occupying himself with teaching, and he continued for some years to act as organist at St Michael’s, Chester Square, but henceforth he devoted most of his time to composition. By 1864 he had produced his “Kenilworth” cantata (remembered chiefly for the lovely duet, “How sweet the Moonlight”), the “Sapphire Necklace” overture, and the five beautiful songs from Shakespeare, which include
- ↑ A short epigram on Aphrodite in the Greek Anthology (Anth. Pal., Appendix, i. 153) is ascribed to him.
