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Rh and the forum was heaped high with the bodies of the slain. Cinna fled, but fled, like Sulla, to the legions. When the senate declared him deposed from his consulship, he replied by invoking the aid of the soldiers in Campania in behalf of the violated rights of the people and the injured dignity of the consulship, and, like Sulla, found them ready to follow where he led. The neighbouring Italian communities, who had lost many citizens in the recent massacre, sent their new champion men and money; while from Africa, whither he had escaped after Sulla's entry into Rome, came Marius with 1000 Numidian horsemen. The senate had prepared for a desperate defence, but fortune was adverse, and after a brief resistance they gave way. Cinna was acknowledged as consul, the sentence of outlawry passed on Marius was revoked and Cinna and Marius entered Rome with their troops. Marius's thirst for revenge was gratified by a frightful massacre, and he lived long enough to be nominated consul for the seventh time. But he held his

consulship only a few weeks. Early in 86 he died, and for the next three years Cinna ruled Rome. Constitutional government was virtually suspended. For 85 and 84 Cinna nominated himself and a trusted colleague as consuls. The state was, as Cicero says, without lawful authority. One important matter was carried through—the registration in all the tribes of the newly enfranchised Italians, but beyond this little was done. The attention of Cinna and his friends was in truth engrossed by the ever-present dread of Sulla's return

from Asia. The consul of 86, L. Valerius Flaccus (who had been consul with Marius in 100 ), sent out to supersede him, was murdered by his own soldiers at Nicomedia. In 85 Sulla, though disowned by his government, concluded a peace with Mithradates. In 84, after settling affairs in Asia and crushing Flaccus's successor, C. Flavius Fimbria, he crossed into Greece, and in the spring of return of 83 landed at Brundusium with 40,000 soldiers and a large following of émigré nobles. Cinna was dead, murdered like Flaccus by his mutinous soldiers; his most trusted colleague, Cn. Papirius Carbo, was commanding as proconsul in Cisalpine Gaul; and the resistance offered to Sulla's advance was slight. At Capua, Sulla routed the forces of one consul, Gaius Norbanus; at Teanum the troops of the other went over in a body to the side of the outlawed proconsul. After a winter spent in Campania he pressed forward to Rome,

defeated the younger Marius (consul, 82) near Praeneste, and entered the city without further opposition. In north Italy the success of his lieutenants, Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius (son of Metellus Numidicus), Cn. Pompeius and Marcus Crassus, had been fully as decisive. Cisalpine Gaul, Umbria and Etruria had all been won for Sulla, and the two principal leaders on the other side, Carbo and Norbanus, had each fled, one to Rhodes, the other to Africa. Only one foe remained to be conquered. The Samnites and Lucanians whom Cinna had conciliated, and who saw in Sulla their bitterest foe, were for the last time in arms, and had already joined forces with the remains of the Marian army close to Rome. The decisive battle was fought under the walls of the city, and ended in the complete defeat of the Marians and Italians (battle of the Colline Gate).

For a period of nearly ten years Rome and Italy had been distracted by civil war. Sulla was now called upon to heal

the divisions which rent the state asunder, to set in working

again the machinery of civil government and above all so to modify it as to meet the altered conditions, and to fortify it against the dangers which visibly threatened it in the future. The real charge against Sulla is not that he failed to accomplish all this, for to do so was beyond the powers even of a man so able, resolute and self-confident as Sulla, armed though he was with absolute authority and backed by overwhelming military strength and the prestige of unbroken success. He stands convicted rather of deliberately aggravating some and culpably ignoring others of the evils he should have tried to cure, and of contenting himself with a party triumph when he should have aimed at the regeneration and confirmation of the whole state. His victory was instantly followed, not by any measures of conciliation, but by a series of massacres, prescriptions and confiscations, of which almost the least serious consequence was the immediate loss of life which they entailed. From this time forward the fear of proscription and confiscation

recurred as a possible consequence of every political crisis, and it was with difficulty that Caesar himself dissipated the belief that his victory would be followed by a Sullan reign of terror. The legacy of hatred and discontent which Sulla left behind him was a constant source of disquiet and danger. In the children of the proscribed, whom he excluded from holding office, and the dispossessed owners of the confiscated lands, every agitator found ready and willing allies. The moneyed men of the equestrian order were more than ever hostile to the senatorial government, which they now identified with the man who cherished towards them a peculiar hatred, and whose creatures had hunted them down like dogs. The attachment which the new Italian citizens might in time have learnt to feel for the old republican constitution was nipped in the bud by the massacres at Praeneste and Norba, by the harsh treatment of the ancient towns of Etruria, and by the ruthless desolation of Samnium and Lucania. Quite as fatal were the results to the economic prosperity of the peninsula. Sulla's confiscations, following on the civil and social wars, opened the doors wide for a long train of evils. The veterans whom he planted on the lands he had seized did nothing for agriculture, and swelled the growing numbers of the turbulent and discontented. The “Sullan men” became as great an object of fear and dislike as the “Sullan reign.” The latifundia increased with startling rapidity—whole territories passing into the hands of greedy partisans. Wide tracts of land, confiscated but never allotted, ran to waste. In all but a few districts of Italy the free population finally and completely disappeared from the open country; and life and property were rendered insecure by the brigandage which now developed unchecked, and in which the herdsmen slaves played a prominent part. The outbreaks of Spartacus in

73, and of Catiline ten years later, were significant commentaries on this part of Sulla's work. His constitutional legislation, while it included many useful administrative reforms, is marked by as violent a spirit of partisanship, and as apparently wilful a blindness to the future. The re-establishment on a legal basis of the ascendancy which custom had so long accorded to the