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REPUBLIC] senate was his main object. With this purpose he had already,

when consul in 88, made the senatus auctoritas legally necessary for proposals to the assembly. He now as dictator 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, and discredited the office by prohibiting a tribune from holding any subsequent office in the state. The control of the courts (quaestiones perpetuae) was taken from the equestrian order and restored to the senate. To prevent the people from suddenly installing and keeping in high office a second Marius, he re-enacted the old law against re-election, and made legally binding the custom which required a man to mount up gradually to the consulship through the lower offices. His increase of the number of praetors from six to eight, and of quaestors to twenty, 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

in them should, as before the lex Domitia (104), be filled up by co-optation. 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, but he made no provision to guard against the consequent reduction of the comitia to an absurdity, and with them of the civic government which rested upon them, or to organize an effective administrative system for the Italian communities. 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. 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. 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

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.

The Sullan system stood for nine years, and was then overthrown—as it had been established—by a successful soldier.

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 ) 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. Still Sertorius held out, until in 73 he was

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, 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

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