Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/659

 S U L S U L 633 having previously informed the senate in an official de- spatch of the result of his campaigns in Greece and Asia, and announced his presence on Italian ground. He com- plained, too, of the ill-treatment to which his friends and partisans had been subjected during his absence. The revolutionary party, specially represented by China, Carbo, and the younger Marius, had massacred them wholesale, confiscated his property, and declared him a public enemy. They felt they must resist him to the death, and with numerous bodies of troops scattered throughout Italy, and the support of the newly enfranchised Italians, to whom it was understood that Sulla was bitterly hostile, they counted confidently on success, but on Sulla's advance at the head of his 40,000 veterans many of them lost heart and deserted their leaders, while for the most part the Italians themselves, whom he confirmed in the possession of their new privileges, were won over to his side. Only the Samnites, who were as yet without the Roman fran- chise, remained his enemies, and it seemed as if the old war between Rome and Samnium had to be fought once again. Several Roman nobles, among them Cneius Pom- peius (Pompey the Great), Metellus Pius, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Lucullus, joined Sulla, and in the following year (82) he won a decisive victory over the younger Marius near Prajneste (Palestrina), and then marched straight upon Rome, where again, just before his defeat of Marius, there had been a great massacre of his adherents, in which the famous and learned jurist Mucius Screvola 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 bloody and very hard-fought battle, routed the enemy before the walls of Rome. With the death of the younger Marius, who killed himself after the surrender of Praeneste to one of Sulla's officers, the civil war was at an end and Sulla was master of Rome and of the Roman world. Then came, with the object of breaking the neck of the Marian or popular party, 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 a succession of wholesale murders and confiscations through- out Rome and Italy -made the name of Sulla for ever infamous. The title of "dictator" was revived after a long period and conferred upon him ; Sulla was in fact emperor of Rome, with absolute power over the life and fortunes of every Roman citizen. There were of course among them some really honest well-meaning men who looked up to him as the " saviour of society." After celebrating a splendid triumph for the Mithradatic War, and assum- ing the surname of "Felix" (" Epaphroditus," "Venus's favourite," he styled himself in addressing Greeks), he carried in 80 and 79 his great political reforms (see ROME, voL xx. pp. 761-762). Of these the main object was to invest the senate, the thinned ranks of which he had recruited with a number of his own creatures, 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 injury and ruin of the old Italian freeholders and farmers, who from this time dwindled away, leaving whole districts waste and desolate. Sulla's work had none of the elements of permanence ; it was a mere stop-gap purchased at the cost of infinite misery and demoralization. In 79 Sulla resigned his dictatorship and retired to Puteoli, where he died in the following year, probably frjin the bursting of a blood-vessel, though there is a story that he fell a victim to a particularly loathsome disease similar to that which cut off one of the Herods (Acts xii. 23). The half lion, half fox, as his enemies called him, the " Don Juan of politics," to quote Momni- sen's happy phrase, 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 of his strange and eventful life. For Sulla and his times, there is his Life by Plutarch, who had his Memoirs for one of his authorities, and there are very numerous references to him in Cicero's writings. The best and fullest modem account of him is that of Mommsen (vol. iii., bk. iv. ch. 8 > 9 > (W. J. B.) SULLY, MAXIMILIAN DE BETHUXE, DUKE OF (1560- 1641), French statesman, was born at the chateau of Rosny near Mantes on 13th December 1560. He derived his early appellation and the title of baron from the place of his birth, and was known as Rosny during the greater part of his life! Some one of his numerous enemies pretended that he did not really belong to the illustrious family represented four centuries earlier by the trouvere and warrior Queues de Bethune, but that his race was derived from Scottish Bethunes of no mark. There is, however, no reason for giv- ing any credit to this story. Sully was a second son ; his elder brother died when but just of age, and even before this his father (if his own account may be trusted) treated Maxi- milian (so he himself spelt his name, and not Maxiniilien) as an eldest son. He was only eleven years old when his father, who was a Protestant, was presented to Henry of Navarre, and from that time he was more or less inseparably attached to the future king of France. He had a narrow escape on St Bartholomew's Day, but he did escape, and when little more than sixteen began to take an active part in the Civil Wars. He distinguished himself not a little, especially in the character of engineer. In 1 583 he married Anne de Courtenay, who, however, died in 1589, and in the intervals of war he lived the life of a country gentle- man at Rosny. At the battle of Ivry, 1590, he had the good luck, though seriously wounded, to capture Mayenne's standard. As soon as Henry's power was established, Sully, who, though by no means always a complaisant or obliging servant, had been uniformly faithful, received his reward in the shape of numerous places, estates, and dignities. In 1601 he was made grand -master of the ordnance and in 1606 duke of Sully. He was also practi- cally the king's minister of finance during the greater part of his reign. After the assassination of his master he makes no further figure in history, though he survived for many years, saw the rise of a far greater minister than himself, and did not die till (less than a year before Riche- lieu himself died) the 22d of December 1641, at Villebon near Chartres. He had married a second time, and anecdote is not compliment- ary to his second wife, while his daughter, who married the great duke of Kohan, also had a not unblemished reputation. Sully, however, who, though deprived of (and indeed resigning) all con- trol of public affairs after Henry's death, retained great wealth, lived in what was almost a caricature of the stately fashions of the time, and busied himself in the composition of memoirs which are among the most curious in form, and not the least interesting in contents, of the kind. He instructed his secretaries to draw the book up in the form of an elaborate address to himself : "you then did this" ; " you said as follows" ; " as you have been good enough to inform us, the affair went on this wise" ; and so forth. And he not only had the book executed in this extraordinary fashion but had it read out to him. Its title is as odd as other tilings about it and runs thus : Memoires dcs Sages et Royales (Economies d'Estat, domcstiques, politiqucs, et militaircs dc Henry le Grand, VExemplaire des Roys, le Prince dcs Vertus, dcs Armcs, et dcs Loix, et le Pere en effet de scs Peuplcs Francois. Et dcs servitudes idilcs, obeissances convcnablcs, et administrations loyalcs de Maximilian de Bethune, I'un dcs phis confidans, familicrs, ct utiles soldals et scrvi- tcurs du grand Mars dcs Francois. Dediees a la France, a tons les bons soldats, ct tons pcuplcs Francois. Two folio volumes were splendidly printed, nominally at Amsterdam, but really under Sully 's own eye at his chateau, in 1634 ; the other two did not appear till twenty years after his death. As his wealth, his ini- XXII. 80