Page:Roman Constitutional History, 753-44 B.C..djvu/222

208 of grain, which seems to have been restricted some time before. His adherents had indeed been provided for and needed no allowance of grain, but the great number of persons who had been impoverished by war and by his confiscations joined the rabble at Rome, and awaited an opportunity to secure a hearing by influence or force.

Reëstablisbment of Constitutional Government. — Sulla had caused consuls to be elected for 81, and was chosen consul himself for 80, together with Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius. He desired to reëstablish constitutional government, and regarded his consular year as a test of his constitution. The result was apparently favorable, the pacification of Italy was almost complete, and the provincial governors were loyal to the oligarchic government. Sulla accordingly considered his work finished, declined a reëlection, and allowed the elections for 79 to take their course. Early in 79 he resigned the dictatorship of his own free will; and in 78 he died.

Observations on the Constitution of Sulla. — Sulla was a conservative aristocrat. He was actuated by the same selfish class spirit, held the same narrow views, and was characterized by the same lack of political originality as the oligarchy in general. The first steps of his restoration — the proscriptions and confiscations — were imitations of the doings of Nasica and Opimius, executed on a large scale and with a dispassionate calmness truly horrible. As he was not a creative statesman like Gaius Gracchus, but simply a man of remarkable administrative ability, he probably did not consider the advisability of establishing a permanent monarchy or even of creating an aristocracy selected from, and representative of, the best elements in the new Italian state.

Like a true aristocrat, he wished to restore an utterly