704. Roman Civil War: Master of the Republic (Part 4)

Who was Gaius Marius’ son, and how did he set out to bring down his father’s rival, Sulla? Which two rising stars in Sulla’s faction, Crassus and Pompey, would go on to bring down the Republic, with Julius Caesar? And, how did a momentous battle in the East see Sulla elevated to the master of Rome? Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the climactic conclusion to the remarkable rise of one of Rome’s greatest generals: Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a man who would destroy his rivals, win victories in the east, and ruthlessly change the destiny of the Roman Republic forever. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ _______ This episode is sponsored by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Try Claude for free today at http://Claude.ai/restishistory. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

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  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

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• 2:57Speaker 01

  On the 6th of July, 83 B.C., the largest and holiest building in Rome was struck by lightning. The ancient temple of Jupiter loomed on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. Here, beneath a ceiling sheathed in gold, amid trophies of statues and shields, the guardian of Rome had his shrine. But now Jupiter had decided to destroy his temple with a thunderbolt. What was the cause of the gods' anger? As the crowds gathered to watch the disaster, the flames billowed, sparks and smoke across the Forum. This was the heart of Rome, stretching all the way from the Capitol, hill of the gods, to the

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Palatine, hill of power. The Forum, along with the Circus Maximus, was one of two open spaces within the city walls where Rome's citizens could mix freely. Here was the committium, where citizens gathered to hear orators address them from the rostra, the curved speaker's platform made from the prowls of long-ago captured ships. Immediately adjacent to it was the Curia, where the Senate met, and a little to its south, the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the assemblies would be summoned to debate and vote on laws. Along this axis of buildings and open spaces lay the great theatre of the Republic's political

• 4:24Speaker 01

  life, Rome's most potent expression of her citizens' liberties and values. All the more portentous then, that as the fire on the Capitol raged, it dyed the Forum below it angry red. Red, the colour of Mars, the god of war and bloodshed. So if you think that was a very melodramatic reading, charged with the sort of port wine-soaked tones of one of London's greatest clubmen, you would be right. That was from Rubicon by our very own Tom Holland, describing an ominous moment in the descent of the Roman

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Republic into its first civil war. The gods are angry, but Tom, with whom?

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that is the question, isn't it? Because we left you last time with the Republic in the shadow of two great patrician strongmen. And the first of these is Sulla, a man who is at once completely charming and utterly sinister. He's very cultured. He's unbelievably brutal. He is a conservative, but he is also a revolutionary because he is the first man ever to lead a Roman army on Rome. So Sulla had led his army on Rome in 88 B.C. And in the intervening years, so between his march on Rome and the burning

• 6:00Speaker 00

  of the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, he has achieved remarkable things. So he has taken the war to Mithridates, who was this bold and ruthless and vindictive king who had conquered the Roman province of Asia and invaded Greece. And in only three years, Sulla had reversed all of Mithridates' conquests. He had brought Greece and the province of Asia once again to acknowledge the might of Rome. And Mithridates had retreated to within his own borders. And he was obliged to accept Roman weapons inspectors to make sure that he wasn't rebuilding his offensive capabilities. And so you would think that

• 6:42Speaker 00

  back in Rome, the news of Sulla's triumphs would be greeted with praise and with thanksgiving and with all kinds of celebrations, but not a bit of it. Because back in Rome, the city is ruled by Sulla's enemies. And they have responded to Sulla's great feats by declaring him a public enemy and raising his house and running his family and friends out of the city. And Sulla is not happy about this. You know, this is not a man that you offend recklessly. And in 84, he had written a letter to the Senate. And Arian, the Greek historian,

• 7:25Speaker 00

  describes what he said. He said, he would be back very soon to take his vengeance on behalf of all those who had been wronged and on behalf of Rome itself upon the guilty men. So a very, very ominous threat.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Oh, a chilling warning. So Sulla has lots of enemies, but there's one in particular, isn't there? Particularly formidable, but also the particular object of his hatred and for completely understandable reasons. Now, we talked about him last time. This is a man called Sinner, who is very able, very ruthless, very opportunistic, who is, you know, just as dedicated to the pursuit of victory and total defeat of his opponent as Sulla is. And remind us about Sinner. So Sinner, he'd been elected as consul, hadn't he, just before Sulla went off to fight his war?

• 8:15Speaker 00

  And Sulla had said, you've got to swear an oath that you won't attack me. And Sinner had said, fine. And then when Sulla went, he stabbed Sulla in the back. And basically, for the past three years, while Sulla's been away fighting Mithridates, Sinner has been the dominant figure in Roman politics. And he had upheld his power in a completely unconstitutional manner by holding consulship after consulship after consulship in succession. And by 84 B.C., when Sulla sent that threatening letter, Sinner was on to his fourth consecutive consulship. And this is basically the closest to being ruled by a permanent autocrat that the Roman Republic has yet experienced. So again, a kind of ominous portent, perhaps, of the

• 8:58Speaker 00

  way that that things are going. However, as Sinner prepares for Sulla's return, I mean, he's not alone, because he's dependent for his position of authority on the support of a quite sizable faction. And these are the Marians, the followers of Gaius Marius, who for decades had been Rome's most successful and celebrated general until Sulla had replaced him. And Marius and Sulla had ended up as very, very bitter rivals. Now, Marius himself by this point is dead. He'd had this kind of massive bender and essentially kind of collapsed of overindulgence, very elderly by this point, kind of in 70, I think. But

• 9:42Speaker 00

  he has, so in the mafia sense, he has left his family, his familia. He has a lot of supporters, a lot of people who...

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Have always backed Marius and have grown very rich off backing him. And just because Marius himself has gone, doesn't mean that his familia is now dead. And the guy who has inherited the leadership of this familia is the son of Marius, who by eighty-four is twenty-six years old. But by virtue of being the head of this kind of Marian clan, is already a very serious player in Roman politics, even though he hasn't as yet held any magistracies at all. And we mentioned him, we described him last time, he's very good looking, he's a playboy, and he's eager to show himself his father's son. You know, he wants to, wants to prove himself a chip off the old block, I guess.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And just on the Marian faction. So in the previous episodes, we talked about how Marius had been a provincial outsider, how he'd appeal to the masses, the populares, all of this kind of thing. Is that, is that class element, and sort of, as it were, regional elements, I suppose, is that still an element of this civil war between Sinner and his people, and Sulla and his people? Or is this generated into a kind of Wars of the Roses struggle between the elites?

• 10:59Speaker 00

  On one level, on one level, because Marius was an out of towner, and he'd always favoured enfranchisement of the Italians who've been in this great war, we might come to that in a minute. And so he has, he is backed by the Italians, basically. And they view Sulla as their great enemy. But in general, the fact that a powerful Roman aristocrat or player appeals over the head of the Senate to the people, doesn't mean that, you know, they're socialist, or that they themselves are necessarily identifying themselves with the masses of the plebeians in the Roman slums, any more than the fact that, that, I don't know, Donald Trump is very popular with people who don't have high incomes, mean that Donald

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Trump himself is, you know, from the masses. Essentially, the Romans, it's less about policy, it's more about vibe. It's, it's about whether you are seen to be on the side of the people, whether you, whether you like them, I guess, whether you enjoy their pleasures, and, and, and if you don't, then you are part of the kind of the aristocratic faction. But basically, everybody is aristocratic in the upper echelons of Roman society.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  And it's important to keep all that in mind. So this is, I think, ultimately, it's not a civil war about principle, it's a civil war about power. And this is why someone like Sinner, someone like Marius Junior, they are never going to arrive at an accommodation with Sulla. They are complete diehards. And it's not over points of principle, it's over issues of personal ambition and rivalry.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. But they don't underestimate Sulla though, do they? They, I mean, they know by now what an absolutely implacable and formidable opponent he is. I mean, he's an outlaw, his property has been confiscated and the property of his supporters, he doesn't have a voice in Rome. And yet, on the other hand, you know, he's an extremely practiced and accomplished commander, he has his legions, who, whose loyalty to him, I'm assuming, because they fought in the east.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Must be absolutely unwavering at this point.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, because Sulla's, you know, provided them with enormous amounts of loot, of course. I mean, they, they, they all absolutely love him.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So how are Sinner and the Marian's gonna, I mean, what do they have to compete with that?

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Well, Sinner has, has legions as a, as a consul, Marius has supporters by virtue of his name. And then, of course, there are the Italians, the, the, the people who had been at war with the Romans a decade before, are now have largely been pacified. And lots of them are being enfranchised. So essentially, the way that the Romans had solved that war had stopped the Italians from breaking away. There was a kind of two-pronged strategy. So one of them was to give actually what the Italians had always been fighting for, which was access to full Roman citizenship. And from the beginning of the war, the Senate

• 13:57Speaker 00

  had been saying to Italian communities that didn't revolt or laid their arms down, look, you can have the citizenship. But also, this had been combined with very brutal military suppression of those who were still up in arms. And Sulla's role in these twin strategies had not made him popular with the Italians. So when it came to the enfranchisement of the Italians, Sulla was always dragging his feet. He was felt by the Italians not to be keen on this process. He wasn't, he was clearly not an enthusiast for it. He was agreeing to it reluctantly. And as a field commander in the war, he had been by far the most lethal and brutal of all the generals, and therefore the most successful as well. And he particularly targeted a people called the Samnites.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, we talked about them.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  The guys who are prone to shaving their private parts in public. But they're also, you know, they're very effective fighters. And for this reason, Sulla had particularly targeted them. And the Samnites had borne the brunt of, of Sulla's reprisals. And Samnium, which is this stretch of the Apennines, which rise to the east of the Bay of Naples, south of Rome, this remains largely unpacified. And so here, should the Marian's wish to employ them, I think there is a third ready resource of men who are willing to oppose Sulla. So you have Sinner's armies, you have the Marian's, and potentially you have the Samnites as well.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Right. So what is Sinner's plan? What's his strategy? You know, he could wait for Sulla to land in Italy and deal with him then. Or he could take the offensive and go after him in Greece. I have to say, people going after Roman adversaries in Greece doesn't tend to, doesn't tend to end well. Anyway, let's see what happens to Sinner.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you're right. Basically, every Roman general who crosses to Greece to fight civil war, it all goes wrong. And Sinner's attempt to do this is the first in a long line. So what does he do? He and his fellow consul, they raise their armies, they go down with the Marian's, they go to a port called Ancona, which is in Piscinum, this region on the east coast of central Italy. And an initial contingent crosses the Adriatic. All is looking well. And then there's a second fleet crosses with, loaded down with men, and this is hit by a storm, and the ships are forced back into harbour. And when the storm dies down, and Sinner says, okay, we're ready to go, can you board ships and we'll, you know, we'll continue with the crossing? They say they're not going

• 16:29Speaker 00

  to go. And there's a mass process of desertion. And the mutiny starts to spread throughout the camp. Sinner is furious at this. You know, he's being directly insulted, he's being disobeyed, he is a consul of the Roman people. And so he summons his men to an assembly to remind them of their duty. The men gather in a great assembly, Sinner starts to march through them to take the rostrum. But as he's pushing his way through the, the mass of soldiers, and his lictors, his bodyguards, each consul has twelve of these lictors armed with rods, they're kind of beating away through. One of the rods catches a soldier painfully,

• 17:10Speaker 00

  and the soldier hits the lictor in the face. And there is then an absolutely massive pile on. The soldiers start to throw stones at Sinner and his bodyguard, they then draw their swords, and they stab Sinner to death.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  What?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  So Sinner never even makes it across the Greece. He is dead in this port town of Ancona.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Sinner, what an end for him. Oh my God, no one saw that coming.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, it's a massive stroke of luck for, for Sulla.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Well, he was Felix, wasn't he? He was blessed with the fortune by Venus, I think.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  And so he's laughing. He's absolutely laughing once again.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  He absolutely is. I think for, for, for two reasons. And the first is that Sinner himself, despite the fact that he's got himself murdered by his own troops, I mean, he is an effective figure, the most effective of Sulla's opponents. And so his loss is a real blow to the cause of those who want to oppose Sulla, because really, the only heavyweight who's left is Marius Junior. But we've said, he's only twenty-six. And a twenty-six-year-old could never become a consul. That would be impossible. So essentially, the Marian's are left with a, you know, a massive leadership vacuum. The second reason why this is great news for Sulla is that the contrast between the evident devotion

• 18:32Speaker 00

  that is felt by Sulla's troops for their general, and the death of Sinner in a mutiny, is a terrible look for the Marian's. And I think that it, it helps to persuade a number of key waverers, people who've been sitting on the fence, wondering which way to jump. Actually, that they should probably throw their lot in with Sulla.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  That he, he has the look of a winner, even though ostensibly he's outnumbered. And among the ranks of those who at this point start to join with Sulla, there are two of them in particular who will become very famous. And both of them at this point are very young. And the first of these is the head of a family celebrated, or you might say notorious for its wealth. And this is a man called Marcus Licinius Crassus.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Crassus, great to have him on the show.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Great to have him on the show. So his father, Crassus's father, a very reputable family. He'd had a dazzling political career, but he'd also had a very unsenatorial interest in the import-export business. Senators were not supposed to busy themselves with trade, but Crassus's dad had. And as a result, he'd become obscenely rich and he'd won himself the nickname divas or the rich moneybags.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  And Crassus's dad had been an opponent of Marius. And so he had been killed in the pogrom of eighty-seven, when Marius returned and was psychotic and killing all his enemies. And Crassus's elder brother as well. And so that had left the young Crassus, who at this point was still only in his early twenties, as the heir to the family name and crucially to its fabulous wealth. But Crassus too, of course, he's being targeted by the Marians too. And so he flees Italy and he takes ship for Spain, where his father had been a governor. And so he has lots of backers and supporters. And Plutarch, who loves a good story, says that Crassus, to begin with, holds himself up on a cave on a beach.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  And his dependents bring him both food and Nubile's slave girls to satisfy his various appetites. And so he hangs out in this cave. I mean, whether that's true or not, who knows? But definitely, the point comes where Crassus feels that it's safe to reemerge. And he sets to recruiting a legion from among all his father's various clients in Spain. And then when he's got the legion at his back and the news reaches him that Sinner has been lynched by his own men, he sets sail for Italy. And when he lands, he uses his wealth, he uses his connections. He's a very able man as well, very persuasive. And he recruits an even larger force, so swelling the number of men at his back.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  And later in life, Crassus would make a celebrated comment, a very notorious comment, to the effect that no man could truly be reckoned rich who lacked the funds to maintain his own army. And I think only someone who had gone through the civil war would ever have thought to say this. So Crassus has quite a substantial military force now at his back, completely illegal. I mean, you know, it's illegal for citizens to raise their own private armies. But, you know, these are troubled times and Crassus has gone ahead and done it. And so he's looking around and wondering, well, which anti-Marian should I throw my lot in with? And he realizes that Sulla is really the only show in town. And so he crosses the Adriatic and he joins with Sulla in Greece.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  And Sulla thinks this is tremendous and they become great pals. Sulla is very, very welcoming to him.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's number one. Who's the second man?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  The second man, he is even younger than Crassus and he is even more glamorous. He's actually a lot more glamorous. Sulla doesn't meet with him in Greece. He meets with him after he has crossed from Greece to Italy and specifically to Brundisium in the heel of Italy. And from there, Sulla has, he's marching up the roads northwards towards Campania, where the Bay of Naples is. And as he's approaching Campania, he's brought news that another private army has been raised on his behalf. And this private army has been raised in Piscinum on the eastern side of Italy. And it is crossing the Apennines to join him. And when Sulla is brought this news, he's anxious that these reinforcements might be ambushed,

• 23:01Speaker 00

  that they might be surprised by the Marians. And so he orders his men to advance quickly so that they can come to the rescue of this private army that is coming to join him. But as the, Sulla and his men are pushing their way up the road towards Campania, further messengers come and they say brilliant news. This army is absolutely fine. It's crossed the Apennines and what is more, it has wiped out not one, not two, but three hostile Marian armies.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  And it is waiting for Sulla. Ahead of him on the road, it's drawn up in, you know, a splendid array. And standing at the head of this array of men is its young commander, the man who has personally raised it from his estates in Piscinum. And he cuts a tremendous dash, this young man. He has golden hair swept up in a quiff and he is the spitting image of Alexander the Great.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  And Dominic, you know who this young man is?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  I do actually know who it is. He is Nias Pompeius, isn't he? And he is the son of Pompeus Strabo, the bloke with the squint, who had the worst run of luck in history. He got plague and then he was in his tent and it was tent was struck by lightning. So Strabo died and I guess his affinity passed to his son, Nias Pompeius or Pompey. And Pompey, as, as lots of listeners well know, he is the great rising star of Roman politics at this point, burning with ambition, ruthless in turn, but a showman. I mean, he wants to basically, he's basically cosplaying as Alexander the Great, isn't he? And he has this quiff, which you can see, you can Google his statues or his busts and you can see the quiff.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  And then later on, he used to sort of wear his cloak like Alexander and all sorts of stuff like this. But at this point, Crassus plus Pompey is quite, I mean, that's quite a catch for Sulla.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Crassus, I think, is more obviously the kind of person that Sulla would want at his back. Pompey is more aberrant because he is so madly young. He's only in his early twenties.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  And why has Pompey chosen to throw his lot in with Sulla? Bear in mind that Strabo, his father, had been notorious as a trimmer, weighing up the odds. Pompey goes full in with Sulla. I think partly it's because Pompey had gone sniffing around Sinner's camp when Sinner was at Ancona and had, had seen him lynched. And so I think that that confirms Pompey in the view that Sulla is the guy to follow. But I think more than that, the reason that Pompey backs Sulla with such commitment is that he can see that civil war has changed the rules of the political game.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Because it has presented the younger generation of Roman aristocrats, nobles, with a really unparalleled opportunity to leapfrog their elders and their betters. Because normally there are kind of massive age restrictions. The young are not supposed to seize power. They're supposed to wait their turn. But for Pompey, you know, he's not going to follow these rules. Crassus isn't going to follow these rules. And someone else who isn't going to follow these rules is a Marian. In fact, the ultimate Marian, the young Marius, the son of, of Gaius Marius, the seven times consul. Let's just have a look at him before we come to Pompey and Crassus.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  So the young Marius, he's basically now the figurehead for the opposition to Sulla. And so the fact that he is young and he doesn't have any official magistracy is a huge problem for the Marian cause. Then, when the, the Temple of Jupiter burns down, so that was being described in the brilliant reading that you, you did to open this, this show. It obviously presents an opportunity for Sulla because the capital is where Sinner had sworn his oath, which he'd then broken. And so the, the Sulla's propagandists can say, well, this demonstrates, you know, Jupiter has destroyed the temple because he's angry with Sinner and his, his followers.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  But it does present an opportunity to Marius because inside the Temple of Jupiter, this is where the Romans keep their gold. It's their, it's their kind of, you know, it's their central bank, if you like. It's where all the reserve, all the financial reserves are kept. So Marius, when he sees the temple up in flames, he rushes up to the top of the capital. And he doesn't bother, you know, rescuing the cult statue or any of the kind of great sacral objects that are stored there. He scoops up the treasure.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  And he then uses it to pay for his own private legions. And then he uses it to bribe people to vote for him as consul. And so in the year eighty-two, he's going to start a term as consul at the age of twenty-six. And this is just unprecedented and by the standards of Roman convention, completely obscene. And even Sulla is shocked. And he understandably regards Marius Junior as his deadliest foe. And he, he kind of made this rueful comment that the older he became, so the younger his, his foes became. But of course, the same is true of his allies.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Pompey is even younger than the young Marius. And just to emphasise how shocking this is to mainstream Roman opinion. The Romans assume that the passions of young men are violent and dangerous. And this is why it's so important, the Romans think, that these passions are bitted and bridled, that they are kept under firm control. But we've said how Sulla, he's a conservative, but he is also a revolutionary. And if he has a sniff of an opportunity, he will take it. And so rather than slap Pompey down for having raised this private army at a very tender age, he thinks Pompey is great.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  And he gives Pompey free rein, not despite, but because Pompey has the savagery of youth. And Sulla wants to use this savagery to his own ends in the war. And the strategy proves brilliantly successful. Because by the autumn of 82, so that's a year and a half after Sulla had returned from Greece, the Merian cause is pretty much on the point of collapse. So Pompey, he's up in the north. Sulla has sent him there to clean up all the northern cities, Etruria and so on, what's now Tuscany. And Pompey does this to such effect that all the Merian forces there, they take ship and withdraw and go to Sicily to try and carry on the fight there.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Marius is defeated by Sulla himself in Campania. He withdraws to a town called Prineste, which is 25 miles east of Rome, holds himself up there. And this means that of all Sulla's enemies, the only army that remains in the field in Italy is the army of the Samnites.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Nice armour, but they're very, they're very smooth people.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly so. And they hate Sulla with a vengeance. And in a sense, they are perhaps, I mean, even more than young Marius, they are his bitterest and most implacable foes.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  They want to relieve the young Marius in Prineste, up towards Rome. They evade Sulla and they start marching up towards Prineste. And Sulla follows them and the two armies are kind of shadow boxing as they, they advance up the road towards Rome and then towards Prineste. But as the Samnites are drawing close to Prineste and they see that Sulla is on their flank, they suddenly think, God, Rome is completely empty. There's no one guarding it. And the Samnites, of course, have been in a war against Rome. They hate Sulla, but they hate Rome as well. And they think, we could go and capture Rome and put it to the torch. What an opportunity.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  And so they suddenly double back. They swing round, they march towards Rome. And Sulla is taken completely by surprise by this manoeuvre. He hadn't thought that they would do this. And he pursues them at frantic, you know, exhausting speed. And he's chasing them desperately because he knows from his scouts that the Samnites are drawing ever closer to Rome. And as the sun starts to set, the Samnites are in front of the walls of Rome. And their commander gazes out at the cityscape and he tells them, prepare to annihilate this monstrous den of, of, of evildoers. And he says, do you think that these wolves who have preyed so terribly upon the freedoms

• 32:01Speaker 00

  of Italy will ever vanish until the forest that shelters them has been destroyed? And the Samnites, great cheer, let's go and do it, let's wipe Rome out. And they advance on the Colline Gate, this gate in the north.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  And as they approach it, they can hear the screams of women in the city who think that, you know, they're, they're about to be raped, enslaved, killed. However, just as they are approaching the Colline Gate, Sulla's cavalry, which is in advance of the main body of Sulla's army, hits them in the back, hits them in their rear. And by late evening, Sulla has arrived with his exhausted army. And against the advice of his lieutenants, he thinks, I'm going to throw them into the battle. I'm not going to give them any chance to, to recapture their breath. And all evening and long into the night, the battle rages and it ebbs and flows. And Crassus is with Sulla and he's commanding the left wing and he shatters the Samnite wing. But Sulla's wing, where he is, that's under enormous pressure. And it, it's on the verge of being broken.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  When Sulla offers up a prayer to Venus, you know, his great patron, you know, and he's not Felix for nothing, Venus hears his prayer. He rallies his men, they fight on. And by dawn, as the sun is rising in the east over Rome, the victory is his. And this turns into a bloodbath. And victory, not just in the battle, but effectively in the, the war against Italian allies and the war against the Merians, the victory at the Colline Gate ends both those wars. And it leaves Sulla as the master of Rome.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Wow. So Sulla now wields power, unprecedented really, certainly for generations. He is the master of Rome. But what will he do with it? Will he govern benevolently and wisely or will more blood flow? We will find out after the break.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps, many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that, Tom, at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus, great pioneering voyage of discovery. And it is of course, the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 34:42Speaker 00

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• 34:59Speaker 01

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• 35:09Speaker 01

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• 36:21Speaker 01

  Welcome back to The Rest Is History. The date is the 2nd of November, 82 BC. So this is the day after Sulla's tremendous victory against the Samnites in the Battle of the Colline Gate. Outside the gate, there are piles of rotting bodies. Sulla's men have rounded up 6,000 prisoners. And Sulla, rather than allow them onto the sacred soil of Rome, has led them to the Campus Martius, the flat expanse beyond the city walls. And Tom, this is where the Romans would assemble to go to war, isn't it? And where they would gather to vote for their magistrates.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  And give us some sense of the scene on the, the field of Mars as Sulla arrives with his prisoners.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Yes, as you said, it's a kind of flat open plain. And so there aren't many public amenities on the campus. But of the buildings that do stand there, the largest is this very grand formal building called the Villa Publica, so the public villa. And it consists of a square, two storied reception hall. And it's adorned with paintings and sculptures. And its ground floor is decorated with arches. And beyond these arches, there stretches a walled enclosure. And this is where magistrates called the censors, who every five years would hold a census, so that the Romans knew where they stood in relation to all their fellow citizens. This is where they were based. This is where the census would be done. And it's also where foreign ambassadors would be greeted.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  And it's where generals who were granted triumphs would spend the night before they enter the Rome with their troops. So it's, it's a kind of, I suppose it's a symbol really of the functioning of the Roman Republic, the entire Roman political system.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  And it is here in that walled enclosure of the Villa Publica, that the 6,000 Samnite prisoners are penned up very, very tightly. There's, you know, really not very much space for them. Meanwhile, Sulla has entered Rome, where he hasn't been for many years. Of course, he's been absent on campaign in Greece and Asia. And he summons the Senate to a meeting, not in the Senate house, but in the temple of a goddess called Bologna, who is, as her name suggests, the goddess of war. And Sulla has chosen it with his, his kind of customary shrewdness and care. So it, it stands within listening distance of the Villa Publica. People in it will be able to hear what's going on in the Villa Publica. But it's also within sight of the capital, where the charred remains of the great temple

• 38:45Speaker 00

  of Jupiter can be seen as well. And this is important for Sulla's purposes because back in the spring of eighty three, when he and his army had landed at Brundisium from Greece, Bellona, the goddess, had put one of Sulla's slaves into a prophetic trance. And speaking through the slave, the goddess had foretold the destruction of Jupiter's temple, which hadn't yet happened at that point, unless the Merians surrendered and submitted to Sulla's benign rule.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  And of course, the Merians had not surrendered, and so the temple had duly burnt to the ground. And Sulla reminds the Senate of this, and he says to them, well, that's all the evidence you need. I have won. I have defeated the Merians. I stand before you as the self-evident favourite of the gods, appointed by them to serve you and Rome as your saviour. Now, what does this mean in practice? Well, it soon becomes clear, because as Sulla is talking to the Senate, and he's described, he's moved on to describing his great victories over Mithridates, senators start to hear kind of muffled bangings and bumpings coming from the Villa Publica, and

• 39:59Speaker 00

  then screams, and then more screams, and then a lot of screams. And Sulla continues, seemingly oblivious to all the noise that is drifting across the campus. And then he pauses, and he says, I see that you've noticed that something is going on in the Villa Publica. Please, please don't be distracted by it. And then to quote, this is what he's recorded as saying, "Some criminals are receiving their punishment. There is no need to worry. It is all being done on my orders." And of course, what is happening is that those 6,000 Samnite prisoners are being systematically massacred. And when the killing is done,

• 40:40Speaker 00

  the corpses of the prisoners are dragged across the campus and tossed into the Tiber. And for days afterwards, they clogged up the bridges and the banks. And the memory of it was something very terrible. And there was a poet years later, who wrote that the corpses stayed in the river until at last its currents cut a swathe of blood through the Asia Open Sea. So very vivid, chilling image.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Eliminating the Samnites is one thing, but Sulla's bloodthirsty ambitions do not end there, do they? Because all this time that he has been away, he has been brooding, and he knows exactly what he wants to do. And he thinks there are too many people in Rome, and a lot of them have got to go.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, there are a lot of people in Rome whom he holds responsible for insulting him, condemning him as a public enemy, expelling his family and his friends from Italy. He has a lot of hatred stored up, and Sulla is a tremendous hater. So what he does is to send death squads fanning out across Rome, even as the Samnite prisoners are being slaughtered in the Villa Publica. And their targets, of course, are supporters of the Merian regime and all its most prominent members. And the scale of the killing is much greater than the killing that Rome had seen back in the days of the Gracchi. It's much greater than

• 42:14Speaker 00

  the scale of the killing that Marius had launched. It seems something utterly terrifying, even to Sulla's own supporters. And one of them dares to ask Sulla, you know, when are the killings going to end? You know, when are you going to rein these death squads in? And then he, you know, he's worried that Sulla might be offended. And so he stammers, and he says, well, you know, at least let us have a list of all those that you are you are planning to punish. And Sulla, who is, he's a very sardonic man, says, fine. And so he draws up a list, and he has it posted in the forum. And over the days and weeks that follow, more lists follow, and hundreds and perhaps thousands of names appear

• 42:58Speaker 00

  on these lists.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  So to clarify, these are, these are kill lists prepared by the master of Rome against Rome's own people?

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yes. And if your name appears on a prescription list, this is very bad news, because all your properties are forfeit. Your sons and your grandsons are barred from standing for office. And if anyone helps you, tries to protect you, tries to hide you, then they likewise are condemned to death. So there's nothing good about this at all. Not only are you put to death, but essentially, there is an attempt by Sulla to extirpate your dynasty as well. And in time, it's not only Merian supporters who start to appear on these prescription lists. So unsurprisingly, anyone who has a name

• 43:48Speaker 00

  for wealth and isn't a particular friend of Sulla's, you know, you might have a swimming pool, or a pleasure garden, or a fancy villa on the Bay of Naples, this becomes reason for people to secrete names onto the prescription lists. And essentially, if you are rich, you are probably going to be visited by a bounty hunter. And the person who is very, very shameless at smuggling the names of rich people onto the prescription lists is Crassus, Dives, the moneybags. There's nothing he enjoys more than ill-gained loot. And finally,

• 44:29Speaker 00

  he goes way too far, and he is so blatant with what he's doing, that Sulla decides to rein him in and say enough is enough, gives him a very public upbraiding. And I think on Sulla's part, that is quite shrewd politics, because it enables Sulla himself to pose, not as someone who is kind of selfish and grasping, he's not doing it supposedly for personal gain, but because he is the selfless defender of Rome. And if he is having to wash Rome in the blood of those who have done wrong and have offended the gods, then so be it. He knows his duty as an upstanding citizen.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  So this is something extraordinary that Sulla is doing, publishing these lists, killing all these people, sending out his death squads. He doesn't need to do it because he's worn. Why does he do it then?

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Well, he's a very vengeful man, as Marius was. He wants his vengeance. He's been brooding on his vengeance for years.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  And I think the longer he broods, the larger his appetite for vengeance has grown. And very grisly stories are told about Sulla's behaviour during the prescriptions. Again, they may be exaggerated, but the fact that they're told, I think, you know, it's always telling. So how do you know that someone has been killed? Well, the bounty hunters have to decapitate the corpse of anyone that they have hunted down, and bring the head to Sulla and his agents. And these agents would then inspect the head. And if they're satisfied, then they will release the promised fee. And if the heads belong to someone whom

• 46:08Speaker 00

  these agents know Sulla particularly hated, they will alert their master. And it is claimed that Sulla would keep some of the heads, you know, particular choice specimens. And you can imagine him kind of going in for a gloat over his enemies.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I said I was very much on Sulla's team in the last episode, and everything I hear about him, he sounds a brilliant person.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  So vengeance is his. I think also, of course, it enables him to impoverish his enemies and to enrich his friends. You know, money is power. And Sulla himself would, you know, he would buy lots of these kind of properties at knockdown prices, and then he would sell them on to his own family and friends. So Marius's villa, for instance, the one that was built to look like a legionary camp on the Bay of Naples, he sells that basically for about, you know, four quid to his own daughter. So Marius's villa passes into the family of Sulla. It's exactly the kind of thing that Sulla loves. And so his entire regime is entrenched by this process. So Salas, Roman historian, writing a few decades later,

• 47:14Speaker 00

  I mean, he identifies what Sulla is doing very precisely. And he says that not until Sulla had glutted all his followers with wealth, did the slaughter at last come to an end. And it's that emphasis on his followers, I think, that is key. Sulla wants... To make sure that those who follow him have a material basis for doing so as well as personal loyalty to him.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Smart politics, I suppose.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  I mean corrupt politics, but smart.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Brutal politics, but smart.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what about now, not all the Marians, of course, are in Rome. There are some outside Rome. Most obviously Marius Junior. Where's he, what's he up to?

• 47:53Speaker 00

  He's still holed up in Pryneste. So that's where Sulla and the Samnites were kind of marching towards before the Battle of the Colonnade Gate. Sulla, pretty much the moment that he, you know, he's addressed the Senate, he's launched the prescriptions, he then gets his army back and he marches back on Pryneste to finish the young Marius off. But before he can reach there, news is brought to him that Marius has committed suicide. You know, he knows the game is up and Sulla is delighted because with the suicide of Marius Junior, the line of Gaius Marius, his great rival, his former commander, the man he's measured himself against all his life, it's extinct. The Merian line is dead and Sulla is so delighted by this, that this, this adjective, he has consistently applied to himself, Felix, the lucky one.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  He adopts it as a formal name and we've said the more names you have in Rome, generally the better you've done, the kind of the grander you are. So Sulla now has four names and one of these is a celebration of the fact that he has made the Merian line extinct.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Do you know, there are so many elements of Sulla's character that I think anticipate Octavian Augustus later on, not least the changing his name in the, in the wake of victory.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Well, and also his willingness, I mean Octavian, when he becomes consul for the first time, I think he's only 18.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  The guy who provides the precedent for that is, is Pompey, who isn't given a consulship at this point by Sulla, but is given a very, very important military command, namely to go to Sicily and Africa and to clean up the Marians who have taken refuge there. Pompey has a lovely time. He leads his legions with, I don't know, the kind of the insouciance of a small boy given a, given a new toy. He, he has such fun. So he goes to Sicily first, he cleans up there and he captures the Merian commander and rather than put him on trial, he has him executed without any due legal process. And this causes a lot of outrage back in Rome and Pompey's enemies give him this nickname,

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Adulescentulus Carnifex, the teenage butcher, which will cling to him for quite a long time, even once he's into his middle age. But Pompey doesn't care about this. He, he cares. He's, he's a winner. And so from Sicily, he crosses to Africa where again he wipes the floor with Sulla's enemies. And at the end of these campaigns, the legions who followed him are really, really impressed. They think Pompey is, you know, he's, he's dashing. He's a, he's a brilliant commander. He really does seem to have a smack of Alexander. And so they call him Magnus the Great, Pompey the Great.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  At this point Pompey is still only 25.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  But he loves it. He loves it because of course Alexander had been young and so Pompey is sharing in the glamour or, you know, of a kind of a youthful kind of Macedonian king. So when Pompey returns to Italy, you know, it's kind of gone to his head. He doesn't want to behave like a conventional Roman commander who, once he's returned to Italy, has to disband his troops. Pompey says, he sends a message to Sulla and says, I'm not disbanding my legions. I want a triumph. And just to reiterate, he is only 25. This is completely without precedent. And Sulla says, no way. You know, there's no doubt you'd have a triumph. That offends against every custom. Now, this is the guy who's just slaughtered large numbers of people, but whatever, he's a conservative.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Pompey doesn't back down and he says to Sulla, more people worship the rising sun than the setting sun.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Tremendous comment.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  I mean, does he say this to Sulla?

• 51:39Speaker 00

  He does say it.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Does Sulla not like immediately have put him on one of his lists or something?

• 51:44Speaker 00

  No, he doesn't. Not only does he grant the triumph, but he officially confirms his protege in the title that his soldiers have given him, the title of Magnus. So from this point on, it's Pompeius Magnus. So he's, he's got another name.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Interesting that Sulla would do that when Sulla is somebody who is so attuned to the jealousies and resentments of Roman politics that he would give way to Pompey. Now, people listening to this may say, well, Sulla does this because he recognizes that Pompey is a threat to him and he feels he has no choice. Pompey is the rising man. But Sulla doesn't quite see it that way, does he? He has a more nuanced appreciation of Pompey.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Sulla by this point is not threatened by anyone, I mean even Pompey. Sulla is undisputed as the ruler of Rome. So I think what's going on, he's not intimidated by Pompey. It's kind of the opposite. I think he sees Pompey as basically, despite all his abilities, as a fundamentally unserious person. So right from the start, that point where Pompey had appeared to Sulla on the road in Campania with all his troops lined up, posing with his quiff and all of that. I think he got Pompey's measure. The, you know, Pompey's vanity, his taste for self-promotion, his kind of relish for

• 53:05Speaker 00

  the perks of success really, is telling that Pompey wants, say, a triumph rather than a consulship. He wants the glamour and the swagger.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  You know, it's the baubles.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Well, it's not just the baubles, but he enjoys being seen to be successful. And so Sulla, who values Pompey as a commander, is happy to allow him, you know, to indulge him on that front. Whereas Sulla himself, I mean, whatever you want to say about Sulla, I mean, he is a serious player. No one would ever doubt that. He is a military genius as Pompey is. And like Pompey, has a great army of loyal legions, but he's much more ruthless than Pompey. And he has been playing a very long game and he has won more spectacularly than anyone in Roman history. But there does remain about Sulla, these kind of paradoxes that we've been alluding to throughout the series.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  So yes, he's a cynic, but he, he does also have kind of strains of idealism in him. He does believe in Rome. He is a true patriot. And we've said that he's a revolutionary, but he is also a conservative. And so this is why, even as the prescription risks are still going up in, in the forum and as the blood is drying on the street, Sulla wants to make sure that he can regularize his position in the Republic. You know, it's important to him that he has constitutional legitimacy. And so he does this not by holding a whole succession of consulships as a sinner has done, but by dusting down a magistracy from the ancient past of Rome.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  And people who listen to our series on Hannibal may remember that when Hannibal was at his most successful, he just inflicted a particularly devastating defeat on the Romans and it seemed like he might prove victorious. The Romans had appointed a very distinguished statesman to an office called dictator. And this dictator had been given absolute power over the whole of the Republic without an election. And a six month limit had been set on this office, but in that six months, he could do whatever he wanted. And the duty of a dictator is very clear, that in a time of danger and disaster, the dictator is called upon to save the Republic and then to step down.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  And this is what Sulla wants. And he intimates this very strongly to the Senate and the Senate duly award him the dictatorship. But Sulla does not want a time limit set on it. You know, he doesn't want to be confined to six months. He wants it to be open ended. And so again, the Senate, you know, you don't, you don't oppose a guy with loads of legions at his back. They give Sulla an open ended dictatorship, which is of course, you know, it's against every constitutional norm. But to reiterate, Sulla's ambition.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  To use his dictatorship to nurse the Republic back to constitutional health. It's not a sham, it's completely genuine. And as dictator, he goes to great efforts to rectify what he sees as the besetting faults of the Republic. And Sulla's diagnosis is an unsurprising one. And it is that the champions of senatorial authority have grown too weak. And the populares, the populists, the people who appeal over the head of the, you know, the conventional norms of political discourse to the mass of the people beyond, that they have gone too far.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  So he's kind of centrist daddery, I guess, only backed by legions and dictatorial power.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Well, you say centrist daddery, you mean you don't see him as an out and out reactionary, as ultra conservative?

• 56:56Speaker 00

  I think he is an ultra conservative because that rhythm of those who appeal to the people, those who cast themselves as a conservative, those are the rhythms of the Republic and they always have been.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  But I don't think that Sulla sees himself as a reactionary. He sees himself as combating what I think is not an anachronism to describe as populism.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  He is Alistair Campbell.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Well, it is of course a populism that has been turned very murderous. And he's been, he's been the object of it, the fact that, that he also is murderous, I mean, he's kind of ignoring that. But there clearly, you know, there clearly are problems and Sulla, I guess, would say, well, I've earned myself the right to try and apply my prescription, the gods have given me this chance, I'm going to go for it.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  And if you were on team Sulla, you would look at his record and you would say, he wants to clean up Rome and sort out Roman politics and put it on a more stable footing. And frankly, he did it. No?

• 57:50Speaker 00

  That's absolutely what they'd say, because he, he takes a whole raft of measures designed to combat populism. So he tries to restore the Senate, for instance, to health. The Senate has been very badly depleted by the wars and the prescriptions and so on. And Sulla not only restores it, but expands its numbers. So it had been 300 before the civil war, Sulla raises its number to 600. And he makes sure, interestingly, to include members of the Italian elites. So this is a kind of an olive branch to the Italians who have always regarded Sulla as their enemy. He's basically saying, you know, let bygones be bygones.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  You are Romans now, come into the Senate, help, help us heal the wounds of our city and, and of Italy. He also passes laws that are very obviously influenced by events of the past few years. So he passes a law that requires a consul to wait an absolute minimum of 10 years before he can run for the consulship again. So that's obviously targeted at people like Marius, at people like Senna.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  He legally regulates the age at which ambitious young noblesse can run for magistracies. So 30 is set by law as the, the minimum age that someone can run for a junior magistracy. And you cannot become a consul before the age of 40 again by law. This has previously been, you know, founded on tradition. Sulla is basically saying, we can't rely on tradition anymore, it has to be prescriptive. And of course, the magistracy that he really hates, because it has been weaponized against him so repeatedly, is the tribune. And he goes out of his way to emasculate the tribune. So he forbids them to propose bills. And remember that it was a bill that had been proposed by a tribune

• 59:44Speaker 00

  that had allowed Marius to try and strip him of his command in 88 B.C. They are also, this is a very cunning move, anyone who becomes a tribune is then banned from running for further magistracies.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  So you're never going to do it, yeah?

• 59:57Speaker 00

  No, no, it's, the tribune that becomes a dead end. And Sulla's aim is very transparently to make sure that never again will there be a Marius, a Senna, a Marius junior in Roman political life.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  And you can see exactly, he's trying to block off all the, the avenues that they had taken to what Sulla sees as rank populism and illegality. And it takes him two years to perform this surgery on the Republic. And then after two years, Sulla feels that he has succeeded, that the Republic is cured. And one morning, to everyone's absolute astonishment, he appears one day in the forum and he doesn't have the 24 lictors that he's been going around with in his role as dictator. Remember, the consul has 12 lictors, Sulla's been going around with 24, but now this morning, they've all gone. And it's a stunning moment because the man who's been responsible for the deaths of more Romans than anyone else in the history of the Republic

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  has simply laid his dictatorship aside and become a completely private citizen. He has no office at all.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  And he had done this, so to quote Arian, the historian of this period, fearing neither his enemies at home, nor the exiles abroad. Such was the extent of his daring and his good luck.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  So Sulla's in his late 50s at this point, he could have stayed on. He could have, you know, thought, well, I'll, I'll be dictated to the end of my days, but he seems Diocletian style or something, he's given up his power and gone into retirement. How does he think he can get away with this?

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  That, that parallel.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  You know who, at the end of the 18th century, Sulla is often compared to is George Washington. So.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Because George Washington had laid down the presidency as Sulla had laid down the dictatorship.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Two massive differences though.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  I, I agree.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Sulla has his own teeth, Sulla has all his own teeth. And a night out with Sulla would be a tremendous laugh. And a night out with George Washington would be purgatory.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  I think a night out with Sulla would be a tremendous laugh, because he has an absolutely brilliant retirement. How is he able to enjoy his retirement? I mean, he has all these enemies. I think in part, it's because he chooses to spend a lot of time on the Bay of Naples, where he is surrounded by his loyal veterans. And the reason for this is that Sulla has been planting colonies, which are settlements of Romans and particularly discharged soldiers where the Italian rebels had been based. So one of these colonies is founded at Pompeii, which Sulla had stormed back in 89.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  And it's from this point onwards really that Pompeii comes to rank as a Roman town. And the same fate is visited on Nola, which actually only finally surrendered in 80 B.C. So that is after Sulla had laid down his, his dictatorship. So that really is the last holdout. So Sulla plants a colony there and he's ever a man for a vindictive gesture. And so he re, he renames Nola Colonia Felix after himself.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Which, you know, such a triumph.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  And where is he, what's he doing?

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  Well, of course, I mean, he's, he's had his pick of beachside villas. He's, he's got a lot of real estate along the Neapolitan coast. And his main villa is between Naples and Puteoli, the great port. And he has such a lovely time. So he, he throws himself into the pleasures of the Bay of Naples, the oysters, the spas, the yacht parties, all of that.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  God, sounds brilliant.

• 1:03:37Speaker 00

  As Marius had done, he has massive drinking bouts, these go on for days and days and days. And he hangs out with all his old mates from, from his bohemian days. So people who listened to our first episode may remember that he loved a stand-up comic, he loved an actor, he loved a courtesan and he loved a drag queen. And he, he gets all of these old friends of his down to how to party. So it's commented of, of one particular of these friends, Metrobius, who was a drag queen. The Metrobius had seen better days, but Sulla never ceased to insist that he was in love with him, all the same. And so he's there with his drag queens and the stand-up comics, necking wine, it's having a great time.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  He has had the best time, I think, of anyone we've ever done on the rest of history, because he's, he's ticked two very difficult tick boxes. One, he's in retirement on the, basically the Bay of Naples, that dream honeymoon destination, stuffing himself with oysters at a ripe old age with drag queens and actors and having a great laugh. And secondly, don't forget, he's still got the heads of his enemies with him.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  Completely.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  So that's brilliant.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  The jokes the stand-up comedians make with, with those props to hand, I mean, they'd be tremendous.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  You can do some fantastic routines with the severed heads of your adversaries.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  You could play football, rugby, whatever.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  God almighty, I'm so envious, I'm so, so envious. This actually doesn't last for very long though, does it? That's the downside.

• 1:05:06Speaker 00

  No, he, so he, he dies in 78 B.C. So not, you know, just kind of a couple of years after really.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what a way to bow out.

• 1:05:14Speaker 00

  And unsurprisingly, he seems to have died of liver failure.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  That seems to be the likeliest explanation for what kills him. And when he's dead, there are at this point, people in Rome who find their courage and who say, you know, actually, I, I think we should damn his memory. And at the very least, we should not give him any public funery honours. You know, he was a terrible man. But again, this is an echo of what happens when Augustus dies. Sulla's veterans descend on his villa and they, they escort his body back to Rome out onto the Campus Martius, where great state funerals are held. And obviously there is no one in Rome to oppose this band of, of veterans.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  And they build a huge pyre for Sulla and they put the body on it. And as they lay it, a great wind comes gusting across the campus and it whips the flames into life. And the body is consumed and then the moment it's been consumed, it starts to rain. And everyone says, oh, this proves it, Sulla is lucky, he's been lucky absolutely to the end. But I guess the question that listeners may be asking themselves is, does that luck hold in the years and the decades that follow his death? You know, have his reforms worked? Has the surgery that he's performed on the Republic, has it proven successful? Has he managed to restore the Republic back to a full and enduring health?

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Or is the future darker? Has Sulla set an example?

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  Of what any general in the future with an army at his back might achieve, given sufficient daring, given sufficient genius. And does the future belong perhaps not to a republic at all, but to a form of autocracy?

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Right, I want to ask you two questions about that. So number one, everybody listening to this podcast knows, well, a lot of people listen to this podcast, anyone will know that in the long run, the Roman Republic does not endure and becomes an empire. Who do you think is more important in the death of the Roman Republic, Marius or Sulla?

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  Sulla, because Marius, he's a brilliant political operator, but he's not as as pitiless in his cynicism as Sulla is. And Sulla, by leading his troops on Rome, sets an example that is properly taboo busting. So what had once been unthinkable is now lurking at the back of basically every Roman general's mind. So Cicero, who we will be doing a bonus on with Catherine Edwards, who's written a great biography of him, you know, the famous orator of Rome. He wrote a letter to a friend in which he, he, he just said, Sulla could do it. Why can't I?

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  This is what they will be pondering.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  You know, he's put his finger on exactly the issue that once the taboo is broken, it's very difficult to restore it.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  That leads perfectly into my second question. We've already alluded to the similarities between Sulla and a much better known Roman, the man who does actually bury the Republic and become the first Roman emperor, which is Octavian, who becomes Augustus. What's the difference between Sulla and Octavian? Why didn't Sulla become the first Roman emperor? Why didn't he found a dynasty and destroy the Republic completely?

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  Because he's a conservative, because even though he's the man who has led an army for the first time against Rome, he admires and respects the constitutional norms and he wants to see them upheld. You mentioned Octavian, who of course, in due course, will become Augustus and establish the autocracy of the Caesars that will endure for centuries and centuries and centuries. The person you've missed out is Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar is very much embroiled in the aftermath of the conflict between Marius and Sulla, because Julius Caesar, we've mentioned this, is by marriage, the nephew of Marius. And he is prescribed and very, very narrowly avoids being killed, gets a pardon from Sulla.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  And Sulla says, you know, there is a lot of Marius in this young man. We have to be careful. But actually, when Caesar himself marches on Rome, becomes a dictator, as Sulla had done, Caesar said that Sulla had been a fool because he had laid down his dictatorship. Caesar, of course, does not lay down his dictatorship and ends up murdered.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  But the lessons that Caesar chooses to draw from the, the war between Marius and Sulla, even though himself is a Marian, he chooses to look to Sulla as the most significant player in that conflict.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's the sublime irony of the whole thing, isn't it? That a man who was dedicated to the principles of conservatism shows his successors the way to demolish the structures, the institutions in some ways for which he was fighting. Anyway, an absolutely fascinating and thrilling series. And as you rightly say, not quite over, because for Rest is History Club members, there is a bonus to come about Cicero, so a generation later, and what he made of Marius and Sulla. And that is out this week and it's out with the brilliant Catherine Edwards. And if you want to listen to that and you're not a member of the club, you can of course, go to therestishistory.com and sign up. And you should of course, whether you want to join the club or not, sign up to our amazing newsletter,

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  which comes every week and is completely free. So Tom, thank you very much for that. That was absolutely riveting. Bye bye, everybody.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Bye bye.