Lucius Cornelius Sulla has recently seen renewed interest within the study of Roman republican history. The volumes under review, which feature many of the most prominent voices working on Sulla today, are representative of emerging trends in the field. Both volumes focus on the traumatic aftershocks of Sulla's regime while questioning the nature, extent and stability of his control over Rome during his time in power.
J. Alison Rosenblitt's Rome After Sulla investigates the state of Roman politics after Sulla's death. Focusing on a period of late republican history that is often glossed over, and privileging Sallust rather than Cicero as her main evidence, R. argues that Sulla's settlement was inherently unstable because it relied on exclusion as a defining principle. As R. outlines in her first chapter, she aims to use Sallust to correct Cicero's overly consensual view of Roman politics and untangle the political history of the years 80–77 b.c. The wider goal of the monograph is to understand better Sulla's impact upon Roman politics and the fall of the Republic.
The monograph's first section sets the scene after the conclusion of Sulla's dictatorship. Ch. 2 focuses on the year 80 b.c., in which Sulla laid down the dictatorship and took up the consulship, and argues for an environment of uncertainty as violence continued in Italy and Sulla's status remained unclear. Cicero's Pro Roscio Amerino was delivered in that year, and R. makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on the speech by showing how Cicero plays on the uncertainty and imagination of his audience. Ch. 3 then moves on to the year 79, marked by Sulla's retirement, which R. argues was already fraught with questions over the legitimacy of Sulla's actions. Arguing against the interpretation that fear of Sulla controlled politics in 79, R. points to the political activity and electoral campaign of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, future rebel against the Sullan orthodoxy. R. maintains that Lepidus was clear about his intentions to restore the children of the proscribed in 79, based on Orosius’ claim that Lepidus’ natural son was one of them. Lepidus’ successful consular canvass under those conditions suggests that Sulla was not in control of the crowd or the forum. Together, these chapters show that despite Sulla's best efforts, his control over Rome after the dictatorship was not strong enough to combat the instability that his brand of autocracy produced.
The second section of the book covers the Revolt of Lepidus from 78–77 — or, as R. prefers to call it, the Lepidan counter-revolution. The fourth chapter examines the three source traditions for the revolt, namely Appian, Sallust and the Livian tradition, showing that Appian's tradition, which minimises Lepidus’ political activity in favour of fitting the revolt into a cycle of civil violence, holds too much sway over our modern picture of the revolutionary. Ch. 5 reconstructs Lepidus’ activities and goals. Rather than an opportunist or misunderstood moderate (the two most recent scholarly interpretations), R.'s Lepidus organised supporters in Rome for his programme of recalling the Sullan exiles and had serious senatorial backing, turning to violent methods only after the revolt in Etruria. The Sullan status quo was therefore threatened almost immediately after the dictator's death. Ch. 6, which wraps up the section, tackles questions of periodisation. R. argues not just that the years 80–77 should be more central to our accounts of late republican history, but that the period between Sulla and Caesar's dictatorships should be understood as ‘after Sulla’ in the spheres of both politics and society. Although the poor state of the evidence for Lepidus should be emphasised, tempering some of the book's broad statements about his goals and activities, R. successfully shows that his revolt deserves a larger place in our understanding of Sulla's impact.
The final section transitions from a history of the instability of 80–77 to a study of Sallust and his presentation of politics after Sulla. Ch. 7 introduces Sallust's Speech of Lepidus and provides an overview of its historiographical problems, suggesting that the speech emphasised the instability of Sulla's control over Roman politics and therefore the failure of his attempt at autocracy. In ch. 8, R. turns to the preface of Sallust's Histories and argues that this often misread passage makes the motivation of political actors an unresolved question that hangs over the rest of the work. Through the example of Pompey, who R. argues is presented as a deceitful potential autocrat, the Histories consistently question whether autocracy can be stable and whether an autocrat can be trusted to be sincere.
Ch. 9 introduces one of the strongest aspects of R.'s monograph: the rhetoric of hostile politics. Part of Sulla's political legacy, R. argues, was the rise of rhetoric construing a Roman political enemy as a hostis or foreign enemy. Sallust's demagogic speeches in the Bellum Jugurthinum and the Histories show this kind of political thought, presenting the Roman people as living in fear and dominated by the powerful as if conquered by foreign enemies. R. proposes that the rhetoric appeared in Sallust's sources for the 80s and 70s in reaction to Sulla's declaration of his Roman enemies as hostes and the broader traumatic climate of civil war. Ch. 10 works the rhetoric of hostile politics into the goals of Sallust's Histories, arguing that this rhetoric supports Sallust's interest in deceitful leadership; the rise of hostile politics, R. suggests, was a central part of Sallust's impression of Sulla's impact in the Histories. The book concludes with an epilogue engaging with major theories about the fall of the Republic, in which R. argues that Rome never found stability between Sulla's dictatorship and the Augustan era, and appendices elaborating on two major historiographical problems of evidence for Lepidus and Sallust. Overall, this volume makes an important contribution to the study of several pivotal late republican texts, and R.'s success in re-centring Sallust and the years 80–77 in reconstructions of Sulla's legacy is welcome.
Sulla: Politics and Reception, which originated as a panel at the Ninth Celtic Conference in Classics at University College Dublin in June 2016, presents nine papers with a much broader focus than R.'s monograph. Edited by Alexandra Eckert and Alexander Thein, who outline the trajectory of Sulla's career in their introduction, the papers in this volume nuance ideas about the absolutism of Sulla's power during his dictatorship and consulship, while adding to our understanding of Sulla's reception in authors from Cicero to Aelian.
The first chapter, by Catherine Steel, seeks to place Sulla among republican orators. Sulla is not often considered as an orator, partially because he never seems to have pursued a career in forensic oratory. Still, as Steel's analysis of the fragments and testimonia of Sulla's speeches shows, Sulla often used public speech to his advantage during his office holding. His use of speech making throughout his time in power demonstrates the place he felt oratory ought to hold in his new Republic: not a persuasive tool, but a vehicle of information for the voting public, whom he considered a vital part of his republican system. Ch. 2, by Sophia Zoumbaki, pivots to the poleis of central and southern Greece, where Sulla's wartime requisitions and punitive settlement measures ushered in a new style of Roman intervention. Although his actions imposed economic damage on an already struggling region, Zoumbaki shows that his presence also caused a ‘revitalising shock’, forcing local poleis to develop new strategies, like Roman-funded euergetism, to negotiate their new reality. Next, Cristina Rosillo-López's chapter questions Sulla's desire and ability to control the urban plebs. Making an important contribution to the wealth of scholarship on Sulla as a reformer, Rosillo-López tests a broad theory about the ineffectiveness and timidity of Sulla's reforms by investigating his legislation on elections. Rosillo-López shows that for the issue of elections, at least, Sulla's interventions were minor, short-lived and ultimately unable to help Sulla's followers in electoral politics.
Ch. 4 also reveals the limitations of Sulla's control even at the height of his power. Alexander Thein seeks to explain fully Plutarch's comment that Sulla tried to rescind the naval command of his supporter Dolabella, clarifying the Dolabella in question and identifying the specific command and date of the incident. Drawing on other examples of defiance of Sulla by his aristocratic partisans, who had heterogenous interests and goals, Thein argues that this episode reveals the limits of Sulla's ‘power to dictate’ and continued political manoeuvring among Sulla's supporters. The section on politics concludes with a chapter by Arthur Keaveney, who focuses on the puzzling remark in Sallust's Speech of Lepidus that Sulla's veteran soldiers, who faced invidia, were settled in swamps and forests. Using evidence from Cicero's speeches De lege agraria and a comparison with Augustus’ veteran settlement, he concludes that a combination of hasty arrangements, fraud on the part of the elite men overseeing the land settlement, and Sulla's waning influence over the later colonies of Volaterrae and Arretium created the scenario described by Sallust. Again, the activities of Sulla's supporters and the practicalities of the Roman system prevented Sulla's plans from unfolding as he anticipated.
The second section shifts its focus from the politics of the late 80s to Sulla's ancient literary reception. In ch. 6, Federico Santangelo undertakes a close reading of Sulla's appearances in Sallust's Bellum Jugurthinum. Pairing well with Catherine Steel's earlier chapter on Sullan oratory, Santangelo explores Sallust's portrayal of Sulla's early career and powers of persuasion in the military and diplomatic spheres. Sallust's portrayal of Sulla's talents of dissimulation and trading in favours show him to be of the same cloth as Jugurtha, Rome's wily enemy; it also silently reminds the reader how Sulla will deploy them later against Romans. Ch. 7, by J. Alison Rosenblitt, is an intertextual study of Tacitus’ Annals and Sallust's Histories, focused on her theory of ‘hostile politics’ (discussed above). She shows convincingly that Tacitus’ representation of the relationship between the people and the princeps as one of slaves and conquerors in Book 1 of the Annals is indebted to the rhetoric of hostile politics found in Sallust's Histories.
The eighth chapter takes Sulla's reception out of a Roman context, as Inger Kuin explores the cultural memory of Sulla's sack of Athens and its relationship with his alleged philhellenism. Using a joke in Aelian about Sulla and philosophers having nothing in common as her jumping-off point, she traces the accounts of Sulla's possession of the library of Apellicon, allegedly looted after the siege. Although Roman sources presented Sulla's philhellenism as appropriate for a late republican elite and saw no contradiction between violence towards Athens and a love of Greek culture, Sulla became known as a rapacious destroyer of Greek culture as Athens grew into a nostalgic cultural symbol for Roman Greeks in the first and second centuries a.d. The final chapter of the volume, by Alexandra Eckert, considers the myth of Sulla as a whole. Eckert looks back at the two formative articles of Umberto Laffi and François Hinard from the 60s and 70s, which argued that Sulla only acquired a negative reputation after Caesar's civil war or the early principate. Eckert shows instead that authors as early as Cicero wrote of Sulla as cruel, tyrannical and unduly violent in the decades after Sulla's death.
Although these two volumes have different aims, they complement one another and point towards new trends in studies of Sulla: a focus on trauma and instability on the one hand, and an interest in a fuller range of consequences of his regime beyond constitutional developments on the other. These books show that the Sullan era and legacy still have room for more work, as scholars continue to think innovatively about his effects on Roman and Mediterranean life. At the same time, many of these papers illustrate the importance of de-centring the ‘great man’ from the history of his time, as scholars have also begun to do for the Augustan era. Scholars of the early first century b.c. should be capacious when considering not just Sulla's spheres of influence, but also the Sullan era and its politics more broadly.
