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Chapter 7 examines the struggles of the Late Republic, when fundamental questions about Roman identity were at stake: who among the inhabitants of Rome was a “true” Roman and, more important, who decided this question? The chapter suggests that without a clear sense of Roman identity, the religious activity of the Late Republic is a less useful tool for understanding the boundaries of Romanness. The religious actions surrounding the Gracchi, Sulla and Marius, and the cult of Isis display the struggle for control more than attitudes toward foreign cults, yet there is no sign of an inward turn. With the triumph of Octavian, it is possible once again to look to religion for its role in reflecting and shaping Roman identity. Augustus bound together many developments, from the continued adaptation of foreign cults and the reshaping of old rituals to the invention of traditions, all of which can be seen in the ludi saeculares of 17 b.c.e. Through these religious actions, he made the claim to include tota Italia within the boundaries of Romanness.

The municipalization following the Social War must be understood within the context of the political atmosphere in which it emerged, and the major public discourses of the time: the admission and absorption of the new citizens into the Roman res publica, and the closely related struggle for domination between the Marian/Cinnan group and that of Sulla and his adherents. This chapter examines the ‘Italian question’ between the end of the Social War and the dictatorship of Sulla. It argues that this period marks the beginning of the municipalization of those communities enfranchised as a result of the Social War.

This chapter focuses on the late second and early first centuries bc and considers the temple foundations and refoundations that are attested for this period, including the competition of Marius with Catulus and with Sulla. Many of these cluster around the Forum and Capitol. The most important hill in Rome was reshaped in terms of divine qualities, creating and recharging both cognitive and physical spaces. The chapter also explores the flowering of numismatic imagery in the same years, from the 130s bc. This opening up of the coin-field as a resource was itself presided over by moneta, and other divine qualities, represented as female figure, head, or attribute with accompanying legend, began to form a fruitful means of framing and expressing a variety of numismatic messages.

This chapter focuses on Cicero's letters that express his reactions to the crisis involving Caesar and Pompey, as well as various kinds of reflection. Among these reactions are exasperation over Pompey's failure in Italy and his retreat abroad, especially as the latter means that any hope of preventing full-scale civil war is lost; secondly, there is deliberation over his own proper conduct in the circumstances; and thirdly, associated with this, there is the recall of past civil war and its potentially horrific consequences. The influence of the wars between the Marians and Sulla, which dominated Cicero's youth, on his thoughts is discussed.

This chapter examines another speech by Cicero. The year after pro Quinctio, Cicero undertook his first criminal defence — that of Sextus Roscius of America — and from then on seemed to have had a regular practice in both private and criminal cases. The speech for the actor Quintus Roscius relates to another private suit arising from a partnership (societas). It was delivered some time after Sulla's dictatorship and is rhetorically more sophisticated. The issue in the speech stemmed from events around the eighties BC and relates to people of similar status to those in pro Quinctio. Like pro Quinctio, the speech provides valuable evidence for private law procedure in the late Republic and for the law of partnership. It also reveals the types of argument an orator needed to deal with such legal issues. In the surviving text, Cicero seems to be deliberately making matters as confused as he can. Based on the structure created by the partition, Cicero moves from arguments drawn strictly from law to arguments from equity, derived from Roscius' character and the history of the partnership. In this later section, he called into question allegations made by the prosecution, which involved the legal interpretation of more than one point of fact from the past, largely damaging to Roscius. Cicero seems indeed to have tried to rewrite the legal history behind the case. The reconstruction of the narrative and the legal argument are discussed.

This chapter explores how Cicero configured the supernatural sphere in the light of his experiences with the tyrannies of Sulla and Caesar. After a look at a passage from the pro Sexto Roscio, in which Cicero turned from the protocols of Rome's civic religion to figures of thought derived from philosophical theology, the discussion focuses on his speeches before Caesar, especially the pro Marcello: it shows how the traditional gods, after imposing political apocalypse on Rome, themselves dwindle into mere shadows of their former selves, displaced by the quasi‐divine dictator. If the gods of Rome's civic religion all but died with the republic, they experienced a resurrection after the death of the dictator: the chapter concludes by exploring the idiosyncratic and incoherent fashion in which Cicero configures the divine in the Philippics.

This chapter asks what civil war does to a republic, arguing that civil war destroys not only people and property but the whole social contract that gives a republic coherence. It identifies the first real civil war at Rome as that of Sulla, and maintains that it destroyed the Republic as traditionally defined. The various constitutions that replaced one another with ever greater frequency between Sulla and Augustus were different republics, destroyed by their own civil wars, until the “restored republic” of Augustus was created from the ruins.

The early life of Caesar may be seen as the story of a young man being hunted, but possessed of an indomitable spirit and a fierce determination to defend the honour of the defeated party of the populares. He incurred the enmity of the dictator Sulla, who sought to eliminate the nephew of Gaius Marius. But Caesar was also the scion of one of the most venerable patrician families, the gens Julia, which boasted a mythical descent from Julus, the son of Aeneas. Any overt action against the young son of Gaius Julius Caesar the Elder would have been fraught with difficulty. Instead Sulla preferred to attempt to humiliate him, trying among other things to make him leave his wife Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, the other leader of the populares, whom Sulla had defeated when he marched on Rome. For Caesar the defining experience was perhaps his first few years of ‘conscious’ life, under the dictatorship of Sulla. That was when he learned what it meant to stake all while facing the overwhelming power of political adversaries. He learned what the unlimited control of the factio paucorum could mean.

Caesar formed a ‘a conspiracy [conspiratio] with Pompey and Crassus’. The crux of the agreement — a private agreement, but with clearly stated mutual responsibilities, and in this sense a true conspiracy — was described by Suetonius, who plainly had a reliable source: ‘that no step should be taken in public affairs which did not suit any one of the three’. There is no historical source that does not comment critically on this pact. Pollio, who saw in it the origin of the civil war, was broadly in agreement with Velleius, who warmly welcomed the rise of Augustus and was also an admirer of Caesar. Marcus Terentius Varro even wrote a satire about the triumvirate, with the title The Three-Headed Monster. In the judgement of the historians, in what concerns this fundamental turnabout by Caesar, the opinion of the Cato school — one of total rejection and condemnation — has held sway. They had feared the rise of another princeps like Sulla, and all of a sudden they had three.

The production of commentaries in the ancient world enjoyed a long and varied history. First to be distinguished are the particular forms within the genre. Later, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the development of commentarii was inextricably bound up with the public life of the city-states and empire. The terms were associated with the keeping of official records among the priests, magistrates, provincial governors, and emperors. In Rome, the genre mutated sharply into the autobiographical, literary form, now recognized in the partially preserved works of Lucius Cornelius Sulla and the commentarii of Julius Caesar. In the great centres of learning established at Athens, Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, and Jerusalem, classical, Hellenistic, and Jewish scholarship produced exegetical commentarii on the texts of favoured authors.

As dictator, Sulla was labelled a ‘tyrant’ by Plutarch and Appian, but this Greek term was also applied to Sulla by Latin writers such as Cicero and Sallust. Important studies by Laffi and Hinard have shown that the potential for contemporaries to have viewed Sulla as a tyrant existed during his lifetime, but that the hostile image, especially of Sulla's cruelty, was only fully activated during the civil war that began in 49, as Pompey came to be configured, by Julius Caesar and even by his own public comments, as a ‘second Sulla’. Hinard aptly describes the civil war victories of Julius and Augustus Caesar as two ‘accidents’ which fuelled the hostile tradition on Sulla. In earlier years, Cicero had alluded to Sulla's cruelty and tyranny, yet his criticisms were always guarded and balanced by a positive appreciation for Sulla's politics. This chapter explores Sulla's dictatorship at Rome: his political effectiveness, as distinct from his constitutional power, was limited by the nature of his support, which was based on guilt and fear.

An overview of the life and career of P. Sulla, nephew of the Dictator and client of Cicero in a major criminal case. His position within the Roman nobility, the extent of his debt to his distinguished relative, the connection with Pompey, his election to the consulship, and his prosecution receive close attention, as well as his involvement in the Civil War and his relationship with Cicero and Sallust. The careers of his descendants are also surveyed.

This paper provides a discussion of the evidence for the life and career of L. Fufidius, a centurion who is singled out by some sources as a crucial figure in Sulla’s inner circle in the aftermath of the Civil War. Close consideration is given to the assessment that Sallust provides of this individual in the Histories. Fufidius’s association with Arpinum is discussed, as well as the epigraphical evidence for Fufidii in other communities in Central Italy.

This chapter talks about Carl Schmitt and his book Dictatorship, where he distinguished between the commissary and the sovereign forms of dictatorship. It focuses on the sovereign forms of dictatorship that is designed within the universe of Roman dictatorships before Sulla and Caesar. The chapter also points out dictatorship characterized by acting in an exception that is provided by the law of the republic in order to conserve and safeguard the law. The dictator is named by the senate to carry out specific tasks, such as to eliminate a dangerous situation, to make war, to repress an internal rebellion, or to celebrate a popular assembly. Sovereign dictatorship, however, exercises dictatorship by suspending the law of the republic. According to Schmitt, Caesar embodies the historical model of the sovereign dictator.

This chapter presents Sulla's actions on Rome in 88 b.c., which show the full potential impact of memory sanctions on a traditional political life, and explains that Sulla was the first Roman to march on his home city to stake his claim to the command against Mithridates in the East by force. It notes that Sulla's first act as master of Rome was to declare twelve of his leading opponents, including P. Sulpicius the tribune and C. Marius his former commanding officer, to be “enemies” (hostes). The chapter explains that this declaration carried with it the loss of all citizen rights: the affected person could be killed with impunity, all property was forfeit, and memory sanctions were the logical conclusion.

This chapter examines the use of characterization by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (the dictator) in his famous (unfinished) memoirs, which were published in 22 books shortly after his death in 78 BC. Sulla’s is the first autobiographical text by a Roman that we can glimpse in any detail, since it was an important source for Plutarch’s biography (as well as being cited by Cicero, Gellius, Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, and Priscian). The chapter argues that Sulla created a vivid, innovative, and believable narrative by using a wide variety of narrative techniques to evoke character. The following three rather different approaches are particularly well attested in the surviving fragments and paraphrases: direct third-person statements describing various leading figures; descriptions of emotions, thoughts, and feelings experienced by Sulla himself and by others; and detailed accounts of the religious experiences (both in dreams and when awake) of specific individuals.

In this chapter we see how in the pair Lysander and Sulla, Plutarch portrays two military leaders both of whom subdued Athens, but whose victories brought danger to their own cities. The treatment of the statues and physical appearance of Lysander and Sulla prepare the reader for the anomalies and inconsistencies of the lives. Lysander shows the ambition, the military ability, and the vices which become more pronounced in the parallel life. Sulla especially presents the paradox of a leader whose victories abroad preserve the empire, but one who in the process of regaining power in Rome turns into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Is it possible to separate the brilliant general from the ruthless partisan fighter and dictator? Plutarch recognizes the paradox, but hopes that his readers will see the dangers of a relentless, even ruthless, ambition.

The final chapter reviews Plutarch’s reporting of good and bad traits and decisions in the Lives. The Lives work with two basic principles of Plutarchan psychology: first, every person can improve by conscious effort, and second, no human is perfect. Examples from the lives of Pericles, Sulla, and Numa show the variety of human behaviour. Pericles has many strengths coupled with some weaknesses; Sulla is a great military commander, but is ruthlessly ambitious and often cruel; Numa presents an ideal of personal justice and devotion to the gods, but cannot pass on his virtues to the next generation. They demonstrate that if we first carefully evaluate the choices and behaviours of Plutarch heroes and the consequences which follow upon them, then thoughtfully choose what to imitate and what to avoid in political leadership, we may still both respond to Plutarch’s hopes for his own contemporary readers, Greek and Roman, and serve ourselves well.