"What kind of man has such a dream? Is he mad? Or a genius? Or simply a child of Rome blessed by Fortune, sent a reassuring message of success by the power that guides his destiny?
Before dawn, as the army assembled, a lamb was sacrificed. By the smoky torchlight the soothsayer Postumius read the entrails. He rushed to Sulla and knelt, offering up his hands as if for shackles. He begged Sulla to keep him bound as a prisoner so that he might be summarily executed if his visions were false, so certain was he of Sulla's triumph. So the legend tells us. There is something about a man like Sulla that makes savants and soothsayers clamour to grovel at his feet.
Sulla attacked from the east with a force of 35,000. There are sections of the Esquiline Hill that still bear the blackened scars of his advance. The walls were breached. The unarmed populace resisted with a bombardment of tiles and rubble cast from rooftops. Sulla himself was the first to take a torch in hand and set fire to a building where the people had gathered to resist. Archers shot fire-arrows onto rooftops. Whole families were burned alive; others were left homeless and ruined. The flames made no distinction between the guilty and the innocent, friend and foe. All were consumed.
Marius was driven back to the Temple of Tellus. Here his radical populism reached its apex: in return for their support, he offered freedom to the slaves of Rome. It says something for the prescience of the slaves or for the decline of Marius's reputation that only three slaves came forward. Marius and his supporters fled the city and scattered. The tribune Sulpicius, master of the Anti-Senate, was betrayed by one of his own slaves and put to death. Sulla first rewarded the treacherous slave by granting him freedom, then punished him as a free man by having him huried to his death from the Tarpeian Rock.
My thoughts, having wandered their own way on the wings of Metrobius's song, returned abruptly to the present. Echoing up from below us, Metrobius's voice affected a childish singsong with an atrociously crude Greek accent:
The crowd gasped. A few in the room tittered nervously. Chrysogonus suppressed his golden smile. Sulla's face was a blank. Rufus looked disgusted. Hortensius had just put something into his mouth and was looking about the room, uncertain whether he should swallow. The ruined young poet looked nauseated — literally nauseated, pale and sweaty, as if something on the table had disagreed with him and he might vomit at any moment.
The lyre fell silent and Metrobius froze for a long moment. The lyre struck a twanging note. Metrobius cocked his head. 'Well,' he said archly, 'it may not be Sophocles, or even Aristophanes — but I like it'
The tension broke. The room erupted in laughter; even Rufus smiled. Hortensius finally swallowed and reached for his goblet The young poet staggered up from his couch and rushed from the room, clutching his belly.
The lyre player strummed and Metrobius took a deep breath. The song recommenced.
Sulla resumed his term as consul. Marius was outlawed. His enemies exiled, the Senate pacified, and the populace dazed, Sulla set out for Greece to win glory and drive back Mithridates.
Afterwards, critics complained that his sweeping eastern campaign was the most expensive military expedition in the history of Rome.
For the Greeks the price was devastating. Always in the past the great Roman conquerors of Greece and Macedonia had paid homage to the local shrines and temples, endowing them with offerings of gold and silver — respecting, if not the present inhabitants, then at least the memories of Alexander and Pericles. Sulla treated the temples differently. He looted them. The statues at Epidaurus were stripped of their gilding. The sacred offerings at Olympia were melted for coin. Sulla wrote to the keepers of the Oracle at Delphi and requested their treasure, saying that in his hands it would be safer from the vagaries of war, and that if he did have occasion to spend it he would certainly replace it. Sulla's envoy, Caphis, arrived at Delphi, entered the inner shrine, heard the music of an invisible lyre, and burst into tears. Caphis sent word to Sulla, begging him to reconsider. Sulla wrOte back, telling him that the sound of the lyre was surely a sign, not of Apollo's anger, but of approval. The portable treasures were carried away in sacks. The great silver urn was cut into pieces and carted off on a wagon. The Oracle fell silent. In a hundred generations the Greeks will not forget.
The Greeks, — especially the Athenians, had welcomed Mithridates, happy to cast off the Roman yoke. Sulla punished them. If the Greeks could create another Euripides, a poet of agony and terror, he might find a theme in Sulla's devouring lust to vanquish Athens — except that in Sulla's life story there is no hubris, only the never-ending caress of Fortune, as steady as the waves of the sea. The siege was bitter and relentless. The populace, driven to starvation, kept up their spirits by composing crude ditties slandering Sulla. The tyrant Aristion railed at the Romans from the city walls, hurling down insults against Sulla and his wife (the fourth, Metella), accompanied by a broad and complicated vocabulary of obscene gestures, many of which the Romans had never seen before but which were subsequently imported and are now fashionable among the street gangs and idle youth of the city. Many of these gestures have facetious names, mostly on the theme of Sulla raping Athena, to the chagrin of his wife.
When the walls were scaled and the gates opened, the slaughter was appalling. It is said that the blood in the enclosed marketplace was literally ankle-deep. Once the fury had subsided, Sulla put a stop to the pillage, ascending to the Acropolis to say a few words of praise for the ancient Athenians, followed by his famous utterance. 'I forgive the few for the sake of the many, the living for the sake of the dead,' a quotation frequently cited as an example either of his profound wisdom or his very dry wit.
Meanwhile, civil war simmered and bubbled in Rome as if her walls were the rim of a cauldron. The Italian allies grumbled over the slow dispensation of citizenships promised at the end of the Social War; the conservatives in the Senate grumbled that the privileges of citizenship were being disastrously diluted; the exiled Marius wandered to Africa and back, like Ulysses pursued by harpies. The anti-Sullan consul Cinna, another radical demagogue, welcomed Marius back to Rome and outlawed Sulla instead. Amid chaos and bloodshed Marius attained his seventh consulship only to die seventeen days later.
Having driven Mithridates back to Pontus, Sulla summarily declared the Eastern campaign a total success and made his way back to Italy with all speed. Here the legends and Memoirs recount further encounters with fawning soothsayers and soaring dreams, but why repeat them? The goddess Bellona supplied fresh thunderbolts and Sulla dispensed them to his loyal generals, Pompey and Crassus foremost among them, who cast them all over Italy and Africa, taming Sulla's enemies to ash. Fortune never ceased to smile for an instant. At Signia, Sulla was engaged by the army of Marius the son of Marius. Twenty thousand of Marius's men were killed, eight thousand were taken prisoner; Sulla lost only twenty-three soldiers.