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

19:55Tom Holland:And then when he's got the legion at his back and the news reaches him that Sina 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. 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.

20:34Tom Holland:So Crassus has quite a substantial military force now at his back, completely illegal. I mean, it's illegal for citizens to raise their own private armies, but these are troubled times and Crassus has gone ahead and done it. And so he's looking around and wondering, well, which anti-Marion should I throw my lot in with? And he realises that Sulla is really the only show in town. And so he crosses the Adriatic and he joins with Sulla in Greece. And Sulla thinks this is tremendous. and they become great pals. Sulla is very, very welcoming to him. Yeah. So that's number one. Who's the second man?

21:07Tom Holland: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 is 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 Piscenum on the eastern side of Italy, and it is crossing the Apennines to join him.

21:45Tom Holland:And when Sulla has brought this news, he's anxious that these reinforcements might be ambushed, 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 cross the Apennines. And what is more, it has wiped out, not one, not two, but three hostile Marian armies. And it is waiting for Sulla ahead of him on the road.

22:25It's drawn up in a splendid array and standing at the head of this array of men

22:33Tom Holland:is its young commander, the man who has personally raised it from his estates in Piscenum. And he He cuts a tremendous stash, this young man. He has golden hair swept up in a quiff, and he is the spitting image of Alexander the Great.

22:52Dominic Sandbrook:Wow. And Dominic, you know who this young man is. I do actually know who it is. He is Gnaeus Pompeius, isn't he? And he is the son of Pompeius 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 his tent was struck by lightning. So Strabo died, and I guess his affinity passed to his son, Gnaeus Pompeius, or Pompey. And Pompey, as lots of listeners will 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?

23:34Dominic Sandbrook:And he has this quiff, which you can see, you can Google his statues or his busts, and you can see the quiff. And 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.

23:51Tom Holland: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 20s. Yeah. 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 Sina's camp when Sina was at Ancona and 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 because it has presented the younger generation of Roman aristocrats and nobiles with a really unparalleled opportunity to leapfrog their elders and their betters.

24:56Tom Holland: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, 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 Gaius Marius, the seven times consul. Let's just have a look at him before we come to Pompey and Crassus. 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.

25:41Tom Holland:Then when the Temple of Jupiter burns down, so that was being described in the brilliant reading that you did to open this show. So it obviously presents an opportunity for Sulla because the capital is where Sina had sworn his oath, which he'd then broken. And so Sulla's propagandists can say, well, this demonstrates, you know, Jupiter has destroyed the temple because he's angry with Sina and his followers. Yeah. 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 central bank, if you like. It's where all the financial reserves are kept.

26:21Tom Holland:So Marius, when he sees the temple up in flames, he rushes up to the top of the capital and he doesn't bother rescuing the cult statue or any of the kind of great sacral objects that are stored there. He scoops up the treasure 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 82, he's going to start a term as consul at the age of 26. And this is just unprecedented and, by the standards of Roman convention, completely obscene. And even Sulla is shocked. And he understandably regards Marius Jr. as his deadliest foe.

27:05Tom Holland:And he kind of made this rueful comment that the older he became, so the younger his foes became. But of course, The same is true of his allies, because Pompey is even younger than the young Marius. And just to emphasize 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.

27:53Tom Holland:And so rather than slap Pompey down for having raised this private army at a very tender age, he thinks Pompey is great. And he gives Pompey free reign, 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 Marian 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.

28:35Tom Holland:And Pompey does this to such effect that all the Marian forces there, they take ship and withdraw and go to Sicily to try and carry on the fight there. Marius is defeated by Sulla himself in Campania. He withdraws to a town called Praneste, 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.

29:06Dominic Sandbrook:Oh yeah, nice armour, but they're very smooth people.

29:10Tom Holland: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. They want to relieve the young Marius in Praeneste up towards Rome. They evade Sulla and they start marching up towards Praeneste and Sulla follows them. And the two armies are kind of shadow boxing as 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.

29:51Tom Holland: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. And so they suddenly double back. They swing round. They march towards Rome. And Sulla is taken completely by surprise by this manoeuvre. Hadn't thought that they would do this. And he pursues them at frantic, 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.

30:36Tom Holland:And their commander gazes out at the cityscape. And he tells them, prepare to annihilate this monstrous den of evildoers. And he says, do you think that these wolves who have prayed so terribly upon the freedoms 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. And as they approach it, they can hear the screams of women in the city who think that they're about to be raped, enslaved, killed. However, just as they are approaching the Colline Gate, Sulla's cavalry, which is an advance of the main body of Sulla's army, hits them in the back, hits them in their rear.

31:22Tom Holland: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 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's on the verge of being broken when Sulla offers up a prayer to Venus, his great patron, and he's not Felix for nothing. Venus hears his prayer.

31:57Tom Holland: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 it turns into a bloodbath and victory not just in the battle but effectively in the the war against the italian allies and the war against the marians the victory at the colline gate ends both those wars and it leaves sulla as the master of rome wow so sulla now

32:29Dominic Sandbrook: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.

32:48Tom Holland: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.

33:01Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, there's a classic example of that, Tom, at the end of the 15th century. And the hard The 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?

33:31Tom Holland:Anthropic asked 100 ,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

33:48Dominic Sandbrook:Ask yours at claude.ai slash restishistory. And keep thinking.

34:01Dominic Sandbrook: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. Give us some sense of the scene on the field of Mars as Sulla arrives with his prisoners.

34:41Tom Holland: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.

35:20Tom Holland:This is where they were based. This is where the census would be done. And it's also where foreign ambassadors would be greeted. And it's where generals who were granted triumphs would spend the night before they enter the Rome with their troops. So I suppose it's a symbol really of the functioning of the Roman Republic, the entire Roman political system. 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 really not very much space for them. Meanwhile, Sulla has entered Rome, where he hasn't been for many years.

35:55Tom Holland: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 Bellona, who is, as her name suggests, the goddess of war. And Sulla has chosen it with his kind of customary shrewdness and care. So 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 of Jupiter can be seen as well. And this is important for Sulla's purposes because back in the spring of 83, 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.

36:42Tom Holland: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 Marians surrendered and submitted to Sulla's benign rule. And of course, the Marians had not surrendered. And so the temple had duly burnt to the ground. And Salah 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 Marians. 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 Salah 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 Philip Publica and then screams and then more screams and then a lot of screams.

37:45Tom Holland: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 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, the corpses of the prisoners are dragged across the campus and tossed into the Tiber.

38:25Tom Holland: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 um the corpses stayed in the river until at last its currents cut a swathe of blood through the azure open sea so a very

38:46Dominic Sandbrook:vivid chilling image yeah eliminating the samnites is one thing but sulla's bloodthirsty ambitions to 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.

39:09Tom Holland: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 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 Marian 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 the scale of the killing that Marius had launched.

39:56Tom Holland:It seems something utterly terrifying even to Sulla's own supporters. And one of them dares to ask Sulla, when are the killings going to end? When are you going to reign 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 on these lists.

40:40Dominic Sandbrook:So to clarify, these are kill lists prepared by the master of Rome against Rome's own people.

40:45Tom Holland: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 Marian supporters who start to appear on these prescription lists. So unsurprisingly, anyone who has a name for wealth and isn't a particular friend of Sulla's.

41:32Tom Holland: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, Deves, the money bags. There's nothing he enjoys more than ill gained loot. And finally, 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.

42:18Tom Holland: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.

42:46Dominic Sandbrook:So this is something extraordinary that Sulla is doing, publishing these lists, killing all these people, Senia, his death squads. He doesn't need to do it because he's worn.

42:56Tom Holland:Why does he do it then? Well, he's a very vengeful man, as Marius was. He wants his vengeance. He's been brooding on his vengeance for years. And I think the longer he broods, the larger his appetite for vengeance has grown. And very grisly stories are told about Salah's behavior during the prescriptions. Again, they may be exaggerated, but the fact that they're told, I think 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.

43:40Tom Holland:And if they're satisfied, then they will release the promised fee. And if the heads belong to someone whom these agents know Sulla particularly hated, They will alert their master. And it is claimed that Sulla would keep some of the heads, particular choice specimens. And you can imagine him kind of going in for a gloat over his enemies.

44:04Dominic Sandbrook: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.

44:12Tom Holland:So vengeance is his. I think also, of course, it enables him to impoverish his enemies and to enrich his friends. Money is power. And Sulla himself 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 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.

44:50Tom Holland:So Salas, Roman historian writing a few decades later, I mean, he identifies what Salah is doing very precisely. And he says that not until Salah 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. Salah wants to make sure that those who follow him have a material basis for doing so as well as personal loyalty to him. Smart politics, I suppose.

45:18Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. I mean, corrupt politics, but smart. Brutal politics, but smart. Yeah. And what about now? Not all the Marians, of course, are in Rome. There are some outside Rome. Most obviously, Marius Jr. Where's he?

45:32Tom Holland:What's he up to? He's still holed up in Praeneste. So that's where Sulla and the Samnites were kind of marching towards before the Battle of the Colangate. Sulla, pretty much the moment that he's addressed the Senate, he's launched the prescriptions, He then gets his army back and he marches back on Praineste to finish the young Marius off. But before he can reach there, news is brought to him that Marius has committed suicide. He knows the game is up. And Sulla is delighted because with the suicide of Marius Jr., the line of Gaius Marius, his great rival, his former commander, the man he's measured himself against all his life, it's extinct.

46:09Tom Holland:The Marian line is dead. And Sulla is so delighted by this, that this adjective he has consistently applied to himself, Felix, the lucky one, 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 Marian line extinct.

46:34Dominic Sandbrook:Do you know, there are so many elements of Sulla's character that I think anticipate Octavian, Augustus. later on, not least changing his name in the wake of victory.

46:45Tom Holland:Well, and also his willingness, I mean, Octavian, when he becomes consul for the first time, I think he's only 18. The guy who provides the precedent for that 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 new toy. He has such fun. So he goes to Sicily first. He cleans up there and he captures the Marian commander. And rather than put him on trial, he has him executed without any due legal process.

47:31Tom Holland:And this causes a lot of outrage back in Rome. and Pompey's enemies give him this nickname, Adules Gentulus 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 cares. 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 dashing. 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.

48:20Tom Holland:At this point, Pompey is still only 25, but he loves it. He loves it because of course, Alexander had been young. And so Pompey is sharing in the glamour of a youthful Macedonian king. So when Pompey returns to Italy, 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 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 way you'd have a try that offends against every custom you know this is the guy who's just slaughtered large numbers of people but whatever he's a conservative pompey doesn't back down and he says to sulla more people worship the rising sun than the setting sun

49:14Dominic Sandbrook:it's a tremendous comment i mean he does he say this to sulla he does say it to sulla not like immediately have put him on one of his lists or something.

49:24Tom Holland:No, he doesn't. Not only does he grant the triumph, but he officially confirms his protege in the title that his soldiers had given him, the title of Magnus. So from this point on, it's Pompeius Magnus. So he's got another name.

49:39Dominic Sandbrook: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 recognises 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.

50:04Tom Holland: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. Pompey's vanity. His taste for self-promotion. notion, his relish for the perks of success really is telling that Pompey wants a triumph rather than a consulship.

50:52Tom Holland:He wants the glamour and the swagger. It's the baubles. 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 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, he 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 so yes he's a cynic but he he does also have kind of strains of idealism in it 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 And Sulla wants to make sure that he can regularise his position in the Republic.

52:07Tom Holland:It's important to him that he has constitutional legitimacy. And so he does this not by holding a whole succession of consulships, as Sinnoh has done, but by dusting down a magistracy from the ancient past of Rome. 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.

52:50Tom Holland: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. 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. He doesn't want to be confined to six months. He wants it to be open-ended. And so again, the Senate, you don't oppose a guy with loads of legions at his back. They give Sulla an open-ended dictatorship, which is, of course, it's against every constitutional norm.

53:40Tom Holland:But to reiterate, Sulla's ambition 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 conventional norms of political discourse to the mass of the people beyond, that they have gone too far. So he's kind of centrist daddery, I guess, only backed by legions and dictatorial power.

54:30Dominic Sandbrook:Well, you say centrist daddery, you mean you don't see him as an out and out reactionary? as ultra-conservative?

54:36Tom Holland: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. 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. He is Alastair Campbell. Well, it is, of course, a populism that has been turned very murderous. And he's been the object of it. The fact that he also is murderous, I mean, he's kind of ignoring that. But there clearly are problems. And Sulla, I guess, would say, well, I've earned myself the right to try and apply my prescription.

55:16Tom Holland:The gods have given me this chance. I'm going to go for it.

55:19Dominic Sandbrook: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?

55:30Tom Holland:That's absolutely what they'd say, because 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.

56:10Tom Holland:You are Romans now. Come into the Senate. Help us heal the wounds of our city 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 Sinner. He legally regulates the age at which ambitious young noblies can run for magistracies. So 30 is set by law as 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.

56:57Tom Holland:This has previously been 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 tribunate. And he goes out of his way to emasculate the tribunate. So he forbids them to propose bills. And remember that it was a bill that had been proposed by a tribune that had allowed Marius to try and strip him of his command in 88 BC. They are also, this is a very cunning move, anyone who becomes a tribune is then banned from running for further magistracies.

57:35Dominic Sandbrook:So you're never going to do it, yeah.

57:36Tom Holland: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 sinner, a Marius Jr. in Roman political life. And you can see exactly he's trying to block off all 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.

58:21Tom Holland: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 has simply laid his dictatorship aside and become a completely private citizen. He has no office at all. 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.

58:54Dominic Sandbrook:So Sullard's in his late 50s at this point. He could have stayed on. He could have thought, well, I'll be dictated till 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? That parallel.

59:08Tom Holland:You know who, at the end of the 18th century, Sulla is often compared to? It's George Washington.

59:17Tom Holland:Because George Washington had laid down the presidency as Sulla had laid down the dictatorship. Two massive differences though.

59:24Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I agree. 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.

59:34Tom Holland: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. And it's from this point onwards, really, that Pompeii comes to rank as a Roman town.

1:00:21Tom Holland:And the same fate is visited on Nola, which actually only finally surrendered in 80 BC. So that is after Sulla had laid down 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 renames Nola Colonia Felix after himself, which, you know, such a triumph.

1:00:48Dominic Sandbrook:And where is he? What's he doing?

1:00:49Tom Holland:Well, of course, I mean, he's had his pick of beachside villas. He's got a lot of real estate along the Neapolitan coast. And his main villa is between Naples and Putioli, the great port. And he has such a lovely time. So he throws himself into the pleasures of the Bay of Naples, the oysters, the spas, the yacht parties, all of that.

1:01:16Dominic Sandbrook:God, sounds brilliant.

1:01:17Tom Holland: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 his Bohemian days. So people who listen to our first episode may remember that he loved a standup comic. He loved an actor. He loved a courtesan and he loved a drag queen. And he gets all of these old friends of his down to party. So it's commented of one particular of these friends, Matrobius, who is a drag queen. The Matrobius 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 standup comics necking wine.

1:01:56Tom Holland:It's having a great time.

1:01:58Dominic Sandbrook:He has had the best time, I think, of anyone we've ever done on The Rest is history because he's ticked two very difficult to tick boxes. One, he's in retirement on 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.

1:02:25Tom Holland:Completely. So that's brilliant. The jokes the stand-up comedians make with those props to hand, I mean, they'd be tremendous.

1:02:32Dominic Sandbrook:You can do some fantastic routines with the severed heads of your adversaries. You could play football, rugby, whatever. 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.

1:02:46Tom Holland:No. So he dies in 78 BC. So not, you know, just kind of a couple of years after, really.

1:02:52Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, but what a way to bow out.

1:02:53Tom Holland:And unsurprisingly, he seems to have died of liver failure. Right. 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 think we should damn his memory. And at the very least, we should not give him any public funerary 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 escort his body back to Rome, out onto the campus marches where great state funerals are held. And obviously there is no one in Rome to oppose this band of veterans.

1:03:41Tom Holland: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. Salah 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? 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?

1:04:27Tom Holland:Or is the future darker? Has Sulla set an example 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?

1:04:53Dominic Sandbrook: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? Sulla.

1:05:12Tom Holland:Because Marius, he's a brilliant political operator, but he's not as pitiless in his cynicism as Sulla is. And Sulla, by leading his troops on Rome, sets an example that is properly tabo-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, the famous orator of Rome. He wrote a letter to a friend in which he just said, Sulla could do it. Why can't I? This is what they will be pondering. He's put his finger on exactly the issue that once a taboo is broken, it's very difficult to restore it.

1:06:05Dominic Sandbrook:Lally, it's 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 because he's a conservative

1:06:29Tom Holland: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.

1:07:12Tom Holland:And Sulla says, 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. But the lessons that Caesar chooses to draw from 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.

1:07:48Dominic Sandbrook: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 successes 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 um 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 the rest is history.com and sign up and you should of course whether you want to join the club or not sign up to our amazing newsletter which comes every week and is completely free so Tom thank you very much for that that was absolutely riveting bye-bye everybody bye-bye

1:08:47Thank you.