In re-reading Rubicon, I again came to the conclusion that, of all the warlords of the last decades of the Republic, the one who did by far the most damage was Sulla, who makes Caesar look perfectly angelic by comparison except on one point. The one point being - Sulla retired. Just because Caesar accepted the dictatorship for life (remember, Sulla also accepted it without a firm ending in time) doesn't mean that he might not have returned power to the Republic himself - we can't discount it just because he was murdered first.

When I read about Sulla's steps, one after another, they prefigure everything that went wrong in the later Republic, whether marching on Rome, the proscriptions, the terror, the use of the Senate as a compliant tool to force through his own reactionary laws, the single-handed re-writing of part of the constitution, the destruction of tribunal vetoes, and on and on. But the one that chills me most is the famous episode when, with his army behind him, Sulla convened the Senate at a location where, part of the way through, he had his soldiers slaughter a few thousand prisoners from the recent war, to be sure that the Senate could hear the screams while Sulla was making his political demands.

I think something broke in the Republican mentality after Sulla that never recovered! WHAT a nasty guy!