I admire your ability, Cimon, to see the good in everyone...or perhaps to expect the good even where there is little to be found. I do not put Sulla in the same rank as Caesar, and like Heraklia, I am not an admirer. His "reform" agenda was regressive from what I have read, more of a reaction to the Gracchi and counter to the popularists and Marians . Didn't Sulla neuter the Tribunate and attempt to promote the powers of the old aristocracy? I propose that one of the problems facing the Republic was its inability to change with the times. The emerging middle classes, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of new citizens coming into the electorate, could not have been content for long to be shut out in favor of the increasingly ineffectual and corrupt old millionaire's club that the Senate had become. Someone like Caesar was needed to find the middle ground of reforms and popular support upon which a really viable government might have been built. Sulla was about killings and confiscations, and rule by terror. As Stalin and Hitler would attest, dictatorships run this way seem invulnerable from outside, but inside are built upon sand as there is little upward support for very long. As soon as the policemen and soldiers blink, the lid blows off (to mix metaphors). Sulla belongs in the same category of history's bloody tyrants, who turn out to be historical "dead ends."