LOL - We ALWAYS disagree on Sulla. Mainly, because every single step he took politically seemed calculated to return the Republic to the world, say, 80 years beforehand, before all the changes and problems arising out of Rome's expansion had ever happened. I think to go reactionary when you've got major new problems is to confront, is only to defer dealing with those problems, and they will pop right back up in the end and usually far worse.

It says a lot to me that, between, say, 78 and 48 BC, hardly anything remained of Sulla's primary changes to the mos maiorum, and many of the most important bits were repealed by Pompey and Crassus within a decade of Sulla's death. That says to me that Sulla's prescriptions were acknowledged, even at the time, to be unworkable in any long-term sense.

Doesn't it say worlds that our own lad, Julius Caesar, literally had no alternative but to flee Rome and spend years abroad with the army, only returning to Rome once Sulla and his secret police were safely dead and/or out of power? This is a world, not where debate can happen, but where tyranny rules without anything more than one man's say-so. It's only sad that anyone can compare Sulla's dictatorship and Caesar - as Caesar said himself, he did "not propose to emulate" anything Sulla did.

What I hate about Sulla is how he was the first to do so many things, or the first to have the gall to do them on a huge scale, including dictatorship, judicial murder, and tampering with the mos maiorum. All these acts threw smoldering ashes into a situation which was politically explosive enough as it was. And heaven knows, his heavy-handed determination to return Roman rule to the aristocracy and to wipe out the knights and others' gains over the preceding 40 years, was a view of a solution - but such a bad one IMHO!

Sulla was the first man cold-bloodedly to use political violence as a deliberate tool of terror. Like Lenin, he did it very well. Like Lenin, he also set a horrific precedent.

Admittedly, the Gracchi ALSO set horrific precedents, and perhaps Sulla's reactionary attitudes were a natural reaction to theirs. But in many other ways, I think his dictatorship injected the virus in a massive dose that killed the Republic.