Plutarch's life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla traces a patrician of modest means who rose through Marius's shadow, seized Rome twice by force, crushed Mithridates and sacked Athens, then ruled as dictator through mass proscriptions before resigning power and dying of a grotesque wasting disease.
Plutarch's Sylla opens with a poor patrician of striking, mottled complexion who wins early distinction as Marius's quaestor by helping engineer the surrender of Jugurtha, then spends the rest of the narrative locked in an escalating rivalry with Marius that both men treat, in Plutarch's telling, as a small and boyish grudge that eventually drags Rome into civil war. Sulla's private life is drawn just as pointedly: he loved actors and drinking companions his whole life, married four times, and attributed his successes not to skill but to a personal divine favor he called Fortune, a claim Plutarch repeatedly tests against the record.
The life unfolds through two great campaigns bracketing two marches on Rome. Sulla first storms his own city to overturn Sulpicius's laws and drive out Marius, then departs to fight Mithridates, besieging and brutally sacking Athens, plundering Delphi and other Greek sanctuaries for war funds, and winning the pitched battles of Chaeronea and Orchomenus against far larger royal armies before negotiating peace directly with Mithridates at Dardanus. While he is in the east, his enemies Cinna and Carbo seize Rome, so Sulla crosses back to Italy, wins the war at the Colline Gate outside the city itself, and then institutes the proscriptions: posted lists of the condemned, rewards for killers, and confiscated estates, climaxing in his acceptance of the title Dictator and his self-chosen honorific 'Fortunate' (Felix). Plutarch closes with the strange final years — Sulla's voluntary resignation of the dictatorship, his marriage to Valeria, his death from a lice-borne wasting disease, and a lavish public funeral secured by Pompey despite Sulla's enemies.
Historically the Life is one of Plutarch's central case studies in how personal ambition corrodes a republic: Sulla is Plutarch's proof that constitutional forms survive intact while their spirit is gutted, since he restored senatorial power through the machinery of proscription and dictatorship. It is also a major source for the First Mithridatic War, the sack of Athens (including the transfer of Aristotle's library to Rome), and the mechanics of Roman civil war a generation before Caesar, making it essential background for both classical historians and readers of the Gospels' Roman world.
“How can you be an honest man, when your father left you nothing and yet you have come to possess so much?”
— Sylla
“In this campaign at least, men of Athens, Fortune has no share.”
— Sylla
“For me, Romans, it is a fine thing to die right here; but as for you, when men ask where you betrayed your commander, remember to say: at Orchomenus.”
— Sylla
“So then, Archelaus, you, a Cappadocian and slave — or if you prefer, friend — of a barbarian king, will not stoop to shame for such great advantages, yet you dare to speak of treachery to me, a Roman commander and Sulla”
— Sylla
“For we do not beg," he said, "on behalf of those whom you have resolved to destroy, from your vengeance, but for those whom you have resolved to spare, from this uncertainty.”
— Sylla
Sulla marched on Rome twice. The first time, in 88 BCE, he did it to overturn laws passed by the tribune Sulpicius (allied with Marius) that had stripped him of his command against Mithridates and threatened his life; Plutarch records that Sulla's own soldiers stoned to death the tribunes sent to take over his army. The second march, after his return from the east, was to overthrow the Cinna-Carbo faction that had seized power in his absence, a campaign that culminated in the brutal Battle of the Colline Gate at the city's own gates.
After a long siege that starved the city under the tyrant Aristion, Sulla's troops burst in at midnight and slaughtered so many that, as Plutarch reports, 'the multitude is reckoned by the extent of ground over which the blood flowed.' He was eventually persuaded to spare the survivors, saying he extended mercy 'toward the majority on account of a handful, and toward the living on account of the dead,' but he also stripped nearby sacred groves for siege timber and plundered Delphi, Epidaurus, and Olympia to pay for the war.
The proscriptions were public lists of men condemned to death that Sulla began posting after seizing Rome, offering two talents to anyone who killed a listed man and death to anyone who sheltered one, with no exception for close relatives. Plutarch describes the lists growing daily — eighty names, then two hundred twenty more, then more still — and notes chillingly that executioners joked a victim 'was killed by his great house, that one by his garden, another by his hot springs,' meaning men were killed simply for their property.
Sulla won the decisive battles of Chaeronea and Orchomenus in Boeotia against vastly larger Pontic armies, reportedly losing only fourteen men at Chaeronea while killing tens of thousands, then negotiated a peace directly with Mithridates at Dardanus in the Troad. The settlement required Mithridates to give up Asia, Paphlagonia, Bithynia, and Cappadocia, pay two thousand talents, and hand over seventy warships, while Sulla confirmed him as an ally of Rome rather than destroying him outright, a leniency his own soldiers resented.
Yes. Plutarch records that Sulla revived the office of dictator 'after a hundred and twenty years,' with unprecedented immunity for past acts and total authority over life, death, and property. Yet he later laid down the office voluntarily and 'made the people master of the consular elections,' standing in the forum afterward as an accountable private citizen — a reversal Plutarch treats as a genuine puzzle about Sulla's character.
Plutarch describes Sulla dying of a horrific wasting disease in which his flesh 'turned entirely into lice,' comparing his case to the deaths of Pherecydes and other ancient figures reportedly killed the same way. He kept working until the end, ordering an execution the day before he died and reconciling factions at Puteoli ten days earlier, and Plutarch notes he had foreseen his own death and stopped his memoirs two days before it came.
Sulla seized the library of Apellicon of Teos, which contained most of the surviving works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, not widely known at the time. Plutarch reports that once brought to Rome, the scholar Tyrannio arranged the collection and Andronicus of Rhodes later published copies from it and drew up the catalogues of Aristotle's works still used in Plutarch's own day.
Sulla adopted the title Felix (Fortunate), rendered in Greek contexts as Epaphroditus, and even named his twin children by Metella 'Faustus' and 'Fausta' after the Latin word for fortunate. Plutarch treats this self-mythologizing skeptically, noting Sulla credited unplanned, spur-of-the-moment decisions with his best outcomes and comparing him to Timotheus of Athens, who was punished by the gods for the opposite sin of denying Fortune any share in his victories.
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