Dictatorship was to carry into execution in a legal manner the great reforms which he meditated in the constitution and the administration of justice, by which he hoped to place the government of the Republic on a firm and secure basis. He had no intention of abolishing the Republic, and consequently he caused Consuls to be elected for the following year, B.C. 81, and was elected to the office himself in B.C. 80, while he continued to hold the Dictatorship. At the beginning of B.C. 81 Sulla celebrated a splendid triumph on account of his victory over Mithridates. In a speech which he delivered to the people at the close of the gorgeous ceremony, he claimed for himself the surname of _Felix_, as he attributed his success in life to the favor of the gods. All ranks in Rome bowed in awe before their master; and among other marks of distinction which were voted to him by the obsequious Senate, a gilt equestrian statue was erected to his honor before the Rostra, bearing the inscription "Cornelio Sullae Imperatori Felici." During the years B.C. 80 and 79 Sulla carried into execution his various reforms in the constitution, of which an account is given at the end of this chapter. At the same time he established many military colonies throughout Italy. The inhabitants of the Italian towns which had fought against Sulla were deprived of the full Roman franchise which had been lately conferred upon them; their lands were confiscated and given to the soldiers who had fought under him. A great number of these colonies were settled in Etruria. They had the strongest interest in upholding the institutions of Sulla, since any attempt to invalidate the latter would have endangered their newly-acquired possessions. But, though they were a support to the power of Sulla, they hastened the fall of the commonwealth; an idle and licentious soldiery supplanted an industrious agricultural population; and Catiline found nowhere more adherents than among the military colonies of Sulla. While Sulla thus established throughout Italy a population devoted to his interests, he created at Rome a kind of body-guard for his protection by giving the citizenship to a great number of slaves belonging to those who had been proscribed by him. The slaves thus rewarded are said to have been as many as 10,000, and were called Cornelii after him as their patron.