Nothing in history shows better how much in remedial legislation depends on the spirit in which it is undertaken. Sulla saw that the great council, the Senate, must be the central point and pivot of government, unless indeed there were a master at hand, like himself, to undertake it; that the popular assemblies, untrained in discussion and affairs, could not do the work of administration. Though the theory of the constitution had always been that the people were sovereign, he contrived that the Senate, which had so long practically governed under an unwritten constitution, should now rule without let or hindrance on a basis of statute law; and here we see an unwritten constitution growing into a written one, as with us Britons at this moment. By a great law of treason, the first on the Roman statute book, he made it almost impossible to defy the Senate without the risk of political effacement. This may be called reactionary, but under the circumstances it was not a reaction to be complained of. The pity was that this master legislator had really none to be grateful or loyal to him but his own army and followers. His constitutional legislation was for the most part swept away soon after his death, and there was no one to lament. On the other hand, all that he did that was not strictly political, and in particular his reorganisation of what we may call the civil service, and of the criminal law and procedure, was so obviously progressive and valuable that no one ever attempted to destroy it; and some of his laws of this kind held good throughout Roman history. Sulla attained his power in 81 B.C., resigned it in 79, and died next year at his villa on the warm Campanian coast, where he had gone to enjoy himself in self-indulgence and literary dilettantism. Here he wrote that autobiography of which some few fragments have come down to us in Plutarch’s _Life_ of him—a life which will repay the reader, even in translation. One of these fragments has always seemed to me to throw real light on the man’s strange nature, and on the imperfection of his work. “All my most happy resolutions,” he wrote, “have been the result, not of reasoning, but of momentary inspiration.” In other words, Sulla did not believe in thinking over a problem, and herein he was a true Roman. He hoped to do the right thing on the spur of the moment. Thus it was that no one ever knew what he would do; no one could trust him nor believe in him. Like so many in that and succeeding ages he believed profoundly in Fortune: he called himself Sulla the Fortunate, and gave like names to his two children. What exactly he meant by Fortuna we cannot say; but we may be sure that it was no such conception of a power ruling the world as might guide a statesman’s feet out of the path of self-seeking into a more bracing region of high endeavour. CHAPTER VII THE REVOLUTION: ACT II