The American Encyclopedia of History, Biography and Travel: Comprising Ancient and Modern History: the Biography of Eminent Men of Europe and America, and the Lives of Distinguished Travelers.Prescott, Thomas H.
History
The American Encyclopedia of History, Biography and Travel: Comprising Ancient and Modern History: the Biography of Eminent Men of Europe and America, and the Lives of Distinguished Travelers.
Prescott, Thomas H.
Biography; World history
his legate Flavius Fimbria, who assumed the command of the army, and
gained some successes; but being afterwards hard pressed by Sulla, and
deserted by his army, committed suicide. This occurred about the time
of the conclusion of the peace with Mithridates (B. C. 84); and Sulla,
after settling the affairs of Asia Minor, and draining the country of
money, so remorselessly as to affect its prosperity for a century,
commenced his journey homewards, with bloody purposes against Cinna
and his adherents, and an army ready to execute them.
Cinna did not live to face his dreadful enemy. Murdered by his
soldiers in his fourth consulship, he left, as his successors in the
leadership of the popular party, Caius Marius the Younger, Papirius
Carbo, and the brave Sertorius――the two former of whom were chosen
consuls for the year B. C. 82, to oppose Sulla in Italy, while
Sertorius was despatched to Spain to secure that province. But Carbo
and the younger Marius, even when backed by the brave Samnites and
other Italian nations, were not equal to a contest with such a general
as Sulla, assisted as he was by commanders like Metellus, Lucullus,
and young Cneius Pompeius Strabo, more commonly called Pompey, the son
of that Pompeius who had been one of the Roman generals in the Marsic
War. The consular armies were defeated; Marius killed himself; Carbo
fled to Africa; and Sulla remained master of Italy. Fearful was his
vengeance. The massacre which Marius had ordered five years before,
was slight compared with the butcheries which took place by the
command of Sulla. In Rome, and over all Italy, every man of
distinction implicated in the popular movement was sought out and
slain. Proscription lists, as they were called――that is, lists of
doomed individuals――were published; and soldiers were ready to track
them out for the prices put upon their heads. Military colonies were
likewise planted in all parts of Italy――lands being taken by force for
that purpose: thus purging Italy of the Marian leaven, Sulla was
resolved to create in it a new population, which should be pliant to
aristocratic influence.
The work of the soldier over, Sulla commenced that of the legislator.
Appointed perpetual dictator B. C. 82, he continued for three years to
exercise the sovereignty, making alterations in the constitution, the
general effect of which was to lessen the power of the people in
political affairs, and reforming the criminal law. In B. C. 79, he
surprised every one by abdicating the dictatorship, and retiring into
private life; and in the following year he died of a loathsome and
incurable disorder, brought on by his debaucheries. Among other
evidences of Sulla’s literary accomplishments, he left memoirs of his
own life composed in Greek.
POMPEY――CICERO――CATILINE――CÆSAR.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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