Fouche on Potential and Probable Uses of Power

Sulla responded to the effect of, “Go tell the Romans that I don’t lie here obedient to their commands. I’m coming to Rome and hell’s coming with me.” The tone of these envoys’ entreaties and the mood of the people of Rome grew increasingly hysterical as the improbable dawned on them: not only could a Roman army commander march an army on Rome, it was increasingly probable that Sulla would march armed Roman legionaries right into the heart of Rome itself to deal with his political enemies. Indeed, Sulla led his men across the sacred pomerium that divided the “public thing” (res publica) of sacred Roma herself from land that was merely the property of Rome. Sulla’s veteran legionaries easily dispatched the hastily gathered mob of gladiators and other ruffians that his political opponents had thrown together at the last moment in a futile attempt to stop them.

Sulla had revealed that the impossible was merely the improbable.

Sulla spent the rest of his life trying to disguise this state of improbability as a mere state of impossibility.

He failed.

That was merely Fouche’s introduction. The post is well worth reading in full.

The post caught my eye because of Sulla, a Roman who did a monstrous thing but who was himself no monster. Much like a surgeon whose patient’s body is riddled with cancer, Sulla attempted to buy the old Roman Republic time and restore a semblance of political health by ruthlessly cutting out a tumorous faction and ratcheting back a host of constitutional gimmickery that had been welded onto Roman government over the years by ambitious politicians. Older, original rules of the game, or new ones in their spirit, were restored after blood shed in the proscriptions was scrubbed from the forum. Sulla even formally stepped down from the supreme power he held, like Cincinnatus, to further drive home the point to his fellow Romans regarding the sanctity of their traditions – though reportedly Sulla remained, even in a debaucherous retirement, a terrifying figure and stringpuller.

Fouche is correct that Sulla’s extreme measures failed. The underlying structural problems of the Republic were rooted in an increasing concentration of wealth, primarily in land ownership by Patricians and politically favored trading opportunities in “the East”, held mostly by the elite of Rome’s Italian “allied” city states, that left many Roman citizens too impoverished to perform military service or to be active in politics, except as dependent members of a clientela. The Republic’s legions and it’s political virtue had been based on an economically independent smallholding class who were being despoiled by politically powerful Patricians. Sulla’s reforms may have tempred political conflict within the ruling class for a time, but they also aggravated the social grievances that provided the Populares with political support from ordinary Romans and tilted the delicate political balance in the Republic toward extreme oligarchy.

In his retirement, observing the young Julius Caesar, whom Sulla had reluctantly spared, his toga fashionably loosely belted, long sleeved and wearing boots, like the ancient kings of Alba Longa, Sulla remarked “ He contains many Mariuses“. Caesar did. And unlike Marius but like Sulla, Julius Caesar was successful, Sulla having shown him the way to cross a Rubicon.

Power is power but power coupled with legitimacy endures. Sulla to Caesar to Augustus is the continuum.

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