the head of the Campanian army, and as little the scandalous irregularity of entrusting an extraordinary supreme command by decree of the people to a private man; but the very tried incapacity of Marius as a statesman gave a sort of guarantee that he would not be able seriously to endanger the constitution, and above all the personal position of Sulpicius, if he formed a correct estimate of Sulla’s designs, was one of so imminent peril that such considerations could hardly be longer heeded.  That the worn-out hero himself readily met the wishes of any one who would employ him as a -condottiere-, was a matter of course; his heart had now for many years longed for the command in an Asiatic war, and not less perhaps for an opportunity of once settling accounts thoroughly with the majority of the senate.  Accordingly on the proposal of Sulpicius Gaius Marius was by decree of the people invested with extraordinary supreme, or as it was called proconsular, power, and obtained the command of the Campanian army and the superintendence of the war against Mithradates; and two tribunes of the people were despatched to the camp at Nola, to take over the army from Sulla.

Sulla’s Recall

Sulla was not the man to yield to such a summons.  If any one had a vocation to the chief command in the Asiatic war, it was Sulla.  He had a few years before commanded with the greatest success in the same theatre of war; he had contributed more than any other man to the subjugation of the dangerous Italian insurrection; as consul of the year in which the Asiatic war broke out, he had been invested with the command in it after the customary way and with the full consent of his colleague, who was on friendly terms with him and related to him by marriage.  It was expecting a great deal to suppose that he would, in accordance with a decree of the sovereign burgesses of Rome, give up a command undertaken in such circumstances to an old military and political antagonist, in whose hands the army might be turned to none could tell what violent and preposterous proceedings.  Sulla was neither good-natured enough to comply voluntarily with such an order, nor dependent enough to need to do so.  His army was—­ partly in consequence of the alterations of the military system which originated with Marius, partly from the moral laxity and the military strictness of its discipline in the hands of Sulla—­little more than a body of mercenaries absolutely devoted to their leader and indifferent to political affairs.  Sulla himself was a hardened, cool, and clearheaded man, in whose eyes the sovereign Roman burgesses were a rabble, the hero of Aquae Sextiae a bankrupt swindler, formal legality a phrase, Rome itself a city without a garrison and with its walls half in ruins, which could be far more easily captured than Nola.

Sulla’s March on Rome