Even when regent he gave orders, while conducting the public sale of the property of the proscribed, that a donation from the spoil should be given to the author of a wretched panegyric which was handed to him, on condition that the writer should promise never to sing his praises again.  When he justified before the burgesses the execution of Ofella, he did so by relating to the people the fable of the countryman and the lice.  He delighted to choose his companions among actors, and was fond of sitting at wine not only with Quintus Roscius—­the Roman Talma—­but also with far inferior players; indeed he was himself not a bad singer, and even wrote farces for performance within his own circle.  Yet amidst these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily nor mental vigour, in the rural leisure of his last years he was still zealously devoted to the chase, and the circumstance that he brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome attests withal his interest in more serious reading.  The specific type of Roman character rather repelled him.  Sulla had nothing of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen, in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic companions to drive their chariots personally at the games.  He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes, which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably at one time felt.  In such a life as his was, oscillating between passionate intoxication and more than sober awaking, illusions are speedily dissipated.  Wishing and striving probably appeared to him folly in a world which withal was absolutely governed by chance, and in which, if men were to strive after anything at all, this chance could be the only aim of their efforts.  He followed the general tendency of the age in addicting himself at once to unbelief and to superstition.  His whimsical credulity was not the plebeian superstition of Marius, who got a priest to prophesy to him for money and determined his actions accordingly; still less was it the sullen belief of the fanatic in destiny; it was that faith in the absurd, which necessarily makes its appearance in every man who has out and out ceased to believe in a connected order of things—­the superstition of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw on each and every occasion the right number.  In practical questions Sulla understood very well how to satisfy ironically the demands of religion.  When he emptied the treasuries of the Greek temples, he declared that the man could never fail whose chest was replenished by the gods themselves.  When the Delphic priests reported to him that they were afraid to send the treasures which he asked, because