Such was the constitution which Lucius Cornelius Sulla gave to the commonwealth of Rome.  The senate and equestrian order, the burgesses and proletariate, Italians and provincials, accepted it as it was dictated to them by the regent, if not without grumbling, at any rate without rebelling:  not so the Sullan officers.  The Roman army had totally changed its character.  It had certainly been rendered by the Marian reform more ready for action and more militarily useful than when it did not fight before the walls of Numantia; but it had at the same time been converted from a burgess-force into a set of mercenaries who showed no fidelity to the state at all, and proved faithful to the officer only if he had the skill personally to gain their attachment.  The civil war had given fearful evidence of this total revolution in the spirit of the army:  six generals in command, Albinus,(45) Cato,(46) Rufus,(47) Flaccus,(48) Cinna,(49) and Gaius Carbo,(50) had fallen during its course by the hands of their soldiers:  Sulla alone had hitherto been able to retain the mastery of the dangerous crew, and that only, in fact, by giving the rein to all their wild desires as no Roman general before him had ever done.  If the blame of destroying the old military discipline is on this account attached to him, the censure is not exactly without ground, but yet without justice; he was indeed the first Roman magistrate who was only enabled to discharge his military and political task by coming forward as a -condottiere-.  He had not however taken the military dictatorship for the purpose of making the state subject to the soldiery, but rather for the purpose of compelling everything in the state, and especially the army and the officers, to submit once more to the authority of civil order.  When this became evident, an opposition arose against him among his own staff.  The oligarchy might play the tyrant as respected other citizens; but that the generals also, who with their good swords had replaced the overthrown senators in their seats, should now be summoned to yield implicit obedience to this very senate, seemed intolerable.  The very two officers in whom Sulla had placed most confidence resisted the new order of things.  When Gnaeus Pompeius, whom Sulla had entrusted with the conquest of Sicily and Africa and had selected for his son-in-law, after accomplishing his task received orders from the senate to dismiss his army, he omitted to comply and fell little short of open insurrection.

Quintus Ofella, to whose firm perseverance in front of Praeneste the success of the last and most severe campaign was essentially due in equally open violation of the newly issued ordinances became a candidate for the consulship without having held the inferior magistracies.  With Pompeius there was effected, if not a cordial reconciliation, at any rate a compromise.  Sulla, who knew his man sufficiently not to fear him, did not resent the impertinent remark which Pompeius