[Sidenote:  Effects of Sulla’s legislation.] Sulla had for the moment undone by his legislation the work of ages.  He gagged free speech by the disabilities attached to the tribunate.  He kept the government within a close circle by his process of recruiting the Senate.  He made the magistrates subordinate to the Senate.  He filled Italy and Rome with his own partisans, and therefore with those of the Senate, and he gave back to the Senate that coveted possession of the judicia for which it had struggled so long with the equites.  But a system which could endure only by the repression not only of hostile interests but of the ambition of its own adherents carried in itself the seeds of early dissolution.  Almost before the reaction was complete a counter-reaction had begun.  Abdication only revealed monarchy, and the broad road which Sulla had laid over the breakers and quicksands of revolution in reality paved the way to a throne.

[Sidenote:  Sulla’s abdication a farce.] When be abdicated, he offered to render account to anyone for his acts, and there is a story that one young man thereupon followed him to his home loading him with abuse, which Sulla listened to with meekness.  If the story be true, the incident was probably a pre-arranged part of the ceremony of abdication, which in everything, except the fact that Sulla slipped off the cares of government, was of course a farce.  His funeral showed what his real power continued to be, and, if another anecdote be true, just before his death he had a magistrate of Puteoli strangled because he had not collected in time his town’s subscription to the restoration of the Capitol.  He had in fact done mischievously what the Gracchi would have done beneficently; and greedy swordsmen occupied the soil which the tribunes would have divided peaceably among peaceable men. [Sidenote:  The policy of the Gracchi justified by after events.] The civil wars and the triumvirates are the best vindication of the policy of the Gracchi, unless we can bring ourselves to fancy that the Gracchi created, instead of attempting wisely to satisfy, the demands of the age.  By an orderly intermixture of Italians and foreigners with the corrupt body of Roman citizens new life might have been infused into the old system, and something foreshadowing modern representative government have been established, without proscription or praetorian rule.  As it was, the vices of society only became aggravated at an era of violence, and the sharpest remedies failed to stay the creeping paralysis by which it was assailed.

The gradual depopulation of Italy has already been described.  In spite of Sulla’s colonies the ruin of the country must have been vastly accelerated by his civil wars and those which followed them.  And, while the honest country class was dying out, the town class was ever plunging deeper into frivolity and voluptuousness.  To defray the cost of the sumptuous life of the capital the fashionable spendthrift