[Footnote 305:  The description of the funeral in Appian (Civil Wars, i. 105, &c.) is a striking picture.  Sulla was buried with more than regal pomp.

Plutarch’s Life of Sulla has been spoken of as not one of his best performances.  But so far as concerns Plutarch’s object in writing these Lives, which was to exhibit character, it is as good as any of his Lives, and it has great merit.  Whether his anecdotes are always authentic is a difficult matter to determine.  Sulla had many enemies, and it is probable that his character in private life has been made worse than it was.  The acts of his public life are well ascertained.  Plutarch has nearly omitted all mention of him as a Reformer of the Roman Constitution and as a Legislator.  Sulla’s enactments were not like the imperial constitutions of a later day, the mere act of one who held the sovereign power:  they were laws (leges) duly passed by the popular assembly.  Yet they were Sulla’s work, and the legislative body merely gave them the formal sanction.  The object of Sulla’s constitutional measures was to give an aristocratical character to the Roman constitution, to restore it to something of its pristine state, and to weaken the popular party by curtailing the power of the tribunes.  The whole subject has often been treated, but at the greatest length by Zachariae, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, &c., Heidelberg, 1834.  Zachariae has drawn the character of Sulla in an apologetical tone.  I think the character of Sulla is drawn better by Plutarch, and that he has represented him as near to the life as a biographer can do.  Whatever discrepancies there may he between Plutarch and other authorities, whatever Plutarch may have omitted which other authorities give, still he has shown us enough to justify his delineation of the most prominent man in the Republican Period of Rome, with the exception of the Dictator Caesar.  But to complete the view of his intellectual character, a survey of Sulla’s legislation is necessary.  Sulla was an educated man:  he was not a mere soldier like Marius; he was not only a general; he was a man of letters, a lover of the arts, a keen discriminator of men and times, a legislator, and a statesman.  He remodelled and reformed the whole criminal law of the Romans.  His constitutional measures were not permanent, but it may truly be said that he prepared the way for the temporary usurpation of Caesar and the permanent establishment of the Roman State under Augustus.  I propose to treat of the Legislation of Sulla in an Appendix to a future volume.]

COMPARISON OF LYSANDER AND SULLA

Now that we have completed the second of these men’s lives, let us proceed to compare them with one another.  Both rose to greatness by their own exertions, though it was the peculiar glory of Lysander that all his commands were bestowed upon him by his countrymen of their own free will and by their deliberate choice, and that he never opposed their wishes or acted in opposition to the laws of his country.  Now,—­