wise economical views than from dislike or contempt of the populace. He had bought the fidelity of his soldiers, who were his support. He could gain nothing by buying the votes of the poor citizens. All we can really affirm is that such people got nothing from him while he lived. The enactment of a law for giving aid to the poor (Lex Frumentaria) was one of the proposed measures of the consul Lepidus after Sulla's death.

Sulla, as already observed, settled his soldiers all over Italy and gave them lands. In fact such was the state of the peninsula after the civil wars, so great was the loss of life, and so many were turned out of their homes, that Sulla had more land to give than he required. He settled Aleria in Corsica for some reason, the only settlement that he made out of Italy, for he had no occasion to seek abroad for the means of rewarding his legions. It seems likely that Sulla's settlements were made pursuant to a Lex Cornelia, which indeed Cicero mentions, for he informs us that the law declared that the allotments made by Sulla (sortes assignatae) to his men should not be alienated. But this absurd prohibition, which had been also made before (vol. i., p. 178), had no effect. The allotments soon passed by death of the holders or by sale into other hands.

The acts of Sulla during the short period that he was in power show his activity. The mischief that he did by his proscriptions and by turning so large a number of people out of their property was enormous. He made Italy a desert, and put idle soldiers in the place of industrious farmers. He made indeed an attempt to cure some of the evils, which were hurrying Rome to ruin, but he did not and could not prolong the existence of such a state. His services in giving form and consistency to the criminal law of Rome cannot be disputed. His laws on criminal matters were the foundation on which Caesar Augustus afterwards built. If he did not himself frame these enactments, he had at least the merit of finding able men to do it.

Sulla might have had a conspicuous place among the writers of Rome, if his Memoirs had not perished; for only

a few lines have been preserved by Gellius and others. Plutarch, as we have already seen, used them for his biography of Sulla. The Memoirs were written in Latin. Sulla's freedman L. Cornelius Epicadus completed the twentysecond book, which, as Suetonius says, had been left unfinished. We have no means of knowing what was the historical value of these Memoirs, and we must form a guess from the character of the man. We may safely assume that self-glorification was not wanting, and that Sulla's good fortune and success were continually proclaimed. As he was a good general and a man of ability, we may believe that he formed his military plans well and explained them clearly, but our confidence in his veracity is weakened when he speaks of the number of his enemies who fell, and of his own losses being in fact nothing. The Memoirs of the Dictator Sulla would have formed a curious contrast with the Commentaries of the Dictator Caesar.

VOL. II.

Ff

CHAPTER XXX.

M. AEMILIUS LEPIDUS.

B.C. 78-74.

THE work of Sallust, which he entitled Historiae, began with the consulship of M. Aemilius Lepidus and Q. Lutatius Catulus. This history has perished except a few fragments, which have been diligently collected from various writers. One of the longer fragments of the first book is a speech of Lepidus to the people against Sulla, and it is undoubtedly one of Sallust's fictitious orations. But though the speech is the work of Sallust, the facts which it contains ought to be true, if Sallust had any regard to the duties of an historian. Lepidus addresses the people as consul, and urges them to recover their liberty of which they had been deprived by the usurpation of Sulla, whom he speaks of as still living and in the possession of power.

We might suppose that Lepidus commenced his attack on Sulla and his policy in the interval between his election and entering on his office on the first of January B.C. 78. But in this oration Lepidus does not speak as consul elect (designatus); he speaks as consul in office, and therefore Sallust makes Lepidus attack Sulla in B.C. 78, and he represents Sulla as not having yet abdicated. Now Sulla, as we have seen, abdicated in B.C. 79 and died in B.C. 78, but we do not know at what time of the year he died, nor how long the interval was between his abdication and his death. But if the facts, on which this fictitious oration is founded, are truly represented, Lepidus in his consulship declared his intention to undo the work of Sulla; and Sulla had not abdicated at

.

the time of this declaration of hostility. The date of Sulla's abdication then, if we follow Sallust's authority, is incorrectly placed in B.C. 79, in the consulship of P. Servilius and Appius Claudius, and we must suppose that Sulla abdicated after Lepidus entered on his consulship in B.C. 78, and that he died shortly after.

Lepidus had been praetor in Sicily (B.C. 81), and he got a bad name for his administration of the island. Two Metelli, Celer and Nepos, began a prosecution against him, but gave it up because they found that he was a popular favourite. His policy in his consulship appears to have been to make another revolution in the popular interest, or rather in his own interest under the popular name. Though he belonged to a noble family, he affected the side of the people, and his marriage with Appuleia the daughter of the turbulent tribune L. Appuleius Saturninus might seem to give him additional credit with the faction which Sulla had crushed. The historians speak of the revolutionary measures which Lepidus proposed in his consulship, and though we might easily guess what his designs were, we have no particular evidence about them beyond a few words in Appian, his speech in Sallust, and the speech of L. Marcius Philippus which was delivered in the following year.

He

Lepidus in his harangue to the people recapitulated the violent measures by which Sulla had deprived Roman citizens of their life and property, driven into exile those who were fortunate enough to escape from his bloody emissaries, and made himself the master and the tyrant of Rome. says that Sulla charged him with having got the property of some of those who had been proscribed. His answer was that this charge was one of Sulla's greatest crimes, for that neither himself nor any one else was safe in the terrible days of the proscription, when to act honestly would have been a man's ruin. He says that he bought the property of the proscribed through fear, and he was ready to restore it to the owners on repayment of the purchase-money. He concluded by calling on the people to follow him as their leader in the recovery of liberty, a

kind of language which any man may use when his design is to make a revolution.

The purpose of Lepidus was to recall the proscribed, and to put them in possession of their property which had passed into other hands, and a great part of it into the hands of Sulla's old soldiers. He proposed to restore civic rights to those towns which had been deprived of them by Sulla. The restoration of the tribunitian authority was also in the designs of Lepidus, according to the speech of Philippus made in B.C. 77, but Licinianus states that the proposal to restore the tribunitian authority was made by the tribunes themselves to the consuls, and that Lepidus was the first to reject the proposal. He declared in an address to the people, which is referred to by the annalist Licinianus, that it was not for the interest of the state that the authority of the tribunes should be restored, and a large part of the audience signified their assent. If then Lepidus did design to restore the antient authority of the tribunes, it was at some time later than that assigned by the annalist to his refusal, and when his affairs were in such a state that he was ready to strengthen nimself by any means in his power. A fragment of an ancient writer might appear to refer to Lepidus, but it refers to C. Aurelius Cotta, consul B.C. 75. The writer says: I do not find either in Sallust, or in Livy, or in Fenestella mention of any other law proposed by him except that which he proposed before the popular assembly, against the will of the nobility, but greatly to the satisfaction of the people, and it was to this effect, that those who had been tribunes should be allowed to hold other offices (magistratus), which was forbidden by a law of the Dictator Sulla enacted a few years before. But some measures of Lepidus showed that he relied on the favour of the people for support: he carried or proposed a Lex Frumentaria, or law for the gratuitous distribution of grain, one of the usual baits with which unprincipled men in those times fished for popularity.

The Senate had declared in B.C. 79 that the provinces of the consuls should be Italy and the Provincia or south of Gallia, and Lepidus had the Provincia. But instead of