A brief orientation
Lucius Cornelius Sulla was a Roman aristocrat, military commander and political reactionary. He served under Marius in the Jugurthine War and accepted Marius' rival Jugurtha's surrender personally — an incident he would later have engraved on a signet ring. He commanded in the Mithridatic War in Asia Minor (89–84 BCE), and when the political faction in Rome moved to strip him of his command he did something no Roman general had done before: he marched his army on Rome and took the city by force. He repeated the manoeuvre in 82, this time staying. He had himself appointed dictator with broad legal authority to "make laws and settle the constitution," used it to proscribe and execute thousands of political enemies, restored the authority of the senate against the popular assemblies, and then — having reset the constitution to his satisfaction — resigned the dictatorship and retired to his estate, where he died of a documented disease in 78 BCE.
The constitutional reforms
Sulla used his dictatorship to legislate. He doubled the size of the senate, restricted the tribunate of the plebs, fixed the cursus honorum, expanded the courts, and broadened the senatorial control of the criminal trials. The reforms were intended to restore senatorial government against the popular tribunes who had been the political vehicle of Marius and his successors. Most of the substantive provisions were undone within a generation; the precedent of using extraordinary power to "reset" the constitution outlived them.
The reading
The Sallustian and Ciceronian frames treat Sulla as the figure in whom Marius' precedents reached their first, sharpest expression — a general who used his army against the city to "save" it, and a politician who codified killing one's enemies by proscription as a political instrument. The fact that he then voluntarily relinquished power was treated by some ancient writers as evidence that he had acted in good faith and by others as the additional cruelty of having broken Roman political habits beyond repair.
Why he matters for Virtue & Power
Sulla is the figure in whom the structural collapse of the late Republic stops being prospective and becomes irreversible. He demonstrated, by doing it, that Rome could be governed by a victorious general's army; the generation that followed read the lesson. See the essay Marius, Sulla and the destruction of Roman norms.