Posterity has not justly appreciated either Sulla himself or his work of reorganization, as indeed it is wont to judge unfairly of persons who oppose themselves to the current of the times. In fact Sulla is one of the most marvellous characters - we may even say a unique phenomenon - in history. Physically and mentally of sanguine temperament, blue-eyed, fair, of a complexion singularly white but blushing with every passionate emotion - though otherwise a handsome man with piercing eyes - he seemed hardly destined to be of more moment to the state than his ancestors, who since the days of his great-great-grandfather Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul in 464, 477), one of the most distinguished generals and at the same time the most ostentatious man of the times of Pyrrhus, had remained in second-rate positions. He desired from life nothing but serene enjoyment.
Reared in the refinement of such cultivated luxury as was at that time naturalized even in the less wealthy senatorial families of Rome, he speedily and adroitly possessed himself of all the fulness of sensuous and intellectual enjoyments which the combination of Hellenic polish and Roman wealth could secure. He was equally welcome as a pleasant companion in the aristocratic saloon and as a good comrade in the tented field; his acquaintances, high and low, found in him a sympathizing friend and a ready helper in time of need, who gave his gold with far more pleasure to his embarrassed comrade than to his wealthy creditor. Passionate was his homage to the wine-cup, still more passionate to women; even in his later years he was no longer the regent, when after the business of the day was finished he took his place at table. A vein of irony - we might perhaps say of buffoonery - pervaded his whole nature. Even when regent he gave orders, while conducting the public sale of the property of the proscribed, that a donation from the spoil should be given to the author of a wretched panegyric which was handed to him, on condition that the writer should promise never to sing his praises again.
When he justified before the burgesses the execution of Ofella, he did so by relating to the people the fable of the countryman and the lice. He delighted to choose his companions among actors, and was fond of sitting at wine not only with Quintus Roscius - the Roman Talma - but also with far inferior players; indeed he was himself not a bad singer, and even wrote farces for performance within his own circle. Yet amidst these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily nor mental vigour, in the rural leisure of his last years he was still zealously devoted to the chase, and the circumstance that he brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen, in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic companions to drive their chariots personally at the games.
He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes, which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably at one time felt. In such a life as his was, oscillating between passionate intoxication and more than sober awaking, illusions are speedily dissipated. Wishing and striving probably appeared to him folly in a world which withal was absolutely governed by chance, and in which, if men were to strive after anything at all, this chance could be the only aim of their efforts. He followed the general tendency of the age in addicting himself at once to unbelief and to superstition. His whimsical credulity was not the plebeian superstition of Marius, who got a priest to prophesy to him for money and determined his actions accordingly; still less was it the sullen belief of the fanatic in destiny; it was that faith in the absurd, which necessarily makes its appearance in every man who has out and out ceased to believe in a connected order of things - the superstition of the fortunate player, who deems himself privileged by fate to throw on each and every occasion the right number. In practical questions Sulla understood very well how to satisfy ironically the demands of religion. When he emptied the treasuries of the Greek temples, he declared that the man could never fail whose chest was replenished by the gods themselves. When the Delphic priests reported to him that they were afraid to send the treasures which he asked, because the harp of the god emitted a clear sound when they touched it, he returned the reply that they might now send them all the more readily, as the god evidently approved his design. Nevertheless he fondly flattered himself with the idea that he was the chosen favourite of the gods, and in an altogether special manner of that goddess, to whom down to his latest years he assigned the pre-eminence, Aphrodite. In his conversations as well as in his autobiography he often plumed himself on the intercourse which the immortals held with him in dreams and omens. He had more right than most men to be proud of his achievements he was not so, but he was proud of his uniquely faithful fortune. He was wont to say that every improvised enterprise turned out better with him than those which were systematically planned; and one of his strangest whims - that of regularly stating the number of those who had fallen on his side in battle as nil - was nothing but the childishness of a child of fortune. It was but the utterance of his natural disposition, when, having reached the culminating point of his career and seeing all his contemporaries at a dizzy depth beneath him, he assumed the designation of the Fortunate - Sulla Felix - as a formal surname, and bestowed corresponding appellations on his children.
Nothing lay farther from Sulla than systematic ambition. He had too much sense to regard, like the average aristocrats of his time, the inscription of his name in the roll of the consuls as the aim of his life; he was too indifferent and too little of an ideologue to be disposed voluntarily to engage in the reform of the rotten structure of the state. He remained - where birth and culture placed him - in the circle of genteel society, and passed through the usual routine of offices; he had no occasion to exert himself, and left such exertion to the political working bees, of whom there was in truth no lack. Thus in 647, on the allotment of the quaestorial places, accident brought him to Africa to the headquarters of Gaius Marius.
The untried man-of-fashion from the capital was not very well received by the rough boorish general and his experienced staff. Provoked by this reception Sulla, fearless and skilful as he was, rapidly made himself master of the profession of arms, and in his daring expedition to Mauretania first displayed that peculiar combination of audacity and cunning with reference to which his contemporaries said of him that he was half lion half fox, and that the fox in him was more dangerous than the lion. To the young, highborn, brilliant officer, who was confessedly the real means of ending the vexatious Numidian war, the most splendid career now lay open; he took part also in the Cimbrian war, and manifested his singular talent for organization in the management of the difficult task of providing supplies; yet even now the pleasures of life in the capital had far more attraction for him than war or even politics. During his praetorship, which office he held in 661 after having failed in a previous candidature, it once more chanced that in his province, the least important of all, the first victory over king Mithradates and the first treaty with the mighty Arsacids, as well as their first humiliation, occurred. The Civil war followed. It was Sulla mainly, who decided the first act of it - the Italian insurrection - in favour of Rome, and thus won for himself the consulship by his sword; it was he, moreover, who when consul suppressed with energetic rapidity the Sulpician revolt. Fortune seemed to make it her business to eclipse the old hero Marius by means of this younger officer. The capture of Jugurtha, the vanquishing of Mithradates, both of which Marius had striven for in vain, were accomplished in subordinate positions by Sulla: in the Social war, in which Marius lost his renown as a general and was deposed, Sulla established his military repute and rose to the consulship; the revolution of 666, which was at the same time and above all a personal conflict between the two generals, ended with the outlawry and flight of Marius. Almost without desiring it, Sulla had become the most famous general of his time and the shield of the oligarchy. New and more formidable crises ensued - the Mithradatic war, the Cinnan revolution; the star of Sulla continued always in the ascendant. Like the captain who seeks not to quench the flames of his burning ship but continues to fire on the enemy, Sulla, while the revolution was raging in Italy, persevered unshaken in Asia till the public foe was subdued. So soon as he had done with that foe, he crushed anarchy and saved the capital from the firebrands of the desperate Samnites and revolutionists. The moment of his return home was for Sulla an overpowering one in joy and in pain: he himself relates in his memoirs that during his first night in Rome he had not been able to close an eye, and we may well believe it.