his consulship, and that he governed a distant province for a year and might even have attained a
triumph for his military achievements in the Taurus mountains, had the civil war not intervened. On the
other hand, he can claim no part in the constitutional reforms or extensive conquests of his generation.
Sulla and his Legacy
The closest approximation to a historical account of Cicero's time written by a contemporary was
eventually provided by Sallust (below, pp. 642 ff.). His monograph on the conspiracy of Catiline, the
chief episode of Cicero's consulship, demonstrates to the full how difficult it was even for a
contemporary witness of events to escape from Cicero's interpretation of them. Yet at the same time, the
work exposes the misleading character of Cicero's version. For Sallust affords glimpses of the economic
and social problems that afflicted the Italian peninsula and led to the unrest represented by Cicero as the
work of a few aristocratic reprobates.
Sallust is valuable in another respect: he furnishes us with a starting point for the period of the late
Republic, namely, the dictatorship of L. Cornelius Sulla. He singled out the return of Sulla's booty-laden
legions from the East, their seizure of the city by force, and the vindictiveness of Sulla's victory as the
final turning-point in Roman conduct. Decline, he held, had set in when the destruction of Rome's
mighty enemy Carthage left her without an incentive to self-discipline. Now personal greed and
ambition came to dominate Roman political life. The historical perspective of Sallust, if not his
diagnosis of the Republic's demise, can stand: it is not difficult to show that the age of Cicero was, in
many respects, the legacy of Sulla.
Not only Catiline, whom Sallust specifically described as the product of the corrupt Sullan era, not only
Crassus and Pompey, who were active partisans of Sulla, but Cicero, born in 106, Caesar, born in 100,
and the younger Cato, born in 94, could remember the first armed conquest of Rome by a Roman, the
proscriptions in which men all over Italy lost their property and their lives, and finally the astonishing
abdication in 80 B.C.
Though related by marriage to Sulla's enemy Marius, Cicero and his family, like many others, kept a low
profile during the fighting and stayed in Rome when Sulla was away fighting Mithridates. Until 84,
when Sulla's return was imminent, things were peaceful under the regime of Cinna and Marius; but the
state was, as Cicero later described it, 'without law, without any semblance of authority'. As a result of
the 'total dearth of orators', the young Hortensius Hortalus, only eight years older than Cicero, gained the
limelight, and it was he whom Cicero opposed when he pleaded his first case after Sulla's return to
Rome. Cicero's next two cases brought him face to face with the hardship inflicted on Italy by Sulla. The
speech in defence of Roscius of Ameria in Umbria, delivered in 80, revealed the corrupt way in which
Sulla's minions exploited the proscriptions and local feuds in the Italian towns for their own profit. In the
second, delivered after Sulla had retired into private life, Cicero defended the rights of a woman of
Arretium, one of the towns in Etruria from which Sulla had attempted to remove the rights of citizenship.
Cicero's attitude was not out of tune with the times. Many of Sulla's own allies had soon realized that the