been replaced by the medieval Senatorial Palace.
If Sulla had hoped that his confiscations would make his veterans prosperous and Italy secure, he was
mistaken. The land allotted was often not of the best, while the forces that had been driving the small
farmer off the land for a century-extended military service and capitalist farming by the rich-continued
to operate. Some of the confiscated land had not actually been allocated and was held either by the
original Marian partisans or by Sullan squatters. Threatened by every agrarian proposal, these men
remained insecure in their tenure and hence ripe for revolution for the duration of the Republic.
Sulla's methods also left moral scars. The richest prizes had been used to keep and buy the loyalty of the
upper orders. Leading men of the late Republic were known to be enjoying ill-gotten gains, and few
consciences were absolutely clear. It is not surprising that in the seventies and sixties there were
repeated attempts to revoke Sulla's exemptions and reclaim for the state treasury the price of proscribed
property and the rewards given to agents of the proscriptions. One of Caesar's early claims to political
notoriety was his willingness, as president of the murder court in 64, to accept charges against those who
had killed for Sulla. Cicero was only too willing to exploit in his campaign for the consulship that year
the threat this posed to his competitor L. Sergius Catilina whom men could still remember carrying the
head of one of Marius' kinsmen through the streets of Rome to present it, still 'full of life and breath', to
the dictator himself. Once elected, however, Cicero opposed a move to restore political rights to the sons
of the proscribed, for, he argued, 'nothing could be crueler than to exclude men of such excellent
families from political life, but the cohesion of the state is so dependent on Sulla's laws that it cannot
survive their dissolution'.
Public Life at Rome
Most of Sulla's constitutional and legal arrangements survived to determine the character of political life
throughout the late Republic. The dictator had laid down rules for the senatorial career, the cursus
honorum, which were designed to ensure that men who finally found themselves, after holding the top
magistracies, in command of armies and provinces would already have sat in the Senate for twenty
years, absorbing its traditions and learning to set a high value on oligarchic cohesiveness. Holders of the
quaestorship, the lowest office to carry senatorial rank, were now to number twenty a year, instead of
eight, in order to maintain a Senate of 600. For the old council of 300 was inadequate to provide juries
for all of Sulla's reorganized statutory courts where senators, as before C. Gracchus, were to be tried for
public crimes by their peers. The number of officials required to administer Rome and its ten provinces
was ensured, without damage to the prestige of the highest offices, by retaining two as the number of
annual consuls and increasing the number of praetors from six to eight. Savage competition was built
into the system, for every year saw twenty men spurred by initial success to hope for high office, fewer
than half of whom would ever be elected praetor. It is therefore not surprising to find an increased
emphasis on legislation against electoral corruption in the late Republic. Sulla's lex de ambitu carried the
penalty of ten years' disqualification from public office; Cicero's lex Tullia, passed in his consulship,
imposed ten years of exile.