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,
Sulla's Political Career
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.