and not less
perhaps for an opportunity of once settling accounts thoroughly with
the majority of the senate. Accordingly on the proposal of Sulpicius
Gaius Marius was by decree of the people invested with extraordinary
supreme, or as it was called proconsular, power, and obtained the
command of the Campanian army and the superintendence of the war
against Mithradates; and two tribunes of the people were despatched
to the camp at Nola, to take over the army from Sulla.

Sulla's Recall

Sulla was not the man to yield to such a summons. If any one had a
vocation to the chief command in the Asiatic war, it was Sulla. He
had a few years before commanded with the greatest success in the
same theatre of war; he had contributed more than any other man to
the subjugation of the dangerous Italian insurrection; as consul of
the year in which the Asiatic war broke out, he had been invested with
the command in it after the customary way and with the full consent
of his colleague, who was on friendly terms with him and related to
him by marriage. It was expecting a great deal to suppose that he
would, in accordance with a decree of the sovereign burgesses of
Rome, give up a command undertaken in such circumstances to an old
military and political antagonist, in whose hands the army might be
turned to none could tell what violent and preposterous proceedings.
Sulla was neither good-natured enough to comply voluntarily with such
an order, nor dependent enough to need to do so. His army was--
partly in consequence of the alterations of the military system
which originated with Marius, partly from the moral laxity and the
military strictness of its discipline in the hands of Sulla--little
more than a body of mercenaries absolutely devoted to their leader
and indifferent to political affairs. Sulla himself was a hardened,
cool, and clearheaded man, in whose eyes the sovereign Roman burgesses
were a rabble, the hero of Aquae Sextiae a bankrupt swindler,
formal legality a phrase, Rome itself a city without a garrison
and with its walls half in ruins, which could be far more easily
captured than Nola.

Sulla's March on Rome

On these views he acted. He assembled his soldiers--there were six
legions, or about 35,000 men--and explained to them the summons that
had arrived from Rome, not forgetting to hint that the new commander-
in-chief would undoubtedly lead to Asia Minor not the army as it stood,
but another formed of fresh tr