iends, conciliate as many
foes, as possible, throw on Cinna, whom he could not hope to keep
quiet, the guilt of perjury, and trust to fortune for the rest. This
is a probable and consistent view of what now took place at Rome; and
every other account makes out Sulla to have been either inconsistent,
which he never was, for he was always uniformly selfish; or patriotic,
which he never was, if patriotism consists in sacrificing private to
public considerations; or indifferent, which he was in principle but
never in practice, unless where his own interests were not threatened
and only the suffering of others involved.

[Sidenote: Sulla's measures.] His first measure was to annul the
Sulpician laws. Secondly, to relieve the debtors, some colonies were
established, and a law was passed about interest, the terms of which
we do not know. Thirdly, the Senate, thinned by the Social War and
the Varian law, was recruited by 300 optimates. Fourthly, because
Sulpicius had resisted the proclamation of a justitium--that device by
which the Senate had virtually, though not legally, retained in its
own hands the power of discussing any measure before it was submitted
to the people--therefore for the future no measure was to be submitted
to the people till it had been previously discussed by the Senate. In
other words, the Senate was now confirmed by law in a privilege
which it had hitherto only exercised by the employment of a fiction.
Fifthly, the votes were to be taken, not in the Comitia Tributa, but
in the Comitia of Centuries. Sixthly, the five classes were no longer
to have an equal voice, but the first class was, as in the Servian
constitution, to have nearly half the votes. As the first class
consisted of those who had an estate of 100,000 sesterces, this
ordinance changed the democracy into a timocracy, transferring the
power from the people generally to the wealthier classes: but,
considering how voting had been manipulated of late, it was perhaps a
measure due to the Senate quite as much as to Sulla. On the whole he
legislated as little as he could and proscribed as few as he could.
[Sidenote: Opposition to Sulla.] But he tried to get two of his
partisans, Servius and Nonius, elected consuls for the year 87.
Instead of them, however, L. Cornelius Cinna, a determined leader of
the populares, was elected; and though Cnaeus Octavius, his colleague,
was one of the optimates, he was not Sulla's creature. In another
quarter his ar