more passionate to women; even in his later years he was no longer
the regent, when after the business of the day was finished he
took his place at table. A vein of irony--we might perhaps say
of buffoonery--pervaded his whole nature. Even when regent he gave
orders, while conducting the public sale of the property of the
proscribed, that a donation from the spoil should be given to the
author of a wretched panegyric which was handed to him, on condition
that the writer should promise never to sing his praises again.
When he justified before the burgesses the execution of Ofella,
he did so by relating to the people the fable of the countryman and
the lice. He delighted to choose his companions among actors, and
was fond of sitting at wine not only with Quintus Roscius--the Roman
Talma--but also with far inferior players; indeed he was himself not
a bad singer, and even wrote farces for performance within his own
circle. Yet amidst these jovial Bacchanalia he lost neither bodily
nor mental vigour, in the rural leisure of his last years he was
still zealously devoted to the chase, and the circumstance that he
brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome
attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific
type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing
of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of
displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of
narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his
humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless of many of his countrymen,
in Greek towns in the Greek dress, or induced his aristocratic
companions to drive their chariots personally at the games.
He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes,
which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent
into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably
at one time felt. 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, w