crisis

Sulla’s Dictatorship and Proscriptions

Date

-82

Part of

crisis

After victory in 82–81 BCE, Sulla ruled as dictator and posted proscriptions—80 names, then 220, then 220—turning death lists into policy. The Forum’s boards bore black ink and red consequences. Estates changed hands as quickly as lives ended.

What Happened

Returning from Greece with victory over Marian forces, Sulla entered Rome a second time, now as undisputed master. He revived the dictatorship and set about ‘reforming’ the state with the sword. Within three days, lists appeared in the Forum: 80 names, then 220, then 220 again.

The mechanics were brutal. A herald’s voice carried under the Basilica Julia’s arches; scribes nailed fresh tablets to wooden frames near the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Harbor a proscribed man, and you died; inform, and you profited. Sons and grandsons lost property and future office. The law’s black letters sanctioned private vengeance.

Confiscated villas on the Esquiline and in Tusculum passed to loyalists at auction, the white chalk of price marks still dusting the marble when new owners moved in. The groan of wagon axles on the Sacra Via told a second story: wealth in motion, redirected from defeated families to Sulla’s base.

Plutarch put it starkly: Sulla proscribed as many as he could remember and would proscribe those he forgot later. The scarlet-lined curule chairs in the Forum seemed to sit on a tide of blood. Dictatorship had found a way to fund itself and to reorder Rome’s elite.

Why This Matters

Proscription fused punishment with finance. By criminalizing shelter and rewarding denunciation, Sulla terrorized opponents while underwriting his regime and settling veterans. The policy taught future rulers—above all the Triumvirs—that killing lists could cleanse politics and fill treasuries at once.

Institutionally, Sulla’s constitutional changes—senate enlargement, jury rearrangements—mattered less than the habit he introduced. Violence could be routinized, posted, scheduled. A generation learned to read names on boards as fate.

The Republic never forgot the mechanism. When Antony and Octavian later built their war chest, they reached for the same tool, broader and colder. Sulla’s boards in the Forum were prototypes; 43 BCE scaled them up.