Constitutional reforms of Sulla
[2] Sulla's dictatorship followed more domestic unrest after the war and was a culmination in this trend for violence, with his leading an army on Rome for the second time in a decade and purging his opponents from the body politic in bloody proscriptions.
[8] The cause of Sulla's first march on Rome was a secondary issue in the politics of the day: Sulpicius had brought the bill to reassign the Mithridatic command to curry favour with Marius to support granting the Italians full citizenship rights in the aftermath of the Social War.
[9] After marching on the city, Sulla drove a number of politicians, including Marius, into exile under threat of death and left for the east to fight Mithridates.
[10] In his absence, Sulla and his supporters lost control of Rome, with Marius' return and election with Lucius Cornelius Cinna to the consulship.
Marius died mere months into their joint consulship,[11] but Cinna survived for four years (before being murdered by his troops), dominating Roman politics, killing his enemies, and inter alia driving Sulla's family to flee for safety in the east.
[23] The consequences of Sulla's changes to the senate resulted in a "two-tiered... system in which the inner circle of the powerful opinion makers... were separated from those who spent their lives as jurors".
[27] Sulla's reforms also encompassed the voting structure of the comitia centuriata, which was changed to a state similar to that of the Servian organisation of the assembly, with more centuries reserved for rich citizens.
Instead of appointing them to wage a campaign of some sort, Sulla required them to go to a province, defined as specific geographic area, and then stay there without deviating from instructions provided by the senate until relieved.
[5] In the realm of religion, he repealed the lex Domitia de sacerdotiis of 104, which placed the election of priests into the hands of the people, returning to the older system of co-option.
[38] The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline hill, which had burnt down in 83, was rebuilt, named after a close ally of Sulla's, Quintus Lutatius Catulus.
[39][40] Conceiving "of his dictatorship in quasi-republican terms, as a special office undertaken to... [establish] a constitutional (republican) form of government" and imagining himself as a lawgiver, he became ordinary consul in the first year of his new republic.
[41] After his consulship, he retired and died in 78, with his funeral held in Rome at public expense, to the dismay of one of the then-consuls, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.
[51] Just eight years after his death, his lieutenants during the civil war, Pompey and Crassus in their consulships for 70, restored the plebeian tribunes to their historic powers[47] and oversaw the reintroduction of elections to the censorship.
[55] Major elements in the failure of republic as it had existed before Sulla's first consulship were the use of political violence[56] and the ineffectiveness of the Roman elite to manage external threats.
[59] With the Third Servile War against Spartacus' slave revolt and the renewed threat from Mithridates, who Sulla had not defeated in the east, "[t]he feeling that the new republic was a failure was hard to escape".
[54] These issues were compounded by political unrest at the consular elections every year between 66 and 62[60] and the greater level of corruption engendered by Sulla's neutering of the traditional republican mechanisms of overseeing magistrates and governors.
[63]And the larger size of the senate after Sulla's reforms, along with the increased number of imperium-possessing magistrates in the city, made the body dysfunctional, difficult to influence, and unpredictable.
