He was true, simple,
and unaffected, and even without ambition in the mean and personal sense.
His fault, which he would have denied to be a fault, was that he had a
patrician disdain of mobs and suffrages and the cant of popular liberty.
The type repeats itself era after era. Sylla was but Graham of Claverhouse
in a Roman dress and with an ampler stage. His courage in laying down his
authority has been often commented on, but the risk which he incurred was
insignificant. There was in Rome neither soldier nor statesman who could
for a moment be placed in competition with Sylla, and he was so
passionately loved by the army, he was so sure of the support of his
comrades, whom he had quartered on the proscribed lands, and who, for
their own interest's sake, would resist attempts at counter-revolution,
that he knew that if an emergency arose he had but to lift his finger to
reinstate himself in command. Of assassination he was in no greater danger
than when dictator, while the temptation to assassinate him was less. His
influence was practically undiminished, and as long as he lived he
remained, and could not but remain, the first person in the Republic.
Some license of speech he was, of course, prepared for, but it required no
small courage to make a public attack either on himself or his dependants,
and it was therefore most creditable to Cicero that his first speech of
importance was directed against the Dictator's immediate friends, and was
an exposure of the iniquities of the proscription.
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