The Roman commander at the siege of Pompeii in 89 BCE, where the teenaged Cicero served as a very junior officer, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, meaning ‘lucky’ or, rather more imposingly, ‘the favourite of the goddess Venus’. He faced well-organised opposition inside the town, to judge from a series of notices, uncovered beneath later plaster on the street façades, apparently giving instructions to the local militia on where to muster.
