As Plutarch says, “Sulla had used his good fortune moderately, at first, and like a statesman, and had led men to expect in him a leader who was attached to the aristocracy, and at the same time helpful to the common people.” But the next time Sulla came to Rome—when the war was finished and there was no one left to challenge him—it would be quite a different story: “His conduct fixed a stigma upon offices of great power, which were thought to work a change in men’s previous characters, and render them capricious, vain, and cruel.”
