Cinna did not live to face his dreadful enemy. Murdered by his soldiers in his fourth consulship, he left, as his successors in the leadership of the popular party, Caius Marius the Younger, Papirius Carbo, and the brave Sertorius――the two former of whom were chosen consuls for the year B. C. 82, to oppose Sulla in Italy, while Sertorius was despatched to Spain to secure that province. But Carbo and the younger Marius, even when backed by the brave Samnites and other Italian nations, were not equal to a contest with such a general as Sulla, assisted as he was by commanders like Metellus, Lucullus, and young Cneius Pompeius Strabo, more commonly called Pompey, the son of that Pompeius who had been one of the Roman generals in the Marsic War. The consular armies were defeated; Marius killed himself; Carbo fled to Africa; and Sulla remained master of Italy. Fearful was his vengeance. The massacre which Marius had ordered five years before, was slight compared with the butcheries which took place by the command of Sulla. In Rome, and over all Italy, every man of distinction implicated in the popular movement was sought out and slain. Proscription lists, as they were called――that is, lists of doomed individuals――were published; and soldiers were ready to track them out for the prices put upon their heads. Military colonies were likewise planted in all parts of Italy――lands being taken by force for that purpose: thus purging Italy of the Marian leaven, Sulla was resolved to create in it a new population, which should be pliant to aristocratic influence.
The work of the soldier over, Sulla commenced that of the legislator. Appointed perpetual dictator B. C. 82, he continued for three years to exercise the sovereignty, making alterations in the constitution, the general effect of which was to lessen the power of the people in political affairs, and reforming the criminal law. In B. C. 79, he surprised every one by abdicating the dictatorship, and retiring into private life; and in the following year he died of a loathsome and incurable disorder, brought on by his debaucheries. Among other evidences of Sulla’s literary accomplishments, he left memoirs of his own life composed in Greek.