Constitutional reforms of Lucius Cornelius Sulla

The constitutional reforms of Lucius Cornelius Sulla were a series of laws enacted by the Roman Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla between 82 and 80 BC, which reformed the Constitution of the Roman Republic.

In the decades before Sulla had become dictator, a series of political developments occurred which severely weakened aristocratic control over the Roman Constitution. Sulla's dictatorship constituted one of the most significant developments in the History of the Constitution of the Roman Republic, and it served as a warning for the coming civil war, which ultimately would destroy the Roman Republic and create the Roman Empire. Sulla, who had witnessed chaos at the hands of his political enemies in the years before his dictatorship, was naturally conservative. He believed that the underlying flaw in the Roman constitution was the increasingly aggressive democracy, which expressed itself through the Roman assemblies, and as such, he sought to strengthen the Roman Senate. He retired in 79 BC, and died in 78 BC, having believed that he had corrected the constitutional flaw. His constitution would be mostly rescinded by two of his former lieutenants, Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus, less than ten years after his death. But what he did not realize was that it was he himself who actually had illustrated the underlying flaw in the Roman constitution: that it was the army, and not the Roman senate, which dictated the fortunes of the state. The precedent he produced would be emulated less than forty years later by an individual whom he almost had executed, Julius Caesar, and as such, he played a critical early role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.

By the middle of the 2nd century BC, the Plebeians (commoners) saw a worsening economic situation. The long military campaigns, in particular those of the Punic Wars, had forced citizens to leave their farms, which often caused those farms to fall into a state of disrepair. This situation was made worse during the Second Punic War, when Hannibal fought the Romans throughout Italy, and the Romans adopted a strategy of attrition and guerilla warfare in response. When the soldiers returned from the battlefield, they often had to sell their farms to pay their debts, and the landed aristocracy quickly bought these farms at discounted prices. The wars had also brought to Rome a great surplus of inexpensive slave labor, which the landed aristocrats used to staff their new farms. Soon the masses of unemployed Plebeians began to flood into Rome, and into the ranks of the legislative assemblies. At the same time, the aristocracy was becoming extremely rich, and with the destruction of Rome's great commercial rival of Carthage, even more opportunities for profit became available. While the aristocrats spent their time exploiting new opportunities for profit, Rome was conquering new civilizations in the east. These civilizations were often highly developed, and as such they opened up a world of luxury to the Romans. As both wealth and eastern luxuries became available to aristocratic Romans, they began to enter the "international" Mediterranean arena in collection of art, sponsorship of literary works, and cultural acquisition and development generally; some Romans saw the changes with alarm. The sums that were spent on the new luxuries had no precedent in prior Roman history; the Romans began to pass sumptuary laws to limit some excesses, although these were harmless at best, political footballs at worst.

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