SULLA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16515, 27 August 1921, Page 15

SULLA.

ROMAN PROTOTYPE OF ROBESPIERRE. FIRST REIGN OF TERROR. The French Revolution, ■with its eternal interest, has lately, owing to the Centenary of Napoleon, drawn the eyes of men once more to its stupendous drama (writes H. Greenhougih Smith in “ John o’ Jx»ndon's Weekly ”). But no one seems to have recalled its prototype, the Roman Reign of Terror, nor to have compared their respective leaders with one another, Plutarch traced a parallel between Sulla and Lysander. A comparison of Robespierre with Sulla would be more striking stillA STRIKING FIGURE. In appearance the two men were opposites. Robespierre we know well enough—that acidulated mawworm with the visage of sea-green. And of Sulla wo can form as clear a picture—the young officer of cavalry, high-born but hard up, with his eagle face, his red-and-white complexion, his steelblue eyes, and fiery mane, who, like Napoleon, fought his way from victory to victory, until h© mad© himself, in everything Ru/fc name,’ the king of Rome. It is strange that, with all his wild adventures, no writer of romance has set him in the limelight—for, if not the greatest, he was assuredly one of the most striking figures of which the world holds record. NEVER LOST A BATTLE. His character was strangely mingled. A t-rifier, yet a scholar, a virtuoso, fond of manuscripts and statues, fonder still of wine and women, a soldier of such genius that he never lost a battle—as on© sees him flirting in the saloons of ladies, roaring drinking songs among bis soldiers, hobnobbing with buffoons and actors, writing farces of his own, he seems a fantastic kind of mixture of Napoleon, Horace Walpole and Don Juan. Like Napoleon, h© was a firm believer in his star. The Goddess of Love was his protector. He carried about him, an a mascot, a golden image of Apollo. Ho was himself Cl half lion and half fox, and worse as the fox than as the lion.” His victories, his adventures, were too wild for fiction. He led the fierce Jugurtha t-o his camp in chains—he quelled the fiercer pride of Mithridates—he beat the mighty Marius out. of Rome—lie made himself the master of the city. And then began his Reign of Terror. He had no guillotine—but his method was as deadly. For the first time in history a daily list of victims Was posted up in public. Any man who murdered one of the proscribed received a pocketful of gold. A slave who thrust a dagger into the body of his master—a discarded mistress who dropped a pinch of poison into her betrayer’s wine—obtained, not revenge alone, but fortune. No wonder that the Dictator’s enemies vanished like the snows in springtime. No wonder that the kennels of the streets ran red with blood. And then, at last, having settled law and order to his liking, having raised the city from a den of anarchists and rebels to a supremacy of glory without rival, he walked one day into the market-place and there, among his enemies, without a single guard, told the people that he had done enough for one man and that he was going home. There was smething in the act so strange and splendid that the very men who, while he was away in Asia, had burned his mansion to the ground and cast his family adrift, now cheered him to the echo. A MAN OF GALLANTRY. Home he went—to his Cunum villa —there to pass the days among hi» books and pictures, choice- wines and lovely women, to angle in his lake, to write his memoirs under the shadow of his cherry trees. A year afterwards he broke a blood-vessel and died. Robespierre and- Sulla are alike among the world’s great murderers. Each was a Prince of Darkness whom all the whitewash in the universe will not avail to whiten. Vet even here tlterei ia a difference. The fate- of women under the French Terror—the mothers shot with babies at their breasts—the tumbrils moving to the guillotine, packed with bevies of young girls, looking “ like bunches of white lilies —the selling of their hair for periwigs—th© tanning of their skins | for breeches—such things ivould have turned the Roman sick. The aristocrat, the man of gallantry, won hi have re garded Robespierre with loathing, not as a criminal, but as a cad. A GREAT FUNERAL. Even after death their fates were different. When the knife fell upon the neck of Robespierre, there rang *from every heart in France a cry of exultation. When Sulla died, his body, robed in a king's apparel and neaped with golden chaplets, his soldiers, ; whom lie had never led except to victory, bearing his war-worn battle-flags before him, followed by white throngs of priests and youths in golden armour, and then by tens of thousands of the people, was carried through the city to tlio funeral pile; his urn was set, as by an equal right, among the utanumenks of ancient kings; and, what he would have valued more, as if each had lost a lover, the women wont in -mourning for a year.