Johnny Dyer’s Reviews > The Shortest History of Ancient Rome > Status Update

'Sulla now busied himself with slaughter, as Plutarch wrote,
'and murders without number or limit filled the city' Names of his foes, with the rewards for their capture set out along with the punishments for anyone who sheltered them. Sulla decorated his palace with their severed heads. Appian put the death toll at fifteen former consuls, ninety senators and 100,000 soldiers on both sides.

The proliferation of the latifundia at the expense of the smallholders meant a great many peasants, who had once formed large parts of the citizen militia, failed to meet the property requirement for military service. The poor and property-less were classified in the censuses as proletarii, or producers of offspring, for they produced and owned nothing but their children.

The fall of this oppressive regime catalysed a series of political reforms that led to a more representative and inclusive political system, in which the plebs enjoyed greater participation through elected officials and a popular assembly where they could cast their votes (in what were known as plebiscites).

Hannibal ad portas (Hannibal is at the gates) subsequently became a phrase expressing fear of an impending
disaster.

The other legacy of the sack was a lingering terror that in 1985 a German scholar called a metus Gallicus, or 'fear of Gauls?
This irrational, paralysing panic would last for centuries and encompass any sort of invader coming from the north

When his two sons sided with the deposed king, Brutus had them beheaded, even watching the gory spectacle himself - a steely act that later impressed Niccolò Machiavelli, for whom to kill the sons of Brutus' became the catchphrase for the unflinching brutality that political leaders needed in order to make tough decisions, maintain their power and preserve the state.

300-strong advisory body, the Senate. The name of this institution, which would survive for the better part of a millennium, derived from senex, 'old man, because it was staffed, in theory at least, by wise, grey heads.