Plutarch, a Greek writer around the first and second centuries, composed Parallel Lives: paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans. This life is Sulla, a Roman general of the late Republic, when Rome was still run by a senate and elected officials, not a king. Plutarch sets him beside Lysander, a Spartan commander. The action runs through Italy, Athens, and Pontus on the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey, in the first century BC.

Lucius Cornelius Sulla had a blotched face, a taste for actors, and the first Roman army willing to follow a man against its own city. He took Athens, beat Mithridates, king of Pontus, and came home to post lists of enemies who could be killed for a reward — the proscriptions. Named dictator to restore the state, he packed the Senate, muzzled the tribunes (officials who spoke for ordinary citizens), then laid the power down and walked to Puteoli, near Naples. He died of a rotting illness. He called himself Felix: Lucky. This is the story of a general who showed what a payroll can do to a republic, and then stopped.