Before Gaius Julius Ceasar took dictatorial power in the Roman Republic there were Gaius Marius & Sulla, two men who would take dictatorial power within the Republic and begun its transformation from a representative republic into a dictatorial empire. This video is about these two men Gaius Marius with his populist Populares support & Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix with his aristocratic Optimates support would shape the politics of the republic. How their actions would lead to effects upon the Roman republic that would make it go towards the empire it would become under Octavian, that is to say emperor Augustus .

As this Video was made in a collaboration with Stoic History @StoicHistorian , I highly recommend that you check out his video about Marius & Sulla : https://youtu.be/NULEblrFEb4

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P.S.
For some reason I mentioned the Populares in descriptive singular dative/ablative rather than plural nominative like the Optimates (probably due to having encountered these words in those cases when reading the sources). Once it was recorded, I just went with it as it sounded catchy and it would have taken too much time to change everything.

Sources and Further Reading:

Conti, Flavio (2003). A profile of ancient Rome. Los Angeles: Getty Publishing

Evans, Richard John (1994). Gaius Marius: a political biography (1st ed.). Pretoria: University of South Africa.

Hermann, Peter (1914), Historicorum Romanorum reliqiuae, vol. 1, pp.195-204

Keaveney, Arthur (2005) [First ed. 1982]. Sulla: The Last Republican (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.


Livius, Titus (59 BC – AD 17 [1994]). Ab urbe condita: book 81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press edited by Christina Shuttleworth

Sallustius Crispus, Gaius (86-34 BC [1909]). Bellum Catilinae. H. 2, Bellum Iugurthinum. Leipzig: Teubner

Steel, Catherine. 2013. The end of the Roman Republic, 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and crisis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.

Plutarch (1920) [2nd century AD]. "Life of Marius". Parallel Lives. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 9. Translated by Perrin, Bernadotte. Harvard University Press.

Plutarch (1916) [2nd century AD]. "Life of Sulla". Parallel Lives. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 4. Translated by Perrin, Bernadotte. Harvard University Press.

Vervaet, Frederik Juliaan (2004). "The lex Valeria and Sulla's empowerment as dictator (82–79 BCE)". Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz. 15: 37–84. doi:10.3406/ccgg.2004.858.

#Roman #Gaius_Marius #Sulla