The First Triumvirate - Pompey, Crassus, Caesar

Although Sulla gets credit from moderns for resigning his dictatorship, the measures he undertook to ensure that the Republican system would continue to work were not adequate. Things had gone too far; all of the ominous trends which we have noticed in the previous two lectures, i.e political violence in the city, armies whose loyalty belonged in the first instance to individual commanders and only secondarily to the state itself, agitation for land distributions, and threats to the traditional prerogatives of the Senate, all these intensify in this period. [David L. Silverman] Classics 373