180-228 CE (Superpowers)

''This History of the Roman Empire chronicles the reigns of emperors after Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. On the eve of his death, he left behind an empire at war and wracked by plague. Even in this maligned state, Rome had retained an unmatched level of economic and military strength. As nearly the largest and most populous state until that point in human history, Rome had the potential to continue its rise in power, if only under cautious leadership. The following pages document the continued rise of this most illustrious empire of the Western World and the challenges that it faced in maintaining its existence.''

A Young Emperor
Princeps Marcus Aurelius died on July 2nd of 180 CE in his quarters of the Domus Augustana. His return to Rome following a major victory in the ongoing war was ended by a sudden illness from which he never recovered. The story goes that the emperor clung onto life only long enough to better prepare his adopted son for taking the purple. As a modest Stoic, Marcus requested a simple funeral on the way to laying his ashes in his grandfather's tomb. As the most distinguished of his day, he was mourned by millions who knew his as a ruler or commander.

A later encomium by Cassius Dio said of his death that:

... [Marcus] did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire. Perhaps only one thing kept him going through many of these hard times, namely that after rearing and educating his [Sulla's] person in the best possible way he was greatly pleased with him. This matter must be our next topic; for our history continues to go from a kingdom of silver to one of gold, as was thought by the Romans of that day.

Son and heir of Marcus Aurelius, Gaius Correlus Sulla was recognized by the Senate as pontifex maximus and princeps civitatis on July 6, 180, under the name Caesar Gaius Aurelius Antoninus Sulla Augustus. Contemporaries expected little of this new emperor of formerly plebeian rank but by his death he would earn the cognomen Magnus (the Great). Ultimately, history regards him as one of the most prosperous of the Princepes Boni (a term coined by a historian of the 6th century in his legendary Romana Historia for the emperors during this productive period of the Principate).

Following his senatorial salutation, Sulla did as was expected and ordered the generals on the frontier to continue to press the enemy in the ongoing war and block the Quadi and Marcomanni tribes from returning to the lowlands east of the Little Carpathians after their defeat by praetorian prefect Tarrutenius Paternus. The battle had marked a key turning point in the Bellum Germanicum et Sarmaticum, allowing Roman generals the freedom to focus their efforts on the Iazygean tribes west of Dacia.

Bad omens
Only sixteen years of age when he became princeps, Sulla operated under the supervision and support of his brother-in-law Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus - who had returned from the frontier to act as his regent. During this uncertain stage of regency, Sulla spent most of his time seeing the clients of the imperial family, hearing appeals in the public courts, and presiding over the usual state rituals as pontifex maximus. His industrious application to imperial duties was grudgingly commended by the Senate. Although they had nothing of substance for which to denigrate this new emperor, many senators were discomforted by his humble birth - a son of Roman colonists before being orphaned and getting adopted by Marcus Aurelius.

When a prediction that his reign would be bloody and short was presented to the Senate by the haruspices (diviners), his opponents took gleefully to the news, aggravating the troubles of his early reign. The sign that was given voice by the haruspices was the portentous change of the sky above Rome - as well as most of the world - to a bloody red around 181 CE. The natural cause of this phenomenon had been a volcanic eruption of vents under a lake on the other side of the planet - the largest volcanic eruption for centuries - but its interpretation as a bloody omen from the gods was all that could be known in this time and place.

The seriousness with which the citizenry - especially among the ranks of the Plebs - took this sign should not be exaggerated. In truth, the declaration of a bad omen was the effect more than the cause of weak support from senators and even that attitude would slowly soften in the face of Sulla's pietas in observing the state rituals, constantia in sacrificing his own convenience to Rome, and personal gravitas in speaking before the Senate. However, it would take clearer public support from outside the Senate before these qualities would have any sway on his more ardent senatorial opponents.

Under this pressure, Sulla offered what he could to the Senate without drastically undermining his own power. Once he began regularly attending sessions of the Senate - upon reaching a sufficiently respectable age to stand among senators - he put forward two motions in an attempt to endear himself to his opponents. Both measures emphasized the role of the Senate in provincial administration, without seriously diminishing his own administrative powers. First, the drawing of lots for provinciae populum Romanorum was moved earlier in the year, ensuring that the lots not only assigned each proconsul a province but also selected the proconsulares for that year, without a prior selection of eligible candidates by the princeps. Second, term limits of five years were imposed on the allotment of provinces to the legati Augusti pro praetore, with an extension only permitted by a prorogation through the Senate. Both motions were proposed and carried through by senators supporting Sulla but without his open involvement, an initial sign that he intended to play down the autocratic aspects of his position. His approval was implicit in who proposed the motions and in his demeanor throughout discussion but his avoidance of direct contributions sent a message on its own. Few senators were swayed by his cooperation at this point but it remained one of the many factors opening the way for substantial improvement should the right push come around.

Emulating his father and committing himself to his imperial responsibilities, Sulla spent much of his early reign personally receiving appeals in court - hearing disputes and settling public petitions with his own judgement. For his just rulings and fervent commitment to the judiciary, Sulla found his most ardent early support among advocates and iurisconsulti. Sulla's personal involvement in law would persist throughout his life, whenever he was in Rome to receive appeals from the quaestiones perpetuae and lesser courts. In his dealings in court and directly with the Senate, Sulla did as little as possible with force, drawing on none of the tyrannical instruments of control available to a princeps - informers were punished, the word maiestas (treason) was scarcely uttered, and correspondence with the Senate was done with respect.

Restoration and renovation of the Pantheum, lavishly decorating it in gold bas relief and repainting statues as well as the building exterior, further strengthened Sulla's position. Pompeianus helped on this front by accelerating the deification of Marcus Aurelius, after which Sulla constructed a templum to his deified father in the southern districts of Rome. Piety toward the Roman gods and the genius populi Romani worshiped through his own person - the locus of the imperial cult - was a core practice for the princeps. His emphasis of other signs of divine favor and his piety would be essential in dispelling the harmful notions of the bad omen while its subversive effects were most salient.

Germanic and Sarmatian Wars
The Bellum Germanicum et Sarmaticum raged on for five more years after the death of Marcus Aurelius. The shadow of the war hung over Sulla's early reign. Throughout these five years, the young emperor made frequent trips to the frontier, appearing before the soldiers and conferring with his generals. During one of these excursions, Sulla spent several months in Venetia drumming up local volunteers for the war. There he oversaw the raising of two legions - Legio I Histria and Legio IV Italica. The presence of the emperor, along with his stirring, albeit uninspired, rhetoric - drawing on the recent siege of Aquileia, the need for old values in these difficult times, etc. - brought many volunteers but, as was required earlier in the war, conscription was needed to fill the ranks.

Financing the war, a task made all the more difficult by the expansion of the army, had pushed Sulla at the start of his reign to sell palace slaves and reduce his retinue of chamberlains. In his tenuous position, he chose not to burden the people with new taxes or the senators with new duties. The constant shortage of money in the imperial purse demanded this personal austerity from the emperor, otherwise the task of keeping the army supplied, holding games to keep the people happy, and sustaining the grain supply in Rome would have been nearly impossible alongside other lesser expenditures.

At last, in 184 CE, news arrived in the Senate declaring the subjugation of the last Iazygean king. Generals Tarrutenius, Clodius Albinus, Pescennius Niger, Helvius Pertinax, and Valerius Maximianus were jointly granted a triumphus for this success at the behest of Sulla. Although the generals had been fighting under the auspices of the emperor and only a general fighting in suis auspiciis could be granted the right to Triumph, the young Sulla assured the Senate of its constitutionality. Although this Triumph was patently unconstitutional, no one opposed the desire of an emperor to honor the five generals who commanded most of the armies in Europe. Going to the frontier for a final time - Sulla made many trips throughout these five years to inspect progress in the war and assert his presence before the troops - the young emperor returned to Rome in the company of the victors and held a place of distinction in their grand triumphal celebration.

In return for the Triumph, the returning generals saluted Sulla as Imperator and conferred upon him the names Germanicus and Sarmaticus, the titles of his father, formally affirming that Sulla had the full support of their legions - the common soldiers gave their personal oaths of allegiances following the lead of their generals. A younger Sulla had spent years on campaign with the generals alongside his adoptive father and had become well-known to them as a beloved child of their first Imperator, Marcus Aurelius, possibly motivating their support of Sulla despite their greater de facto military authority (among a host of other factors that would have encouraged their respect and the lawful relinquishment of military imperium).

Over the next year, Sulla coordinated closely with legati on the Danube to maintain Roman control over the subdued peoples. For the sake of this goal, the provincia augustum (imperial province) of Marcomannia was established beyond the limes danuvius, on the border of Pannonia. Near Dacia, the territories of Rome had been extended in two directions by the five year campaign against both the Iazyges and the Roxolani. The result was the administration of land up to the Fluvius Tisia (River Tisza) through Iazygean client kings and of the land between Dacia and Moesia Inferior - beyond the limes alutanus - through Roxolan client kings, bringing about the ambition of Marcus Aurelius to create a province of Sarmatia (which Sulla integrated into Lower Moesia). Over time, Roman governors in Dacia would slowly procure Iazygean territory and wealth for themselves and for Rome, undermining the position of these kings.

In the present crisis of manpower, the triumphant legions were reorganized to accommodate their low numbers. Legiones III Italica and IV Flavia Felix were united as Legio III Gemina while Legiones II Italica and X Gemina were combined into Legio IV Gemina. This formality left the empire with the number of legions ante bellum and ensured a more realistic equilibrium for the army. In the wake of the plagues during the reign of his father, Sulla could only rely on time to bolster Roman military strength, without austere measures of recruitment that could scarcely be justified without a pressing, local threat.

Before the Triumph, the emperor published the Stoic reflections of his father, asking the Stoic school in Athens to create copies in Greek and to translate the writings into Latin for gifts to senators. Those senators seeking the favor of Sulla read the reflections and often quoted passages in his presence, knowing their ruler's appreciation for his father's philosophy. As the number of years under Stoic emperors approached half a century, Stoicism would gain a firmer hold on the aristocracy and the academic world.

After the Triumph, Sulla assisted in the raising of a Victory Column immortalizing the military achievements of his father, giving a special place in its reliefs to the five generals who he had celebrated, alongside his in-law Tiberius Claudius Pompeianus who had lost his opportunity to triumph when he returned to Rome to act as regent for the young princeps. The column was erected in the Transitorium, i.e. the Forum Nervae north of the Forum Romanum, directly in front of the Temple of Minerva, both showing respect for Marcus' great-great-grandfather and recognizing the late emperor for his strategic brilliance.

Popular support
With clear support from the legions, Sulla rose dramatically in reputation in the eyes of the armies and people of Rome. As a signal of peace, the denarius, the primary coin for state expenditure, was revalued from a silver purity of ~79% to ~83% in a coin struck at 102 to the pound. Despite the added strain this would impose on the treasury, Sulla gave away the first batch of the new denarii during a ceremony for closing the Gates of Janus, a symbol of peace depicted on one side of these coins.

In light of financial strains, the Senate agreed with Sulla in approving more vigorous tax collection over nearby Gaul and Illyricum, without imposing new taxes. Later that same year, Sulla went personally to dozens of cities in northern Italy to express gratitude to their decuriones for quartering and supplying troops during the war. On these visits, he impressed upon them the financial troubles facing the empire in its wake and the need for every citizen to do his part to return the civilized world to proper form. In this vein, Sulla requested a more extensive exercise of the usual munera (civic obligations) practiced by the municipia and coloniae. More couriers would run the cursus publicus (state postal service) through Italy to the frontiers, roads would need more regular maintenance, and more spectacles would be needed to entertain the humiliores (peasants). A similar need for extraordinary euergetism was impressed upon the Senate, as the treasury finances were to be spent farther afield at the expense of public games in Rome. The fiscus (imperial purse) would obviously continue to provide the greatest contribution to these spectacles but the senators were implored to bear some of the burden, with the benefit of the prestige they would thus earn. This final move was a risky decision for an emperor even though it would not give an opening for any nobiles (aristocrats) to even approach him in public standing.

For the rest of his annus mirabilis of 184, Sulla focused on coordinating military efforts toward maintaining control over the Marcomanni and other tribes in the new province. For this purpose, the other major frontier of the Rhine was put under the command of Pertinax with Clodius Albinus in Gaul nearby and Tarrutenius was promoted to legatus augustus pro praetore for Marcomannia, while the other generals returned to the Senate with praise and promises of future consulships. These men formed the inner circle (contubernium) for an emperor still working to solidify his political position.

While Sulla had done little but see clients and participate in religious ceremonies for his first five years, he now entered the more active, second period of his reign. His position had been sufficiently secured, in all respects except his standing over the Senate, that he could begin taking riskier, more rewarding actions as he struggled to weather the effects of the storm that had raged during the reign of his father.

Despite the challenges - low treasury, waning manpower, and expensive provincializations - Sulla steered an empire that, for the most part, was firmly under the control of Rome. Its present course seemed unalterable to its citizens as long as magistrates remained competent and the legions stayed loyal to their Imperator. Continuous stability and the effectiveness of leadership was allowing Rome to foster a fruitful environment for progress in art and philosophy. Perhaps no field of inquiry best reflected the fusion of these two flourishing traditions and the present climate of progress than the medical arts.

Advances in medicine
Practitioners of the medical arts were a diverse breed in the early empire. A physician might be a priest or a doctor at a temple to a god of healing, a personal doctor for wealthy clients, or a doctor working from a public clinic. Although most of these professions shared the tradition of Hellenistic medicine, passed down from the Hippocratic Corpus of medical texts, their methods and knowledge were not homogeneous. This situation of diversity persisted until the time of Galen of Pergamum.

Already famous for his tenure as personal physician of Marcus Aurelius, Galen returned to Rome in 181 to serve in the court of Sulla. Familiar with the position, he devoted himself to his trade rather than his writings, treating many men of distinguished social status and earning ever greater fame among the nobility. This dry spell in his writing career was, as history would show, the metaphorical calm before a storm.

A series of plagues had epidemics had afflicted Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and the threat of more plague loomed over Sulla during his first decade. Seeking to strengthen the empire against this illusive enemy, the emperor placed the æsculapeum (healing temple) in Alexandria under the control of Galen in 183, funding an expansion to accommodate a new type of facility. After four years of construction, this Academia Medica Galena was inaugurated as a center of healing and research.

Tasked with studying the human body and its ailments, this academy - named for the philosophical school of Galen's hero, Plato - consisted of four connected buildings: a library for medical texts, a clinic for seeing patients, an operating room for surgical procedures, and an office for the staff. Most of these sections of the facility were additions onto the old temple but the earlier structure could still be recognized. A tower in the center of the academy was built to be seen across the whole of Alexandria, facilitating its auxiliary role as a local hospital at all times of the day.

Copies of medical texts from libraries in the major cities were brought to the academy, its shelves being filled with the majority of known works on medicine within only ten years. This wealth of knowledge played a key part in educating students at the academy. At no earlier time in history could students of medicine find most of their culture's medical literature in a single place. A close familiarity with these texts was instilled by copying these texts, as task given to most students for their own benefit and to disseminate the important works to more physicians and scholars at the academy. While this great library had certain advantages for pedagogy, its real utility came from the effect it would have on the doctrine of physicians.

Medical doctrines
With most of the medical literature at hand, physicians were encouraged by Galen to resolve disagreements between the three medical sects on method and on how to justify treatments, for the sake of the curriculum and for the practice of the art itself.

Physicians tended to adhere to one of three major doctrines: the Methodici (Methodists), the Empirici (Empiricists), and the Dogmatici (Rationalists). Methodists held that a treatment should be specific to the present symptoms of the patient, without regard to the personal history or trais (e.g. height, weight, sex) of the patient. At its base an atomist doctrine, Methodism saw all sickness as the result of localized mechanical blockages or fluxes of the atoms in the body, meaning they saw little variation in a given disease between different people and their approach to treatment could be extraordinarily simple. Methodist doctors could be trained in months rather than years and could suggest a treatment after only minutes with a patient rather than after days of questions and observations.

Methodist doctrine arose in response to the Empiricist and Rationalist schools of thought. The latter held that the symptoms of an illness were signs of an underlying problem in the patient and that a treatment should address these hidden causes, known by inference from the symptoms and the history of the patient (diet, character, environment, injuries, etc.) in light of knowledge about human bodies. By contrast, the former sect advised physicians to tailor a treatment solely to the evident causes of disease, selecting one that had worked in the past on patients presenting similar symptoms after similar events. While there was some theory involved in noting similarities, Empiricists did away almost completely with physiological or anatomical theories about the human body.

A synthesis of Empiricist and Rationalist doctrine was prevalent within the academy by 202 CE, with most of its physicians agreeing on a unified theory of physiology, sickness, and infection drawn from the writings and observations of Galen (described below). Over several decades, the Galenici would lead the empire in a transition to a more homogeneous and rigorous medical community, whose practitioners followed a more reliable doctrine and communicated using the same technical vocabulary. Galen lived to see the beginning of this ideological movement and knew better than anyone what was known in medicine but cautioned that "Medicine lay in her Infancy and more waited to be uncovered about how Man functioned". Unfortunately, his directions toward further inquiry were largely ignored by his successors and his doctrine became more or less unquestionable for the centuries that followed.

On the bright side, doctrinal unity among physicians and homogeneity of medical practice across the empire led over the next century to medical knowledge filtering into urban culture. The ideological monolith that was medicine after Galen impressed upon the public the urgency of hygiene and exercise for a longer and healthier life. This impression on Roman culture would have been dramatically weaker without the improved reputation of physicians after Galen. With their esoteric knowledge, lifestyle advice, and effective practices, doctors carried a similar mundane wonder as priests - visiting the doctor was, after all, consulting a wise man to request the intervention of incomprehensible forces in daily life.

Medical services
This changing role of doctors in Roman society was facilitated by the fact that visiting a doctor before Galen literally involved seeing a priest; the primary center of healing in a Roman city was usually an æsculapeum (temple of Æsclepius). Depending on the location, a patient might receive anything from the attention of a highly-trained physician - who might moonlight as a private doctor to wealthy clients - to a place to sleep for a night in anticipation of dreams that a priest would interpret in suggesting a divinely-inspired treatment. In either case, medicine was tied to the gods, limiting its practice to the extent of Hellenistic culture. Soldiers and slaves could find professional treatment in a valetudinarium, referring either to a simple home clinic for household slaves or a military hospital accompanying a legion. With this variety of medical services, the meaning of medicus (physician) was equally varied and few universal features existed.

Inspired by the work of Galen, doctors working out of Pergamum in 195 funded a renovation of the massive local æsculapeum, allowing the facility to operate along similar lines to the new hospital in Alexandria. Their hospital had an added atrium for seating patients, a basement for dissecting cadavers, and a separate wing for holding infectious patients where they could bathe and be segregated from people in good health (as in a quarantine - an old practice improved by Galen). The expanded facility continued all that the æsculapeum had been doing, including teaching the next generation of physicians (now using Galenic conventions).

As part of the euergetism of the curial class, hospitals in the Galenic tradition started to appear in other Hellenic cities, as men of wealth increasingly saw these medical institutions as proper objects of their usual beneficence. Befitting their inspiration, these hospitals were commonly called galenariae, much to the dissatisfaction of that religious element which opposed replacing priestly healers with scholars. Although most galenariae were locally supported, a special few received funding from a provincial governor using the public wealth at his disposal, similar to how patronage of a library or school worked in a large city.

Upon his return in 205 from campaign, Sulla wasted no time in constructing a galenaria for Rome, on some open land in the Campus Martius (Field of Mars). Dwarfing others of its kind, this facility drew its expertise from physicians already practicing in Rome, as other hospitals had been doing, and had its expenses paid by the patronage of the emperor, whose propaganda would portray this alongside the alimenta as an act of imperial generosity. In this case, the assurance of care at the hospital in Rome was mediated through the curator curationum, a position given equal prestige among senators as the curator alimentorum.

Despite this patronage, the galenariae - even in Rome - could not afford to care for all patients without fees. In Rome, a person could plead poverty for free treatment but otherwise, a patient still paid a fee for herbal and surgical treatments as in other hospitals. By contrast, therapeutic treatment, in the form of advising patients on a curative regimen, was free at all galenariae, as it had been before Galen. As much as medical practice was becoming homogenized, costs still varied widely with local conditions.

Every hospital had some piece of the medical literature on its premise, typically the works of Erasistratus, Aretaeus, Hippocrates, Herophilus, or other landmark medical thinkers. Among these texts, one resource became common to hospitals across the empire: the indispensable De Remediis by Galen. Originally written in 195 and updated four times before Galen's death, this handbook thoroughly describes the possible signs of different diseases and how to approach treatment to fit the patient. Details are mostly methodological, since the focus is diagnosis and treatment, but the book incorporates Galen's own distinctions for diseases, based on his theories about their origins and hidden causes within the body. Useful both in pedagogy and in practice, this text was a landmark for medicine - the first comprehensive encyclopedia of diseases.

Medical procedures
A comprehensive handbook of disease was far from Galen's only contribution to medical practice. Roman doctors had learned countless surgeries, herbs, diets, and exercises for treating specific diseases, after centuries of simple trial and error, but these treatments were barely grounded in an understanding of the body. Galen set about the task of not only uncovering how treatments worked but also expanding the medical tool set of physicians.

For Hellenic medicine, preventative treatments were the focus over curative ones. Patients were advised on regiminae (therapies) both to mitigate any chronic diseases and avoid poor health in the future. Diet and exercise were the mainstay of recommended therapies but Galen added a third central practice to the list. While cleanliness was a core part of Roman society, especially for the nobility, and sterilization was a key step in dressing wounds, hygiene did not became one of the main therapies until Galen.

First, Galen would prescribe cleaning teeth with a brush and paste for patients with mouth disease or pain, even advising healthy people to adopt a regular regimen of cleaning teeth for "a more pleasing and healthier mouth". Second, sterilization was emphasized before surgeries, going as far as forcing everyone involved in a surgery to wash their hands and harms with concentrated vinegar - the same substance long used to dress wounds and sterilize equipment. Following his own theory of infection, Galen discovered by observation that even contact with dead or sick people could spread certain diseases, justifying thorough cleansing using the usual vinegar after any such encounters.

Going further with this practice, Galen built upon earlier approaches to a quarantine. Going into detail on how to handle the spread of disease from person to person, he outlined ways to implement these ideas in a variety of contexts: from a ship to a port, from a port to the ships, over the walls of a city, within a city, etc. In particular, there were descriptions in his later works on the quarantine of sick within a city hospital, as a means of slowing the spread of a plague within that city (the Antonine Plague remained an obsession of Galen throughout his life). He advised keeping patients in one room of a hospital where they could be visited by doctors to prescribe whatever treatments were available but that when a doctor finished he was to use the hospital's bath to scrub his entire body with vinegar and cleanse himself with oil.

More dramatic interventions than therapy were also on the menu of options expanded by Galen. Since he saw disease as an imbalance, he prescribed specific drugs that evidence suggested would restore balance (here theory and experience intersected in an often inexplicable manner). A wide range of diseases of the bowels were prescribed purgative drugs, with varying degrees of success.

When other treatments failed, surgery was often the last resort of the physician. Although he passed on his skills to others through personal instruction, Galen's greatest contribution to the art of surgery was his strict surgical protocols describing the steps involved in each distinct procedure. For eye surgeons, he laid out how to extract a cataract by suction rather than by dislocating the lens in couching and demonstrated how glaucoma could be treated in some cases by reducing intraocular pressure. For brain surgeons, his writings focus on reducing intracranial pressure and closing internal bleeding, noting that the fragility, complexity and importance of the brain makes surgery especially difficult. Building on the study of carcinomae (malignant tumors) by Hippocrates, Galen discovered that treatment was sometimes possible through surgery, although noticing that the problem was a tumor was difficult without exploratory surgery (another field that was left in a vastly more effective state by Galen). Among these other surgeries, Galen improved upon earlier practices for setting bones, letting blood, and ligating arteries, as well as performing a tracheotomy, lithotomy, reducing dislocations and fractures, and repairing hernias. Through both instruction and systematization, Galen ensured that future surgeons had a rigorous basis for even the most audacious of surgeries.

Many of these developments were the result of experiments at the academy on cadavers, often as a means of discovering the cause of death of a patient. However, less ethical activities occurred in the lower levels of the academy. On request, local authorities brought live convicts to Galen to supply human vivisections. Discoveries made by this means were crucial in ending the debate between the Empiricists and Rationalists, not to mention for perfecting surgical protocols. Indeed, the most enduring product of these dissections and vivisections was the concrete evidence they provided for theories about the human body.

Medical methodologies
Before the year 200, Galen alone published over 300 works on medicine, covering topics as diverse as oral hygiene, medical botany, paralysis, optics, and even logic alongside the more general topics of physiology and anatomy. Public and private donations flowed into his academy, supplying ample funds to expand the operations of its facilities and to accommodate more patients, bodies, and books.

The latter three resources were essential in advancing knowledge of the body. For his part, Galen was exceptionally well-read not only as a physician but as a philosopher. Characterizing himself as an eclectic - one who belonged to no school of medicine or philosophy - he drew from sources as diverse as Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus, Erasistratus and Herophilus in expounding a method of his own.

Agreeing with Aristotle, Galen held that the role of the philosopher was to explain the phenomena found in nature, requiring observation to supply that which is to be explained. More specifically, he addressed how descriptions of nature from observation logically related to theories purporting to explain the observation. Building on syllogistic logic, Galen expounded on a relational syllogism, for inferences about relative quantity as in 'A is equal to B, B is equal to C; therefore A is equal to C', and a hypothetical syllogism that formalized the conditional statements of the Stoics using syllogism.

Conditionals were essential to Galen's methodology. A typical experiment of his would present opposing theories about some phenomenon - say the Stoic theory that the ruling faculty of man is in the heart and the Platonic one that it is in the brain - then find a syllogism the truth of whose premises could be known by observation and the conclusion of which was one of the competing theories. Candidate theories were a key part of this method since the proposed observational test would vary with the conclusion - in this case, if the brain is the ruling faculty, then movement and sensation would cease by cutting off the connection to the brain (this evidence was especially impressive in the case of the nerve controlling the vocal cords since the screams prior to cutting the nerve contrast with the sudden silence once the subject is mute).

More is involved in this method than appears at first glance. First, the subject (e.g. ruling faculty) must be defined in a way agreed upon by the opposing researchers (e.g. as the source of movement and sensation). Second, premises from which a given conclusion (e.g. the ruling faculty is in the brain) can be inferred must be conceived. For this step, Galen draws on the categories of predicates discussed by Aristotle, since he saw each statement in a syllogism as predicating something of a subject and agreed with Aristotle that the ten categories identified the essential classes of predicates of things in nature. Identifying the category (e.g. location) of the attribute (e.g. in the brain) being predicated of the subject by a theory sufficed to conceive of what premises form a syllogism whose conclusion is the theory. Naturally enough, the third condition is that the truth (or falsehood) of the premises corresponds with a test. Premises must be chosen such that there is something that can be observed to know whether they are true or false. Using relational and hypothetical syllogism, larger and more complicated chains of syllogisms can be conceived in conceiving of premises to test a given theory, permitting justification of more abstract theories without diluting the certainty one has in the observations (Galen rightly saw deduction as perfectly preserving truth from premise to conclusion).

Based as they were on the categories, the syllogisms Galen sought in designing his experiments tended to demand a wide variety of types of observations, whether that involved locating an object somewhere, timing one event with another event, or isolating different substances from within an object. None of these were terribly novel features of his method but where Galen did innovate was in applying the category of quantity to his observations, holding that quantitative measures could show an attribute of something. His focus on this category likely resulted from his theory that sickness and health are only differences in the proportions of various fluids, motivating the importance of careful observation of their quantities. Few quantities were emphasized more by Galen than pulse. Renowned physicians Praxagoras and Herophilus were the first to use the pulse as a diagnostic tool but Galen elevated its use to the point that one of the first things that a doctor after him would check is the pulse (the sight of a doctor holding out a man's arm to check his pulse at the wrist became the go-to image for portraying a doctor for centuries after him).

As a development upon the eudoxic method of Aristotle, this method of demonstration was a great leap forward in the history of the scientific method, subordinating traditional wisdom to the role of directing experimentation (so that less hinges on those beliefs being true) and providing some method (lacking as it does in rigor) for designing an experiment to test a theory. Ultimately, the logical and methodological works of Galen - notably On Demonstration and The Best Physician is also a Philosopher - received nowhere near the attention of his anatomical and physiological works but would slowly exert an influence on how other philosophers of nature would approach their investigations.

Medical discoveries
With Galen's novel methods and doctrine of medicine in mind, it is easier to survey the discoveries that he ended up making in his own investigations. These discoveries are manifold, building on the works of his predecessors, correcting some of their mistakes, and proposing entirely novel theories of his own.

Galen found that the blood flowing through the arteries and veins was the same fluid, that the septum separating the cardial ventricles was impermeable to blood, that contractions of different parts of the heart were the cause of blood flow to specific parts of the body, that blood flows from the heart to the lungs to mix with air to produce sanguis pneumata (arterial blood), that blood circulated rather than oscillated or stagnated (he observed that about two ounces of blood left the heart per beat, necessitating recycling of the blood), that veinous valves prevented blood from flowing backward, that neither the heart nor brain alone regulated body temperature, and that the appendix can be safely removed from a person, particularly for the treatment of certain illnesses. Galen performed the first successful appendectomy on a live patient in 198, carefully recording what made this attempt more successful than his dozens of prior failures. After a few more years, Galen wrote a treatise on a reliable method for performing an appendectomy, a procedure which he prescribed for alleviating a certain class of pains in the lower right section of the abdomen.

In addition to his contributions to knowledge of blood vessels, Galen observed a number of facts about nerves. Alongside the venerable Erasistratus, Galen categorized nerves into sensory and motor nerves. The former were supposed to transmit data from the senses to the brain while the latter were thought to transmit intentions from the brain to the muscles. Galen disagreed with Herophilos on the notion that neural transmissions functioned by exchange of pneuma (breath), as Galen thought pneuma was one of two essential components of arterial blood rather than nerves. Instead, he proposed the existence of a unique fluid that filled the nerves. Supposing that this fluid was produced in the brain, where he located the psyche (intelligence) of a person, Galen named this fluid psychon (Greek: ψυχων) and speculated that it carried information as vibrations induced either by stimuli (for sensory nerves) or by the psyche (for motor nerves). Besides this wild speculation about nerves, Galen also identified specific spinal nerves with the muscle groups they controlled, such as observing that the laryngeal nerve only affected the voice. Some structures in the brain such as the corpus callosum and putamen were also described for the first time by Galen. Similarly, he identified the main arteries supplying blood to the brain, now known as the cerebral arterial circle.

More impressive than these theoretical discoveries is Galen's development of reliable medical protocols for eye, chest, throat, and brain surgeries that were not likely to permanently injure patients. Such procedures were major breakthroughs. Using his methods, even surgeons of normal skill could be relied upon (usually) to perform surgery on the brain, eye, or spine.

There were also setbacks in Galen's work. Bloodletting was not only advocated by his hospitals but he invented a rigorous methodology for the practice. The four humors theory of sickness and health was strongly emphasized in his books, providing numerous arguments in its favor. Among these harmful mistakes, Galen also proposed numerous incorrect theories about the body: a bipartite theory of the psyche that divided it into an animal (voluntary) part in the brain and vegetative (autonomic) part in the liver; that toxins in the body ultimately deposit in the appendix, necessitating its removal in some people; and that blood was replenished and created in the liver. His ideas on the physiology of the nervous system also established fundamentally incorrect ideas but these were steps forward for medicine, approaching the actual electrochemical behavior of that system.

The work of Galen, prior to his death at the ripe age of 89, set the stage for the next 1,400 years of Roman medicine. It is fair to say that medical science only slowly advanced after his discoveries, until the 1600's. For this reason, historians say that "Galen was for medicine what Aristotle was for logic". The institutions he inspired - galenariae - established medicus (doctor) and chirurgius (surgeon) as highly respected secular professions and his unification of the medical community in a doctrinal and political sense played an essential role in creating the health care system that Romans continue to enjoy.

Mathematics & astronomy
Although Sulla's stoic beliefs gave him little interest in the affairs of natural philosophers outside of medicine, continued stability under his reign allowed for scholars to contribute to knowledge of the natural world and to spread the ideas of past discoveries to wider audiences.

Beyond the purview of Rome, philosophical and mathematical schools in the Hellenized provinces went about their business as usual. The 2nd century had been a productive period for mathematicians and by this time, a number of their discoveries were spreading to the philosophical teachers in the capital. Among these ideas were a detailed arithmetic and a novel theory of numbers, that presented the known perfect and prime numbers through the lens of a Platonic-Empiricist concept of numbers, in the works of Nicomachus of Gerasa, and a pioneering step into the field of spherical trigonometry in the treatise Sphaerica by Menelaus of Alexandria, which established a primitive concept of geodesics (shortest paths on spheres). Other works were written in this century by Serenus of Antinoopolis, who studied cylindrical and conical geometries, and by geometers propagating the works of the great Hero of Alexandria, especially his highly useful texts on geometric surveying.

Arguably the greatest inventor and mathematician since Archimedes, Hero had left behind countless discoveries and inventions that demonstrated either the utility or the beauty of knowledge about the natural world. Among his latter curiosities were the aeolipile, giving insight into the operation of the wind, and the wind-wheel, the first device to directly harness the power of the wind from nature. Some of his more practical inventions were: a displacement pump with applications as a fire engine, pulley systems for behind the stage in a theater, a syringe for a doctor to deliver fluids into the body, and a fountain powered by the storage of hydrostatic energy. Previous emperors had commissioned his pump for stationary pump-operated fire engines that could be brought to the scene of a fire by the department in Rome while his other inventions became more or less common technologies used in Roman society, alongside the more prominent ideas of the aqueduct, concrete, the crane, and the dome).

Cleomedes
The astronomer Cleomedes, already famous for spreading the discoveries of Posidonius of Rhodes, began around the 180's to make his own discoveries. He is recorded teaching the following novel ideas at his school in Greece: the notion that the atmosphere deviates the straight path of light (186), the theory that the Moon is not a source of light but only reflects light from the Sun (190), and the further argument for the sphericity of the Earth based on the circularity of its shadow during an eclipse. His works were also the first to expound the procedure of Eratosthenes for measuring the circumference of the Earth as 252,000 stadia (39,690 km) [Cleomedes preached the perfect accuracy of this measurement but it is truly about 2% lower than the actual circumference].

Romans and Greeks saw the discoveries of Cleomedes as a path toward a better understanding of the center of the universe: describing its exact dimensions and its interaction with sunlight. In a short time, these ideas became integral components of the Ptolemaic theory of the universe - an exact mathematical system predicting the positions of the Sun, Moon, and wandering stars (planets) using a geocentric model. Although this theory would ultimately be falsified by the discoveries of future Roman astronomers, it was at this time without competition as the alternative theory - held at one time by the Pythagoreans - contradicted with the prevailing beliefs in the perfection of the heavenly spheres and in the heaviness of the Earth, which seemed obviously immovable.

Civil projects
In the hopes of helping improve shipping routes, Sulla commissioned the naval forces in the Mediterranean in 206 to map the entire Mare Internum going clockwise from Rome. Three decades of work went into accurately representing the private lake of Rome on a series of maps, resulting in the unparalleled drawings of the Carta Mediterranea - a name that its creators took from the works of Claudius Aelianus. The survey of coasts and islands employed the most effective techniques known to Romans (primitive even by the standards of 9th century agrimensores but sophisticated for their time). The original map was a codex consisting of more than 80 pages, with a single continental map drawn using the more detailed maps. Modification and improvement of these maps created a new science of tablographia (cartography) and their definitive versions were kept at the archives in Rome for use by magistrates.

Another concern of Sulla was the existence of unskilled or even downright fraudulent doctors, which had long been a problem in most of the Roman world. Against these practitioners, the medical academy in Alexandria had given its students certificates that verified their skill and knowledge. In 214, Sulla issued an edict that severely penalized falsifications of medical qualifications and disseminated propaganda to discourage citizens from seeking uncertified medici - who remained the most prevalent physicians. About two centuries later, an emperor would issue an edict forcing every practicing medicus and chirurgius to obtain a license by passing federal examinations at any of the national medical schools. By that time, a medical license had to be displayed in the hospital where that doctor or surgeon practiced, unless he was not employed by a public hospital. By 393, the last private hospitals and doctor's offices would be outlawed in cities above a certain size, although a licensed medical practitioner was within his rights to be the private physician of a single client, leaving a viable career path for someone unable to find work at a public hospital. These measures eventually guaranteed a single national standard for medical care.

Early rule
Although many cities prospered, Rome had stretched herself near her limits under present modes of governance as numerous problems could now present themselves at once to her rulers. Although the legions had pacified the Germans and Sarmatians for the time, there were always unruly tribes that diverged from the confederations on which Rome had imposed treaties, requiring the efforts of Tarrutenius Paternus and his troops in Dacia to keep under control alongside the usual resistance among even the compliant tribes. In the north of Britannia, a different threat presented itself - Pict tribes overran the nearly abandoned Antonine Wall (Vallum Antoninum) and were putting more pressure on Hadrian's Wall farther south. Reports of their raids on British cities alarmed senators in Rome, who looked to Sulla for a response.

In his capacity as commander-in-chief, he transferred auxiliary cohorts in Alpes Cottiae to Britain, distributing other Britannic cohorts to the wall itself. In order to main a military presence in the now undefended Alpes Cottiae, he combined the province with its neighbor, Alpes Poeninae, into the provincium augustum of Alpes Ulterior, spreading the cohorts of the former throughout the province. The main highway connecting Colonia Ludgnum and Taurinorum, which passed through the larger castra (forts) in the Alpes, was also renovated to reduce the risk of diluting the military presence. Lastly, the prominent general Avidius Cassius, a renowned disciplinarian and former governor of Syria, was appointed legatus augustus pro praetore of Britain.

From his position as governor, Cassius raided ports along the eastern coast of Caledonia (Scotland) until about 188, when he had effectively quelled the roving bands of Caledonii harassing British settlements. In leading local legions, his disciplined mode of command was made effective by his reputation, for defeating the Parthians twenty years earlier. Through his determined efforts, the Pict threat was kept at bay, allowing the many cities of northern Britain to rest at ease, while the loyalty of the British legions was only strengthened.

Inner circle
With the German Wars at an end, Rome was poised to enjoy a period of reasonable stability. Hispania (Spain), Britannia (Britain), and Gallia (Gaul) had been restful for the last century but for one small rebellion. It came as a surprise then that, in 186, the Gauls rose against Roman taxes, forcing a response by the legate Clodius Albinus. Unfortunately, Clodius was killed during the uprising by a stray arrow. As a war hero, he was mourned by hundreds of thousands of Romans and given a state funeral in Rome. Afterward, the Gauls were vilified in Italy, inspiring efforts by the Gallic curiales (provincial elite) to show Rome that they were firmly in its favor, as well as pacify their own people with donatives and games. By the early 3rd century, their efforts would bear fruit as the emperor transferred Gallia Lugdunensis to the authority of the Senate and reduced the garrisons to a level befitting a provincia populi Romani.

Meanwhile, the legate of Germania Superior, Publius Helvius Pertinax, handled the local threats in 188 when, under a deficiency of legionaries, he defeated an organized invasion by the Chatti with a decisive use of his auxiliary archers. Pertinax made every attempt to play up his victory to his peers in the Senate. After returning to the frontiers in 196 as governor of Dacia, he would add several cohortes milliaria sagittariorum to the local forces. The Dacian talent for archery would already be growing by this time from Sulla's response to Pertinax's achievement on the field - an encouragement of archery, through tournaments and the like, in villages where people already possessed a penchant for the ars sagitta. These skills were intended to be drawn upon for auxiliary forces throughout the empire and would prove invaluable in future conflicts but would take time to foster in appreciable number; Pertinax would only be able to muster these new auxiliaries four years into his governorship as the few alae that had been trained had already been taken, at his behest, for war with Parthia.

As brother-in-law to Sulla and the old benefactor of Pertinax, Tiberius Pompeianus was well-placed in Rome as he entered his twilight years - even holding a key position on the Consilium Principis (Imperial Council) and receiving an important place on the victory column dedicated to his father-in-law. However, Pompeianus had become only one of many advisers to Sulla, within an inner circle of generals from the German wars. Holding his third consulship in 187, he went to Syria Palestina to serve the following year as legate, allowing him to supervise the province during the mass migration of the Jews begun by Sulla's reopening of Aelia Capitolina to circumcised men. In particular, he is cited as prosecuting Roman colonists who had attacked their new neighbors. His return to Rome in 192 marks a rising period of ethnic violence within Aelia Capitolina. Sadly, a year later, Pompeianus passed away, receiving a funeral on a similar scale as had Clodius Albinus. His widow, Lucilla, would be married to Lucius Fabius Cilo, the former proconsul of Gallia Narbonensis who had been appointed legate to quell the rebellion in his neighboring province after the death of Clodius Albinus. Although only a Hispanian, he was a rising senator, of an age with the middle-aged Lucilla, and had distinguished himself in his handling of affairs in Gaul through negotiation rather than solely through battle.

Even with the loss of Pompeianus, Sulla continued to listen carefully to his consilium, earning a reputation for patience and open-mindedness. Many of his reforms throughout his reign bear the distinct mark of members of this active component of his inner circle - especially, the inventive administrative minds of Pertinax and Cassius Dio, and the legal expertise of men such as Aemilius Papinanus and Annius Ulpianus, most of whom were only beginning to come to the attention of the new emperor at the time Pompeianus died.

While his senatorial allies performed well in their appointed offices, his enemies in the Senate were moving to oppose him behind the scenes. In 186, there was an attempt on the emperor's life by Ummidius Quadratus, his cousin and, apparently, someone sympathetic to certain conservative interests in the Senate. In his now characteristic opportunism and pragmatism, Sulla responded to the attempt by confiscating the fortune of Quadratus - through a trial before a senatorial court on charges of treason - and publicly devoting this wealth to creating a new fleet for securing grain from North Africa to Rome - the classis annona africana.

Treasury management
The benefits of the new merchant fleet for manifold. Over the last two years, Sulla had garnered a reputation for stinginess as public games had been lackluster since the triumphal parade, despite his best efforts to bring senators into more energetic involvement as aediles and local benefactors for Rome. The resulting enlargement of the annona (frumentatio) to 250,000 recipients was popular with the urban poor. The first expanded shipments of grain from Africa were timed in 187 with a major festival for Ceres. The existence of the new fleet would lead to a rapid decline in the frequency and severity of piracy in the Mare Internum (Mediterranean Sea) - a long overdue mitigation of raids on internal routes of trade - in addition to its bolstering of the fleet capacity providing the grain supply to Italy.

Funds diverted from spectacles during this time were not all required for the army. Sulla devoted whatever he could afford to construction projects and major commercial ventures, in an attempt to procure more sources of permanent revenue for the state. With the goal of procuring more gold and silver, mining operations in Hispania and Dalmatia were expanded, despite the relative paucity of easily workable seams. At the same time, money went to assisting the German and veteran colonists on the Danubian frontier, who were restoring farms that had been abandoned during the war. These efforts to re-appropriate land would take about a decade to truly bear fruit as tenant coloni and independent farmers helped make the frontier garrisons more self-sufficient. As these farms expanded, Sulla graciously repealed the extraneous tribute laid on the Iazyges and Roxolani, which he had exacted upon them, in excess of foederatus status, to provide for the agricultural needs of nearby legions.

Some more concrete programs of expenditure were the construction of the Galenic Academy in Alexandria and the restoration of more temples to the Roman gods. However, his greatest early construction project was the restoration of the Pontum Traiani (Trajan's Bridge) spanning the Danube, north of the town of Bononia in Upper Moesia. Stretching over 1.1 km in length, this segmental arch bridge had allowed for the original conquest of Dacia by Princeps Trajan but was partially dismantled by Hadrian to remove the risk that barbarians would take control of it and cross into the more secure provinces. With Dacia more pacified, the utility of the bridge far outweighed the risks and its reconstruction was deemed less costly than building a new bridge. The archways on either side of the bridge were integrated into stone forts with commercia (customs posts) from which travelers had to gain permission to cross the Danube. These forts were placed under the control of a single cohors of 500 auxiliary soldiers from Dalmatia.

During this period, public funds were separated into three official accounts: the aerarium populi Romani, for ordinary expenditure by the Senate; the aerarium militare, for paying the pensions of legionaries; and the fiscus, for personal expenditure by the princeps civitatis. In practice, Sulla controlled the spending of all three treasuries - in addition to the reserve treasury known as the aerarium sanctius - but he only directed the spending of the senatorial treasury indirectly through his influence in the Senate. Salaries for legionaries and payment for major public works came from the fiscus, as no other senator could be paymaster for the armies. The items of greatest value in the state - legionary standards, tables of law, and other artifacts of the Eternal City's history, were stored in the aerarium Saturni alongside the wealth of the Senate - all secured within the Temple of Saturn on the main forum and overseen by appointees of the emperor with praetorian rank, such was its importance to the affairs of the state.

Nearly three-quarters of public revenue was spent on maintaining the military and another tenth sustained the grain supply (cura annonae) for Roman citizens - both from the wealth of the fiscus alone. Although the dole (frumentatio) itself only amounted to enough grain to feed less than 200,000 people, the subsidies were important for maintaining the price of grain around one denarius per modius (6.67 kg). The rest of state revenues paid for public works, civil servants, public festivals, and the support of curiae (governing councils) that operated under the auspices of Rome. On the whole, the regime of Sulla adopted proportionally low enough expenses to maintain stable finances in these times of weakened revenue, pressing provincialization, and high prices of grain for the urban poor.

Grain prices rose around 186 alongside an alarming rise of general prices in Ægyptus. Some senators blamed the heavy inflation on the revaluation of the denarius, leaving the Egyptian drachma of weakening stature. Regardless of the cause, the new grain fleet and some senatorial loans to merchants had a positive effect on restoring local prices. However, the situation would not settle entirely for another few decades, eventually restoring the price of grain and calming the frustrations of the Egyptian poor, who were not as insulated from the effects of the inflation as were the plebs in Rome.

Parthian War
From 194 to 195, news came to Rome that Shah Vologeses V of Parthia was tampering with Roman loyalties in its foederatus (client kingdom) of Osroene. After diplomatic efforts went nowhere, Sulla took this sufficient casus belli, Sulla broke the peace that followed the end of the Germanic and Sarmatian Wars, bring three of the Danubian legions in 196 to supplement the eastern legions. With the initiative in this next war, Rome took the Parthian vassals by storm.

Armenia fell first. Sulla showed clemency to all nobles within the Armenian Kingdom, even the royal family. The captured King Khosrov would be used to great effect fomenting dissent among the Persian forces, especially those remaining from Armenia, and bringing other Persian allies out of the war. By contrast, Kartlia served as an example to other vassals choosing to oppose Rome alongside their King of Kings. The execution of King Rev served to emphasize this demonstration, as well as show Khosrov the consequences of failing to comply with Rome. While his brother Rev had been uncooperative, Khosrov had personally no issues with the Romans and, by this time, surely saw the writing on the wall for his future position within the Parthian Empire.

In contrast to Trajan decades before him, Sulla offered clemency to whatever cities would agree to support his march on the capital. The city of Assur (among others) served as another example of failure to comply while the commercially powerful city of Atra went a step further than other negotiations, forging a quick alliance with Rome that would ultimately outlast the war. Reaching Ctesiphon by late 198, Sulla sacked the Parthian capital, approaching from the southeast to cut off the escape of the Shah and to force a reorganization of defending forces. With the fertile plains of Parthia under its control and the armies of its great enemy in ruins around the capital, Rome showed little mercy to its longtime foe. Shah Vologases V was killed - in a manner that avoided humiliation to his family - and some token land around Osroene was taken for Rome. Most importantly, the royal treasury - valued in the millions of denarii - was taken by the emperor, after distribution of a portion of its riches to his triumphant soldiers.

In the wake of his father's death, the absence of any siblings in the capital, and tacit support from the Roman military presence, Khosrov took the throne and began to secure the allegiance of his family's vassals. Only the kingdoms of Armenia and Kartlia did not answer. On the way to Rome, Sulla stopped in the Caucasus to check the situation in Armenia. The situation in Vagharshapat had devolved into a squabbling for power among the local nobility, as the instated successor of Khosrov had been deposed. As soon as Sulla arrived with his armies, he and his men were showered with honors in an attempt to garner favor with Rome in light of the fall of Ctesiphon. One of the larger and more respected houses, the Khoguvtuni, were named Kings of Armenia as a new foederatus of Rome, a dynasty that Romans would refer to as the Cogutunidae. In the eternal back and forth over Armenia, the Roman Empire was securely in the lead position, for the present. A few legions under Pescennius Niger were sent to Kartlia to secure its loyalty, forming another eastern client for Rome.

Mesopotamia
Punishing King Agbar of Osroene for flirting with an alliance with Persia, Sulla had him deposed and his kingdom annexed alongside conquered Parthian land as the provincium augustum of Mesopotamia. Agbar and his family were all offered Roman citizenship and estates in North Africa, where their new equestrian status would allow future careers in the Roman Senate - a situation that none in the family could contest given their situation. The new province had its capital in Nisibis - a loyal fortress city - and would be governed by Pescennius Niger, who had assisted in the war alongside the general Lucius Septimius Severus, who had distinguished himself in his support of Sulla. Severus became a close military adviser for the emperor, joining his inner circle after the triumphus celebrating the victory over Parthia.

Mesopotamia became a second bastion for the eastern legions, alongside Syria, allowing a division of eastern forces between two legates. Most of their legions at this time were nowhere near full strength, as the war had exacted its toll during a time of low manpower for the empire. The only full legion was Legio V Syriana, which Sulla had founded before beginning his invasion of Parthia, in anticipation of needing reinforcements for the later stages of the war - this supplemented the seven legions that would be divided between the two provinces.

In this difficult position, it is unfortunate for Rome that tribals in the northern reaches of Western Europe were once again causing trouble for Roman Britain. The Picts had undergone something of a resurgence by this time so Sulla wasted little time bringing a legion of his veterans, blood hot from their glorification at the triumph in Rome, to put an end to the threat posed by native tribes on the island.

Conquest of Scotland
Although the famous general Avidius Cassius had subdued the Caledonii by 188, they were raiding towns with renewed vigor by 198. With three legions and a legate with local knowledge, Sulla wasted no time in pursuing a solution to the persistent troubles of Britain.

His strategy was as ruthless as it was effective. Under the climate in 198 of roving tribes, engaging in violence on both sides of the Vallum Hadrianum, Sulla selected several isolated villages not far north of the wall and had them systematically surrounded as their entire population was slaughtered. Messengers were sent to other Caledonian villages warning of the destruction of these villages by the "same tribes that had sacked Roman towns" and offering the aid of Rome against their rapine neighbors. The rumors polarized the people of southern Caledonia toward Rome; those who chose to ignore this veneer of Roman aid armed themselves for a more organized conflict. As a result, the local enemies of Roman rule were brought to the forefront and the assimilation of Caledonia was accelerated.

Fighting continued in Britain until a letter arrived in the Senate in 205 declaring the conquest of land up to the major rivers of Caledonia. The guerrilla tactics of Rome's Caledonian enemies had prolonged the war, as Sulla chose a slow, cautious strategy rather than allow the guerrillas to dictate when and where battles were fought, and dissuaded the emperor from a full conquest of the region. As treaties were formed with the non-belligerent tribes and the scorched earth tactics of the fighters lent credence to the official story, the conquest gradually unfolded in the favor of Rome. Caledonia was declared a new provincium augustum separated from Britannia by Hadrian's Wall and the armies hailed Sulla as Britannicus, having recently hailed him as Parthicus after the sack of Ctesiphon. During the war, the fleets in the Oceanus Britannicus had been greatly expanded and trade encouraged between Gaul and Britain, both as means to keeping the legions fed in the face of fewer local supplies. This growth in the number of ships in the region came at a high cost to the treasury, especially since the campaign offered few sources of revenue, but was sustained by the wealth coming in from Parthia.

With further distinctions from his support in Caledonia, Septimius Severus was assigned as governor of the conquered territory and given the directive to pursue peaceful trade with the natives beyond the Antonine Wall - once more the frontier of Roman Britain. He would only remain there for three years before returning to Rome to attend to other matters as he was quickly becoming a favorite of the emperor.

Garamantian campaign
Since Avidius acted as a military expert on local geography during the annexation, he became the only major general alongside Sulla while Septimius was sent elsewhere in 202 CE as news reached Sulla of escalating incursions by the Garamantes into Africa Proconsularis. Perhaps the news had been distracting to Septimius Severus, who hailed from the African city of Leptis Magna, since a prominent general of an ongoing invasion and a great deal of resources were devoted to this Garamantian campaign. Through these efforts, the war culminated in the capture of the capital Garama in 205. At the behest of Sulla, the Garamantians were forced into a treaty as foederatus, allowing Rome a greater hand in the Trans-Saharan caravan trade. At the same time, the limes tripolitanus was strongly fortified to weaken the odds that other African tribes could pose a threat to the cities of Northern Africa - with numerous towers build to stand vigil over the surrounding desert.

Power & politics
Upon returning to Rome, Sulla collected vexillationes from among the armies that had fought with him over the last decade and had them assemble north of Rome for his reditus. Once he entered the city, he had the Praetorian Guard dispersed either into retirement or into centuriones in legions throughout the empire, only to replace the entire ranks of the guard with his loyal soldiers. Installing entirely new praetoriani, he took this opportunity to restructure their ranks and the broader relationship of the guard to the emperor.

Although praefectus praetorio would remain a prestigious military post, their number was multiplied to 16 - one for each cohors in the roughly 8,000-man guard. Each prefect would answer directly to the emperor and be an equal in rank to every other prefect. Otherwise, the role of the guard would remain much as it had been before this restructuring. However, the role of its commanders became purely defensive, losing a great deal of their administrative and juridical influence. This reduction of the power of the praetorian prefecture was the most dramatic shift Sulla had yet instigated within the imperial court - castrating the influence of an increasingly central office. At the same time, the prefect who had the command before the renewal of the guard was given sufficient wealth from the emperor to ensure his eligibility in the Senate, before receiving those high honors. Along with his elevation in status, this former prefect was named legate of Mauretania, allowing the recently victorious Septimius Severus to return to the Senate.

Although there had been no recent acts of treason by the guard, its commanders had been on a frequent rotation whenever Sulla was in Rome, as potential interests against him came to light regarding its prefects. In this regard, Sulla had been slowly expanding the role of the frumentarii (provincial grain collectors). In 186, after the closest attempt on his life, Sulla had expanded the operations of the frumentarii into Italy as part of his reform of the grain supply through its new fleet and expansion of the frumentatio. Two frumentarii were given roles alongside the consular praefectus annonae while another two had been appointed within the praetoriani as part of an effort to involve them in the distribution of grain within Rome (a role that appealed to its members due to a rise in public opinion through association with the frumentatio).

With the reform of the guard, praetoriani continued to be involved in the distribution of grain but no single prefect would fulfill this role for any significant amount of time. Only the emperor could be permanently associated with free grain. Although the threat of praetorian assassins was reduced, Sulla was making every attempt to diminish the involvement of individual guard commanders in political affairs, so this decision fit within an overall reaction to the former political prominence of the guard.

Senatorial prominence
In abolishing the judicial powers associated with the praefecti praetorianes, Sulla and the Senate assigned its jurisdiction, over Italian municipalities beyond 100 miles of Rome, to the praetor urbanus (urban praetor), whose judicial role had diminished over the last few centuries. In this capacity, he had permission, or rather a duty, to leave the confines of Rome in his administration of justice among Italian citizens.

At the same time, the diminution of the judicial role of praetorians accompanied Sulla's continued attempts to endear himself to the Senate, whose opposition to his birth had fallen but failed to entirely disappear. Another example of Sulla's provisions (or rather concessions) to the Senate was the creation in 206 of a committee for supervising the collection of vectigaliae and fulfillment of munerae in Italy. Partially in reaction to the escalating duties of the Italian curiae and partially as part of an overall trend in the growth of the correctorial system in the provinces - from which Italy had been exempt - the emergence of a similar system in Italy was slowly becoming necessary for the efficiency of taxation. Befitting the prestige of Italia, this decemviri missus ad corrigendum statum Italiae (Committee of Oversight in Italy) consisted solely of senators with praetorian rank, tasked with visiting the municipalities of Italy during their year of appointment (by the Senate) to ensure an appropriate level of commitment to taxes and public responsibilities at that level of administration.

On the whole, deliberate edicts were an exception among Sulla's attempts to endear himself to senators, The majority of his efforts involved his de facto treatment of senatorial proceedings. He behaved in meetings of the Senate as a peer - participating in discussion but never dominating, encouraging opposing opinions through his own senatorial friends (who set an open example to others of acceptable behavior), and avoiding the open use of his considerable constitutional powers (tribunicia potestas, imperium consulare maius) in the Senate. His time in power engendered an atmosphere where freedom of speech could flourish and no senator would claim that his peers were not constantly involved in governing the empire, despite the continued concentration of power.

Given the constitutional reality of his role, this cooperative relationship with the Senate - present despite the surreptitious belligerence of many senators - could not outlast his reign, without serious transformations in the structures of political power, but it was at least a temporary swing of the pendulum of power away from the Legion and toward the Senate. Every attempt was made to be the ally of the Senate.

On a more personal level, Sulla was affable and approachable to other senators and never flaunted his now considerable military accomplishments (his full name included Germanicus Sarmaticus Parthicus Britannicus) to others seeking the more limited military fame available to senators - as Pertinax, Albinus, and others had gotten while the emperor was younger. How much of his modesty and cooperativeness was a deliberate act and how much was genuine is unclear. Despite an affable demeanor on the Senate floor, Sulla is described in a more personal setting as lacking expressiveness in, as Cassius Dio went on to say, the manner of the Stoic with control over the range of his emotions. Certainly, when his wife Polonia died in childbirth in 186, he is known to have mourned publicly, but he would remarry within less than a year.

Imperial family
The familia Caesaris played an important role in pushing these improving relationships with the Senate. Alongside Pompeianus, whose essential role has been discussed, the family had the supportive Marcus Petronius Sura Mamertinus, whose swift participation in the increased euergetism of the Senate helped Sulla's suggestion gain some momentum (albeit not enough), and Marcus Peducaeus Plautius Quintillus, who was influential with the high aristocracy that disliked Sulla and likely played an important part in endearing his brother-in-law to many of these patricii. Last of the brother-in-laws, Lucius Antistius Burrus became a reliable legate for Sulla, serving in a number of theaters of war, including the Garamantian campaign. Over time, their children joined the ranks of the Senate and became similarly involved in affairs of state as this new generation took center stage.

Even closer to the emperor was his first daughter, Domitia Aurelia, who was his only child before the loss of his wife and potential son. Polonia, a former attendant in the imperial court, had reportedly been very close with Sulla, to the extent that she is implicated by ancient historians in the death of Commodus, but she was a frequent target of senators deploring the status of the imperial family after the death of Marcus Aurelius (neither the emperor nor the empress being of senatorial or equivalent descent). For his second wife, Sulla was directed to the Syrian city of Emesa, where the wealthy, senatorial and formerly royal family of Julius Bassianus had a daughter looking to marry. This young Julia Domna was nearly of an age with the emperor, only a little younger, and, aside from her high birth, brought with her an impressive dowry as well as a large estate of her own, inherited from her uncle Julius Agrippa. As much as this appeared to be a marriage of convenience for both parties, a match that has been variously supposed to have been initiated by a prophecy or astrological prediction, Julia and Sulla were well-matched. Her intellectual proclivities and interest in the details of Roman politics blossomed under the support of her husband and Sulla enjoyed a cooperative household with a wife who handled the affairs of the familia Caesaris with a noblewoman's grace during his long absences.

Roman agriculture
Since the reign of Augustus, agriculture had shifted from the landholding peasant to landed estates owned by the nobility. By the time of Sulla, the latifundium (landed estate) was in the process of encompassing more and more of the agricultural production in the empire. The situation was worse in the provinces than in Italy - e.g. over half of farms in proconsular Africa were in the hands of six landowners - but there were evident signs, recorded even in the time of Pliny, that the disparity in land ownership would only become more severe.

As more Italian farmland was appropriated by senatores and equites, not to mention acquired by the fundi patrimoniales (estates of the emperor), the number of unemployed plebs in the capital grew. By the reign of Sulla, displaced farmers were a pressing threat to the state finances, motivating the new grain fleet among other policies, and to the stability of the Roman public, aggravating the relative dearth of public entertainment. In 192, the emperor, supposedly at the behest of Pertinax, enacted a program of giving all land which was not under cultivation to private citizens, with secure tenure over the land and a ten-year exemption in taxes. This sweeping policy extended from the provinces down into the heart of Italy and greatly increased the production of foodstuffs, in the wake of its decline as land was abandoned or former tenants were killed by the plague.

When Sulla returned from Caledonia, he extended this policy by purchasing land from major landowners then renting it out to coloni to work as though it were their own. Millions of denarii were spent on this program from 205 to 207, resulting in a major expansion of the imperial patrimonium and in the efficiency of Italian farmland - as the majority of these purchases were made in the homeland.

The importance of a landholding peasantry in Italy would be emphasized by the emperor to his adopted son, setting a precedent that his successors would continue for two centuries. His strategy of buying latinfundia and only leasing the land to peasants had the large advantage of preventing the resale of the farms to the nobility, since plebs were more likely to acquiesce to patrician demands. The eventual selling of the land back to patricians by less competent emperors is made all the more sad by the success of this program.

These sharecroppers would be treated with special care by some emperors after Sulla. Measures were put into place by Sulla's son to enforce strict two-field crop rotation and by a grandson to procure mechanical reapers for Italian peasants who could not afford them. Unfortunately, this program only curtailed the eventual population collapse that was inevitable with the rising population of Italy. Only the plague was keeping the number of people in cities from reaching a breaking point; the reign of Sulla had seen recovery from the epidemics during the time of his father but repopulation was slow.

A project initiated by Sulla to drain the Lacus Fucinus in 219 opened more than 14,000 acres of arable land for the state to lease to the urban poor. This massive effort built on the work of Princeps Hadrianus, who had drained the lake to its size at the time. Sulla only had his engineers finish the job. The plains on the former lake were some of the most fertile land in Italy and, over the next century, also became famous as a symbol of the public land due to its unique and stunning topography for farmland. At the same time, numerous regulations were enforced for use of land on the Fucinus, in an effort to maintain its fertility, acting as a barrier to future efforts to sell the land to patricians (the fate of most of the public land in Italy).

Restoration of Judaea
Before his series of wars, Sulla had sought to defuse tensions with the Jews in 185, repealing Hadrian's edict that outlawed circumcised men (Jewish males) from entering Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem). Believing that his predecessor had made a mistake in listening to his advisers and not rebuilding the city for the Jews, he worked with the community to resettle the area, until 194 when concerns in Rome required public funds. Roman temples and colonists were not removed from the city and the name was not changed but the older sections of Jerusalem were opened for tens of thousands of returning Jews, who flocked to the city as news of the repeal spread throughout the empire. Sulla made a grand event of their return, declaring that his actions were an olive branch to the Jewish community and were not to be taken lightly. He warned that they could either cooperate with Rome or face another painful defeat.

While some moved into Aelia Capitolina, many Jews returned to Syria Palestina in general, coming even from Parthia after the conquest of Mesopotamia. Unfotunately, these exclusively Jewish communities within the holy city became the target of attacks by Roman colonists. Governors tried to prevent these hostilities to varying degrees, certainly enough to prevent any violent retaliation, and, in combination with other factors, managed to keep the new communities peaceful. However, the threat of unsanctioned persecution hung over the lives of many Jewish migrants and could be a severe detriment to local businesses.

A small number of money lenders and changers handled the conversion from profane currencies to proper religious currencies for locals and pilgrims, receiving a massive boost in wealth as immigrants came from throughout the Roman world. These merchants initially operated from their usual benches but the violence of neighboring Roman colonists encouraged a change in affairs - money changers in Jerusalem were a common target of these malcontents. As a community, around 197-199, the Jewish people of Aelia Capitolina pooled resources to construct stone buildings for housing the wealth and business of the money lenders and changers - partially in emulation of the Greek practice of using large, stone temples as vaults for money. Designed to safely store the money of clients and conduct exchanges in greater privacy, the welfare of the community was improved by the use of these establishments.

These tutae bancae (safe benches) became an easy means for the Roman governor of Syria to answer the continued calls for protection from violence, by outlawing Roman citizens from entering these buildings. Although the law was not easily enforced, it provided a useful rhetoric for the locals to drive off attackers, discouraged attacks with social pressure, and allowed the Roman governors to satisfy demands from Rome to protect the interests of the returning Jews, as a means of ensuring that persecution would not be answered with rebellion as it had in the past.

Christian scholarship
In the affairs of other religions, two eastern cults steadily gained ground throughout the empire as the reign of Sulla stretched onward. Both cults initiated members with a ritual bath and centered around the deeds of a mythic figure but the similarities scarcely go any further. Where the Mysteries of Mithras placed its god among the syncretic pantheons of the empire, the Christian Church put its god above all others, if not outright denied the existence of other gods. With this difference, Mithraic initiates found a place in Rome, many among them even hailing from the Legion, while Christians were looked down upon by commoners and often killed by their Roman governors, recently at the behest of Marcus Aurelius. Under Sulla, Christians saw less persecution but only through the inaction of the new emperor, rather than any active policy.

As the persecutions in North Africa slowly ceased, Christian scholars at the Didascalium Alexandriae (Theological School of Alexandria) came under the Stoic Pantaenus, following a period of missionary work in the Far East. Believing that Christian texts could be reconciled with Hellenic philosophy, Pantaenus inspired a new generation of theologians, including the influential Clement of Alexandria.

Going behind his teacher, Clement treated Hellenic philosophy as indispensable for understanding scripture, comparing faith without philosophical instruction to harvesting crops without tilling the soil. Drawing on the Stoic notion that belief involves an assent to how things seem, he describes pistis (faith or conviction) as a choice to commit to a belief with confidence, as happens when presented with first principles (as pointed to by Aristotle), with demonstrations (as the result of sound arguments), and with scripture. He regards each as avenues for truth and each as dependent on reasoning to avoid misunderstanding and falsehood. When a secure belief in God is achieved through a reasoned approach to scripture, the faithful attains what Clement pointedly calls gnosis, reclaiming a word for knowledge of the divine from the esoteric Gnostic sects.

In a similar way, Clement saw Christianity as reclaiming philosophy from the pagans, agreeing with Philo of Alexandria (c. 50 CE) that Hebrew scripture and the revelations to Moses are the root of the philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras (as a result, also of the Stoics and Aristotelians). In this view, the Hellenic thinkers are worth studying not only for their expertise in grammar, rhetoric, and logic but also for the grains of truth that they carry over from the Jews, in the manner of valuable coins unearthed in worthless soil (namely, in the pagan ideas he saw as covering up the true philosophy sent by God).

Administrative reform
Rome governed more people than almost any other political entity in history. Risks from this size were recognized by the Senate and by Sulla, who recognized that only military coercion and desire for stability held the empire of Rome together. Unlike the Old Republic, when Rome was only the region of Latium, the present one was not politically unified except in Italia and had no single cultural identity uniting the interests of people across the territories. The emperor was convinced that if either of the present forces unifying the empire somehow became unreliable, then all three continents would degrade into another Germany. Since the empire had almost a century of unprecedented stability, despite recent breaches of geopolitical security, Sulla elected to reform the politics of the empire and create more durable political structures.

For this purpose, Sulla brought about a division of the Populus Romanus (Roman Republic) into many nominally independent nations that were clients to Rome [here nation refers to something with the type of unity of a kingdom but without the government being autonomous or independently chosen]. Modeled on the existing policy of managing foederati (vassal kingdoms), a foederata (vassal nation) was a federation of provinces that had no military and no currency but administered its own affairs through a local leader chosen by Rome. Provinces within a foederata were still governed by Roman governors appointed by the Senatus Romanus, since governors were a source of ius civile (civil law), which is to say Roman law, and a means of controlling the local Roman military, but the federation itself had a Consul Gentis (loosely President of the Nation) that could impeach these governors and request money from the Roman treasury for spending in his foederata. In practice, each client nation had its own leader that could pay for local festivities and construction, and had some role in regulating the governors sent from Rome, but was otherwise symbolic of a solidarity between cities in the group of provinces that constituted his nation. In principle, Sulla was trying to convey the idea that the Roman Republic was a community of nations rather than the military holdings of Rome.

Although a Consul was appointed by the emperor, he had to (a) be a Roman citizen (civis Romanus), (b) have ancestry within the provinces of the nation to which he was being appointed, and (c) have equestrian rank (equites). There was an ample number of local nobles in every province that had been giving Roman citizenship and finding ones to appoint as Consul was rarely difficult.

When this division was enacted in 208, the recognized client nations of the empire were: Italia, Arabia, Gallia, Illyria, Graecia, Dacia, Asia, Syria, Africa, Hispania, Ægyptus, and Germania Minor. Aside from his duties to remove corrupt governors and to celebrate local traditions within Roman money, a Consul was encouraged to promote the Roman tradition of law among his people, since the majority of people living within the empire followed local laws. The institution of these 12 administrative offices involved the effective abolition of the original office of Consul, with a spiritual successor to it in the Consul of the Italians (which was under the same restrictions as the earlier consulship). Pertinax was named Consul Italiorum and Lucius Antistius Burrus, the brother-in-law of the emperor, was named Consul Africanorum when this political reform was accepted by the Senate.

The reform involved a shift in a financial power from the Senate to a decentralized network of officials, despite the Senate having the authority to regulate the amount of funds given to a particular Consul. Furthermore, it accelerated the entry of citizens outside Italy into the Roman Senate and gave the emperor a closer eye on the attitudes and concerns of local people across his empire (one of the duties of a Consul was to correspond with someone in Rome about problems in his foederata). Propaganda portrayed the foederata system as a gift of autonomy; the word foederata itself had a similar sense as foederatus but denoted a closeness to Rome, the promise of protection by the Legion, and a direct dependence of the government on the government of Rome (by the appointment of the Consuls and the payment of taxes to Rome before having some of that wealth spent back in the nation). In this way, a Consul had a public image of being the civil leader of a nation [again, in a loose sense of that word] that owed its existence to Rome for her gifts of stability and prosperity. In the same way that the Roman Empire was described as the Populus Romanus, each foederata would sometimes be referred to as a populus. Over time, the term Populus Romanus would come to denote a kind of "over-nation" or the republic that united the Roman community of nations (formally, this shift would occur in the 6th century).

From the perspective of the elite and the educated, the reform was understood as a way of equalizing political power between the governing city of Rome and the provincial cities in which local political and economic power were concentrated. Since eligibility for a consulship was tied to the local aristocracies (where citizenship had tended to be given by Rome), the ruling class in cities gained a sense of autonomy from this granting of real power by Sulla. There was a realistic path for a noble in the provinces to eventually join the Senate by receiving recognition as a President of his nation, further demotivating the decision of a provincial aristocrat to support rebellion against Rome. Loyalty to Rome was further reinforced in the fostering of the notion that the civilized world (as opposed to the barbarian world that lay beyond the limites of the Roman Empire) was constituted by the foederatae and that this community was intimately connected with exposure to the benefits of Roman law, Roman commerce, and Roman security. These distinctions relied heavily on the growing perception that the Roman world was more civilized than the rest of the world and that being Roman meant living in land defended by Roman soldiers and enjoying the fruits of a commercial network founded on Roman roads and ports - a belief that was only magnified by the closer integration of provincials through the foederata system.

Sulla mitigated the feeling in the provinces that a foreign authority and culture was being imposed upon their lifestyles and (for the local elite) on their political authority, and provided a means of celebrating local traditions at the cost of Rome. At the same time, he increased the level of oversight that the capital had over its territories. His reform promoted the fiction of independence that still prevailed in many areas in the Roman Empire and extended the Augustan process of fostering local centers of power. It is a mark of the political ingenuity of Sulla that he extended the Roman policies of federalized administration in this way.

Great Fire of Rome
On 11 August 208, a fire started in the Subura district and spread to large parts of the Collis Quirinalis and the Collis Viminalis. Huge swathes of the city were destroyed, leaving nearly a hundred thousand citizens homeless and many thousands dead. Sulla and the Senate devoted large amounts of the growing treasury toward helping the common people rebuild after this disaster. Despite the cost, Sulla ordered that houses be built of higher quality material, favoring brick and stone over wood, and that the streets be made slightly wider than the cramped spaces of older Rome (some roads had even been too thin for more than a handful of people to walk abreast). Despite some senators pushing for fewer blocks of apartments (insulae) in Rome, the decision was made to simply build apartments with less flammable materials and designs rather than abandon this efficient form of housing.

A major design element of houses built after the fire was the lack of confined or unreachable spaces in the structure, as a measure to prevent the nesting of pests such as rats and pigeons. In the long-run, this decision drastically slowed the spread of disease in the capital and reduced the frequency of large outbreaks. These design choices were motivated by the same need that drove the creation of a center for medical research - major concerns over the Antonine plague.

In the wake of the Great Fire of Rome, the Senate and Sulla took administrative steps toward reducing the vulnerability of Rome to future blazes. Although this fire gave the Quirinal and Viminal Hills less risky architecture and the Great Fire of 64 CE had given the Caelian and Palatine Hills better fire resistance, the city still suffered looters and arsonists who assisted the spread of the fires and small fires were a known risk for larger infernos (a small fire in the hearth of an apartment was believed to have set off this latest conflagration). A fire department was founded as a service distinct from the vigiles urbani (watchmen of the city) and manned by slaves volunteered by their masters on a short rotation - in other words, a citizen could put a slave under the authority of a praefectus spartolianum (overseer of fire fighters) for a day or two each week. Over time, various measures would be attempted to ensure that Rome had a sufficient number of spartoliani for its protection from fire.

Slaves who were volunteered to fight fires received training to fill various roles in the service. A siphonarius operated the siphon for pumping water over a fire, an aquarius managed the supplies of water, and all spartoliani carried a mixture of axes, buckets, mattocks, picks, and wired hooks for dismantling masonry. Although spartoliani in some parts of Rome had water carts (aquifera) from which water could be pumped, spartoliani in poorer districts relied on water towers built over houses and apartments. One of the duties of spartoliani when there were no fires to combat was to check the water level in these towers, keep them full, and clean them out on a regular basis to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes in its stagnant waters.

As part of modifications to the municipal government of Rome, Sulla transferred some of the responsibilities of the praefectus urbanus (urban prefect of Rome) to a praefectus collegianum, who supervised the local guilds and kept them from instigating violence in the streets, and gave control over the cohortes urbanae (urban riot police) to a triumviri of equestrian procuratores. By the 3rd century, the duty of the urban prefect would be the coordination between the various overseers of municipal affairs in Rome.

On the whole, the situation in Rome did not return to normal until a decade after the conflagration, when the new services were reaching their strides and the burned districts had finished being rebuilt. Although Rome had recovered, there was no effective way for the Senate to ensure that its vulnerability to urban fires would not rise again. At the same time, the vast wealth procured from Parthia was nearly depleted from reconstruction.

Roman archery
With the growing respect for archery in the Legion, several commanders were calling for the creation of professional divisions of archers for the Legion, the first being founded in Legio Gemina X in 199. By 201 CE, there were nine more cohortes milliaria sagittariorum (regiments of archers) and a year later, Sulla had regulated these regiments to 1,000 archers each. Earlier archer-units were part of the auxiliary forces of the empire, consisting of non-citizens who provided field support to the legions. At the time, there were 32 archer-units in the Auxilia, out of which almost a third were horse archers. Citizens could only become part of an archery cohort by joining the Auxilia but reforms of this time period led to the integration of archery regiments into legions, where archers would exclusively consist of citizens.

Each sagittariorum was assigned to a specific legion. An archer in such a regiment was called a sagittarius and his weapons were the arcus (bow) and sagittae (arrows). Auxiliary archers had employed a carefully crafted composite bow with a short body, often for more effective use on horseback, but the new regiments equipped their archers with the arcus ligneis, a bow with a longer body that provided longer range and power at the cost of mobility. Since legion archers were expected to march at the pace of heavy infantry and were deployed on foot, the costs were considered minor for the rewards.

In the context of the growing respect for archery in the Legion, these displays of the prowess of archers led to the formation of the first professional archery unit for the Legion, given to Legio Gemina X in 199. This unit was not the last. By 200 CE, nine other cohortes milliaria sagittariorum (archery regiments), that were 1,000 strong, got added to legions. Each sagittariorum was combined with one legion to provide support for its troops during conflict on open terrain. An archer in such a regiment was called a sagittarius and his weapons were the arcus (bow) and sagittae (arrows). Romans normally employed a carefully crafted composite bow with a short body for effective use on horseback. By contrast, the new sagittariorum were infantry units. For this reason, the decision was made to equip them with arcus ligneis that had a longer body, providing less mobility for longer range and power. This was a good fit for the comparatively heavy infantry units of a legion.

By the end of the reign of Sulla, every legion had an integrated unit of citizen archers but the numbers for auxiliary archers were not reduced. Instead, the auxiliaries concentrated further on mounted archers, bringing their particular numbers up to 12,000 men. Over time, legion archers would become exclusively associated with infantry while auxiliary archers were the mounted variety.

Milestones
Although the turn of the century in the Anno Domini calendar went unnoticed, this event marked the rise of the global population above a record 260 million people. Around a fourth of this total lived within the Roman Empire, matched only by China, where the population was in decline from a period of instability. For people inside, the limites (borders) of the empire were regarded as the physical boundaries of civilization, with the view that the rest of the world was consumed by tyranny and barbarism. The city of Rome was an enormous metropolis of 800,000 citizens supported by their 500,000 slaves. Slavery sustained a higher standard of living for citizens in the capital, performing menial tasks for the citizens of Rome.

Philosophical schools
Under the stability of Roman governance, numerous academic schools flourished. Rooted in Greek traditions, the various schools of thought whose perspectives are reflected in the works of hundreds of ancient philosophers were enjoying varied success in the cultural environment of the Roman Empire. On the one hand, Roman culture engendered a form of pragmatism, where things are judged largely on their use - a mindset that favored technological over philosophical innovation. Nevertheless, the Greeks retained a great deal of their cultural attitudes and independence under Roman rule, maintaining the Greek tradition of philosophy.

With that said, Romans showed a clear preference for certain aspects of Greek thought - basically picking and choosing ideas that struck a cord with Roman ideals - and no school contributed more to this practice than Stoicism.

Stoicism
Popularity of the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius, as the public had come to call the writings that he addressed to himself and that his son published, reached an early zenith while Sulla was on campaign in Caledonia. By this time, many senators had read the book as it gained a substantial following among wealthy citizens in Rome, some seeking closer ties with the emperor and other genuinely turning over to a worldview based on Stoicism. The spread of the Reflections was aided by a Latin translation written in 184 by the Stoic school of Athens, becoming widely read in Italy by both patricians and equestrians.

Sulla personally had no time to waste contemplating the cosmos or the nature of virtue. His Stoicism was entirely handed down from his adopted father and as far as he was concerned, was in no need of improvement. However, he respected the work of Stoic academics and wanted other Romans to follow Stoic doctrine, likely out of a genuine belief that it would help the people deal with life's hardships as opposed to an attempt to render the populace more passive to imperial rule. To this end, Sulla paid for the construction of the magnificent Stoa Purata (Pristine Porch) near the banks of the Tiber. The collected works of Stoics from Zeno to Epictetus were copied for the attached library and dozens of the most educated Stoics were brought from the Stoa Poikile in Athens to lecture and converse here in Rome. The academy grounds featured a wide porch, overlooking a stunning garden, from which lectures on Stoic metaphysics and ethics would be given regularly to the public.

There were mixed receptions in Rome to the intricacies of Stoicism. Aristocrats with even a modicum of capacity for reason noticed a dissonance between the Stoic belief in an immanent, single divinity and the Roman religion. For a time, many were assuaged by the interpretation of this God as Nature, a product of the true gods, but the incompatibility of Stoicism with polytheism would be an ideological ticking time-bomb, going off in slow waves for the next century and moving the elite of Rome in short leaps toward the growing monotheistic cult coming out of Judaea. The spread of Stoicism among the Roman elite was a turning point in the history of Christianity, driving demographic shifts that would not have occurred without the prevalence of this philosophy.

Furthermore, Stoicism continued to influence Roman attitudes toward slavery. Stoic morals considered all humans equal and although it did not advocate abolition of slavery, as a deeply-rooted institution of civilization, Stoics supported improving the treatment of slaves. This belief ultimately influenced several laws that were passed by Sulla, in the same way that its emphasis on the community of mankind may have motivated his reforms of the political structure of the Roman Empire.

Stoicism would enjoy academic dominance in Italy and eventually in Hispania and Gaul for the next two centuries before being supplanted by Aristotelianism during the rebirth of Greek culture in the fifth century. In Greece itself, the Stoics were even with the Aristotelians and Atomists as the only philosophies with central schools. Atomism had enjoyed a brief height in popularity from the Latin writings of Lucretius, but its decline has been consistent since the death of Virgil, its last great proponent.

Pyrrhonism
While Stoicism was strongly favored by the emperor and gaining popularity in Rome, the other Greek schools of thought were growing on their own. One such group was the revived school of Pyrrhonism (or Skepticism) founded two centuries earlier by Aenesidemus. Pyrrhonian Skepticism grew out of the principle of epoché (suspended judgement) - namely, that any non-evident belief can be opposed with equal weight by a contrary belief. Pyrrhonists reasoned that since there is no way of deciding between two mutually exclusive, non-evident beliefs (without an arbitrary decision at some stage in the justification), there was no way to reach firm conclusions about nature or morals (only logic consisted of self-evident propositions). As a benefit to himself, the Skeptic also achieved a lasting peace of mind (ataraxia) by not emotionally investing or committing to any specific ideologies or beliefs.

Support for Pyrrhonism increased after the physician Sextus Empiricus completed his Outlines of Pyrrhonism around 200 CE, a most perspicuous presentation of the pros of Pyrrhonism and a meticulous exposition of its methods. Sextus presented ten modes or arguments for withholding judgement, drawing on the diversity of animals, mankind, senses, circumstances, and customs in the world. The treatise includes a thorough contrast of Skepticism with the Heracleitian, Cyrenaic, Democritean, Protagorean, Stoic, and Platonic schools of thought. This contrast is accompanied by a brief discussion of the Galenic school of medicine and how its marriage of Empiric and Dogmatic practices had unfortunately overshadowed the Methodic school which professed an approach to medicine that aligned more strongly with skeptical principles.

The Outlines made two great contributions to epistemology. Its criticism of induction, especially in the manner used by Aristotle, would be cited later in the development of empirical methodologies, but did not initially receive much attention. By contrast, its regressive arguments against positive assertions, showing that any belief requires justification ad infinitum, were repeatedly brought up by later philosophers as a peculiar weakness of all systems of thought. The other four tropes of skepticism, attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic, are mentioned in the Outlines and provide further ammunition against claims of knowledge - namely, that what is not justified in an infinite regress may rest instead on circularity of justification or merely on assumption, while those beliefs justified by experience, itself resting on either circular or regressive justification, lose their weight in the face of all of the different perspectives that may be taken (summarized as the ten modes for suspending judgement). Later skeptics almost universally refer to the Outlines as an inspiration for their views, employing similar arguments for their own suspensions of judgement.

Notable contributions that Sextus made to epistemology were his criticism of induction, especially as used by Aristotle, and his use of regressive arguments against positive assertions, showing that they require justification ad infinitum. Later skeptics almost universally refer to his Outlines as an inspiration for their views, citing similar arguments for their own suspensions of judgement. Although little was made of Sextus' work in his day, it became the basis for more modern philosophical turns of thought.

Aristotelianism
Although the Peripatetic school at the Lyceum of Athens had recovered from the sacking of Athens during Republican times, the school remained overshadowed by other philosophical institutions. Nevertheles, the works of Aristotle were widely disseminated throughout the Roman world, both in Italy and in the various academies of Greece and Egypt. The most prevalent ideas of Aristotle were his syllogistic logic, a common complement to the propositional logic of the Stoics. Scholars also treated him as an exemplar philosopher of nature, whose methods were to be emulated in studying the natural world. In particular, the works of the Aristotelian scholar Theophrastus (371-287 BCE) presented more concise and sophisticated illustrations of syllogistic logic and the inductive methods of Aristotle, in its limited form of classifying objects into natural kinds by their shared qualities and of devising general principles (causal or teleological) as explanations of observed phenomena.

In particular, Galen had been heavily influenced by Theophrastus in his application of experimentation to knowledge of the human body, as well as following the detailed observational methods of Hippocrates. The successes of Galen brought a renewed interest in Aristotelian practices, priming the Lyceum for future discoveries in the less dogmatic fields of geology and biology.

As a philosopher, Galen also made notable contributions to logic, synthesizing the formal logics of the Stoics and the Aristotelians.

Consolidation (211-220)
The emperor passed the Constitutio Sulla (Edict of Sulla) in 208 CE. The core of the edict was the dissolution of the Latin Right  as a mediate stage in acquiring full citizenship. After the edict, free residents of the empire could only be distinguished as cives (citizens) and peregrini (non-citizens), leaving a clearer legal and cultural delineation between Romans and non-Romans. People of the latter group were administered under ius gentium (law of nations or international law) and only encountered the ius civile (civil law) of the Romans in their interactions with citizens. As part of the edict, people who possessed the ius latinum (latin right) were granted full citizenship and contemporary libertini (freedmen) received the same. Furthermore, every free resident of Epirus and Achaia was made a citizen of Rome, bringing Greece deeper into the affairs of Roman society.

Although hundreds of thousands of people acquired citizenship through the edict, some sections placed new restrictions on future acquisitions of citizenship. Manumission no longer gave the freed man any form of citizenship and left the children of former slaves only as free non-citizens. However, a libertinus benefited from lower taxes compared with other peregrini. In addition, a term of service as a military auxiliary would no longer confer citizenship but service in its cohorts would offer higher wages than before. Lastly, the tax on non-citizens - a poll tax known as the Tributum - was raised closer to the rate of taxes on citizens while the ius commercii (property rights) afforded only to citizens were extended to all free people living within the empire.

In effect, the edict abolished all means of acquiring citizenship without having a citizen as a father or receiving citizenship as a gift directly from the Senate. The result was a more static base of cives romani and a marginally greater equality between citizens and free non-citizens. The only way to get citizenship other than naturalization or dispensation was to have been adopted by a male citizen before reaching two years of age (an older non-citizen could not legally be adopted by a Roman citizen).

Not all parts of the edict pertained to the acquisition of citizenship. Brief sections created a new tax on the manumission of slaves, proportional to the original price of the slave and raised the minimum age for freeing a slave from 30 to 40 years. At the same time, higher minimum standards for the treatment of slaves were instituted, including lower prices on giving medical care to slaves and restrictions on selling slaves, i.e. limiting the sale of slaves to public slave markets with permits. Part of the additional medical care for slaves encouraged the bearing of children, providing a larger supply of vernae (born slaves).

After his edict, Sulla reinforced Augustan marriage laws - raising taxes on the lifestyle of bachelors and offering priviliges such as lower taxes and housing subsidies to married citizens. In the capital, a male citizen could accept 15 denarii each year for ten years after the birth of any child. More restrictive marriage laws were passed that prohibited marriage between different class of society, especially the marriage of citizens with non-citizens and of the nobilitas (upper class) with the plebes (lower class). Some people protested to the emperor that the laws were too draconian but he justified them to the public on the grounds that they followed the judgements of the Divine Augustus and protected the traditional values of the Roman household.

Banking in Rome
Meanwhile, the bancae in Aelia Capitolina inspired the richer money lenders in Antioch, Petra, and some minor colonies to expend the capital required to move their businesses to secure, temple-like buildings. In many cases, these facilities were only storehouses for clients' coin and the lenders continued to run their service on a bench in the local marketplace. However, the security, intimacy, and privacy of doing business in a bank appealed to many clients and the buildings became popular replacements for the benches, as they were in Aelia Capitolina due to more prevalent threats to the money changers.

Sulla caught wind of the growing prominence of banks in the eastern provinces and sought money lenders in Rome to build one of their own on the Insula Tiberina (Tiber Island). Although far from the markets, this bank was popular and inspired another group of money lenders to found their own in the Mercatus Traiani (Trajan's Market). Finally, in 219, the Senate commissioned its own facility on a spot beside the Temple of Harmony, marked overhead with "TUTA BANCA ROMAE/APOTHECA NUMMAE SPQR". Locals simply referred to the institution as the Banca Romae. This magnificent structure was even longer than the Basilica Julia but presented a small facade to the Roman Forum, with most of its length stretching farther back than the Tabularium. In other words, it became one of the most prominent structures in the city.

Under order of the emperor, the office of Praefectus Argentarius (Overseer of the Silver) was instituted to manage the bank and supervise its other argentarii (bankers). His role was to personally attend to clients of the Banca Romae in a manner that mirrored the traditional relationship of a wealthy patron with his clients. Equipped to store more than a billion denarii, this bank served a completely separate purpose as the nearby Temple of Saturn, where some funds for the aerarium (national treasury) were kept.

From a cultural standpoint, the banks in the capital had a visual prominence and authenticity that heavily distinguished them from the benches of money lenders. Starting with the Banca Romae, the Senate began the practice of endorsing banks and by 268, outlawed banks in Italy that did not have the endorsement of the Senate. In general, endorsement came with the requirement that banks follow the lead of the Banca Romae, particularly in their interest rates. Respect for these institutions grew as they became more prominent, numerous, and encouraged by senators. A slow trend of common citizens taking out loans from banks, in place of requesting patronage from a wealthy citizen, started shortly after the Senate began its program of endorsement.

Rule Britannia
During the same decade as his edict, Sulla devoted more of his time and energy to the Romanization of the domain of Britannia. With the whole island under his control, he seized the opportunity to issue propaganda that played on the idea of a Roman Britain and on the unity of the region. In particular, he commissioned public works of art portraying Britannia - a beautiful figure modeled after the goddess Minerva and wearing a centurion helmet. In contrast to earlier art, these depictions portrayed Britannia as a free and strong woman, accompanied by a wolf or a legionary in an amicable context. Hundreds of statues were carved for plazas and temples throughout the isle, emphasizing a beneficial relationship with Rome.

At the center of public works in the island was Londinium. A temple to Divus Claudius was built on its forum followed shortly by the Banca Britannica, an institution that would control interest rates throughout the south of the province. A galenaria was built on the west of the rivulet that went down the center of the city, bringing a kind of medicine unknown to the local population. Since the governor of the province was a military commander, Sulla sought to bring the provincial administration closer to the locals by building a provincial villa, where the governor would live and receive guests in a more open fashion. In this way, the people of the city and, by extension, nearby rural Britons, would be less conscious of the military nature of being governed. Elsewhere in the province, dozens of banks and hospitals were established alongside Roman temples to further Romanize the populace.

To the north, the Antonine Wall was cannibalized to renovate Hadrian's Wall, which was intended to serve as the formal border between the provinces of Britannia and Caledonia, after the latter became an imperial province in 208. A 541 km road now went from Londinium to Eboracum and continued beyond the wall. Although locals saw a benefit to trade, the legions in the area were the primary audience as they could now easily move between the northern and southern reaches of the island. Furthermore, the expansion and renovation of the main highway facilitated construction in the north using stone from quarries in the south.

Over the next two centuries, the island of Britannia saw increasing integration with the rest of the Roman Empire. Although denied direct access to the Mediterranean, Britain began to participate heavily in trade with the Gallic provinces and became indispensable for its iron and coal. Features of Roman culture and civilization, such as hypocausts and baths, were ubiquitous in most towns by the end of the 3rd century and by the 5th century, most of the population spoke a dialect of Latin. However, aspects of the local culture persisted in the form of an elite variation on earlier Celtic dialects from the south of the island and in the household rituals of most commoners. For this reason, Britain was one of the last regions of the empire to accept new religious traditions.

At the same time, the last of the foederati (vassal kingdom) in Britain were only dissolved in 321 with the dissolution of the special status of the Votadini, bringing them under the authority of the governor of Caledonia. Although some small enclaves of Druids and their kin still existed far away from Roman settlements, this transition marked the end of independent rule in Britain.

Foreign contact
Beyond the Dacian frontiers, Gothic tribes were gathering in large numbers, making themselves known to Rome through several invasions starting in 220. Although their first assault achieved early successes, they were repulsed within two years and the Senate resolved to counter the growing threat by building defensive walls along the frontiers. Nearly 960 km of heavy stone and mortar walls were built, stretching from Lauriacum to Aquincum, bolstering the defenses of the limes danuvius. At the same time, Rome lent military support to the local Alani - an Iranian culture inhabiting the lands around the Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea) - to encourage co-operation against the Goths, assisted further by the Bosporan kingdom that served Rome as a vassal.

Although the Goths would remain nearby for some time, the support of the Alani would strengthen Alanic presence among the other local Sarmatian tribes and ensure the dominance of their culture over the Goths. In general, the Vesigothic culture resulted from the intermingling of Goths and Alans over the course of the following two centuries, whereas the Ostrogothic culture were the more northern descendants of the Goths, receiving less influence from Roman and Sarmatian cultures.

In the same year as the first invasion, a delegation arrived in Egypt from a kingdom in India, asking to meet the fabled king of the Hellenic world. News of its arrival reached Sulla, who decided to reaffirm direct trade with the Indians and to circumvent Persia as a mediary for eastern commerce. The delegates entered Rome to a fanfare instigated by the equites of Roman society. No one had ever met an Indian or anyone from the Far East for that matter, and anyone who could afford guests was enthusiastic about dining with these strange visitors. At the same time, Sulla had people search for citizens who had dealt with Indians before, finding a gnostic Christian by the name of Bardaisan. Despite his beliefs, this man was suitable for the purposes of the emperor.

From conversation, Romans learned that the delegation had come from the Kingdom of Andhra on behalf of its ruler. Within the year, the delegates were returning with deals for their king and were accompanied by Bardaisan as a legatus indicus (envoy to India) - the first ambassador of Rome to an Indian kingdom. Roman influence on the Andhra would be larger than on any other eastern kingdom, although it did not amount to much. Several hundred ships left ports such as Aelana, Berenice, and Myos Hormos each year to trade with the Orient, amounting to nearly 70 million denarii worth of goods leaving the empire. In return, Roman and foreign merchants brought hundreds of millions of denarii worth of exotic goods to Egypt and Arabia Petraea (keeping in mind that these values denote the worth of goods within the empire alone).

Later rule (221-228)
In reaction to the Indian delegation, Sulla sent soldiers as envoys to the Far East, travelling as merchants to discover and carefully appropriate the source of Asiatic silk. Some minor trade agreements were made with the Chinese Emperor of Wei but the main goal was to steal living silkworms. Alongside a hundred pounds of the worms, Chinese sericulturalists were kidnapped and forced to instruct Romans in the care of the worms and the extraction of their silk. By this means, Rome became the second culture to break the Chinese monopoly on the international silk trade, opening a handful of silk farms on ager publicus in Egypt. A market for Egyptian silk started from here to compete with Chinese and Indian silk.

However, Sulla had the Senate pass laws that restricted the transport of silk within the empire. All silk from the Egyptian farmers would go straight to the capital, where the only lawful facilities for processing silk were situated. Although foreign silk did not face this restriction, it ensured that the best weaving and processing happened in Rome, effectively diverting the entire market for silk through the Eternal City. Unfortunately for Rome, silk from Egypt had inferior quality to Chinese silk, as a result of a number of factors such as climate and skill. Nevertheless, Egyptian silk became a slightly cheaper alternative to true, eastern silk.

Other kingdoms were not performing nearly as spectacularly as the Roman Empire during this period. After a period of instability, the Chinese Empire of Han had just fractured, leaving behind a number of smaller kingdoms that squabbled over its lands. The Regnum Bospori (Bosporan Kingdom) had its own problems with the Gothic tribes that had attempted to invade Roman Dacia. Without much interest from Rome, Bosporan civilization collapsed by 255 under the combined weight of the Alans (who were taking advantage of having Rome's favor) and the Goths.

At the same time, the Parthians were suffering from a loss of land and authority to their enemy - the Sassanids that had emerged from the eastern fringes around 208 CE. From their fortress of Ardashir-Khwarrah, the Sassanids, or Sasanians as Romans knew them, slowly tore Parthia apart from the inside, culminating in the death of the empire in 224 when the Sasanians took power in the land of Eran (Eranshahr). Although the Parthian nobility were terrified by these events, the Senate of Rome received the news with an expected amount of excitement, calmly watching their centuries long rival collapse. Romans took pleasure in the notion that "mighty Persia" had fallen while Rome was stronger than ever before.

Public games were held in Rome to celebrate the fall of the Parthian Empire. For his part, Shahanshah Ardashir of Sasan had no desire to challenge the western colossus that was the Roman Empire and politely negotiated trade and peace with the governor of the province of Syria. In 226, Sulla arranged a meeting with the Shah in Petra. The Shah wisely professed submissiveness to Rome and asked only that "[their] two kingdoms persist in peace". Sulla dismissed the notion that Rome was a "kingdom" and gave his assurance that the Persian people would one day enjoy the Pax Romana as Romans did. For the time being, he offered the Shah the status of foederatus (client kingdom) and after this was respectfully declined, he said that Persia would be allowed to exist under Sasanian rule by his grace. A parade through the streets of Aelia Capitolina as a gift for the Shah emphasized his point through the thundering of feet from tens of thousands of marching legionaries.

Prior to this meeting of giants, the Roman Empire was shook by an uprising in its western provinces. People were stirring up the local non-citizens of Hispania by spreading a different account of the Punic Wars in the Hispanic province of Tarraconensis. These public speeches and pamphlets described how the Carthaginians had defended th city of Saguntum against a surprise invasion by Rome and how the Romans used the battle with the defenders as an excuse to start the Second Punic War. Unrest struck that same city in 221, largely instigated by the Phoenician populace. The revolt was crushed by the Legion but minor unrest persisted in the region for another fifty years, spoiling an otherwise peaceful era in Roman history.

Indeed, Sulla had used his Triumph from the annexation of Caledonia as an opportunity to usher in an era of peace over his empire, only two decades after a massive war against Germanic tribes and a decade after defeating Persia. After the Triumph, there was a ceremonious closing of the Gates of Janus, starting a procession that ended at the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace). These ceremonies signaled the start of a proper period of peace, with few conflicts involving the Legion from 206 to 233. Even more, the years to come were a golden era for the empire, when the leadership of Rome was firmly established and the military strength of Rome over her enemies was undoubted. The two national treasuries stayed steady, the population rose, and trade between the provinces boomed. In particular, recent developments in medicine marked the start of a persistent natural increase in the numbers of citizens relative to the other people living within the empire (since citizens benefited from inexpensive medicine).

This period was a time for civil reform. In 222 and 225 respectively, the provinces of Alpes Ulterior and Aquitania were converted to proconsular provinces, as was Lycia in 227. The shift allowed the strategic relocation of multiple legions in the direction of more treacherous borders and signaled to the people of Rome that their empire was stabilizing. A more widespread sentiment that Rome was settling permanently into her territory began to spread during the golden age of Sulla the Great.

In 212, the city of Colonia Corellia was founded in honor of the emperor on a confluence of the Fluvius Clota (River Clyde). As the first colonia of Caledonia, Corellia was slowly settled by Roman citizens from Gallia (France) and Italy. Immigration to the new city was encouraged by the cheap cost of land and lower taxes than in other provinces. Over the next century, Corellia would grow rapidly and receive much of the infrastructure expected of a Roman colony (galenariae, templa, statuae, etc.). In addition to a temple to Mars, the colonists erected temples to Sulla, Marcus Aurelius, and Hadrian.

Death
On January 1, 228, Emperor Sulla - who received the cognomen Magnus in 225 - collapsed during a speech in the Senate. The stroke he seems to have suffered, despite his good health, was incurable even by Rome's best medici and ultimately, the leader of the civilized world passed away late that evening.

A grand state funeral was held on January 4th, in stark contrast to Marcus Aurelius' modest private one, to coincide with the public mourning of tens of millions of people - the entire Western world - and to lay the emperor to rest with his ancestors in the Mausoleum Hadriani. On January 5th, the adopted Marcus Antoninus Sulla was formally proclaimed Princeps Civitatis by the Senate after the insistence of senators that the apotheosis of Sulla be completed beforehand. In the wake of the acclaim of his father, Marcus Sulla came to power in the Roman Empire.

Statistics for the Roman Empire of 228 AD
Population: 69 million people (26.0% of global population), including ~8 million slaves

Area: 5,840,000 km2

GDP: 4.9 billion denarii (~$49 billion US)

Treasury: 79 million denarii (~$790 million US)

Government revenue: 274 million denarii (~$2.74 billion US), 5.6% of GDP

Military spending: 157 million denarii (57% of revenue or 3.2% of GDP)

Military size: 156,000 legionaries (30 legions), ~227,000 auxiliaries, and 10,000 praetorian guards