Enmity, Anger, Cruelty and Revenge: Explaining the Proscriptions of Sulla (81 BC) within the Context of Ancient Rome’s Emotional Communities.

<p dir="ltr">The proscriptions of Lucius Cornelius Sulla were an unprecedented period of revenge-based murder, culminating in a period of state sanctioned extra-judicial murders in 81 BC. These proscriptions aimed at eliminating political and personal opposition, providing rewards for Sulla’s supporters, and allowing Sulla to remove individuals who endangered his regime and the establishment of a functional, conservative government. My thesis analyses Sulla’s motivations for the conduct of the proscriptions, viewing him through the emotions he displayed during the proscriptions. The thesis focuses on <i>the history of emotions</i>, as a structure to examine Sulla’s emotions, which has rarely been applied to ancient history. Hence, this thesis explores Sulla’s membership of a range of emotional communities analysing the emotions attributed to him, highlighting how the language of emotion places Sulla’s actions into a wider context of Roman emotional communities. The thesis categorises how ancient writers perceived Sulla emotionally within the context of his time. I believe the approach of investigating how <i>the history of emotions </i>provides a structure through which to analyse the incidence of emotion words that describe Sulla and his various emotional communities is unique within the current study of ancient history, and if successful, could be a new critical perspective in the understanding of how and why ancient individuals reacted to the social and cultural stimuli around them. The thesis concludes that the <i>emotion words </i>used about Sulla reflect the language of the emotional communities, as a whole, and that the emotions displayed by Sulla can equally be part of the language used by other agencies within the community. These emotions, and Sulla’s use of them, explain why the proscriptions are a violent personal reaction by him to his enemies’ pursuit of his family, friends and supporters, and their attempt to destroy Sulla’s <i>auctoritas </i>and <i>dignitas</i>.</p>