Lucius Cornelius Sulla - Retirement and Death

Retirement and Death

After his second consulship, he withdrew to his country villa near Puteoli to be with family. From this distance, he remained out of the day-to-day political activities in Rome, intervening only a few times when his policies were involved (e.g., The Granius episode).

Sulla's goal now was to write his memoirs, which he finished in 78 BC, just before his death. They are now largely lost, although fragments from them exist as quotations in later writers. Ancient accounts of Sulla's death indicate that he died from liver failure or a ruptured gastric ulcer (symptomised by a sudden haemorrhage from his mouth followed by a fever from which he never recovered) possibly caused by chronic alcohol abuse. His funeral in Rome (at Roman Forum, in the presence of the whole city) was on a scale unmatched until that of Augustus in AD 14. His epitaph reads "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full".