Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
It was urged even by contemporaries in
vindication of Sulla that a king is better than a bad constitution,(2)
and presumably the title of dictator was only chosen to indicate
that, as the former dictatorship implied a reassumptionwith various
limitations,(3) so this new dictatorship involved a complete
reassumption, of the regal power.
2. -Satius est uti regibus quam uti malis legibus- (Ad Herenn. ii.
36).
Thus, singularly enough,
the course of Sulla here also coincided with that on which Gaius
Gracchus had entered with so wholly different a design. In this
respect too the conservative party had to borrow from its opponents;
the protector of the oligarchic constitution had himself to
come forward as a tyrant, in order to avert the ever-impending
-tyrannis-. There was not a little of defeat in this last victory
of the oligarchy.
