Sulla had succeeded in restoring the rule…

Sulla had succeeded in restoring the rule of the oligarchs, but he had failed to remedy the socioeconomic conditions that had undermined their rule in the first place.

After his second consulship, Sulla had withdrawn to his country villa near Puteoli to be with family.

From this distance, he remains out of the day-to-day political activities in Rome, intervening only a few times when his policies are involved.

His goal now was to write his memoirs, which he finishes in 78 BCE, 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 (its symptoms a sudden hemorrhage from his mouth followed by a fever from which he never recovered) caused by chronic alcohol abuse.

His funeral in Rome (at Roman Forum, in the presence of the whole city) is on a scale unmatched until that of Augustus in CE 14.

His epitaph reads "No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full".