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After his second consulship, Sulla had withdrawn to his country villa near Puteoli to be with family.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

The Roman Pausilippo Tunnel, cut through volcanic rock in 36 to connect Pozzuoli with …

Agrippa, having raised a sizable loan in Alexandria, returns in 36 to Rome, where the emperor Tiberius receives favorably at Puteoli but refuses to allow him to stay at the court until his debt is paid.

A new loan covers the obligation, and he secures a post as tutor to Tiberius' grandson Tiberius Gemellus.

He also forms an intimacy with Caligula, at this time a popular favorite among the Roman people.

Agrippa is one day overheard by his freedman Eutyches expressing a wish for Tiberius' death and the advancement of Caligula, and for this he is cast into prison, but Caligula remains his friend.

...the neighboring port of Puteoli.

It is said that the bridge is to rival that of Persian King Xerxes' crossing of the Hellespont.

Caligula, a man who cannot swim, then proceeds to ride his favorite horse, Incitatus, across, wearing the breastplate of Alexander the Great.

This act is in defiance of a prediction by Tiberius's soothsayer Thrasyllus of Mendes that Caligula had "no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse across the Bay of Baiae".

…recovers ground in Campania, sacking Pozzuoli, …