High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The constitutional reforms of Lucius Cornelius Sulla were a series of laws that were enacted by the Roman Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla between 82 and 80 BC, which reformed the Constitution of the Roman Republic. In the decades before Sulla had become Dictator, a series of political developments occurred which severely weakened aristocratic control over the Roman Constitution. Sulla`s Dictatorship constituted one of the most significant developments in the History of the Constitution of the Roman Republic, and it served as a warning for the coming civil war, which ultimately would destroy the Roman Republic and create the Roman Empire. Sulla, who had witnessed chaos at the hands of his political enemies in the years before his Dictatorship, was naturally conservative. He believed that the underlying flaw in the Roman constitution was the increasingly aggressive democracy, which expressed itself through the Roman assemblies, and as such, he sought to strengthen the Roman Senate. He retired in 79 BC, and died in 78 BC, having believed that he had corrected the constitutional flaw. His constitution would be mostly rescinded by two of his former lieutenants, Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus, less than ten years after his death. But what he did not realize was that it was he himself who actually had illustrated the underlying flaw in the Roman constitution: that it was the army, and not the Roman senate, which dictated the fortunes of the state. The precedent he produced would be emulated less than forty years later by an individual whom he almost had executed, Julius Caesar, and as such, he played a critical early role in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.