76.3
With the same disregard of law and precedent he named magistrates for several years to come, bestowed the emblems of consular rank on ten ex praetors, and admitted to the House men who had been given citizenship, and in some cases half-civilised Gauls. He assigned the charge of the mint and of the public revenues to his own slaves, and gave the oversight and command of the three legions which he had left at Alexandria to a favourite of his called Rufio, son of one of his freedmen.
77.1
No less arrogant were his public utterances, which Titus Ampius records: that the state was nothing, a mere name without body or form; that Sulla did not know his A. B. C. when he laid down his dictatorship; that men ought now to be more circumspect in addressing him, and to regard his word as law. So far did he go in his presumption, that when a soothsayer once reported direful inwards without a heart, he said: They will be more favourable when I wish it; it should not be regarded as a portent, if a beast has no heart.Playing on the double meaning of cor, also regarded as the seat of intelligence.