structural:scholar_edition
Family and youth

Sulla, the son of Lucius Cornelius Sulla and the grandson of Publius Cornelius Sulla, was born into a branch of the patrician gens Cornelia, but his family had fallen to an impoverished condition at the time of his birth. Publius Cornelius Rufinus, one of Sulla's ancestors and also the last member of his family to be consul, was banished from the Senate after having been caught possessing more than 10 pounds of silver plate. Sulla's family thereafter did not reach the highest offices of the state until Sulla himself. His father may have served as praetor, but details are unclear; his father married twice and Sulla's stepmother was of considerable wealth, which certainly helped the young Sulla's ambitions.

One story, "as false as it is charming", relates that when Sulla was a baby, his nurse was carrying him around the streets, until a strange woman walked up to her and said, " Puer tibi et reipublicae tuae felix ", which can be translated as, "The boy will be a source of luck to you and your state". After his father's death, around the time Sulla reached adulthood, Sulla found himself impoverished. He might have been disinherited, though it was "more likely" that his father simply had nothing to bequeath. Lacking ready money, Sulla spent his youth among Rome’s comedians, actors, lute players, and dancers. During these times on the stage, after initially only singing, he started writing plays, Atellan farces, a kind of crude comedy. Plutarch mentions that during his last marriage to Valeria, he still kept company with "actresses, musicians, and dancers, drinking with them on couches night and day".

Sulla almost certainly received a normal education for his class, grounded in ancient Greek and Latin classics. Sallust declares him well-read, intelligent, and he was fluent in Greek. Regardless, by the standards of the Roman political class, Sulla was a very poor man. His first wife was called either Ilia or Julia. If the latter, he may have married into the Julii Caesares. He had one child from this union, before his first wife's death. He married again, with a woman called Aelia, of whom nothing is known other than her name. During these marriages, he engaged in an affair with the hetaira Nicopolis, who also was older than he. The means by which Sulla attained the fortune which later would enable him to ascend the ladder of Roman politics are not clear; Plutarch refers to two inheritances, one from his stepmother (who loved him dearly) and the other from his mistress Nicopolis. Keaveney 2005, pp. 10–11 accepts these inheritances without much comment and places them around Sulla's turning thirty years of age.