From ambition or for safety, politicians formed compacts. […] Cicero, a knight’s son from a small town, succumbed to his talents and his ambition. […] For Caesar’s ambition, Plutarch, Antonius 6 (cf. […] Sulla had all the ambition of a Roman noble: but it was not his ambition to seize power through civil strife and hold it, supreme and alone. […] From the beginning, his sense for realities was unerring, his ambition implacable.