Battle of the Colline Gate
82 BCE battle
The Battle of the Colline Gate, fought on 1 November 82 BC, was the decisive battle of the civil war between Lucius Cornelius Sulla and the Marians, Samnites and Lucanians. Sulla won the battle at the northeastern end of Rome, near the Colline Gate, and secured control of Italy. Appian is the only source who provides details about the battle.
The next day Sulla ordered the slaughter of the Marian leaders and Samnite prisoners in the Villa Publica. On 3 November, he started the proscription of his enemies.
Prelude
In spring of 83 BC Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix had returned to Italy at the head of a battle-hardened veteran army fresh from his victory over king Mithridates of Pontus in the First Mithridatic War. During 83–82 BC he and his allies had defeated the government's forces in several major battles. With their allies on the brink of disaster the Samnites and the Lucanians, who feared they would be next, decided to join the fray. The Samnite leader Pontius Telesinus rallied an army of 70,000 men from his own people and their allies (among others the Lucanians) and marched to raise the siege of Praeneste and rescue consul Gaius Marius, who was considered the heart of the anti-Sullan cause.
Breaking the siege of Praeneste turned out to be next to impossible.
The public source identifies “Battle of the Colline Gate” as 82 BCE battle. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Battle, Colline and Gate.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1230563. Authority coordinates are 41.907, 12.499. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of the Colline Gate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.