I ' m not sure Rome fell in 88 . I ' m not sure it ' s fair to say even that a hostile army entered the city . Sulpicius Rufus , as tribune of the plebs , was running the assembly with outright violence , had threatened the life of an elected consul and had driven the consul out of the city . One of Sulpicius ' laws was a law distributing Italians across the voting tribes , fundamentally changing the nature of the Roman state . I may be wrong , but I think using the plebeian assembly to transfer a command was unprecedented . Whether or not it rises to the level of a constitutional crisis I suppose depends a lot on your own politics , but the matter was certainly one of how Romans govern themselves , not an imposition by a foreign power . I think it ' s worth noting that as far as I ' m aware no one wrote about Sulla taking Rome with the sort of view that Jerome or Augustine wrote about the sack of Rome in 410 CE . Granted , all the surviving sources postdate Sulla ' s dictatorship and Sulla ' s first march would have been , well , if not normalized , contextualized into a postSullan view of history , but I don ' t see any evidence that people in 88 thought it was the end of the world . If we do think Rome fell in 88 , then must we also think it fell to Marius ? To Sulla a second time in 82 ? To Caesar in 49 ? Several times in 69 CE ? What about the ascension of Claudius , secured by the Praetorian guard ? Rome starts falling an awful lot .