Of course, the thing with Caesar's "forgiveness" is that his contemporaries don't read mercy as a virtue -- they see it as his way of making his superiority clear, because clementia is always something given by superiors to inferiors. So you've probably read Plutarch's biography of Cato, but in Cato's death-scene he gives this whole speech about not wanting to acccept from Caesar what Caesar has no right to grant him. So the forgiveness, which ought to make it more difficult for Brutus and Cassius to turn against Caesar (for us) is for them just more proof of his ambition.

ANd yes, there's an enormous gap between what Sulla thinks he's doing and what he actually does!