[82 B.C.] Events and circumstances had now fulfilled their part in developing Sulla's policy, and moulding his character. Fond of literature, vain of his accomplishments, attached to frivolous pleasures and frivolous people, a man, it is said, of soft and even tender feelings, and easily moved to tears by a tale of sorrow, Sulla in his early years had surprised his countrymen, rather than alarmed them, by the success of his military career and his influence with the soldiers. The haughty jealousy of Marius had disposed him to take an opposite part in public life. The rivalry of the two great captains had been enhanced by the contrast of their manners, origin, and connections. In brooding over his personal resentments Sulla had insensibly come to identify himself with the cause of the oligarchy. The sanguinary violence of Cinna and Marius had irritated the champion of the persecuted faction, and he had vowed a bloody vengeance against the authors of the proscriptions. But the opposition he experienced in Italy expanded his views beyond the limits of party warfare. The Etrurians and the Samnites transformed him from the chief of a Roman faction into the head of the Roman nation. The vows of extermination they breathed against the sacred city of Quirinus sank deeply into his mind. He had displayed in the East his contempt for the just claims of the provincials. The cries of the miserable Greeks and Asiatics he had mocked with pitiless scorn, and had reimposed upon their necks, in its full weight and irksomeness, the yoke from which they had in vain invoked Mithridates to relieve them. The man who had reconquered the East had now reconquered Italy, and he determined to restore the supremacy of his countrymen at their own gates, which he had vindicated with triumphant success at the farthest limits of their empire. The morning after the battle of the Colline Gate, Sulla was haranguing the senate in the temple of Bellona. As an imperator commanding a military force, the law forbade him to enter the city, and the senators attended his summons beyond the walls. Cries of horror and despair were suddenly heard outside the place of assembly. "Be not alarmed," he calmly remarked to the affrighted senators, "it is only some rascals whom I have ordered to be chastised." They were the death cries of the eight thousand Samnite prisoners, whom he had delivered to be cut to pieces by his legions in the Field of Mars. The first of his blows fell upon the Italian confederates; but he speedily launched his vengeance upon the Romans themselves. his return from Præneste he mounted the rostra, and addressed the people. He vaunted his own greatness and irresistible power, and graciously assured them that he would do them good if they obeyed him well; but to his foes he would give no quarter, but prosecute them to the death, high as well as low, prætors, quæstors, tribunes, and whosoever had provoked his just indignation. THE PROSCRIPTIONS These words were a signal to his adherents, and before the names of the destined citizens were publicly announced many a private vengeance was wreaked, and many a claim advanced upon the conqueror's gratitude. The family of Marius were among the first attacked. One of his relatives named Marius Gratidianus, who had signalised his prætorship by checking the debasement of the coinage, was pursued by Catiline, a brutal young officer, and murdered with the most horrible tortures. The assassin placed the bloody [82 B.C.] head upon Sulla's banquet-table, and coolly washed his hands in the lustral waters of a neighbouring temple. The corpse of the great Marius himself, which had been buried and not burned, was torn from its sepulchre on the banks of the Anio, and cast into the stream. This desecration of the funeral rites was an impiety of which the contests of the Romans had hitherto furnished no example. It was never forgotten by a shocked and offended people. The troubled ghost, says the poet of the civil wars, continued to haunt the spot, and scared the husbandmen from their labours on the eve of impending calamity. A great number of victims had already perished, when Catulus demanded of Sulla in the senate, "Whom then shall we keep to enjoy our victory with, if blood continues to flow in our cities as abundantly as on the battle-field?" A young Metellus had the boldness to ask when there would be an end to these miseries, and how far he would proceed before they might hope to see them stayed. "Spare not," he added, "whomsoever it is expedient to remove; only relieve from uncertainty those whom you mean to save." Sulla coldly replied that he had not yet determined whom he would spare. "Tell us then," exclaimed Metellus, "whom you intend to punish." Thereupon a list of proscriptions appeared containing eighty names. This caused a general murmur; nevertheless, two days after, 230, and the next day as many more, were added to the list. And this proscription, in which Sulla had consulted no magistrate, was accompanied with a speech in which he said that he had proscribed all he could think of for the present; by and by he might perhaps remember more. Rewards were offered for slaying the proscribed; it was rendered capital to harbour them. Their descendants were declared incapable of public office, and their fortunes were confiscated to the use of the state, though in most cases they were actually seized and retained by private hands. Nor were the proscriptions confined to Rome; they were extended to every city in Italy, and throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula neither temple nor domestic hearth offered security to the fugitives. From the first of December 682 to the first of June in the following year, this authorised system of murder was allowed to continue. Catiline, who had previously assassinated a brother, now got his victim's name placed on the fatal list, in order to secure his estate. The favourites of Sulla, his slaves and freedmen, drove a lucrative trade in selling the right to inscribe the names of persons whom any one wished to make away with. The dignity of public vengeance was prostituted to mere private pique and cupidity.1 One man was killed for his house, another for his gardens, another for his baths.2 One unfortunate wretch, who had never meddled with affairs, examined the lists out of mere curiosity. Horror-struck on seeing his own inscribed, "My Alban farm," he exclaimed, "has ruined me"; and hardly had he spoken the words before the pursuers smote him. Sulla might smile to see the number of accomplices he had associated in his crimes, and he sought perhaps to render their share in these horrors more conspicuous by the rewards with which he loaded them. Upon Catiline, the boldest and readiest of his partisans, a man of blasted character and ruined fortunes, he heaped golden favours. The young Crassus, who had so h [1 Mommsen quotes the sale of an estate valued at £61,000 or $305,000 for about £20 or $100; and rates the total proceeds of confiscation at £3,050,000 or $15,250,000.] [2 Cicero makes a grim pun which Guthrie Englished thus, "The same gentlemen who knocked down estates, knocked down men." Later he says in the same oration that the slaughter was so great it reminded one of the battle of Lake Trasimene when Hannibal annihilated a Roman army.] [82 B.C.] narrowly escaped the sword of Marius, now laid the foundation of the wealth which earned him the renown of the richest of the Romans. Pompey had executed without remorse his master's vengeance upon captives taken in arms; at his command he had consented to divorce his wife Antistia, and take in her stead Sulla's step-daughter Metella; but he withheld his hand from the stain of the proscriptions, and scorned perhaps to enrich himself with the spoils of judicial massacre. Among the kinsmen of Marius was one whom Sulla himself vouchsafed to spare. Caius Julius Cæsar, then eighteen years of age, was connected by blood with Marius, 'and by marriage with Cinna. Sulla contented himself with requiring him to repudiate his wife. Cæsar refused, and fled into the Sabine mountains. The assassins were on his track, while his friends at Rome exerted themselves to the utmost to obtain his pardon. The vestals interceded for him. Some of Sulla's own adherents raised their voices in his favour, and pleaded his youth, his reckless temper and dissipated habits, in proof of his innocence or harmlessness. "I spare him," exclaimed Sulla, "but beware! in that young trifler there is more than one Marius." Cæsar was saved; but he prudently repaired to the siege of Mytilene. The proscriptions were lists of selected victims, and though hundreds undoubtedly perished whose names had never been publicly devoted to slaughter, yet the number of the original citizens who fell in the massacres were not beyond the reach of computation. The accounts we have received vary indeed in this particular; but of senators there were slain perhaps from one to two hundred, of knights between two and three thousand. The victims of a lower class were, we may suppose, proportionally more numerous. But the destruction of the Italians was far more sweeping and indiscriminate. Cities were dismantled, and even razed to the ground; their lands. were seized and distributed among the veterans of the Sullan armies, of whom 120,000 were located in colonies from one end of the peninsula to the other. The natives driven from their houses and estates were massacred in crowds; according to popular tradition the Samnite people were utterly annihilated, and of all their cities Beneventum alone remained standing. The inhabitants of the wretched Præneste were slaughtered wholesale. The Etrurians expiated with the direst persecution the tardy aid they had given to the common cause of the Italians. The great centres of their ancient civilisation had long fallen into decay, but a new class of cities had risen upon their ruins, and attained riches and celebrity. Of these Spoletium, Volaterræ, Interamna, and Fæsula were delivered to Roman colonists; the latter city was dismantled, and the new town of Florentia erected with the fragments of its ruins. Throughout large districts the population became almost entirely changed; everywhere the chief people perished from the face of the land, and with them all that was distinctive in the manners and institutions, even in the language of the country. The civilisation of Etruria disappeared from the sight of men, to be rediscovered at the end of twenty centuries, among the buried tombs of forgotten lucumons. The same exterminating policy extended also to the provinces, wherever the temper of the native races seemed to resent the uncontrolled domination of the Roman conquerors. Sulla had chastised Greece and Asia with a rod of iron. He now commissioned his lieutenants to chase his enemies from the retreats to which they had been invited in Sicily, Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Metellus fell upon the Cisalpine province, Valerius Flaccus devastated the [1 The connection with Marius was not by blood but by marriage; Julia, Cæsar's aunt, was the wife of Marius.] [82 B.C.] Narbonensis, Pompey was despatched to punish the provinces of the south, and Annius was deputed to follow Sertorius into Spain and recover the vast regions which he had armed against the new government of Rome, and even against Rome herself. At the same time the republic was threatened with a renewal of her foreign warfare. The Thracians, never yet subdued, troubled the frontiers of Macedonia; Mithridates was commencing a new movement in Asia; the distressed and indignant population of the eastern coasts had betaken themselves in vast numbers to the sea, and infested the waters of Greece and even Italy itself with fleets of pirate vessels. The mountains of Etruria and Sabellia, of Samnium and Lucania, swarmed with the miserable fugitives from spoliation and massacre, and armed bands roamed beneath the walls of populous cities ready to carry off any booty that fell in their way, and rendering both life and property everywhere insecure. Even the proprietors of estates leagued themselves with these wretched outcasts, and employed them to kidnap free citizens of the republic, to be buried as slaves in their forests, or chained in their factories. Sulla had returned to Rome laden with the spoils of war; his troops had been gorged with plunder, and he could not plead for his proscriptions the demands of an insatiate soldiery. But the accumulating troubles of the empire, and the increasing armaments required in every quarter, demanded the opening of new sources of revenue. The provinces, harassed by war, were now crushed by imposts. Treaties and promises were alike disregarded. All were forced to contribute - not only the tributary states, but even those which had acquired by their services immunity and independence. To satisfy the requisitions made upon them, many cities were forced to pledge their public lands, their temples, their ports, and even the stones of their walls. Sulla took upon himself to sell the sovereignty of the independent kingdom of Egypt to Alexander II. Donatives were demanded of foreign kings and potentates.b "Zachariæ," says Ihne,e" in his book on L. Cornelius Sulla (i. 145), has hit the truth in saying: 'We must not imagine that these horrors and cruelties were caused by the passions so powerfully excited by the civil war, nor that they are to be attributed to Sulla's implacability and vindictiveness, nor that Sulla simply connived at them, or ordered deeds which he could not prevent, surrounded as he was by an army drunk with victory and greedy for plunder. It is true some dark passions were at work, and in several instances Sulla acted from momentary whims or was influenced by angry passions. It is true that Sulla was obliged to be indulgent and forgiving to his soldiers because he was himself in want of indulgence and forgiveness. Nevertheless we have good reason to believe that on the whole Sulla acted on a deep and coolly meditated plan. He intended that out of the work of destruction a new and vigorous Italy was to come forth with a population from whose gratitude or satisfaction he could confidently expect security for peace, and for that constitution of the republic which he was about to establish."" With this Freeman' agrees, when he says that Sulla "was not cruel in the sense of delighting in human suffering. Through the whole of Sulla's tyranny there is nothing passionate; it is not so much cruelty as recklessness of human life; it is the cold, deliberating, exterminating policy of a man who has an object to fulfill, and who will let nothing stand in the way of that object." THE reign of violence and revolution dated from the victory of the Colline Gate, the first of November, 82. While the young Marius and his colleague still occupied the consular office, the master of Rome, omnipotent as he really was, could not legitimately be invested with any civil authority. The weapon which he wielded with such terrible effect was the unsheathed sword of his proconsular imperium. The tribunal, before which he cited the wretched victims of his policy or vengeance, was the military suggestum of the prætorian tent. The death of Marius a few days later rendered vacant one of the consuls' chairs. Carbo, who occupied the other, did not long survive, being taken in Sicily and executed by Pompey without respect to his rank or office. Before the close of the year the republic was left without a chief magistrate. The senate appointed L. Flaccus, one of Sulla's officers, interrex to hold the assembly for the election of consuls for the term which was about to commence. But Flaccus, prompted by his imperator, proceeded to recommend the creation of a dictator. The senate obeyed, the people acquiesced, and after an interval of 120 years, which had elapsed since Q. Fabius Maximus, the citizens beheld once more the four-and-twenty lictors, who invested with invidious splendour that union of civil and military pre-eminence of which their feelings and institutions were equally jealous. The dictatorship, they might remember, had been the rare resource of the patricians in ancient times, when they roused themselves to defend their hateful privileges against the just claims of the plebeians; but since the rights of either class had been happily blended together, the office itself had ceased to have any significance. To revive it now, when no enemy was at the gates, was only to threaten the commons of Rome with a new aristocratical revolution, to menace rights and liberties acquired in a struggle of two hundred years, and on which the greatness and glory of Rome were confessedly founded. But all these misgivings were hushed in silence.b In the vivid words of Plutarch in North's old translation, Sulla in the beginning, was very modest and civil in all his prosperity, and gave great good hope that if he came to the authority of a prince, he would favour nobility well, and yet love, notwithstanding, the benefit of the people. And being moreover a man in his youth given all to pleasure, delighting to laugh, ready to pity, and weep for tender heart; in that he became after so cruel and bloody, the great alteration gave manifest cause to condemn the increase of honour and authority, as the only means whereby men's manners continue |