[Quick set-up: Republican Rome is reeling under the Civil Wars between Sulla and Marius, and Sulla has recently driven Marius out of Rome and set up shop in the city. He set about murdering all of his political enemies through proscriptions, or public death lists. Every day he would post in the public forums the names of those proscribed to die, and anyone whose name was listed could be legally killed by any man for a bounty, and all his property and inheritance would be publicly auctioned by the state.]
Sylla being thus wholly bent upon slaughter, and filling the city with executions without number or limit, many wholly uninterested persons falling a sacrifice to private enmity, through his permission and indulgence to his friends, Caius Metellus, one of the younger men, made bold in the senate to ask him what end there was of these evils, and at what point he might be expected to stop? “We do not ask you,” said he, “to pardon any whom you have resolved to destroy, but to free from doubt those whom you are pleased to save.” Sylla answering, that he knew not as yet whom to spare, “Why, then,” said he, “tell us whom you will punish.”
This Sylla said he would do.
[…]
Immediately upon this, without communicating with any of the magistrates, Sylla proscribed eighty persons, and notwithstanding the general indignation, after one day’s respite, he posted two hundred and twenty more, and on the third again, as many. In an address to the people on this occasion, he told them he had put up as many names as he could think of; those which had escaped his memory, he would publish at a future time. He issued an edict likewise, making death the punishment of humanity, proscribing any who should dare to receive and cherish a proscribed person without exception to brother, son, or parents. And to him who should slay any one proscribed person, he ordained two talents reward, even were it a slave who had killed his master, or a son his father. And what was thought was most unjust of all, he caused the attainder to pass upon their sons, and sons’ sons, and made open sale of their property.
Nor did the proscription prevail only at Rome, but throughout all the cities of Italy the effusion of blood was such, that neither sanctuary of the gods, nor hearth of hospitality, nor ancestral home escaped. Men were butchered in the embraces of their wives, children in the arms of their mothers.
Those who perished through public animosity or private enmity were nothing in comparison of the numbers of those who suffered for their riches. Even the murderers began to say, that “his fine house killed this man, a garden that, a third, his hot baths.” Quintus Aurelius, a quiet, peaceable man, and one who thought all his part in the common calamity consisted in condoling with the misfortunes of others coming into the forum to read the list, and finding himself among the proscribed, cried out, “Woe is me, my Alban farm has informed against me.” He had not gone far before he was despatched by a ruffian, sent on that errand.
Source:
Plutarch, John Dryden, and Arthur Hugh Clough. "Sylla." Plutarch's Lives. New York: Modern Library, 2001. 633-34. Print.
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