Section sixteen of the grochy Marius and Solla by A. H. Beesley. This librovox recording is in the public domain. Read by Pamelinagami, chapter fourteen, the personal rule and death of Sullah. Sullah was, to all intents and purposes, a king in Rome. He harangued the people on what he had achieved and told them that if they were obedient, he would make things better for them, but that he would not spare his enemies and would punish every one who had sided with them.
Since Scipio violated his covenant, then began a reign of terror. Not only did he kill his enemies, but gave over to his creatures men against whom he had no complaint to make. At last, the young noble Gaius Metellus asked him in the Senate, tell Us, Sullah, when there is to be an end of our calamities, we do not ask thee to spare those whom thou hast marked out for punishment, but to relieve the suspense of those whom thou hast determined to save. Sullah replied that he did
not yet know. Then said Metellus, let us know whom thou intendest to destroy? Selah answered by issuing a first proscription list, including eighty names. People murmured at the illegality of this, and in two days, as if to rebuke their presumption, he issued a second of two hundred and twenty and as many more the next day. Then he told the people from the rostrum that he had now proscribed all that he remembered, and those whom he had
forgotten must come into some future proscription. Such a speech would seem incredible if put into the mouth of any other character in history, but it is in keeping with Sullah's passionless and nonchalant brutality. The ashes of Marius he ordered to be dug up and scattered in the Annio, the only unpractical act we ever read of him. Committing death was ordained for everyone who should harbor or save a proscribed person, even his own brother's son, or parent.
But he who killed a proscribed man, even if it was a slave who slew his master or a son his father, was to receive two talents. Even the son and grandson of those proscribed were deprived of the privileges of citizenship, and their property was confiscated, not only in Rome but in all the cities of Italy. This went on. Lists were posted everywhere, and it was a common saying among the ruffianly executioners. His fine home was the death of such an one, his gardens of another, his hot
baths of a third. For they hunted down men for their wealth more than from revenge. One day a quiet citizen came into the forum and, out of mere curiosity, read the proscription list. To his horror, he saw his own name, wretch. He cried that I am my alban Villa pursues me, and he had not gone far when a Ruffian came up and killed him. The famous Julius
Caesar was one of those in danger. He would not divorce his wife at the bidding of Sullah, who confiscated her property, if not his as well, being so far merciful for some reason which we do not know. One case has been made memorable by the fact that Cicero was the council for one of the sufferers. Two men named Roscius procured the assassination of a third of the same name by Sullah's favorite freedman, Chrysogonus, who then got the name of Roscius put on the proscription list and
seizing on his property, expelled them and Sun from it. He, having friends at Rome, fled to them and made the assassins fear that they might be compelled to disgorge, so they suddenly charged the son with having killed his father.
The most frightful circumstance about the case is not the piteous injustice suffered by the Sun, but the abject way in which Cicero speaks of Sullah, comparing him to Jupiter, who, despite his universal beneficence, sometimes permits destruction, not on purpose, but because his sway is so worldwide, and scouting the idea of its being possible for him to share personally in such wrongs. It has been well said, we almost touched the tyrant with our finger. Cicero soon afterwards left Rome,
probably from fear of Sullah. It is said that the names of four thousand, seven hundred persons were entered on the public records as having fallen in the proscriptions, besides many more who were assassinated for private reasons. Whole towns were put up for auction, says one writer, such as Polatum, Prineste, Interomna, and Florentia. By this we may understand that they lost all their land their privileges and public buildings, perhaps even
the houses themselves. Others, such as Voltaire and Aretium, were deprived of all privileges except that of commercium or the right of trade. Sulla's friends attended such auctions and made large fortunes. One of his centurions, named Luscius, bought an estate for ten million sesterces or eighty eight thousand, five
hundred and forty pounds of our money. One of his freedmen bought for twenty pounds twelve shillings an estate worth sixty one thousand pounds Crassus Verres, and Sulli's wife, Mattella, became in this way infamously rich. In spite of such nominal prices, the sale of confiscated estates produced three hundred and fifty million sistercees or nearly three million pounds of our money. Sullah approved of such purchases, for they bound the buyers to his interests and insured their wishing to
uphold his acts after his death. With the same view of creating a permanent sullen party in Italy, and at the same time, to fulfill his pledges to the soldiers, he allotted to them all public lands in Italy hitherto undistributed, and all confiscated land not otherwise disposed of. In this way he punished and rewarded at a stroke no fewer than one hundred and twenty thousand allotments were made and
twenty three legions provided for. There was in it a plausible mimicry of the democratic scheme of colonies, which Sola must have thoroughly enjoyed. Thus, in Italy he provided a standing army to support his new constitution. In Rome itself, by enfranchising ten thousand slaves whose owners had been slain, he formed a strong body of partisans, ever ready to do his bidding. These were all named Cornelii. A man is known by his adherents, and the worst men were
Sullah's proteges. Cataline's name rose into notoriety among these horrors. He was said not only to have murdered his own brother, but to requite Sullah for legalizing the murder by including his brother's name in the list of the proscribed to have committed. The most horrible act of the civil war, the torture of Marcus Marius Gratadianus. This man, because he was a cousin of Marius was offered up as a victim to the manes of Catullus, of whom the elder
Marius had said he must. This poor wretch was scourged and had his limbs broken, his nose and hands cut off, and his eyes gouged out of their sockets. Finally, his head was cut off, and Cicero's brother writes that Cataline carried it in his hand, streaming with blood. But no one would attach much importance to what the Ciceros said of Cataline, and two circumstances combined to point to his
innocence of such extreme enormities. One is that it was the son of Catullus who begged as a boon from Sullah the death of this Marius, and his name was very likely confused with Catalines in the street rumors of the time. And the other and more direct piece of evidence is that Catiline was tried in the year sixty four for murders committed at this time and was acquitted.
It is a curious thing that the obloquy which has clung to Cataline's name on such dubious reports, has never attached in the same measure to the undoubted horrors and abominations of Sullah's career. Sullah, though he meant above all to have his own way, had no objection to use
constitutional forms where they could be conveniently employed. He made the Senate pass a resolution approving his acts, and as there were no consuls in eighty two, after the death of Marius and Carbo, he retired from Rome for a while and told the Senate to elect an interrex in
conformity with the prescribed usage under such circumstances. Then he wrote to the interrects and recommended that a dictator should be appointed, not for a limited time, but till he had restored quiet in the Roman world, and with a touch of that irony which he could not resist displaying in and out of season, went on to say that
he thought himself the best man for the post. Thus, in November eighty two, he was formally invested with despotic power over the lives and property of a his fellow citizens. Could contract or extend, the frontiers of the state, could change as he pleased, the constitution of the Italian towns and the provinces, could legislate for the future, could nominate proconsuls and proprietors, and could retain his absolute power as long as he liked. He might have dispensed with consuls altogether,
but he did not care to do this. The consuls whom he allowed to be elected for eighty one were, of course, possessed of merely nominal power. Twenty four lictors preceded him in the streets. He told the people to hail him as Felix declared that his least deliberate were
his most successful actions. Signed himself epaphroditis when he wrote to Greeks, named his son and daughter Faustus and Fausta, boasted that the gods held converse with him in dreams, and sent a golden crown and acts to the goddess, whom he believed to be as patroness. Like Wallenstein, he mingled indifference to bloodshed with extreme superstition and boundless self confidence. But as the historian remarks, a man who is superstitious is capable of any crime, for he believes that his
gods can be conciliated by prayers and presents. The greatest crimes have not been committed by men who have no religious belief, no doubt to his mind. There was a sort of judicial retribution in all this bloodshed, and as he tried to make himself out the favorite of the gods. So by formally announcing the close of the proscription lists for June first, eighty one b c. He spread some
veil of legality over his shameless violence. There is something particularly revolting in the business like and systematic way in which he went about his murderous work, appointing a fixed time for it to end, a fixed list of the victims, a fixed price to be paid per head, a fixed exemption for the murderers from his own law. De sicaries.
Modern idolators of a policy of blood and iron may profane history by their glorification of human monsters, but no sophistry can blind and independent reader to the real nature of Sulla's character and acts. He organized murder and filled
Italy with idle soldiers instead of honest husbandmen. He did so in the interests of a class, a class whose incapacity for government he had discovered, and yet, knowing that his re establishment of this class could only be temporary, he fortified it by every means in his power, and then, after a theatrical finale, returned to the gross debaucheries in which he reveled. Anything more selfish or cynical cannot be conceived, and those who call vile acts by their plain names
will not feel inclined to become Sullah's apologists. When he died, he left behind him it is said what he may have meant as his epitaph, an inscription containing the purport of three lines in the Medea. Let no man deem me weak or womanly or nerveless, but of quite another mood, a scourge to foes beneficent two friends. Pompeius, the only man who had successfully bearded him, was the only friend
not mentioned in his will. If anything could palliate his remorseless selfishness, it is the candor with which he confessed it. He had made a vast private fortune out of his countryman's misery. When he surrendered his dictatorship, he offered a tenth of his property to Hercules, and gave a banquet to the people on so profuse a gaale that great
quantities of food were daily thrown into the Tiber. Some of the wine was forty years old, perhapsps wine of that vintage, which was gathered in when Gaius Gracchus died in the Middle of the banquet, his wife Metelli Sicond, and, in order that as PONTIFEXI might prevent his home being polluted by death, he divorced her and removed her to
another house whilst still alive. Soon afterwards he married another wife, who, at a gladiatorial show, came and plucked his sleeve in order, as she said, to obtain some of his good fortune. The rest of his life was spent near Kumai and hunting, writing his memoirs, amusing himself with actors, and practicing all sorts of debauchery. Ten days before he died, he settled the affairs of the people of Puteole at their request, and was busy in collecting funds to restore the capital
up to the last. Some say he died of the disease which destroyed Herod. Some say there is no such disease. Others say that he broke a blood vessel when in a rage. He is described as having blue eyes and a pale face so blotched over that he was likened to a mulberry sprinkled with meal. His death in seventy eight b C. Was the signal for that break up of his political institutions, to which he had wilfully shut his eyes. The great men of Rome began to wrangle
over his very body before it was cold. Lepidus, whom Pompeius, against Sullah's wishes, had helped to the consulship, opposed a public funeral. The other consul supported it. Sullah had, with his usual shrewdness, divined the character of Lepidus, and told Pompeius that he was only making a rival powerful. Pompeius supposed Lepidus now, for he knew that the partisans of Sullah would insist on doing honor to his memory. Appian
describes the funeral at length. The body was borne on a litter adorned with gold and other royal array, amid the flourish of trumpets, and with an escort of cavalry. After them followed a concourse of armed men, his old soldiers, who had thronged from all parts and fell in with the procession as each came up. Besides these there was as vast a crowd of other men as was ever seen at any funeral. In front were carried the axes and the other symbols of office which had belonged to
him as dictator. But it was not till the procession entered Rome that the full splendor of the ceremonial was seen. More than two thousand crowns of gold were born in front, gifts from towns, from his old comrades in arms, and his personal friends. In every other respect too, the pomp and circumstance of the funeral was past description in awe
of the veterans. All the priests of all the sacred fraternities were there in full robes, with the vestal virgins, and all the senators and all the magistrates, each in his garb of office. Next, in array that contrasted with theirs, came the Knights of Rome and Column. Then all the men whom Sullah had commanded in his wars, and who had vied with each other in hastening there carrying gilded
standards and silver plated shields. There was also a countless host of flute players, making now most tender, now most wailing music. A cry of benediction raised by the senators was taken up by the knights and the soldiers, and re echoed by the people. For some mourned his loss in reality, and others feared the soldiers and dreaded him in death as much as in life. The present scene recalling dreadful memories that he had been a friend to his friends, they could not but admit, but to the rest,
even when dead, he was still terrible. The body was exhibited before the rostra, and the greatest orator of the time spoke the funeral oration for Faustus. Sullah's son was too young to do so. Then some strong senators took up the litter on their shoulders and bore it to the Compass Martius, where kings only were wont to be buried. There it was placed on the funeral pyre, and the knights and all the armies circled round it in solemn procession.
And that was Sullah's ending. To the student of history, the story of such a funeral seems like the prostration of a nation of barbarians before the car of some demon god. If the strong personality of the man, with all that dauntless bravery, that unerring sagacity, that trenchant tongue, still after two thousand years, fascinates attention, if we are forced to own that for sheer power of will and intellect,
he stands in the very foremost rank of men. Yet we feel also that in the case of such superhuman wickedness tyrannicide Wood, if it ever could cease to be a crime end of Section sixteen