rout; but Crassus meanwhile, with the right, had broken the enemy's ranks, and pursued them as far as Antemnæ. Eight thousand Italians were made prisoners, and the Roman officers captured in their ranks were put to the sword. Pontius Telesinus, grievously wounded in the fight, was slain by the conqueror on the field of battle. His whole life had been devoted to the hatred of Rome, but he was the last of her Italian enemies. As the adversary of the Decii and the Fabii he might have been her destroyer, and have changed the face of history. But in the age of Marius and Sulla he could only hope for one day of plunder and conflagration, and when this was denied him he might be content to die among fifty thousand brave men, of whom a full half were Romans.

The Prænestines had indulged for a moment in the belief that their foe was defeated, but when they saw the heads of the Italians and the Marians paraded before them they opened their gates to the conquerors. The young Marius had retired to a covert underground with the brother of Pontius the Samnite. Determined not to fall into the enemy's hands, they challenged each other to the combat, and Marius, having slain his associate, caused himself to be despatched by a slave. A few cities still held out. At Norba, in Latium, the inhabitants chose to consume their city, U.C. 672. rather than surrender it. Nola opened its gates after a B.O. 82. long defence. Volaterræ resisted for two years. But the struggle in Italy came finally to a close. Spain and Africa rose, indeed, against the Roman government, but their efforts were ineffectual to prolong the contest in the peninsula.

Events and circumstances had developed Sulla's policy. In his early years he had surprised his countrymen by his success in warfare 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 between their manners, origin, and connections. Brooding over his personal resentments, Sulla had come insensibly to identify himself with the cause of the oligarchy. The sanguinary violence of Marius and Cinna had irritated the champion of the persecuted faction, and he had vowed no less bloody vengeance against the authors of the proscriptions. But the opposition he encountered in Italy expanded his views beyond the limits of mere 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 they had breathed against the city and the people sank into his mind. He had displayed in the East his contempt for the just claims of the provincials. The cries of the wretched Greeks and Asiatics he had mocked with

CHAP. XXXIII.

SULLA'S PROSCRIPTIONS.

261

The

pitiless scorn, and had loaded them again with the chains from which they hoped to have been freed by Mithridates. man who had reconquered Greece had now reconquered Italy. He would enforce a similar policy in the one case and the other.

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. Violent and piteous cries were heard in the distance. "No matter," he calmly remarked to the senators; "it is only some rascals whom I have ordered to be punished." They were the deathcries of the 8000 Samnite prisoners whom he had brought to be cut in pieces by his soldiers in the Campus Martius. He soon turned his blows from the Italians upon the Romans. On 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 be good to them if they obeyed him well; but to his foes he would give no quarter, to high as well as low, prætors, quæstors, tribunes, and whosoever had provoked his indignation.

These words were in fact a signal to his creatures, and before the names of the required victims had been made public many a private vengeance was wreaked and many a claim made on the conqueror's gratitude. The family of Marius was among the first to be attacked. One of his relatives, Marius Gratidianus, was pursued by Catilina and murdered with cruel torments. The corpse of the great warrior 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 funeral rites was an impiety hitherto unknown in the contests of the Romans. It was the more deeply felt by a shocked and offended people. The troubled ghost, according to the poet Lucan, continued to haunt the spot and scared the peasant from his labor on the eve of impending revolutions.

A great number of victims had already perished when Catulus. demanded of Sulla in the Senate how far the sacrifice must extend. Thereupon a list of proscriptions appeared containing eighty names. This caused a general murmur; nevertheless, two days later, 230, and the next day as many more, were added. Nor would the tyrant yet declare that with these he should be finally satisfied: "By and by he might remember more." Rewards were offered for slaying the proscribed; it was declared capital to harbor them. Their fortunes were confiscated or abandoned to their assassins; their descendants made incapable of public office. Nor

U.C. 672. B.C. 82.

were the proscriptions confined to residents at Rome; they were extended to every city in Italy. From December (82) to June of the year following this system of authorized murder was allowed to continue. Catilina, who had previously assassinated a brother, now got his victim's name placed on the fatal list in order to secure his estate. The favorites of Sulla, his slaves and freedmen, sold the right of inscribing the names of the persons whom any one wished to destroy. The dignity of public vengeance was prostituted to private pique and cupidity. Such were the murmurs which long resounded among the Roman people at the use and abuse of the terrible proscriptions.

Sulla might smile to see the number of accomplices he had associated in his crimes, and he made these more conspicuous by the rewards with which he loaded them. Many of them were men whom he might expect to become prominent afterwards. On Catilina, the boldest and most unscrupulous of all, a man of blasted character and ruined fortunes, as he is represented to us, he heaped golden favors. The young Crassus, who had narrowly escaped the sword of Marius, now laid the foundation of the wealth which earned him the renown of "the richest of the Ro mans." Cnæus Pompeius 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 Sulla's stepdaughter Metella; but he at least withdrew his hand from the stain of the proscriptions. Caius Julius Cæsar, then a youth of eighteen, 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 favor, and pleaded his youth, his careless temper and dissipated habits, in proof of his innocence or his harmlessness. "I spare him," answered Sulla; "but beware! In that young trifler there is more than one Marius." Cæsar was saved; but he prudently withdrew from the scene of danger, and repaired to the East, where he served at the siege of Mitylene, which still held out for Mithridates.

The proscriptions were lists of selected victims; and though hundreds undoubtedly perished whose names had never been publicly designated, yet the numbers that fell in these massacres were not beyond the reach of computation. Our accounts, indeed, vary; but of senators were slain perhaps from one to two hundred, of knights between two and three thousand. The victims of a lower class may have been much more numerous. But the destruction.

CHAP. XXXIII. FALL OF ETRURIA AND SAMNIUM.

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Cities

of the Italians was far more sweeping and indiscriminate. were dismantled and even razed to the ground; their lands were distributed among Sulla's veterans, of whom 120,000 were settled in colonies from one end of the peninsula to the other. The Samnite people, according to the popular tradition, were utterly annihilated. Of all their cities, Beneventum alone, it is said, was left standing. These, no doubt, are immense exaggerations. But the people of Præneste, we must believe, were slaughtered wholesale. The Etrurians suffered little less. The great centre of their ancient civilization had long fallen into decay; but a new class of towns had risen on their ruins, and attained to wealth and celebrity. Of these Spoletum, Volaterræ, Interamna, and Fæsulæ were delivered to Roman colonists; Fæsulæ itself was dismantled, and the new city of Florentia erected with the fragments of its ruins. Throughout large districts the population entirely changed; everywhere the chief people perished from off the face of the land, and with them most that was distinctive in the manners and institutions, and even in the language of the country. The civilization of Etruria disappeared from the sight of men, to be rediscovered at the end of twenty centuries among the buried tombs of forgotten Lucumonз.

The same exterminating policy extended also to the provinces, wherever any symptoms of discontent had been manifested. Sulla had chastised Greece and Asia with a rod of iron. He now directed his officers to chase his enemies from the retreats to which they had been invited in Sicily, Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Metellus fell upon the Cisalpine, another Flaccus devastated the Narbonensis, Pompeius was sent to punish the provinces of the South, and Annius was deputed to follow Sertorius into Spain. 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 harassed population of the eastern coasts had betaken itself in vast numbers to the waters, and infested the bays of Greece and Italy itself with fleets of pirate vessels. The mountains of Etruria and Sabellia, of Samnium and Lucania, swarmed with miserable fugitives from spoliation and slaughter, while armed bands roamed beneath the walls of populous cities, ready to carry off any booty that fell in their way, and rendering 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. Such is the picture, which we dare not consider overcharged, of the state to which the civilized empire of the Romans had been reduced by their political system and the atrocities it had engendered.

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 claims of a dissatisfied 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, long harassed by war, were now.crushed by imposts. Treaties and promises were alike disregarded. All were forced to contribute, not only the states regularly assessed, but even those which had acquired by their services immunity and independence. To satisfy the requisitions made upon them many cities were constrained to pledge their public lands, their temples, their ports, and even the stones of their walls. Sulla sold the sovereignty of the independent kingdom of Egypt to Ptolemy Alexander II., requiring him in turn to leave it by will to the Roman people. Donations were demanded of foreign kings and potentates. The revolution in the capital extended its shock to the farthest limits where the name of Rome was known; and the restoration of the ancient republic, which her conqueror pretended to effect, required the efforts and sacrifices, not of her own parties and factions only, but of her subjects, her allies, and her dependents.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

The consul Carbo put to death in Sicily by Pompeius.-Sulla appointed dictator, without limit of time.-He reconstitutes the republic in the interest of the oligarchy.-He reconstructs the Senate, gives to it supreme legislative authority, restores to it the judicia, and curtails the power of the tribunes. Further legislation of Sulla.-Evil effect of his military colonies.Sumptuary laws.-Sulla resigns the dictatorship.-His fanatical belief in his own good fortune.-His death.-Review of the spirit of Sulla's policy. -Its inefficiency and speedy overthrow.-His military services great and durable. (B.c. 82-78.)

THE reign of violence and anarchy dated from the victory of U.C. 672. the Colline Gate, the 1st of November (B.c. 82). While B.C. 82. the young Marius and his colleague still occupied the consular office, the actual master of Rome could have no legal authority within the city. He was proconsul, he was imperator, he was omnipotent in his own camp, but he had no right to enter the walls. He set up his prætorium in the Campus, surrounded by his armed soldiers, raised far above the laws, and yet paying an appearance of respect to the letter while he trampled under foot their spirit. The death of Marius a few days later rendered vacant