The Storm Before the Storm полностью

With anxiety running high in the richer quarters of the city, a small deputation of senators approached Sulla and asked for some relief. They said, “We do not ask you to free from punishment those whom you have determined to slay, but to free from suspense those whom you have determined to save.” When Sulla replied that he did not know whom he would save, one senator said, “Let us know whom you intend to punish.” If everyone knew whom Sulla considered his mortal enemy, it would resolve a lot of anxiety on the Palatine Hill. Sulla took their words to heart and spent the night with his closest advisers talking it through. Obviously men who had served magistracies or senior commands in the Cinnan regime would be marked for death, as would any noncombatant senator who had actively collaborated with the regime. The next morning, Sulla posted an inscribed tablet containing eighty names. These named men could be killed on sight and their property confiscated. The Sullan proscriptions had begun.⁵

THE LIST OF proscribed enemies started as way to free the innocent from fear. When the original list of eighty names went up, it seemed that the surgeon Sulla was going back to work. Yes, it was a seven-fold increase of the twelve men named after the first march on Rome, but a lot had happened since then. Sulla’s enemies had declared him an enemy of the state, seized his property, exiled his family, killed his friends, and forced him to fight a civil war. Eighty seemed a bargain to atone for all that. But though a few of these eighty men scrambled to extract themselves from Rome, most already knew they could expect no mercy. Carbo, Norbanus, and Sertorius were all on the list. They had fled already. Since Marius had escaped Sulla’s wrath by dying, Sulla settled for demolishing Marius’s monuments and digging up the body of his late nemesis and scattering the bones.⁶

But the next day, the people of Rome awoke to a frightening revision. Overnight Sulla posted in the Forum a new list with 220 additional names. Men who had breathed a sigh of relief the day before now faced death. The following morning another new list went up. It now contained more than five hundred names. Now everyone lived in fear that at any moment they would be proscribed. A man who had been spared from the original lists arrived in the Forum one day to discover his name was now posted. When he discovered he was marked for death, he tried to cover his face and withdraw, but he was spotted, attacked, and killed on the spot. Another man reveled in the early days of the killing and mocked those who faced grim death. His name appeared on the list the next day; he was killed and his property confiscated. In addition to the proscribed themselves, anyone caught harboring a fugitive was also subject to immediate execution. Far from relieving tension, the proscription blanketed Italy under a reign of terror.⁷

As the proscriptions continued, the promise to limit victims to Sulla’s personal enemies went up in smoke. Sulla not only paid a bounty for every head delivered, but he allowed the murderers a share of the victim’s property. This led to an odious mingling of political proscription and personal profit as men with hard hearts and empty wallets fanned out across the peninsula to get rich killing Sulla’s enemies. With the official proscription list ever changing, a man’s name could be added to the list simply because he was rich and held valuable property. An apolitical Equestrian named Quintus Aurelius found his name posted on the list and lamented that he was, “done for because of my Alban Farm.”⁸

Out in the countryside of Italy, the list itself acted as a basic guideline with improvisation left to the discretion of senior officers. Among those sent forth was Marcus Licinius Crassus, the hero of the Battle of the Colline Gate. Accompanied by a greedy and brutal young officer named Gaius Verres, Crassus traveled a circuit across Italy taking testimony from locals about anti-Sullans in their midst. The guidelines of the proscription now included any family that had rendered material aid to Sulla’s enemies, so local merchants, bankers, and magistrates were seized and executed. But, as often as not, local pro-Sullan leaders took the opportunity to eliminate personal rivals, naming men who were not enemies of Sulla, but enemies of themselves. Little care or notice was taken why a man was named, but the punishment was always the same: execution and confiscation of property. Crassus and Verres both became experts at this swift and profitable justice. Beginning his infamously sadistic career in real estate, Crassus had a man executed in Bruttium just to seize an attractive estate.⁹