The Storm Before the Storm полностью

Aside from Sulla’s formal representatives like Crassus, unofficial murder gangs also now roamed the streets. Professional proscription became a lucrative business to get into. Joining these gangs was another ambitious youth with a cruel streak named Lucius Sergius Catilina, more commonly known as Catiline. In twenty years, Catiline would stand at the center of another cycle of revolutionary upheaval, but for the moment he was simply a young Sullan partisan on the make. Coveting the property of his brother-in-law, Catiline killed the man to get title to the land. Then he made a run through the Equestrian merchant class, murdering his way to an impressive portfolio. He rounded this out by targeting his other brother-in-law—who just so happened to be Marcus Marius Gratidianus, the nephew of Marius who had introduced the measure to guarantee coins during the Cinnan regime. Falsely accusing Gratidianus of murdering Catulus during the Marian terror, Catiline dragged his brother-in-law to Catulus’s tomb and brutally murdered him.¹⁰

With the rules collapsing, the proscription became self-perpetuating as new victims could always be named. One man was killed for lamenting the death of his friend. One of Sulla’s freedmen killed another man to settle a personal score, then conspired to add the victim’s name to the list after the fact. Another freedman was dragged to face Sulla after he was discovered hiding one of the proscribed. To his astonishment, Sulla discovered the man was his old upstairs neighbor from when he lived in the rented apartment before his public career began. Sulla ordered his old neighbor tossed from the Tarpeian Rock.¹¹

The proscriptions soon reached beyond Italy as many of Sulla’s principal enemies had fled the peninsula. Norbanus was located in Rhodes. Agents of Sulla demanded the city hand him over or face grave consequences. As the Rhodians debated what to do, Norbanus did them all a favor by going down to the marketplace and committing suicide. Sulla also dispatched Pompey to personally hunt down Carbo. Following intelligence that Carbo was on an island off the coast of Sicily, Pompey sailed for Sicily. Upon arrival Pompey convened summary tribunals to identify and execute known anti-Sullan partisans. When the people of Messana protested that the tribunals were illegal, Pompey snapped, “Cease quoting laws to us that have swords.” Carbo was soon tracked down and dragged before the tribunal. Though Carbo was still tecÚically consul of Rome, Pompey paid the sanctity of the office no mind. He ordered Gnaeus Papirius Carbo, three-time consul of Rome, executed on the spot.¹²

In the final stage of the proscriptions, the killing became indiscriminate. Because this was ancient Rome and not the digital age, no one really knew what a proscribed man actually looked like. When a proscription gang had trouble tracking down the real victim, they seized random people off the street. These anonymous heads were then presented to Sulla as if they were real men from the list. Sulla asked few questions and always paid the bounty. The idea that there was any rationality or morality to the proscriptions became a cruel joke: “The whole state was now plunging headlong into ruin… avarice furnished a motive for ruthlessness; the magnitude of one’s crime was determined by the magnitude of his property; he who possessed riches became a malefactor and was in each case the prize set up for his own murder. In short nothing was regarded as dishonorable that brought profit.”¹³

As the weeks passed and the killing continued, some effort was finally made to end the terror. Sulla announced that no more names would be proscribed after June 1, 82. In the meantime, men already on the list might use friends influential with Sulla to get their names off the list, the most famous case of this sort being nineteen-year-old Gaius Julius Caesar—the Gaius Julius Caesar. In addition to the crime of being Marius’s nephew, Caesar had also married Cinna’s daughter. Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce his wife, but Caesar refused. So Caesar’s name went on the proscription list and he was forced into hiding. But the young man had friends deep in Sulla’s inner circle, and after a few weeks they secured him a pardon. Sulla did not grant the pardon without reservation, however, and said, “Have your way and take him; only bear in mind that the man you are so eager to save will one day deal the death blow to the cause of the aristocracy, which you have joined with me in upholding; for in this Caesar there is more than one Marius.”¹⁴