, was
liable to the severest punishment. The property of the proscribed
was forfeited to the state like the spoil of an enemy; their children
and grandchildren were excluded from a political career, and yet,
so far as they were of senatorial rank, were bound to undertake their
share of senatorial burdens. The last enactments also applied to the
estates and the descendants of those who had fallen in conflict for
the revolution--penalties which went even beyond those enjoined by
the earliest law in the case of such as had borne arms against their
fatherland. The most terrible feature in this system of terror was
the indefiniteness of the proposed categories, against which there was
immediate remonstrance in the senate, and which Sulla himself sought
to remedy by directing the names of the proscribed to be publicly
posted up and fixing the 1st June 673 as the final term for closing
the lists of proscription.

Proscription-Lists

Much as this bloody roll, swelling from day to day and amounting
at last to 4700 names,(5) excited the just horror of the multitude,
it at any rate checked in some degree the mere caprice of the
executioners. It was not at least to the personal resentment of
the regent that the mass of these victims were sacrificed; his furious
hatred was directed solely against the Marians, the authors of the
hideous massacres of 667 and 672. By his command the tomb of the
victor of Aquae Sextiae was broken open and his ashes were scattered
in the Anio, the monuments of his victories over Africans and Germans
were overthrown, and, as death had snatched himself and his son from
Sulla's vengeance, his adopted nephew Marcus Marius Gratidianus,
who had been twice praetor and was a great favourite with the Roman
burgesses, was executed amid the most cruel tortures at the tomb
of Catulus, who most deserved to be regretted of all the Marian
victims. In other cases also death had already swept away the most
notable of his opponents: of the leaders there survived only Gaius
Norbanus, who laid hands on himself at Rhodes, while the -ecclesia-
was deliberating on his surrender; Lucius Scipio, for whom his
insignificance and probably also his noble birth procured indulgence
and permission to end his days in peace at his retreat in Massilia;
and Quintus Sertorius, who was wandering about as an exile on the
coast of Mauretania. But yet the heads of slaughtered senators were
piled up at the Servilian Basin, at the point