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interesting than any account of the great facts, however grand.

The Kalends of June had been fixed by Sulla as the day on which the
slaughter legalized by the proscriptions should cease. In the September
following an old gentleman named Sextus Roscius was murdered in the
streets of Rome as he was going home from supper one night, attended by
two slaves. By whom he was murdered, probably more than one or two knew
then, but nobody knows now. He was a man of reputation, well acquainted
with the Metelluses and Messalas of the day, and passing rich. His name
had been down on no proscription list, for he had been a friend of
Sulla's friends. He was supposed, when he was murdered, to be worth
about six million of sesterces, or something between fifty and sixty
thousand pounds of our money. Though there was at that time much money
in Rome, this amounted to wealth; and though we cannot say who murdered
the man, we may feel sure that he was murdered for his money.

Immediately on his death his chattels were seized and sold--or divided,
probably, without being sold--including his slaves, in whom, as with
every rich Roman, much of his wealth was invested; and his landed
estates--his farms, of which he had many--were also divided. As to the
actual way in which this was done, we are left much in the dark. Had the
name of Sextus Roscius been on one of the lists, even though the list
would then have been out of date, we could have understood that it
should have been so. Jupiter Optimus Maximus could not see everything,
and great advantages were taken. We must only suppose that things were
so much out of order that they who had been accustomed to seize upon the
goods of the proscribed were able to stretch their hands so as to grasp
almost anything that came in their way. They could no longer procure a
rich man's name to be put down on the list, but they could pretend that
it had been put down. At any rate, certain persons seized and divided
the chattels of the murdered man as though he had been proscribed.

Old Roscius, when he was killed, had one son, of whom we are told that
he lived always in the country at Ameria, looking after his father's
farms, never visiting the capital, which was distant from Ameria
something under fifty miles; a rough, uncouth, and probably honest
man--one, at any rate, to whom the ways of the city were unknown, and
who must have been but partially acquainted with the doings of the
time.[64] As we read th