ered on grounds
of private enmity, who had never had anything to do with Sulla, but he
consented to their death to please his adherents. At last a young man,
Caius Metellus, had the boldness to ask Sulla in the Senate-house,
when there would be an end to these miseries, and how far he would
proceed before they could hope to see them stop. "We are not
deprecating," he said, "your vengeance against those whom you have
determined to put out of the way, but we entreat you to relieve from
uncertainty those whom you have determined to spare." Sulla replied,
that he had not yet determined whom he would spare. "Tell us then,"
said Metellus, "whom you intend to punish." Sulla said that he would.
Some say that it was not Metellus, but Afidius,[283] one of Sulla's
flatterers, who made use of the last expression. Sulla immediately
proscribed eighty persons without communicating with any magistrate.
As this caused a general murmur, he let one day pass, and then
proscribed two hundred and twenty more, and again on the third day as
many. In an harangue to the people, he said, with reference to these
measures, that he had proscribed all he could think of, and as to
those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe them at some
future time. It was part of the proscription[284] that every man who
received and protected a proscribed person should be put to death for
his humanity; and there was no exception for brothers, children, or
parents. The reward for killing a proscribed person was two talents,
whether it was a slave who killed his master or a son who killed his
father. But what was considered most unjust of all, he affixed infamy
on the sons and grandsons of the proscribed and confiscated their
property. The proscriptions were not confined to Rome; they extended
to every city of Italy: neither temple nor hospitable hearth nor
father's house was free from murder, but husbands were butchered in
the arms of their wives, and children in the embrace of their mothers.
The number of those who were massacred through revenge and hatred was
nothing compared with those who were murdered for their property. It
occurred even to the assassins to observe that the ruin of such a one
was due to his large house, another man owed his death to his orchard,
and another again to his warm baths. Quintus Aurelius, a man who
never meddled with public affairs, and though he was no further
concerned about all these calamities except so far as he sympathise