battle, and at length gain a
complete victory. Fifty thousand men were said to have fallen on each
side. All the most distinguished leaders of the Marian party either
perished in the engagement, or were taken prisoners and put to death.
Among these was the brave Samnite Pontius, whose head was cut off and
carried under the walls of Praeneste, thereby announcing to the young
Marius that his last hope of succour was gone. To the Samnite prisoners
Sulla showed no mercy. He was resolved to root out of the peninsula
those heroic enemies of Rome. On the third day after the battle he
collected all the Samnite and Lucanian prisoners in the Campus Martius,
and ordered his soldiers to cut them down. The dying shrieks of so many
victims frightened the Senators, who had been assembled at the same time
by Sulla in the temple of Bellona; but he bade them attend to what he
was saying, and not mind what was taking place outside, as he was only
chastising some rebels. Praeneste surrendered soon afterward. The Romans
in the town were pardoned; but all the Samnites and Praenestines were
massacred without mercy. The younger Marius put an end to his own life.
The war in Italy was now virtually at an end, for the few towns which
still held out had no prospect of offering any effectual opposition, and
were reduced soon afterward. In other parts of the Roman world the war
continued still longer, and Sulla did not live to see its completion.
The armies of the Marian party in Sicily and Africa were subdued by
Pompey in the course of the same year; but Sertorius in Spain continued
to defy all the attempts of the Senate till B.C. 72.

Sulla was now master of Rome. He had not commenced the Civil war, but
had been driven to it by the mad ambition of Marius. His enemies had
attempted to deprive him of the command in the Mithridatic war, which
had been legally conferred upon him by the Senate; and while he was
righting the battles of the Republic they had declared him a public
enemy, confiscated his property, and murdered the most distinguished of
his friends and adherents. For all these wrongs Sulla had threatened to
take the most ample vengeance; and he more than redeemed his word. He
resolved to extirpate the popular party root and branch. One of his
first acts was to draw up a list of his enemies who were to be put to
death, which list was exhibited in the forum to public inspection, and
called a _Proscriptio_. It was the first instance of the kind