The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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Executions
Sulla had not sought and had not desired the difficult and dreadful
labour of the work of restoration; out, as no other choice was left
to him but either to leave it to utterly incapable hands or to
undertake it in person, he set himself to it with remorseless energy.
First of all a settlement had to be effected in respect to the guilty.
Sulla was personally inclined to pardon. Sanguine as he was in
temperament, he could doubtless break forth into violent rage, and
well might those beware who saw his eye gleam and his cheeks colour;
but the chronic vindictiveness, which characterized Marius in the
embitterment of his old age, was altogether foreign to Sulla's easy
disposition. Not only had he borne himself with comparatively great
moderation after the revolution of 666;(4) even the second revolution,
which had perpetrated so fearful outrages and had affected him in
person so severely, had not disturbed his equilibrium. At the same
time that the executioner was dragging the bodies of his friends
through the streets of the capital, he had sought to save the life of
the blood-stained Fimbria, and, when the latter died by his own hand,
had given orders for his decent burial. On landing in Italy he had
earnestly offered to forgive and to forget, and no one who came to
make his peace had been rejected. Even after the first successes
he had negotiated in this spirit with Lucius Scipio; it was the
revolutionary party, which had not only broken off these negotiations,
but had subsequently, at the last moment before their downfall,
resumed the massacres afresh and more fearfully than ever, and had
in fact conspired with the inveterate foes of their country for the
destruction of the city of Rome. The cup was now full. By virtue
of his new official authority Sulla, immediately after assuming the
regency, outlawed as enemies of their country all the civil and
military officials who had taken an active part in favour of the
revolution after the convention with Scipio (which according to
Sulla's assertion was validly concluded), and such of the other
burgesses as had in any marked manner aided its cause. Whoever
killed one of these outlaws was not only exempt from punishment like
an executioner duly fulfilling his office, but also obtained for the
execution a compensation of 12,000 -denarii- (480 pounds); any one on
the contrary who befriended an outlaw, even the nearest relative, 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 where the -Vicus
Jugarius- opened into the Forum, where the dictator had ordered them
to be publicly exposed; and among men of the second and third rank in
particular death reaped a fearful harvest. In addition to those who
were placed on the list for their services in or on behalf of the
revolutionary army with little discrimination, sometimes on account of
money advanced to one of its officers or on account of relations of
hospitality formed with such an one, the retaliation fell specially on
those capitalists who had sat in judgment on the senators and had
speculated in Marian confiscations--the "hoarders"; about 1600 of
the equites, as they were called,(6) were inscribed on the proscription-
list. In like manner the professional accusers, the worst scourge of
the nobility, who made it their trade to bring men of the senatorial
order before the equestrian courts, had now to suffer for it--"how
comes it to pass," an advocate soon after asked, "that they have left
to us the courts, when they were putting to death the accusers and
judges?" The most savage and disgraceful passions raged without
restraint for many months throughout Italy. In the capital a Celtic
band was primarily charged with the executions, and Sullan soldiers
and subaltern officers traversed for the same purpose the different
districts of Italy; but every volunteer was also welcome, and the
rabble high and low pressed forward not only to earn the rewards
of murder, but also to gratify their own vindictive or covetous
dispositions under the mantle of political prosecution. It sometimes
happened that the assassination did not follow, but preceded, the
placing of the name on the list of the proscribed. One example shows
the way in which these executions took place. At Larinum, a town of
new burgesses and favourable to Marian views, one Statius Albius
Oppianicus, who had fled to Sulla's headquarters to avoid a charge
of murder, made his appearance after the victory as commissioner of
the regent, deposed the magistrates of the town, installed himself
and his friends in their room, and caused the person who had
threatened to accuse him, along with his nearest relatives and
friends, to be outlawed and killed. Countless persons--including
not a few decided adherents of the oligarchy--thus fell as the victims
of private hostility or of their own riches: the fearful confusion,
and the culpable indulgence which Sulla displayed in this as in every
instance towards those more closely connected with him, prevented
any punishment even of the ordinary crimes that were perpetrated
amidst the disorder.
Confiscations
The confiscated property was dealt with in a similar way. Sulla
from political considerations sought to induce the respectable
burgesses to take part in its purchase; a great portion of them,
moreover, voluntarily pressed forward, and none more zealously than
the young Marcus Crassus. Under the existing circumstances the
utmost depreciation was inevitable; indeed, to some extent it was the
necessary result of the Roman plan of selling the property confiscated
by the state for a round sum payable in ready money. Moreover, the
regent did not forget himself; while his wife Metella more especially
and other persons high and low closely connected with him, even
freedmen and boon-companions, were sometimes allowed to purchase without
competition, sometimes had the purchase-money wholly or partially
remitted. One of his freedmen, for instance, is said to have
purchased a property of 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds) for 2000
(20 pounds), and one of his subalterns is said to have acquired by
such speculations an estate of 10,000,000 sesterces (100,000 pounds).
The indignation was great and just; even during Sulla's regency an
advocate asked whether the nobility had waged civil war solely for the
purpose of enriching their freedmen and slaves. But in spite of this
depreciation the whole proceeds of the confiscated estates amounted to
not less than 350,000,000 sesterces (3,500,000 pounds), which gives
an approximate idea of the enormous extent of these confiscations
falling chiefly on the wealthiest portion of the burgesses. It was
altogether a fearful punishment. There was no longer any process or
any pardon; mute terror lay like a weight of lead on the land, and
free speech was silenced in the market-place alike of the capital and
of the country-town. The oligarchic reign of terror bore doubtless a
different stamp from that of the revolution; while Marius had glutted
his personal vengeance in the blood of his enemies, Sulla seemed
to account terrorism in the abstract, if we may so speak, a thing
necessary to the introduction of the new despotism, and to prosecute
and make others prosecute the work of massacre almost with indifference.
But the reign of terror presented an appearance all the more horrible,
when it proceeded from the conservative side and was in some measure
devoid of passion; the commonwealth seemed all the more irretrievably
lost, when the frenzy and the crime on both sides were equally balanced.
Maintenance of the Burgess-Rights Previously Conferred
In regulating the relations of Italy and of the capital, Sulla--
although he otherwise in general treated as null all state-acts done
during the revolution except in the transaction of current business--
firmly adhered to the principle, which it had laid down, that every
burgess of an Italian community was by that very fact a burgess also
of Rome; the distinctions between burgesses and Italian allies,
between old burgesses with better, and new burgesses with more
restricted, rights, were abolished, and remained so. In the case
of the freedmen alone the unrestricted right of suffrage was again
withdrawn, and for them the old state of matters was restored.
To the aristocratic ultras this might seem a great concession;
Sulla perceived that it was necessary to wrest these mighty levers
out of the hands of the revolutionary chiefs, and that the rule
of the oligarchy was not materially endangered by increasing
the number of the burgesses.
Punishments Inflicted on Particular Communities
But with this concession in principle was combined a most rigid
inquisition, conducted by special commissioners with the co-operation
of the garrisons distributed throughout Italy, in respect to
particular communities in all districts of the land. Several towns
were rewarded; for instance Brundisium, the first community which
had joined Sulla, now obtained the exemption from customs so
important for such a seaport; more were punished. The less guilty
were required to pay fines, to pull down their walls, to raze their
citadels; in the case of those whose opposition had been most
obstinate the regent confiscated a part of their territory, in some
cases even the whole of it--as it certainly might be regarded in law as
forfeited, whether they were to be treated as burgess-communities which
had borne arms against their fatherland, or as allied states which had
waged war with Rome contrary to their treaties of perpetual peace.
In this case all the dispossessed burgesses--but these only--were
deprived of their municipal, and at the same time of the Roman,
franchise, receiving in return the lowest Latin rights.(7) Sulla
thus avoided furnishing the opposition with a nucleus in Italian
subject-communities of inferior rights; the homeless dispossessed
of necessity were soon lost in the mass of the proletariate.
In Campania not only was the democratic colony of Capua done away
and its domain given back to the state, as was naturally to be
expected, but the island of Aenaria (Ischia) was also, probably
about this time, withdrawn from the community of Neapolis. In Latium
the whole territory of the large and wealthy city of Praeneste and
presumably of Norba also was confiscated, as was likewise that of
Spoletium in Umbria. Sulmo in the Paelignian district was even
razed. But the iron arm of the regent fell with especial weight
on the two regions which had offered a serious resistance up to
the end and even after the battle at the Colline gate--Etruria and
Samnium. There a number of the most considerable communes, such
as Florentia, Faesulae, Arretium, Volaterrae, were visited with total
confiscation. Of the fate of Samnium we have already spoken; there
was no confiscation there, but the land was laid waste for ever, its
flourishing towns, even the former Latin colony of Aesernia, were left
in ruins, and the country was placed on the same footing with the
Bruttian and Lucanian regions.
Assignations to the Soldiers
These arrangements as to the property of the Italian soil placed
on the one hand those Roman domain-lands which had been handed
over in usufruct to the former allied communities and now on their
dissolution reverted to the Roman government, and on the other hand
the confiscated territories of the communities incurring punishment,
at the disposal of the regent; and he employed them for the purpose
of settling thereon the soldiers of the victorious army. Most of these
new settlements were directed towards Etruria, as for instance to
Faesulae and Arretium, others to Latium and Campania, where Praeneste
and Pompeii among other places became Sullan colonies. To repeople
Samnium was, as we have said, no part of the regent's design.
A great part of these assignations took place after the Gracchan
mode, so that the settlers were attached to an already-existing urban
community. The comprehensiveness of this settlement is shown by the
number of land-allotments distributed, which is stated at 120,000;
while yet some portions of land withal were otherwise applied, as
in the case of the lands bestowed on the temple of Diana at Mount
Tifata; others, such as the Volaterran domain and a part of the
Arretine, remained undistributed; others in fine, according to
the old abuse legally forbidden(8) but now reviving, were taken
possession of on the part of Sulla's favourites by the right of
occupation. The objects which Sulla aimed at in this colonization
were of a varied kind. In the first place, he thereby redeemed
the pledge given to his soldiers. Secondly, he in so doing adopted
the idea, in which the reform-party and the moderate conservatives
concurred, and in accordance with which he had himself as early
as 666 arranged the establishment of a number of colonies--
the idea namely of augmenting the number of the small agricultural
proprietors in Italy by a breaking up of the larger possessions
on the part of the government; how seriously he had this at heart
is shown by the renewed prohibition of the throwing together of
allotments. Lastly and especially, he saw in these settled
soldiers as it were standing garrisons, who would protect his new
constitution along with their own right of property. For this
reason, where the whole territory was not confiscated, as at Pompeii,
the colonists were not amalgamated with the urban-community, but
the old burgesses and the colonists were constituted as two bodies
of burgesses associated within the same enclosing wall. In other
respects these colonial foundations were based, doubtless, like the
older ones, on a decree of the people, but only indirectly, in so
far as the regent constituted them by virtue of the clause of the
Valerian law to that effect; in reality they originated from the
ruler's plenitude of power, and so far recalled the freedom with
which the former regal authority disposed of the state-property.
But, in so far as the contrast between the soldier and the burgess,
which was in other instances done away by the very sending out of
the soldiers or colonists, was intended to remain, and did remain,
in force in the Sullan colonies even after their establishment,
and these colonists formed, as it were, the standing array of the
senate, they are not incorrectly designated, in contradistinction
to the older ones, as military colonies.
The Cornelian Freedmen in Rome
Akin to this practical constituting of a standing army for the senate
was the measure by which the regent selected from the slaves of the
proscribed upwards of 10,000 of the youngest and most vigorous men,
and manumitted them in a body. These new Cornelians, whose civil
existence was linked to the legal validity of the institutions of their
patron, were designed to be a sort of bodyguard for the oligarchy and
to help it to command the city populace, on which, indeed, in the
absence of a garrison everything in the capital now primarily depended.
Abolition of the Gracchan Institutions
These extraordinary supports on which the regent made the oligarchy
primarily to rest, weak and ephemeral as they doubtless might appear
even to their author, were yet its only possible buttresses, unless
expedients were to be resorted to--such as the formal institution
of a standing army in Rome and other similar measures--which would
have put an end to the oligarchy far sooner than the attacks of
demagogues. The permanent foundation of the ordinary governing
power of the oligarchy of course could not but be the senate,
with a power so increased and so concentrated that it presented a
superiority to its non-organized opponents at every single point
of attack. The system of compromises followed for forty years was
at an end. The Gracchan constitution, still spared in the first
Sullan reform of 666, was now utterly set aside. Since the time of
Gaius Gracchus the government had conceded, as it were, the right of
-'emeute- to the proletariate of the capital, and bought it off by
regular distributions of corn to the burgesses domiciled there;
Sulla abolished these largesses. Gaius Gracchus had organized and
consolidated the order of capitalists by the letting of the tenths
and customs of the province of Asia in Rome; Sulla abolished the
system of middlemen, and converted the former contributions of the
Asiatics into fixed taxes, which were assessed on the several
districts according to the valuation-rolls drawn up for the purpose
of gathering in the arrears.(9) Gaius Gracchus had by entrusting
the posts of jurymen to men of equestrian census procured for
the capitalist class an indirect share in administering and in
governing, which proved itself not seldom stronger than the official
adminis-tration and government; Sulla abolished the equestrian and
restored the senatorial courts. Gaius Gracchus or at any rate the
Gracchan period had conceded to the equites a special place at the
popular festivals, such as the senators had for long possessed;(10)
Sulla abolished it and relegated the equites to the plebeian benches.(11)
The equestrian order, created as such by Gaius Gracchus, was deprived
of its political existence by Sulla. The senate was to exercise
the supreme power in legislation, administration, and jurisdiction,
unconditionally, indivisibly, and permanently, and was to be
distinguished also by outward tokens not merely as a privileged,
but as the only privileged, order.
Reorganization of the Senate
Its Complement Filled Up by Extraordinary Election
Admission to the Senate through the Quaestorship
Abolition of the Censorial Supervision of the Senate
For this purpose the governing board had, first of all, to have its
ranks filled up and to be itself placed on a footing of independence.
The numbers of the senators had been fearfully reduced by the recent
crises. Sulla no doubt now gave to those who were exiled by the
equestrian courts liberty to return, for instance to the consular
Publius Rutilius Rufus,(12) who however made no use of the permission,
and to Gaius Cotta the friend of Drusus;(13) but this made only slight
amends for the gaps which the revolutionary and reactionary reigns
of terror had created in the ranks of the senate. Accordingly by
Sulla's directions the senate had its complement extraordinarily made
up by about 300 new senators, whom the assembly of the tribes had
to nominate from among men of equestrian census, and whom they
selected, as may be conceived, chiefly from the younger men of the
senatorial houses on the one hand, and from Sullan officers and
others brought into prominence by the last revolution on the other.
For the future also the mode of admission to the senate was
regulated anew and placed on an essentially different basis.
As the constitution had hitherto stood, men entered the senate
either through the summons of the censors, which was the proper and
ordinary way, or through the holding of one of the three curule
magistracies--the consulship, the praetorship, or the aedileship--
to which since the passing of the Ovinian law a seat and vote in
the senate had been de jure attached.(14) The holding of an inferior
magistracy, of the tribunate or the quaestorship, gave doubtless a
claim de facto to a place in the senate--inasmuch as the censorial
selection especially turned towards the men who had held such
offices--but by no means a reversion de jure. Of these two modes
of admission, Sulla abolished the former by setting aside--at least
practically--the censorship, and altered the latter to the effect
that the right of admission to the senate was attached to the
quaestorship instead of the aedileship, and at the same time
the number of quaestors to be annually nominated was raised to
twenty.(15) The prerogative hitherto legally pertaining to the
censors, although practically no longer exercised in its original
serious sense--of deleting any senator from the roll, with a
statement of the reasons for doing so, at the revisals which
took place every five years (16)--likewise fell into abeyance for
the future; the irremoveable character which had hitherto de facto
belonged to the senators was thus finally fixed by Sulla.
The total number of senators, which hitherto had presumably not
much exceeded the old normal number of 300 and often perhaps had
not even reached it, was by these means considerably augmented,
perhaps on an average doubled(17)--an augmentation which was rendered
necessary by the great increase of the duties of the senate through
the transference to it of the functions of jurymen. As, moreover,
both the extraordinarily admitted senators and the quaestors were
nominated by the -comitia tributa-, the senate, hitherto resting
indirectly on the election of the people,(18) was now based throughout
on direct popular election; and thus made as close an approach to a
representative government as was compatible with the nature of the
oligarchy and the notions of antiquity generally. The senate had in
course of time been converted from a corporation intended merely to
advise the magistrates into a board commanding the magistrates and
self-governing; it was only a consistent advance in the same direction,
when the right of nominating and cancelling senators originally
belonging to the magistrates was withdrawn from them, and the senate
was placed on the same legal basis on which the magistrates' power
itself rested. The extravagant prerogative of the censors to revise
the list of the senate and to erase or add names at pleasure was
in reality incompatible with an organized oligarchic constitution.
As provision was now made for a sufficient regular recruiting of its
ranks by the election of the quaestors, the censorial revisions became
superfluous; and by their abeyance the essential principle at the
bottom of every oligarchy, the irremoveable character and life-tenure
of the members of the ruling order who obtained seat and vote,
was definitively consolidated.
Regulations As to the Burgesses
In respect to legislation Sulla contented himself with reviving the
regulations made in 666, and securing to the senate the legislative
initiative, which had long belonged to it practically, by legal
enactment at least as against the tribunes. The burgess-body
remained formally sovereign; but so far as its primary assemblies
were concerned, while it seemed to the regent necessary carefully
to preserve the form, he was still more careful to prevent any real
activity on their part. Sulla dealt even with the franchise itself
in the most contemptuous manner; he made no difficulty either in
conceding it to the new burgess-communities, or in bestowing it on
Spaniards and Celts en masse; in fact, probably not without design,
no steps were taken at all for the adjustment of the burgess-roll,
which nevertheless after so violent revolutions stood in urgent
need of a revision, if the government was still at all in earnest
with the legal privileges attaching to it. The legislative functions
of the comitia, however, were not directly restricted; there was
no need in fact for doing so, for in consequence of the better-
secured initiative of the senate the people could not readily
against the will of the government intermeddle with administration,
finance, or criminal jurisdiction, and its legislative co-operation
was once more reduced in substance to the right of giving assent to
alterations of the constitution.