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The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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A great number of victims had already perished, when Catulus demanded of Sulla in the senate, “Whom then shall we keep to enjoy our victory with, if blood continues to flow in our cities as abundantly as on the battle-field?” A young Metellus had the boldness to ask when there would be an end to these miseries, and how far he would proceed before they might hope to see them stayed. “Spare not,” he added, “whomsoever it is expedient to remove; only relieve from uncertainty those whom you mean to save.” Sulla coldly replied that he had not yet determined whom he would spare. “Tell us then,” exclaimed Metellus, “whom you intend to punish.” Thereupon a list of proscriptions appeared containing eighty names. This caused a general murmur; nevertheless, two days after, 230, and the next day as many more, were added to the list. And this proscription, in which Sulla had consulted no magistrate, was accompanied with a speech in which he said that he had proscribed all he could think of for the present; by and by he might perhaps remember more. Rewards were offered for slaying the proscribed; it was rendered capital to harbour them. Their descendants were declared incapable of public office, and their fortunes were confiscated to the use of the state, though in most cases they were actually seized and retained by private hands. Nor were the proscriptions confined to Rome; they were extended to every city in Italy, and throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula neither temple nor domestic hearth offered security to the fugitives. From the first of December 82 to the first of June in the following year, this authorised system of murder was allowed to continue. Catiline, who had previously assassinated a brother, now got his victim’s name placed on the fatal list, in order to secure his estate. The favourites of Sulla, his slaves and freedmen, drove a lucrative trade in selling the right to inscribe the names of persons whom any one wished to make away with. The dignity of public vengeance was prostituted to mere private pique and cupidity.[94] One man was killed for his house, another for his gardens, another for his baths.[95] One unfortunate wretch, who had never meddled with affairs, examined the lists out of mere curiosity. Horror-struck on seeing his own inscribed, “My Alban farm,” he exclaimed, “has ruined me”; and hardly had he spoken the words before the pursuers smote him.
Sulla might smile to see the number of accomplices he had associated in his crimes, and he sought perhaps to render their share in these horrors more conspicuous by the rewards with which he loaded them. Upon Catiline, the boldest and readiest of his partisans, a man of blasted character and ruined fortunes, he heaped golden favours. The young Crassus, who had so narrowly escaped the sword of Marius, now laid the foundation of the wealth which earned him the renown of the richest of the Romans. Pompey had executed without remorse his master’s vengeance upon captives taken in arms; at his command he had consented to divorce his wife Antistia, and take in her stead Sulla’s step-daughter Metella; but he withheld his hand from the stain of the proscriptions, and scorned perhaps to enrich himself with the spoils of judicial massacre. Among the kinsmen of Marius was one whom Sulla himself vouchsafed to spare. Caius Julius Cæsar, then eighteen years of age, was connected by blood with Marius,[96] and by marriage with Cinna. Sulla contented himself with requiring him to repudiate his wife. Cæsar refused, and fled into the Sabine mountains. The assassins were on his track, while his friends at Rome exerted themselves to the utmost to obtain his pardon. The vestals interceded for him.
Some of Sulla’s own adherents raised their voices in his favour, and pleaded his youth, his reckless temper and dissipated habits, in proof of his innocence or harmlessness. “I spare him,” exclaimed Sulla, “but beware! in that young trifler there is more than one Marius.” Cæsar was saved; but he prudently repaired to the siege of Mytilene.
The proscriptions were lists of selected victims, and though hundreds undoubtedly perished whose names had never been publicly devoted to slaughter, yet the number of the original citizens who fell in the massacres were not beyond the reach of computation. The accounts we have received vary indeed in this particular; but of senators there were slain perhaps from one to two hundred, of knights between two and three thousand. The victims of a lower class were, we may suppose, proportionally more numerous. But the destruction of the Italians was far more sweeping and indiscriminate. Cities were dismantled, and even razed to the ground; their lands were seized and distributed among the veterans of the Sullan armies, of whom 120,000 were located in colonies from one end of the peninsula to the other. The natives driven from their houses and estates were massacred in crowds; according to popular tradition the Samnite people were utterly annihilated, and of all their cities Beneventum alone remained standing. The inhabitants of the wretched Præneste were slaughtered wholesale. The Etrurians expiated with the direst persecution the tardy aid they had given to the common cause of the Italians. The great centres of their ancient civilisation had long fallen into decay, but a new class of cities had risen upon their ruins, and attained riches and celebrity. Of these Spoletium, Volaterræ, Interamna, and Fæsulæ were delivered to Roman colonists; the latter city was dismantled, and the new town of Florentia erected with the fragments of its ruins. Throughout large districts the population became almost entirely changed; everywhere the chief people perished from the face of the land, and with them all that was distinctive in the manners and institutions, even in the language of the country. The civilisation of Etruria disappeared from the sight of men, to be rediscovered at the end of twenty centuries, among the buried tombs of forgotten lucumons.
The same exterminating policy extended also to the provinces, wherever the temper of the native races seemed to resent the uncontrolled domination of the Roman conquerors. Sulla had chastised Greece and Asia with a rod of iron. He now commissioned his lieutenants to chase his enemies from the retreats to which they had been invited in Sicily, Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Metellus fell upon the Cisalpine province, Valerius Flaccus devastated the Narbonensis, Pompey was despatched to punish the provinces of the south, and Annius was deputed to follow Sertorius into Spain and recover the vast regions which he had armed against the new government of Rome, and even against Rome herself. At the same time the republic was threatened with a renewal of her foreign warfare. The Thracians, never yet subdued, troubled the frontiers of Macedonia; Mithridates was commencing a new movement in Asia; the distressed and indignant population of the eastern coasts had betaken themselves in vast numbers to the sea, and infested the waters of Greece and even Italy itself with fleets of pirate vessels. The mountains of Etruria and Sabellia, of Samnium and Lucania, swarmed with the miserable fugitives from spoliation and massacre, and armed bands roamed beneath the walls of populous cities ready to carry off any booty that fell in their way, and rendering both life and property everywhere insecure. Even the proprietors of estates leagued themselves with these wretched outcasts, and employed them to kidnap free citizens of the republic, to be buried as slaves in their forests, or chained in their factories.