| Plutarch's Parallel Lives | |
| The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch | |
|
The Cruelty of Lucius Cornelius Sylla
Sylla's general personal appearance may be known by his statues;
only his blue eyes, of themselves extremely keen and glaring, were
rendered all the more forbidding and terrible by the complexion of
his face, in which white was mixed with rough blotches of fiery
red. Hence, it is said, he was surnamed Sylla, and in allusion to
it one of the scurrilous jesters at Athens made the verse upon
him,
Sylla is a mulberry sprinkled o'er with meal.
Sylla being wholly bent upon slaughter, filled the city with
executions without number or limit, many wholly uninterested
persons falling a sacrifice to private enmity, through his
permission and indulgence to his friends. At last Caius Metellus,
one of the younger men, made bold in the senate to ask him what
end there was of these evils, and at what point he might be
expected to stop? "We do ask you," said he, "to pardon any whom
you have resolved to destroy, but to free from doubt those whom
you are pleased to save." Sylla answering, that he knew not as yet
whom to spare, he asked: "Will you then tell us whom you will
punish?" This Sylla said he would do. These last words, some
authors say, were spoken not by Metellus, but by Afidius, one of
Sylla's fawning companions. Immediately upon this, without
communicating with any magistrates, Sylla proscribed eighty
persons, and notwithstanding the general indignation, after one
day's respite, he posted two hundred and twenty more, and on the
third again, as many. In an address to the people on this
occasion, he told them he had put up as many names as he could
think of; those which had escaped his memory, he would publish at
a future time. He issued an edict likewise, making death the
punishment of humanity, proscribing any who should dare to receive
and cherish a proscribed person, without exception to brother,
son, or parents. And to him who should slay any one proscribed
person, he ordained two talents' reward, even were it a slave who
had killed his master, or a son his father. And what was thought
most unjust of all, he caused the attainder to pass upon their
sons, and sons' sons, and made open sale of all their property.
Nor did the proscription prevail only at Rome, but throughout all
the cities of Italy the effusion of blood was such that neither
sanctuary of the gods nor hearth of hospitality nor ancestral home
escaped. Men were butchered in the embraces of their wives,
children in the arms of their mothers. Those who perished through
public animosity, or private enmity, were nothing in comparison to
the numbers of those who suffered for their riches. Even the
murderers began to say, that "his fine house killed this man, a
garden that, a third, his hot baths." Quintus Aurelius, a quiet,
peaceable man, and one who thought all his part in the common
calamity consisted in condoling with the misfortunes of others,
coming into the forum to read the list, and finding himself among
the proscribed, cried out, "Woe is me, my Alban farm has informed
against me." He had not gone far, before he was despatched by a
ruffian, sent on that errand.
In the meantime, Marius, on the point of being taken, killed
himself; and Sylla, coming to Praeneste, at first proceeded
judicially against each particular person, till at last, finding
it a work of too much time, he cooped them up together in one
place, to the number of twelve thousand men, and gave order for
the execution of them all, save his own host (The friend, that is,
with whom he always stayed when he happened to be at Praeneste,
his 'xenos;' a relationship much regarded to the Greek and Roman
world) alone excepted. But he, brave man, telling him he could not
accept the obligation of life from the hands of one who had been
the ruin of his country, went in among the rest, and submitted
willingly to the stroke.
Return to
©2008 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. | |
