regarding posts of authority had created both their friendships and their violent hatreds.  All those that had aided or assisted one of the group in any way the others held in the light of an enemy.  So it came about that the same persons had become friends to some one of them, and enemies to the entire body, so that while each was privately quelling his antagonists, they destroyed the dearest friends of all in general.  In the course of their joint negotiations[26] they made a kind of account of who was on their side and who was opposed, and no one was allowed to take vengeance on one of his own enemies who was a friend of another without giving up some friend in his turn:  and because of their anger over what was past and their suspicion of the future they cared nothing about the preservation of an associate in comparison with vengeance on an adversary, and so gave them up without much protest. [-6-] Thus they offered one another staunch friends for bitter enemies and implacable foes for close comrades; and sometimes they exchanged even numbers, at others several for one or fewer for more, altogether carrying on the transactions as if at a market, and overbidding one another as at an auction room.  If some one was found just equivalent to another and the two were ranked alike, the exchange was a simple one; but all whose value was raised by some excellence or esteem or relationship could be despatched only in return for several.  As there had been civil wars, lasting a long time and embracing many events, not a few men during the turmoil had come into collision with their nearest relatives.  Indeed, Lucius Caesar, Antony’s uncle, had become his enemy, and Lepidus’s brother, Lucius Paulus, hostile to him.  The lives of these were saved, but many of the rest were slaughtered even in the houses of their very friends and relatives, from whom they especially expected protection and honor.  And in order that no person should feel less inclined to kill any one out of fear of being deprived of the rewards (remembering that in the time of Sulla Marcus Cato, who was quaestor, had demanded of some of the murderers all they had received for their work), they proclaimed that the name of no proscribed person should be registered in the public records.  On this account they slew ordinary citizens more readily and made away with the prosperous, even though they had no dislike for a single one of them.  For since they stood in need of vast sums of money and had no other source from which to satisfy the desire of their soldiers, they affected a kind of common enmity against the rich.  Among the other transgressions they committed in the line of this policy was to declare a mere child of age, so that they might kill him as already exercising the privileges of a man.