cool and unconcerned manner, as if he were performing the most ordinary duties of an officer of state.  He called the Senate together one day, and, while he was addressing them, the attention of the Assembly was suddenly distracted by the noise of outcries and screams in the neighboring streets from those who were suffering military execution there.  The senators started with horror at the sound.  Sylla, with an air of great composure and unconcern, directed the members to listen to him, and to pay no attention to what was passing elsewhere.  The sounds that they heard were, he said, only some correction which was bestowed by his orders on certain disturbers of the public peace.

[Sidenote:  Executions.] [Sidenote:  Extent of Sylla’s proscriptions.] [Sidenote:  Man’s nature.]

Sylla’s orders for the execution of those who had taken an active part against him were not confined to Rome.  They went to the neighboring cities and to distant provinces, carrying terror and distress every where.  Still, dreadful as these evils were, it is possible for us, in the conceptions which we form, to overrate the extent of them.  In reading the history of the Roman empire during the civil wars of Marius and Sylla, one might easily imagine that the whole population of the country was organized into the two contending armies, and were employed wholly in the work of fighting with and massacring each other.  But nothing like this can be true.  It is obviously but a small part, after all, of an extended community that can be ever actively and personally engaged in these deeds of violence and blood.  Man is not naturally a ferocious wild beast.  On the contrary, he loves, ordinarily, to live in peace and quietness, to till his lands and tend his flocks, and to enjoy the blessings of peace and repose.  It is comparatively but a small number in any age of the world, and in any nation, whose passions of ambition, hatred, or revenge become so strong as that they love bloodshed and war.  But these few, when they once get weapons into their hands, trample recklessly and mercilessly upon the rest.  One ferocious human tiger, with a spear or a bayonet to brandish, will tyrannize as he pleases over a hundred quiet men, who are armed only with shepherds’ crooks, and whose only desire is to live in peace with their wives and their children.

[Sidenote:  Husbandmen.] [Sidenote:  How the Roman edifices were built.] [Sidenote:  Standing armies.]

Thus, while Marius and Sylla, with some hundred thousand armed and reckless followers, were carrying terror and dismay wherever they went, there were many millions of herdsmen and husbandmen in the Roman world who were dwelling in all the peace and quietness they could command, improving with their peaceful industry every acre where corn would ripen or grass grow.  It was by taxing and plundering the proceeds of this industry that the generals and soldiers, the consuls and praetors, and proconsuls and propraetors, filled