Sulla’s own partisans were alarmed.  A young senator, Caius Metellus, one of a family which was strongly attached to Sulla and with which he was connected by marriage, had the courage to ask him in public when there would be an end to this terrible state of things.  “We do not beg you,” he said, “to remit the punishment of those whom you have made up your mind to remove; we do beg you to do away with the anxiety of those whom you have resolved to spare.”  “I am not yet certain,” answered Sulla, “whom I shall spare.”  “Then at least,” said Metellus, “you can tell us whom you mean to punish.”  “That I will do,” replied the tyrant.  It was indeed a terrible time that followed, Plutarch thus describes it:  “He denounced against any who might shelter or save the life of a proscribed person the punishment of death for his humanity.  He made no exemption for mother, or son, or parent.  The murderers received a payment of two talents (about L470) for each victim; it was paid to a slave who killed his master, to a son who killed his father.  The most monstrous thing of all, it was thought, was that the sons and grandsons of the proscribed were declared to be legally infamous and that their property was confiscated.  Nor was it only in Rome but in all the cities of Italy that the proscription was carried out.  There was not a single temple, not a house but was polluted with blood.  Husbands were slaughtered in the arms of their wives, and sons in the arms of their mothers.  And the number of those who fell victims to anger and hatred was but small in comparison with the number who were put out of the way for the sake of their property.  The murderers might well have said:  ’His fine mansion has been the death of this man; or his gardens, or his baths.’  Quintus Aurelius, a peaceable citizen, who had had only this share in the late civil troubles, that he had felt for the misfortunes of others, coming into the forum, read the list of the proscribed and found in it his own name.  ’Unfortunate that I am,’ he said, ‘it is my farm at Alba that has been my ruin;’ and he had not gone many steps before he was cut down by a man that was following him.  Lucius Catiline’s conduct was especially wicked.  He had murdered his own brother.  This was before the proscription began.  He went to Sulla and begged that the name might be put in the list as if the man were still alive; and it was so put.  His gratitude to Sulla was shown by his killing one Marius, who belonged to the opposite faction, and bringing his head to Sulla as he sat in the forum. (This Marius was a kinsman of the great democratic leader, and was one of the most popular men in Rome.) This done, he washed his hands in the holy water-basin of the temple of Apollo.”

Forty senators and sixteen hundred knights, and more than as many men of obscure station, are said to have perished.  At last, on the first of June, 81, the list was closed.  Still the reign of terror was not yet at an end, as the strange story which I shall now relate will amply prove.  To look into the details of a particular case makes us better able to imagine what it really was to live at Rome in the days of the Dictator than to read many pages of general description.  The story is all the more impressive because the events happened after order had been restored and things were supposed to be proceeding in their regular course.