that every man who received and protected a proscribed person should be put to death for his humanity; and there was no exception for brothers, children, or parents.  The reward for killing a proscribed person was two talents, whether it was a slave who killed his master or a son who killed his father.  But what was considered most unjust of all, he affixed infamy on the sons and grandsons of the proscribed and confiscated their property.  The proscriptions were not confined to Rome; they extended to every city of Italy:  neither temple nor hospitable hearth nor father’s house was free from murder, but husbands were butchered in the arms of their wives, and children in the embrace of their mothers.  The number of those who were massacred through revenge and hatred was nothing compared with those who were murdered for their property.  It occurred even to the assassins to observe that the ruin of such a one was due to his large house, another man owed his death to his orchard, and another again to his warm baths.  Quintus Aurelius, a man who never meddled with public affairs, and though he was no further concerned about all these calamities except so far as he sympathised with the sufferings of others, happened to come to the Forum and there he read the names of the proscribed.  Finding his own name among them, he exclaimed, Alas! wretch that I am; ’tis my farm at Alba that is my persecutor.  He had not gone far before he was murdered by some one who was in search of him.

XXXII.  In the mean time Marius killed himself to avoid being taken.  Sulla now went to Praeneste,[285] and he began by examining the case of each individual before he punished him; but having no time for this inquiry, he had all the people brought to one spot, to the number of twelve thousand, and ordered them to be massacred, with the exception of one man, an old friend of his, whom he offered to pardon.  But the man nobly declared he would never owe his safety to the destroyer of his country, and mingling with the rest of the citizens he was cut down together with them.  The affair of Lucius Catilina[286] was perhaps the most monstrous of all.  Lucius had murdered his brother before the termination of the war, and he asked Sulla to proscribe him among the rest as if he were still alive; which was done.  To show his gratitude, Catilina killed one Marcus Marius,[287] who belonged to the opposite faction, and after bringing his head to Sulla, who was then sitting in the Forum, he went to the temple of Apollo, which was close by, and washed his hands in the sacred font.[288]

XXXIII.  Besides the massacres, there were other things to cause dissatisfaction.  Sulla had himself proclaimed Dictator,[289] and thus revived this office after an interval of one hundred and twenty years.  An act of indemnity was also passed for all that he had done; for the future it was enacted that he should have power of life and death, and should confiscate property, distribute lands, found colonies, destroy