Sulla's proscription

• 1. Introduction

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  Sulla's proscription started not with a formal decree but with a failure. On the 2nd of November 82 BC, Lucius Cornelius Sulla called the Roman Senate to meet at the Temple of Bellona. Next door, in the villa publica, Samnite prisoners captured the previous day at the battle of the Colline Gate were being massacred. Their shouts could probably be heard by the assembled senators. Sulla wanted their approval for a formal list of his enemies. They refused him.

  The following day, Sulla went to a popular assembly instead. He won his vote. Within days, more than 520 names had been painted on whitened planks and displayed in the Roman Forum. The men named had their lives and property legally forfeit. Anyone who killed them would receive a paid reward. Anyone who sheltered them would be put to death.

  What Rome saw was something without direct precedent. It was a bureaucratically organised campaign of state-sanctioned murder, complete with published lists, set bounties, official record-keeping, and public payments. How did Sulla build his machinery of reprisal, and who ran it? Who profited from it? And how long did the consequences reach?

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• 2. Composing the Lists

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  Gnaeus Papirius Carbo stood first on Sulla's initial list. He had served three times as consul and led the Marian faction after Cinna's death in 84 BC. After Carbo came Gaius Marius the Younger, then the consuls for 83, Gaius Norbanus and Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiagenus. The ordering was deliberate. The four surviving Marians of consular rank appeared first, followed by praetors, then tribunes of the plebs, and then active Marian supporters. Almost every magistrate elected after Sulla's departure from Italy in 88 BC was somewhere on those lists.

  This first list held 80 names. Three days later, on the 5th and the 6th of November, a second list arrived in two equal instalments, adding 440 more. Sulla composed the full set personally. Once a name appeared, nobody could remove it. The proscribed were drawn exclusively from the Roman aristocracy. Equites, or knights, were actually more numerous than senators on the lists, though more senatorial names have survived in the historical record.

  Copies of the lists were sent throughout Italy to purge municipal administrations of equestrians who had supported the Marians. Cicero records in his speech Pro Cluentio that a man named Oppianicus was dispatched by Sulla to the city of Larinum. There, Oppianicus murdered four local councillors who were also his personal enemies, men whose names he had apparently suggested to Sulla for inclusion. Ancient sources say Sulla was easily persuaded to add names when his supporters pushed for it.

  In 81 BC, Sulla passed a formal law, the lex Cornelia de hostibus rei publicae, to retroactively legitimise the edict. Roman law required this because an edict otherwise expired at the end of a magistrate's term. The lex Cornelia also extended punishment to the descendants of the proscribed, called the liberi proscriptorum. Their properties were seized, their civic rights were stripped, and they were banished from Rome. Plutarch later judged this stripping of rights from children and grandchildren to be the gravest injustice of all.

  At least two men, Quintus Aurelius and a man named Lollius, first learned of their own proscription while reading the public list. Both were killed on the spot.

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• 3. The Price of a Head

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  48,000 sesterces, the equivalent of 12,000 denarii, was the price the Roman state fixed for the head of a proscribed man. Payment came publicly through the quaestor, drawn from the public treasury, to the killers the Romans called percussores. Informants received separate compensation. Slaves who murdered their own proscribed master were rewarded with their freedom.

  The payment structure made beheading the practical standard, since rewards required a severed head. The most prominent victims were sometimes treated differently. They were brought alive to Sulla and executed with an axe, the method Rome used for captured foreign enemies. Sulla had already performed such executions himself against Ephesians who had revolted during his campaign in Asia. Pompey followed the same method when he caught Gnaeus Papirius Carbo in Sicily near the end of 82. After execution, prominent heads were paraded through the streets and mounted on the rostra, the public speaker's platform in the Forum. Some bodies and heads were also displayed near the Servilius Lacus, a fountain on the Forum.

  What came after execution was also deliberate. Headless corpses were sometimes mutilated further, dragged with a hook, and thrown into the Tiber. Burial was forbidden for the proscribed, perhaps by a specific clause in the edict itself. Romans believed physical integrity was necessary for a proper afterlife, which gave the post-mortem desecration a meaning beyond simple brutality. Catiline, whom Sulla had officially assigned to hunt the proscribed, notoriously inflicted gruesome mutilations on the former praetor Marcus Marius Gratidianus.

  Much of the enforcement work fell to freedmen. When Sulla captured the slaves of his defeated enemies, he would manumit the most capable of them. Among those he freed, Lucius Cornelius Chrysogonus became the most notorious. All took the name Lucius Cornelius upon manumission, and Appian recorded that Sulla had the remarkable number of 10,000 such freedmen. Groups of men all sharing that same name would arrive at houses in the dark to take men away. Many of those taken were never seen again. The pattern produced a pervasive anxiety: any outwardly seditious behaviour could invite a knock at the door after dark.

  One freedman named Cornelius Phagita commanded forces in Sabine territory to pursue Sulla's enemies. According to Plutarch, the young Julius Caesar had been summoned for questioning, though he was not himself proscribed. He paid Phagita a bribe equal to the bounty for a proscribed head, and escaped.

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• 4. Spoils and Fortunes

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  A former centurion named Lucius Luscius received 144,000 sesterces for delivering three proscribed heads. By 64 BC, those initial earnings had grown into a personal fortune of 10 million sesterces through investment. Luscius was not the most famous profiteer from the proscription, but his trajectory captures what the system made possible.

  Marcus Licinius Crassus accumulated more. His acquisitions in the region of Bruttium were so flagrantly greedy that even Sulla refused to give him political appointments in Rome. The wealth Crassus built during the proscription underpinned his entire subsequent public career. In 59 BC, he joined the three-way political alliance later called the First Triumvirate.

  Sulla's own family took a substantial share of the proscribed's properties, which were sold at drastically reduced prices or sometimes simply given away. Sulla's daughter Cornelia purchased the former villa of Gaius Marius at Miseno for 300,000 sesterces. She sold it shortly after to Lucullus for 2,000,800 sesterces. That implied a discount of roughly 85 percent. From this figure, the historian Francois Hinard estimated total wealth transferred through the proscription at around 2.3 billion sesterces. A different calculation by Israel Shatzman placed the figure at 1.88 billion. The classicist C. F. Konrad called it the most radical redistribution of property in Roman history to that point.

  Many victims were targeted for their wealth rather than their politics. Men who failed to offer swift and conspicuous proof of loyalty to the new regime were vulnerable simply because their property was valuable. The names of informers, and of those who killed the proscribed and collected the rewards, were entered into the public record. Several prominent figures of the following decades probably owed portions of their early fortunes to the proscription. Among them, ancient sources suggest, were Pompey, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, and Gaius Verres.

  The men whose properties funded these fortunes largely had no choice but to run. Most made for Spain, where a resistance was already forming under a veteran Marian general.

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• 5. Sertorius and the Fugitives

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  Of the 75 proscribed whose fates are known, 18 survived by crossing to Spain and joining Quintus Sertorius. That was one quarter of the total. Sertorius had refused to accept Sulla's settlement and gone to Spain, where he organised a sustained military resistance. A veteran of the campaigns under Gaius Marius, he had governed Hispania in the early 80s and now turned that experience against Rome. The war he led, called the Sertorian War, ran from 80 to 72 BC.

  The length of that conflict was partly explained by a basic fact about its proscribed leaders: they could not surrender. Their properties were gone, their rights stripped, and their lives still forfeit under Sulla's edict. The war in Spain was not just ideological. For many of the proscribed who joined Sertorius, it was the only alternative to execution.

  Among those who chose exile over death, individual fates diverged sharply. Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiagenus, the consul for 83, stood fourth on Sulla's first list. Sulla allowed him to go into exile at Massalia rather than face execution, apparently out of respect for his illustrious family name. Records show Scipio was still alive there as late as 57 BC. His former consular colleague Gaius Norbanus fared worse: after fleeing to Rhodes, he committed suicide when Sulla pressed the Rhodians to surrender him.

  Sertorius was murdered in 72 or 73 BC by a group of his own officers, several of whom were themselves proscribed. Pompey captured and executed all the conspirators afterward, except one: a man called Aufidius, who had possibly made a private arrangement with Pompey. Aufidius was never rehabilitated. He died in poverty in a Spanish town.

  Not all the fugitives went to Spain. Some fled to the court of Mithridates of Pontus, which helps explain the contacts Sertorius maintained with the Pontic king. A number of these men died at the battle of Lemnos in 73 BC. Of all who fled east, only Marcus Varius is mentioned by name in the ancient sources.

  One survivor, Aulus Trebonius, could not inherit even when his unproscribed brother Publius died in 75 BC. The legal disability of proscription barred him from holding property. By 72 BC, only six of Sulla's proscribed were known to still be alive. They were Scipio Asiagenus, Aufidius, Aulus Trebonius, Gnaeus Decidius, Lucius Fidustius, and Lucius Cornelius Cinna the younger.

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• 6. Rehabilitation and Legacy

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  Around 70 BC, a tribune named Plautius brought forward a law with the support of Julius Caesar. Caesar was then the brother-in-law of Lucius Cornelius Cinna the younger. The lex Plautia offered some relief to surviving proscribed men. It granted asylum in certain cities and allowed the descendants of the proscribed to return to Rome. But it did not restore their political rights. They still could not run for office or bring legal charges in the courts. The law was designed to ease conditions, not to enable revenge.

  In 64 BC, Marcus Porcius Cato and Julius Caesar launched prosecutions against several of Sulla's hired killers. Minor figures were convicted, among them Lucius Luscius and a man named Lucius Bellienus. Catiline, who had been among the most violent of Sulla's enforcers, was charged but acquitted. His standing as a former Sullan loyalist apparently protected him.

  The following year, a tribune named Servilius Rullus put forward a series of ambitious bills. One would have restored the political rights of the proscribed's sons. The consul for 63 BC, Cicero, destroyed the package by concentrating his attack on a clause about agrarian reform. When that provision fell, the amnesty bill collapsed with it. Cicero had argued consistently that restoring the former proscribed's rights would unleash private vendettas. He had made the same argument against the lex Plautia a decade earlier. The failure left some descendants so desperate that they joined Catiline's conspiracy. This was striking: Catiline had been among the most violent agents of the proscription.

  Several descendants of the proscribed had by this point attached themselves to Julius Caesar. Among them were men who would later serve as consuls: Gaius Carrinas, Lucius Marcius Censorinus, Gaius Norbanus Flaccus, and Gaius Vibius Pansa Caetronianus.

  Full restoration came only under Caesar. After he seized control of Rome in 49 BC, Caesar had Mark Antony pass the lex Antonia de proscriptorum liberis. That law restored the political rights of the proscribed's sons, including the right to run for magistracies. It deliberately left out their properties, because restoring them would have made Caesar's own wartime acquisitions legally vulnerable. Instead, Caesar distributed to the liberi proscriptorum properties he had seized from his Pompeian enemies.

  Among those who had worked around the legal restrictions earlier was Marcus Junius Brutus. His father had been proscribed, but Brutus was adopted by Quintus Servilius Caepio in 59 BC. The adoption made him technically no longer the son of a proscribed man. He was able to pursue a political career in the 50s without the usual obstacles.

  Sulla's proscription served as the model when the Second Triumvirate published its own death lists in 43 BC. Two men who had survived Sulla's proscription of 82, Lucius Fidustius and Lucius Cornelius Cinna the younger, found themselves proscribed a second time.

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