Marius._
Then followed the victory of Sylla, the so-called avenger of the
cruelties of Marius. But not only was his victory purchased with
great bloodshed; but when hostilities were finished, hostility
survived, and the subsequent peace was bloody as the war. To the
former and still recent massacres of the elder Marius, the younger
Marius and Carbo, who belonged to the same party, added greater
atrocities. For when Sylla approached, and they despaired not only
of victory, but of life itself, they made a promiscuous massacre
of friends and foes. And, not satisfied with staining every corner
of Rome with blood, they besieged the senate, and led forth the
senators to death from the curia as from a prison. Mucius Scævola
the pontiff was slain at the altar of Vesta, which he had clung to
because no spot in Rome was more sacred than her temple; and his
blood well-nigh extinguished the fire which was kept alive by the
constant care of the virgins. Then Sylla entered the city victorious,
after having slaughtered in the Villa Publica, not by combat, but by
an order, 7000 men who had surrendered, and were therefore unarmed;
so fierce was the rage of peace itself, even after the rage of war
was extinct. Moreover, throughout the whole city every partisan of
Sylla slew whom he pleased, so that the number of deaths went beyond
computation, till it was suggested to Sylla that he should allow some
to survive, that the victors might not be destitute of subjects. Then
this furious and promiscuous licence to murder was checked, and much
relief was expressed at the publication of the prescription list,
containing though it did the death-warrant of two thousand men of
the highest ranks, the senatorial and equestrian. The large number
was indeed saddening, but it was consolatory that a limit was fixed;
nor was the grief at the numbers slain so great as the joy that the
rest were secure. But this very security, hard-hearted as it was,
could not but bemoan the exquisite torture applied to some of those
who had been doomed to die. For one was torn to pieces by the unarmed
hands of the executioners; men treating a living man more savagely
than wild beasts are used to tear an abandoned corpse. Another had
his eyes dug out, and his limbs cut away bit by bit, and was forced
to live a long while, or rather to die a long while, in such torture.
Some celebrated cities were put up to auction, like farms; and one
was collectively condemned to slaughter, just as an individual
criminal would be condemned to death. These things were done in
peace when the war was over, not that victory might be more speedily
obtained, but that, after being obtained, it might not be thought
lightly of. Peace vied with war in cruelty, and surpassed it: for
while war overthrew armed hosts, peace slew the defenceless. War gave
liberty to him who was attacked, to strike if he could; peace granted
to the survivors not life, but an unresisting death.