Free Cicero by Anthony Everitt Page A

and looting. The victims included friends of the Cicero family, among them one of his mentors, the orator and elder statesman Marcus Antonius.
    Marius did not survive to enjoy his triumph for long. Bad news from abroad brought on an illness, perhaps a stroke, and he died in 86 at the beginningof his seventh Consulship. Cinna was left in charge; he brought the killings to an end and retained the Consulship for two more years, until he was killed in 84 by mutinous troops.
    Meanwhile, Sulla won his war with Mithridates despite also having had to cope with a Roman army sent out against him. Anxious to return to Rome, he did not have time to insist on an unconditional surrender. He met the king near the ruins of Troy and signed a peace treaty. Mithridates got off quite lightly, merely agreeing to evacuate Asia and pay a moderate indemnity. In return he was confirmed as King of Pontus and recognized as an Ally—in today’s terms, he was awarded “most favored nation status.”
    In 83 Sulla was back at last after an absence of three years. He landed in Brundisium (modern-day Brindisi) and marched inexorably up Italy like an avenging angel. The
popularis
regime that had been governing the Republic fought back. However, having brushed aside one army in the north, Sulla resoundingly defeated another outside one of the gates of Rome and, in 82, entered the city. He regulated his position by reviving the disused post of Dictator, which gave him supreme authority in the government. He had himself appointed for an indefinite period, instead of the traditional six months, and set himself the task of reforming and restoring the institutions of the Republic.
    Another massacre of the ruling class now took place. Under Marius, men of the political right had been struck down. Now it was the turn of the left. After a period of indiscriminate slaughter, a young Senator complained to Sulla, “We are not asking you to pardon those you have decided to kill; all we ask is that you free from suspense those you have decided not to kill.”
    The Dictator took the point and agreed to put some order into the mayhem. He posted proscription lists on white tablets in the Forum, which gave the names of those he wanted dead. Anybody was legally entitled to kill a proscribed person and on the presentation of convincing evidence (usually a head) could claim a substantial reward of 1,200 denarii. A S a rule, the heads of those killed were displayed in the Forum.
    A cousin of Cicero’s, the Praetor Marcus Marius Gratidianus, was one of those who suffered. He was handed over to Quintus Lutatius Catulus, a leading conservative, because he had been implicated in the forced suicide of Catulus’s father during Marius’s reign of terror. With the help of ayoung aristocrat named Lucius Sergius Catilina, Catulus flogged Gratidianus through the streets to the tomb of the Catulus clan. There his arms and legs were smashed with rods, his ears cut off, his tongue wrenched from his mouth and his eyes gouged out. He was then beheaded and his corpse was offered as a sacrifice to the spirit of Catulus’s dead father. In a grim postscript, an officer fainted at the horror of what he was seeing and was himself executed for disloyalty. Catilina was then said to have carried Gratidianus’s severed head “still alive and breathing” (according to Cicero in one of his more fanciful flights of rhetoric) into Rome to present to Sulla.
    Many of the most senior figures of the day were liquidated. Forty Senators were proscribed at the outset and 1,600
equites
, but the final death toll was far higher. According to one estimate there were 9,000 victims in all. The sons of those killed were sent into exile, their descendants barred forever from holding public office. One consequence of these massacres was that the Senate became seriously depleted. There were fewer than 200 survivors, not enough to run an empire.
    At the time of the