A source-book of ancient history - The Search For Mecca

430 The Revolution
scribed all he could think of, and as to those who now escaped
his memory, he would proscribe them at some future
time.
It was a part of the proscription 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 all the proscribed, and confiscated
their property.
Greed the The proscriptions were not confined to Rome but exmotive,
tended to every city in 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 notice 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, who never meddled
with public affairs, and who was no further concerned about
all
these calamities except so far as he sympathized 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: my farm at Alba is my persecutor!" He had
not gone far before he was murdered by some one who
was in search of him.
Meanwhile Marius (adopted son of the great Marius,
and a democratic general in the civil war) killed himself to