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3And while the people were still in this state of mind, those murders by proscription which Sulla had once indulged in were once more resorted to and the whole city was filled with corpses. Many were killed in their houses, many even in the streets and here and there in the fora and around the temples; 2the heads of the victims were once more set up upon the rostra and their bodies either allowed to lie where they were, to be devoured by dogs and birds, or else cast into the river. Everything that had been done before in the days of Sulla occurred also at this time, except that only two white tablets were posted, one for the senators and one for the others. 3The reason for this I have not been able to learn from anyone else or to find out myself; for the only reason that might occur to one, namely, that fewer were to be put to death, is by no means true, since many more names were posted, owing to the fact that there were more persons making the lists. However, this circumstance did not cause these proscriptions to differ from the murders on the earlier occasion; 4since the posting of the names of the prominent citizens, not promiscuously along with those of the rabble, but separately, must surely have seemed a very absurd distinction to the men who were to be murdered on precisely the same terms. But over against this one difference there were not a few other conditions of a very distressing nature that fell to their lot, although Sulla’s proscriptions, to all appearances, left no room for outdoing them.
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