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4In Sulla’s time, to be sure, the perpetrators had committed their shocking deeds on the spur of the moment, inasmuch as they were trying this sort of thing for the first time, and not as the result of deliberate planning, and hence in most cases they behaved less wickedly, since they were acting, not with malice aforethought, but as chance dictated; and the victims, encountering misfortunes which came upon them suddenly and had never before been heard of by them, found some alleviation in the unexpectedness of their sufferings. 2At this time, however, when men had either taken part themselves in all the former terrible deeds, or had beheld them, or were at any rate thoroughly acquainted with them from recent descriptions, and accordingly in all the time between, in the expectation of a recurrence of similar outrages, had, on the one hand, been devising many additional horrors, with the idea that they would inflict them, and, on the other hand, been conjuring up additional terrors with the idea that they would suffer them, the perpetrators resorted to the most unusual devices in their emulation of the outrages of yore and their consequent eagerness to introduce into their schemes, by their ingenuity, novel features of some sort; and the victims, reflecting upon all that they might suffer, underwent great tortures in their minds even before their bodies were put to torture, as if they were already in the very midst of their sufferings.
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