‘Proscription’ appears to be the current word of the month. But what does it mean? The Latin scribo means ‘I write’ and generates a root in script-. Since the Latin prefix pro carried the idea of ‘bringing something into the open’, the noun proscriptio meant ‘a written notice announcing a sale’.
In the 1st century BC, a culture of corruption, bribery and political violence in a fight for power led by wealthy dynasts with private armies at their back resulted in civil wars and the complete collapse of Rome’s traditional institutions. One feature of this collapse was to be particularly significant. In 88 bc the current strong man Lucius Cornelius Sulla decided to call any Roman who opposed him a hostis (cf. ‘hostile’), a term up till then applied solely to foreigners or external enemies. Such a one would be stripped of his citizenship rights and could therefore be killed without trial.
That was disastrous enough, but in 83 BC Sulla escalated the anarchy by turning the proscriptio into a list put up in the forum condemning to death his personal enemies, with rewards for those who killed or assisted in killing them, and penalties for those who resisted them. Thousands were named – all aristocrats – including about a third of the Senate. It was also announced that their property was to be confiscated and sold at auction (this was applied even to the sons and grandsons of the proscribed) – all proceeds to Sulla. His daughter Cornelia bought a villa for 300,000ss and promptly sold it for more than two million.
All this had a dramatic effect on the configuration of the Roman elite. Many indeed claimed it was their property that had killed them – ‘their great house, their gardens, their warm baths’. When the quietly inoffensive Quintus Aurelius saw his name on the list, he lamented that ‘he was being prosecuted by his estate in Alba’.
Sulla’s personal epitaph, put up in Latin on the Campus Martius, survives only in a paraphrased version composed in Greek: ‘No friend outdid him in doing good, no enemy in doing evil.’ Readers can decide for themselves to whom, past or present, this moving eulogy should be applied.
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