crisis

Triumviral Proscriptions

Date

-43

Part of

crisis

Late in 43 BCE, the triumvirs posted killing lists to fund and purify their regime, echoing Sulla but broader. Names filled wooden boards in Rome, Capua, and beyond. The market’s hum mixed with the sobering creak of auction wagons.

What Happened

With armies to raise and Brutus and Cassius entrenched in the East, the triumvirs needed money and security. They chose the tool Sulla had field-tested: proscriptions. Teams posted names in the Forum, at the Saepta Julia on the Campus Martius, and in provincial centers from Capua to Bononia.

The rules were as precise as they were ruthless: execute the listed; reward informers; confiscate estates; bar heirs. Cicero, the Republic’s greatest voice, fell to an execution squad along the coast road near Formiae—his head and hands a grim offering on the Rostra. Bronze rang as a soldier laid the trophies; the crowd fell to a whisper.

Auctions followed. Villas on the Palatine, farms in Etruria, warehouses by the Tiber changed ownership under the chalked numerals of price. The scarlet hems of bidding agents brushed marble floors sticky with spilled wax from seals broken in haste.

The lists financed legions and signaled a political purge. The process, unlike Sulla’s chaotic first days, felt bureaucratic—a machine set to cleanse and supply. Rome learned again how account books could tally both cash and lives.

Why This Matters

The proscriptions fused fiscal and political goals with terrifying efficiency. War chests filled; opponents vanished; survivors learned to keep their heads down and their coin liquid. The policy tied thousands of families’ fortunes to Triumviral victory, creating a constituency invested in the regime’s survival.

As a theme, proscriptions show terror as governance: posted names, scheduled seizures, official murder as public theater. They also reveal how emergency legality enabled cruelty; the lex Titia’s authority cloaked what boards and blades achieved.

The memory of these lists haunted Augustan peace. When Augustus later boasted of closing the gates of Janus, Romans could count the cost in the silent houses of those whose names had once hung in the Forum.