crisis

Sulla’s Proscriptions and Mass Confiscations

Date

-82

Part of

crisis

Beginning in 82 BCE, Sulla posted three waves of proscriptions—80 names, then 220, then 220—legalizing murder and seizure across Italy. Plutarch records his chilling vow to add those he forgot. The hammering of lists on the Forum’s boards became the sound of state terror.

What Happened

Rome awoke to lists. On whitened boards near the Forum’s edge, names appeared: enemies, rivals, the unlucky rich. Sulla’s proscriptions began with 80, then grew by 220 and 220 more—520 lives turned into bounties and auctions in a matter of days [9]. The hammer on bronze nails rang under the Capitoline’s shadow; buyers gathered where senators had debated.

Plutarch preserves Sulla’s cold sentence: he was “proscribing as many as he could remember, and those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe at a future time” [9]. The sentence traveled from the Curia Hostilia to the Basilica Aemilia, to villas in Etruria and shops in Ostia. The terror was not only death; it was the epilogue—property confiscated, descendants marked, the social map erased and redrawn with a bureaucrat’s stylus.

The lists spread beyond the city. In Arretium, Praeneste, and Capua, notices went up; killers knocked and called it legal. The crack of a door kicked in, the scrape of a chest dragged across mosaic, the quiet after—all became part of Sulla’s constitutional music. Auctions swelled the fortunes of friends; enemies’ houses became others’ atria [9].

Even the temples felt implicated. Near the Temple of Saturn’s treasury, where bronze bars and coin were stacked, new wealth flowed in waves. The Forum’s color shifted—fewer purple‑bordered togas from old houses, more new men in crisp white claiming seats in the expanded senate, all with the smell of fresh wax still on their seals.

The proscriptions did their work: fear, enrichment, elimination. When the lists stopped, the silence did not heal. Men learned to scan public boards not just for grain distributions or voting notices, but for death warrants made tidy by ink [9]. And in that silence Sulla wrote his reforms, knowing every senator could still hear the hammering that had made their calm possible.

Why This Matters

The proscriptions institutionalized political murder and theft. By making lists law, Sulla demonstrated that legality could be arranged around killing. Property concentrated in the hands of allies; enemies’ lines were extinguished. The republic’s elite composition shifted with a bureaucratic act repeated 520 times and more [9].

The message outlived the lists. Later crises—Catiline’s conspirators, civil war purges—drew on the same logic: name, denounce, eliminate. Fear structured politics as much as law did, and citizens learned that safety required proximity to power. The republic thus became a map of adhesions rather than principles [7][9].

Historians treat the proscriptions as the clearest proof that the late Republic had normalized force as policy. Once the hammering stopped, the senate sat, the courts convened, and elections were held—but everyone remembered how quiet the Forum can become when 520 names are read and erased [9].