Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/31

80 B.C.] , when the city was full of gangs of assassins hunting down their victims for the sake of the blood-money promised by the government, Sextus Roscius, a wealthy citizen of Ameria, who had served in Sulla's army and had come to Rome after his victory, was murdered in the street as he returned home from supper. The assassins were neighbours and distant kinsmen who had been on bad terms with the murdered man. These men next applied to Chrysogonus, a favourite freedman of the Dictator, and induced him to get the name of Roscius inserted in the Proscription list. His property was thereupon confiscated and sold en bloc at a sham auction; Chrysogonus was the buyer, and paid into the treasury the sum of £20 as the purchase money of an estate worth £60,000. He then constituted the murderers his agents and employed them to oust from his father's house the only son of the deceased, who had remained throughout in his country-seat at Ameria. Chrysogonus and his associates now divided the property at their leisure. But they could not feel quite sure that the son, named like his father Sextus Roscius, would not one day call them to account. To assassinate him, now that times were quieter, was not so easy; so they adopted the plan of accusing him of being the murderer of his father. If they could procure his condemnation on a capital charge, he would, even if he evaded actual execution by exile, be quite powerless to annoy them in the future. It mattered little to the promoters of the accusation, that they were notoriously in possession of the property of the