Page:Roman Constitutional History, 753-44 B.C..djvu/214

200 no doubt, in order that they might not disturb the future owners of confiscated property. He did not at all disdain to enrich himself, his wife, his relatives, and his dependents by purchases at nominal prices or by gifts of estates. The enormous extent of the confiscations is indicated by the fact that, in spite of the greatest depreciation of values, the state realized from the sales some $19,000,000 (350,000,000 sestertii). The first of June, 81, was fixed as the limit for closing the proscription lists and the auctions.

Citizenship. — By these measures Sulla facilitated the restoration of the oligarchy, and secured a number of zealous supporters, whose welfare and safety depended on his government. He probably began very early to reorganize the state. As a rule he seems to have allowed the new citizens to retain the equal rights which they had obtained under the democracy. But he made numerous exceptions. While he rewarded some towns, he punished others by the confiscation of a part, or the whole, of their territory, and in other ways. The citizens thus dispossessed — for example, the inhabitants of Volaterrae — were deprived of Roman citizenship and given the lesser Latin rights (jus Arimini, p. 97). Samnium was laid waste and placed on the same footing as the Bruttian country.

The freedmen he confined, as of old, to the four city districts. On the other hand, he conferred citizenship on more than ten thousand slaves (called Cornelii) that had belonged to the outlaws, and made them his bodyguard.

Popular Assemblies. — Sulla apparently did not consider it worth while to complete the still very imperfect registration of the citizens by means of a census. Nor did he attempt to divide all the Roman territory proper into thirty-five districts according to the original purely geographical principle. The districts had in fact lost their