heat too great, or the cold too bitter. If so, how can we wonder that
Sulla, who has to rule the State, to govern, in fact, the world,
should not be able himself to see to everything? Jove probably found
it convenient not to see many things. Such must certainly have been
the case with Sulla.

I will venture, as other biographers have done before, to tell the
story of Sextus Roscius of Ameria at some length, because it is in
itself a tale of powerful romance, mysterious, grim, betraying guilt
of the deepest dye, misery most profound, and audacity unparalleled;
because, in a word, it is as interesting as any novel that modern
fiction has produced; and also, I will tell it, because it lets in a
flood of light upon the condition of Rome at the time. Our hair is
made to stand on end when we remember that men had to pick their steps
in such a State as this, and to live if it were possible, and, if
not, then to be ready to die. We come in upon the fag-end of the
proscription, and see, not the bloody wreath of Sulla as he triumphed
on his Marian foes, not the cruel persecution of the ruler determined
to establish his order of things by slaughtering every foe, but the
necessary accompaniments of such ruthless deeds--those attendant
villanies for which the Jupiter Optimus Maximus of the day had neither
ears nor eyes. If in history we can ever get a glimpse at the real
life of the people, it is always more interesting than any account of
the great facts, however grand.

The Kalends of June had been fixed by Sulla as the day on which
the slaughter legalized by the proscriptions should cease. In the
September following an old gentleman named Sextus Roscius was murdered
in the streets of Rome as he was going home from supper one night,
attended by two slaves. By whom he was murdered, probably more