Hide browse bar
Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the
line to jump to another position:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
[63]
After he had thus spoken Sulla apportioned the fine to the delegates and sent men to collect the money. The cities, oppressed by poverty, borrowed it at high rates of interest and mortgaged their theatres, their gymnasiums, their walls, their harbors, and every other scrap of public property, being urged on by the soldiers with contumely. Thus was the money collected and brought to Sulla. The province of Asia had her fill of misery. She was assailed openly by a vast number of pirates, resembling regular fleets rather than robber bands. Mithridates had first fitted them out at the time when he was ravaging all the coasts, thinking he could not long hold these regions. Their numbers had then greatly increased, and they did not confine them-selves to ships alone, but openly attacked harbors, castles, and cities. They captured lassus, Samos, and Clazomenæ, also Samothrace, where Sulla was staying at the time, and it was said that they robbed the temple at that place of ornaments valued at 1000 talents. Sulla, willing perhaps that those who had offended him should be maltreated, or because he was in haste to put down the hostile faction in Rome, left them and sailed for Greece, and thence passed on to Italy with the greater part of his army. What he did there I have related in my history of the civil wars.
