The confiscated property was dealt with in a similar way. Sulla from political considerations sought to induce the respectable burgesses to take part in its purchase; a great portion of them, moreover, voluntarily pressed forward, and none more zealously than the young Marcus Crassus. Under the existing circumstances the utmost depreciation was inevitable; indeed, to some extent it was the necessary result of the Roman plan of selling the property confiscated by the state for a round sum payable in ready money. Moreover, the regent did not forget himself; while his wife Metella more especially and other persons high and low closely connected with him, even freedmen and boon-companions, were sometimes allowed to purchase without competition, sometimes had the purchase-money wholly or partially remitted. One of his freedmen, for instance, is said to have purchased a property of 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds) for 2000 (20 pounds), and one of his subalterns is said to have acquired by such speculations an estate of 10,000,000 sesterces (100,000 pounds).

The indignation was great and just; even during Sulla's regency an advocate asked whether the nobility had waged civil war solely for the purpose of enriching their freedmen and slaves. But in spite of this depreciation the whole proceeds of the confiscated estates amounted to not less than 350,000,000 sesterces (3,500,000 pounds), which gives an approximate idea of the enormous extent of these confiscations falling chiefly on the wealthiest portion of the burgesses. It was altogether a fearful punishment. There was no longer any process or any pardon; mute terror lay like a weight of lead on the land, and free speech was silenced in the market-place alike of the capital and of the country-town. The oligarchic reign of terror bore doubtless a different stamp from that of the revolution; while Marius had glutted his personal vengeance in the blood of his enemies, Sulla seemed to account terrorism in the abstract, if we may so speak, a thing necessary to the introduction of the new despotism, and to prosecute and make others prosecute the work of massacre almost with indifference.

But the reign of terror presented an appearance all the more horrible, when it proceeded from the conservative side and was in some measure devoid of passion; the commonwealth seemed all the more irretrievably lost, when the frenzy and the crime on both sides were equally balanced.

In regulating the relations of Italy and of the capital, Sulla - although he otherwise in general treated as null all state-acts done during the revolution except in the transaction of current business - firmly adhered to the principle, which it had laid down, that every burgess of an Italian community was by that very fact a burgess also of Rome; the distinctions between burgesses and Italian allies, between old burgesses with better, and new burgesses with more restricted, rights, were abolished, and remained so. In the case of the freedmen alone the unrestricted right of suffrage was again withdrawn, and for them the old state of matters was restored. To the aristocratic ultras this might seem a great concession; Sulla perceived that it was necessary to wrest these mighty levers out of the hands of the revolutionary chiefs, and that the rule of the oligarchy was not materially endangered by increasing the number of the burgesses.

But with this concession in principle was combined a most rigid inquisition, conducted by special commissioners with the co-operation of the garrisons distributed throughout Italy, in respect to particular communities in all districts of the land. Several towns were rewarded; for instance Brundisium, the first community which had joined Sulla, now obtained the exemption from customs so important for such a seaport; more were punished. The less guilty were required to pay fines, to pull down their walls, to raze their citadels; in the case of those whose opposition had been most obstinate the regent confiscated a part of their territory, in some cases even the whole of it - as it certainly might be regarded in law as forfeited, whether they were to be treated as burgess-communities which had borne arms against their fatherland, or as allied states which had waged war with Rome contrary to their treaties of perpetual peace.

In this case all the dispossessed burgesses - but these only - were deprived of their municipal, and at the same time of the Roman, franchise, receiving in return the lowest Latin rights[7]. Sulla thus avoided furnishing the opposition with a nucleus in Italian subject-communities of inferior rights; the homeless dispossessed of necessity were soon lost in the mass of the proletariate.

In Campania not only was the democratic colony of Capua done away and its domain given back to the state, as was naturally to be expected, but the island of Aenaria (Ischia) was also, probably about this time, withdrawn from the community of Neapolis. In Latium the whole territory of the large and wealthy city of Praeneste and presumably of Norba also was confiscated, as was likewise that of Spoletium in Umbria. Sulmo in the Paelignian district was even razed. But the iron arm of the regent fell with especial weight on the two regions which had offered a serious resistance up to the end and even after the battle at the Colline gate - Etruria and Samnium. There a number of the most considerable communes, such as Florentia, Faesulae, Arretium, Volaterrae, were visited with total confiscation. Of the fate of Samnium we have already spoken; there was no confiscation there, but the land was laid waste for ever, its flourishing towns, even the former Latin colony of Aesernia, were left in ruins, and the country was placed on the same footing with the Bruttian and Lucanian regions.

These arrangements as to the property of the Italian soil placed on the one hand those Roman domain-lands which had been handed over in usufruct to the former allied communities and now on their dissolution reverted to the Roman government, and on the other hand the confiscated territories of the communities incurring punishment, at the disposal of the regent; and he employed them for the purpose of settling thereon the soldiers of the victorious army. Most of these new settlements were directed towards Etruria, as for instance to Faesulae and Arretium, others to Latium and Campania, where Praeneste and Pompeii among other places became Sullan colonies. To repeople Samnium was, as we have said, no part of the regent's design. A great part of these assignations took place after the Gracchan mode, so that the settlers were attached to an already-existing urban community. The comprehensiveness of this settlement is shown by the number of land-allotments distributed, which is stated at 120,000; while yet some portions of land withal were otherwise applied, as in the case of the lands bestowed on the temple of Diana at Mount Tifata; others, such as the Volaterran domain and a part of the Arretine, remained undistributed; others in fine, according to the old abuse legally forbidden[8] but now reviving, were taken possession of on the part of Sulla's favourites by the right of occupation. The objects which Sulla aimed at in this colonization were of a varied kind. In the first place, he thereby redeemed the pledge given to his soldiers. Secondly, he in so doing adopted the idea, in which the reform-party and the moderate conservatives concurred, and in accordance with which he had himself as early as 666 arranged the establishment of a number of colonies - the idea namely of augmenting the number of the small agricultural proprietors in Italy by a breaking up of the larger possessions on the part of the government; how seriously he had this at heart is shown by the renewed prohibition of the throwing together of allotments. Lastly and especially, he saw in these settled soldiers as it were standing garrisons, who would protect his new constitution along with their own right of property. For this reason, where the whole territory was not confiscated, as at Pompeii, the colonists were not amalgamated with the urban-community, but the old burgesses and the colonists were constituted as two bodies of burgesses associated within the same enclosing wall. In other respects these colonial foundations were based, doubtless, like the older ones, on a decree of the people, but only indirectly, in so far as the regent constituted them by virtue of the clause of the Valerian law to that effect; in reality they originated from the ruler's plenitude of power, and so far recalled the freedom with which the former regal authority disposed of the state-property.