safe-conduct and slew himself. [Sidenote:  Sulla’s measures.] Sulla incorporated his troops with his own army, and proceeded to regulate the affairs of Asia.  Those towns which had remained faithful to Rome or had sided with him were liberally rewarded.  All slaves who refused to return to their masters were slain.  The towns that resisted were punished and their walls destroyed.  The ringleaders in the massacre were put to death.  The taxpayers were forced to pay at once the previous five years’ arrears and a fine of 20,000 talents (4,880,000_l_.), and Lucullus was left to collect it.  In order to raise this sum the unhappy Asiatics were obliged to mortgage their public buildings to the Italian money-lenders; but Sulla got the whole of it, and scarcely was he gone when pirates, hounded on by Mithridates, came, like flocks of vultures, to devour what the eagles had left.

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CHAPTER XIII.

SULLA IN ITALY.

[Sidenote:  Sulla sets out homewards.] Leaving Murena in Asia with Fimbria’s legions, Sulla, in 84 B.C., with his soldiers in good humour, and with full coffers, at last set out homewards.  Three days after sailing from Ephesus he reached the Piraeus.  Thence he wrote to the Senate in a different style from that in which he had communicated his victory over Fimbria, when he had not mentioned his own outlawry.  He now recounted the Senate all that he had done, and contrasted it with what had been done to him at Rome, how his house had been destroyed, his friends murdered, and his wife and children forced to fly for their lives.  He was on his way, he said, to punish his enemies and those who had wronged him.  Other men, including the newly-enfranchised Italians, need be under no apprehension.  We do not know much of what had been going on at Rome beyond what has been related in a previous chapter.  Cinna and Carbo, the consuls, were making what preparations they could when the letter arrived.  But it struck a cold chill of dread into many of the Senate, and Cinna and Carbo were told to desist for a time, while an embassy was sent to Sulla to try and arrange terms, and to ask, if he wished to be assured of his own safety, what were his demands.  But when the ambassadors were gone, Cinna and Carbo proclaimed themselves consuls for 83, so that they might not have to come back to Rome to hold the elections; and Cinna was soon afterwards murdered at Ancona.  The tribunes then compelled Carbo to come back and hold the elections in the regular manner; and Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus and Caius Norbanus were elected.