So far the matter had gone with the Tituses, and with Chrysogonus who had got his lion's share. Our poor Roscius, the victim, did at first abandon his property, and allow himself to be awed into silence. We cannot but think that he was a poor creature, and can fancy that he had lived a wretched life during all the murders of the Sullan proscriptions. But in his abject misery he had found his way up among the great friends of his family at Rome, and had there been charged with the parricide, because Chrysogonus and the Tituses began to be afraid of what these great friends might do.
This is the story as Cicero has been able to tell it in his speech. Beyond that, we only know that the man was acquitted. Whether he got back part of his father's property there is nothing to inform us. Whether further inquiry was made as to the murder; whether evil befell those two Tituses or Chrysogonus was made to disgorge, there has been no one to inform us. The matter was of little importance in Rome, where murders and organized robberies of the kind were the common incidents of every-day life. History would have meddled with nothing so ordinary had not it happened that the case fell into the hands of a man so great a master of his language that it has been worth the while of ages to perpetuate the speech which he made in the matter. But the story, as a story of Roman life, is interesting, and it gives a slight aid to history in explaining the condition of things which Sulla had produced.
The attack upon Chrysogonus is bold, and cannot but have been offensive to Sulla, though Sulla is by name absolved from immediate blame. Chrysogonus himself, the favorite, he does not spare, saying words so bitter of tone that one would think that the judges--Sulla's judges--would have stopped him, had they been able. "Putting aside Sextus Roscius," he says, "I demand, first of all, why the goods of an esteemed citizen were sold; then, why have the goods been sold of one who had not himself been proscribed, and who had not been killed while defending Sulla's enemies? It is against those only that the law is made. Then I demand why they were sold when the legal day for such sales had passed, and why they were sold for such a trifle."[72] Then he gives us a picture of Chrysogonus flaunting down the streets. "You have seen him, judges, how, his locks combed and perfumed, he swims along the Forum"--he, a freedman, with a crowd of Roman citizens at his heels, that all may see that he thinks himself inferior to none--"the only happy man of the day, the only one with any power in his hands."[73]