[Sidenote: Sulla rewards his soldiers and establishes a permanent party.] Sulla's friends attended such auctions and made large fortunes. One of his centurions, named Luscius, bought an estate for 10,000,000 sesterces, or 88,540_l_. of our money. One of his freedmen bought for 20_l_. 12_s_. an estate worth 61,000_l_. Crassus, Verres, and Sulla's wife, Metella, became in this way infamously rich. In spite of such nominal prices, the sale of confiscated estates produced 350,000,000 sesterces, or nearly 3,000,000_l_. of our money. Sulla approved of such purchases, for they bound the buyers to his interests, and ensured their wishing to uphold his acts after his death. With the same view of creating a permanent Sullan party in Italy, and at the same time to fulfil his pledges to the soldiers, he allotted to them all public lands in Italy hitherto undistributed, and all confiscated land not otherwise disposed of. In this way he punished and rewarded at a stroke. No fewer than 120,000 allotments were made and twenty-three legions provided for. There was in it a plausible mimicry of the democratic scheme of colonies which Sulla must have thoroughly enjoyed. Thus in Italy he provided a standing army to support his new constitution. [Sidenote: The Cornelii.] In Rome itself, by enfranchising 10,000 slaves whose owners had been slain, he formed a strong body of partisans ever ready to do his bidding; these were all named Cornelii. A man is known by his adherents, and the worst men were Sulla's _protégés_. [Sidenote: Catiline.] Catiline's name rose into notoriety amid these horrors. He was said not only to have murdered his own brother, but, to requite Sulla for legalising the murder by including this brother's name in the list of the proscribed, to have committed the most horrible act of the Civil War--the torture of Marcus Marius Gratidianus. This man, because he was cousin of Marius, was offered up as a victim to the manes of Catulus, of whom the elder Marius had said, 'He must die.' This poor wretch was scourged, had his limbs broken, his nose and hands cut off, and his eyes gouged out of their sockets. Finally his head was cut off, and Cicero's brother writes that Catiline carried it in his hands streaming with blood. But no one would attach much importance to what the Ciceros said of Catiline, and two circumstances combine to point to his innocence of such extreme enormities. One is that it was the son of Catulus who begged as a boon from Sulla the death of this Marius, and his name was very likely confused with Catiline's in the street rumours of the time; and the other and more direct piece of evidence is, that Catiline was tried in the year 64 for murders committed at this time, and was acquitted. It is a curious thing that the obloquy which has clung to Catiline's name on such dubious reports has never attached in the same measure to the undoubted horrors and abominations of Sulla's career.