Sulla

For although the Romans of that time no longer retained their ancient purity and uprightness of life, but had degenerated, and yielded to the appetite for luxury and extravagance, they nevertheless held in equal opprobrium those who lost an inherited wealth and those who forsook an ancestral poverty.

And afterwards, when he had at last become absolute in power, and was putting many to death, a freedman, who was thought to be concealing one of the proscribed, and was therefore to be thrown down the Tarpeian rock, cast it in his teeth that they had long lived together in one lodging house, himself renting the upper rooms at two thousand sesterces, and Sulla the lower rooms at three thousand. The difference in their fortunes, therefore, was only a thousand sesterces,[*](In Sulla’s time the sestertius was a silver coin worth between two and three pence, or about five cents. The Attic drachma was a silver coin worth about eight pence, or twenty cents.) which are equivalent to two hundred and fifty Attic drachmas. Such, then, is the account we find of Sulla’s earlier fortune.