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] This trial was, as has been said, a "causa publica," a criminal accusation of such importance as to demand that it should be tried before a full bench of judges.

Of these the number would be uncertain, but they were probably above fifty.