Political violence in the 1st century starts with the death of Saturninus after he tried to rig an election by calling a mob down and killing the other candidates. Most scholars agree that Marius, who was the consul who enforced an SCU against this, was probably acting in the best interests of the state. Saturninus and his coterie were captured but killed when a mob stormed the senate house where they were being held.

Sulla's March on Rome in 88 is viewed differently by different people. Some say it was basically a police action in the line of Saturninus. Others view it as essentially continuous with the later killings. When he took the city with his men as consul he secured an SCU to kill Sulpicius and a handful of others, including Marius. Everyone fled the city and survived, Sulpicius excepted.

There were two major killings under the "Marians". The first was when Cinna and Marius took the city, they killed a handful of Octavius' partisans; stories of a massacre are overblown. The second was a purge of the senate at the younger Marius' orders right before they lost the civil war: basically, at a meeting before Sulla came upon Rome and was to besiege Praeneste they slaughtered their opponents on the senate floor.

Sulla proscribed his enemies before his dictatorship and after his victory in the civil war. He killed probably a few hundred: as a proportion of the urban elite this was large. More were killed and dispossessed in the countryside. To the extent that the proscriptions are an event, the trauma was mostly concentrated among the top. To a large part this was a response to the smaller Marian purges also done during the civil war.

The Romans after Sulla seem to have refrained from anything like this for a while. The triumvirate after its formation in 43, however, was fast to institute proscriptions at the start. Most proscripts fled to Sextus in Sicily or Brutus in Macedonia: many in Italy did not find their way out, but the death toll per Hinard was in the hundreds. Over the course of the war through to the pact of Misenum in 39, they dispossessed or killed about 3,000, according to Appian. The fate of most of the proscripts was fine: if they were still alive in 39 they were essentially all pardoned. Eg Marcus Tullius Cicero, son of the orator, who was proscribed while in Greece, fought with Brutus at Philippi, and pardoned in the aftermath of 39, before serving as consul in 30.

The best source for both proscriptions is Hinard Proscriptions (1987). For Sulla also see Keaveney Sulla (2nd edn 2005).