laus now suspecting some treachery set men at the gates with torches to sally out, if Sulla should attack those who were carrying the corn. Both plans succeeded. Sulla took the corn, and Archelaus fired some of Sulla's engines.

Mithridates saw that the struggle between himself and the Romans must be decided on the west side of the Aegean, and he sent one of his sons, Arcathias, with an army into Macedonia, from which the small force of the Romans was easily expelled, and all the country was brought under the king's dominion. Arcathias appointed governors of Macedonia and began his march southward to Athens. The design was to relieve Archelaus, who was shut up in the Piraeus. On the way Arcathias fell ill and died. His army subsequently joined Archelaus in Boeotia.

Sulla was conducting two sieges at once, and it is not easy to conceive how he found men enough to shut in Athens and to attack the Piraeus at the same time. He must have had some Greeks in his army. In Athens indeed there was probably no great force, but the extent of the walls made the blockade difficult. If it was not relieved, famine would compel a surrender, and with this view Sulla constructed numerous castella, or forts round the city, to prevent any of the inhabitants from making their escape and so to increase the sufferings of all.

When Sulla had completed his embankment against the Piraeus, he placed his engines on it. Archelaus in the mean time was undermining the work of Sulla and carrying off the earth. At last the embankment suddenly sank in, on which the Romans withdrew their engines and set about repairing the embankment. They also began to undermine the enemy's wall, and as their excavations and those of the besieged met underground, the men fought in these subterraneous galleries. The battering-rams of Sulla at last threw down a part of the wall, which was near to one of the enemy's wooden towers, and the tower itself was fired. Sulla seized the part where the wall had fallen, and at the same time filled with sulphur, tow, and pitch the mine which he had carried under the walls. The upper part of his mine was

sustained by the timber, which had been placed there to protect the excavators from the earth falling in. When the combustibles had destroyed the wood-work, the wall gave way, first in one place, and then in another, burying in the ruins the men who were upon it. The consternation of the enemy encouraged the Romans, and Sulla urged them on to the assault. He continually relieved his men, when they were exhausted, by sending fresh men in their place to scale the walls. Archelaus also brought up fresh troops to resist the assault. Many men fell on both sides, but at last Sulla finding the defence more easy for the enemy than the attack for himself drew off his soldiers. In the night Archelaus worked at a new wall, which was constructed in the form of a crescent with the convex side turned inwards, for the purpose of closing the breach. Sulla attempted to destroy this wall which was fresh constructed and weak, but his men were assailed both in front and on the flank when they advanced within the hollow of the crescent. Failing in this attempt, Sulla gave up all hope of taking the Piraeus by assault, and blockaded it with the view of reducing it by famine. But if this was his purpose, as Appian says, he must have known that Archelaus, who had the command of the sea, could supply himself with provisions better than Sulla could furnish his own army; and though Archelaus might have taken off his men by the ships when he pleased, he had no intention yet of giving up the stronghold which he possessed.

The provisions in Athens were now exhausted. A medimnus of wheat, something less than twelve gallons, was selling for a thousand drachmae (above 407.). All the animals had been eaten, and skins, shoes, and leather bottles were cooked for food; even the dead were devoured. Men ate the wild chamomile that grew about the Acropolis. Aristion all the time was enjoying himself, for he had laid in a store of good things for himself and his own crew. The members of the Senate and the priests entreated him to come to terms with Sulla, and at last being persuaded he sent some of his boon companions to treat of peace. When they came to the

Roman general, they had no proposals to make, but they began a pompous speech about Theseus and Eumolpus, and the Persian wars, which Sulla cut short by telling them to be gone with their fine talk: he had not been sent to Athens to learn a lesson, but to compel rebels to submit. He completed his line of contravallation round the city, and it was now impossible for a single person to escape. It happened that the Roman soldiers who were stationed at the outer Ceramicus, a suburb on the west side of Athens, overheard some old men in the city abusing the tyrant for not guarding the approach to the wall about the Heptachalcum, the only part, as they said, where it was easy to get in. The story of the overhearing is improbable, and we must assume that the Romans could see where the wall was weakest. However, this was the part where the Romans entered. Sulla levelled the wall between the Piraic and the Sacred Gates, as Plutarch reports, or we may rather suppose that he levelled enough to make a wide entrance. Any further labour at this time would have been useless. The resistance was feeble. About midnight the infuriated besiegers broke into the city, striking terror into the inhabitants with the sound of trumpets and horns and loud cries. The men were so weakened by want of food that they could not fly, and the women and children were massacred without mercy. Sulla's orders were to kill all before them. Many of the Athenians seeing no hope presented themselves to the soldiers, and some killed themselves. A large number fell about the Agora, and the blood streamed down the inner Ceramicus, and, as many say, even flowed through the gates into the suburbs. A few escaped to the Acropolis with Aristion, who first set fire to the Odeium of Pericles or music hall, that Sulla might not use the timber for an attack on the Acropolis. Sulla would not allow the city to be burnt, but his men had permission to plunder as much as they liked. They found in many houses human flesh prepared for food. According to Plutarch's statement, two Athenian exiles, who were with Sulla, and some Roman senators also who were in his army, at last prevailed on him to stay the slaughter. The city was taken, as Sulla says in VOL. II.

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his Memoirs, on the Calends or first of March (B.c. 86) after a siege of several months.

Sulla left an officer C. Scribonius Curio to besiege Aristion in the Acropolis. The tyrant and those with him were compelled by famine to surrender. Aristion was put to death, and all those with him who had been his guards or had held any office since the rebellion, or who in any way had acted contrary to the rules established by the Romans at the conquest of Greece. Sulla raised some money by selling all the slaves that he took in the city. It is not reported that he sold any free persons, an act of grace which is more than the Athenians could have expected. He took out of the Acropolis forty pounds of gold and six hundred of silver. Sulla is not charged with carrying off any of the works of art from Athens. All that he is said to have taken were some columns from the Olympieium, which were used in the Capitoline temple at Rome. But these columns must have been sent off some time after the capture of Athens, for Sulla had no ships now, and he had more weighty business on hand than the collecting of works of art to adorn Rome. If he did not carry off plunder of this kind, it was not from any scruples. He could do nothing with it, so long as Rome was in the possession of his enemies, and he would not send it home, even after he had cleared Greece of the armies of Mithridates, to fall into the hands of the opposite faction. We must conclude that it was the circumstances of the times that saved Athens from being plundered of her statues, or possibly Sulla's indifference to such things, though that is less likely, for he was a man of education and well acquainted with the value of Greek art. The only statue that he is said to have carried away from Greece was an ivory statue of Athena from Alalcomenae in Boeotia.

After the capture of Athens Sulla made another attempt to storm the Piraeus. He broke down a part of the new wall which Archelaus had constructed, but he found that the enemy had built other similar walls behind this. However Sulla pushed the assault so vigorously that Archelaus gave up the defence of the circuit of the Piraeus and retired to the

strongest part of the Piraic fortifications, or the Munychia, which was surrounded by the sea except where the neck of the peninsula was joined to the mainland, and here he was safe. When the Romans broke into the Piraeus, they burned the greater part of it with the sheds of the dry docks and the noble arsenal constructed by the architect Philo.

Another army from Asia was now coming against Sulla under Taxiles a general of Mithridates. He was moving from Thrace and Macedonia with one hundred thousand men, ten thousand horse, and ninety scythe chariots. He summoned Archelaus to join him, an important fact, which Appian has omitted, and Plutarch has recorded. Probably Mithridates, who was in Asia, directed the operations of the war, as military movements have been directed in modern times by men who sit at home and know not what they are doing. Archelaus could stay in the Munychia as long as he pleased, for he had the command of the sea. His plan, says Plutarch, was to protract the war and to cut off Sulla's supplies. When Archelaus took off his men in the ships and landed them in Boeotia, Sulla also left Attica and crossed the mountains. Pausanias says that Sulla hearing of the advance of Taxiles from Elateia in Phocis left the siege of Athens and met Taxiles in Boeotia, and that the news of the capture of Athens reached him three days after, and on the very day that he won his victory at Chaeroneia. He also states that Sulla returned to Athens after his victory, and shutting up his prisoners in the Ceramicus put to death every tenth man on whom the lot fell. A fragment of Licinianus seems also to agree with Pausanias, but the passage is so defective that we cannot safely rely on it. This discrepancy has perhaps been caused by a confusion between the capture of Athens, and the capture of the Acropolis, which, as Appian remarks, took place a little after the entrance of the Romans into the city. Sulla may have visited Athens after the capture of the Acropolis, and in the interval between the battle of Chaeroneia and the battle of Orchomenus. However this may be, it is safer to follow the continuous narrative of Appian.