Pausanias, Description of Greece (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Paus.].
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7.16.6

So he won glory for the Athenians and for himself, by saving the men under his command and seeking his own death. But Diaeus having ruined the Achaeans came to tell the tidings of disaster to the people of Megalopolis, killed his wife with his own hand, just to save her from being taken prisoner, and then committed suicide by drinking poison. He may be compared to Menalcidas for his avarice, and proved equally like him in the cowardice of his death.

7.16.7

As soon as night fell, the Achaeans who had escaped to Corinth after the battle fled from the city, and there fled with them most of the Corinthians themselves. At first Mummius hesitated to enter Corinth, although the gates were open, as he suspected that an ambush had been laid within the walls. But on the third day after the battle he proceeded to storm Corinth and to set it on fire.

7.16.8

The majority of those found in it were put to the sword by the Romans, but the women and children Mummius sold into slavery. He also sold all the slaves who had been set free, had fought on the side of the Achaeans, and had not fallen at once on the field of battle. The most admired votive offerings and works of art were carried off by Mummius; those of less account he gave to Philopoemen, the general sent by Attalus; even in my day there were Corinthian spoils at Pergamus.

7.16.9

The walls of all the cities that had made war against Rome Mummius demolished, disarming the inhabitants, even before assistant commissioners were despatched from Rome, and when these did arrive, he proceeded to put down democracies and to establish governments based on a property qualification. Tribute was imposed on Greece, and those with property were forbidden to acquire possessions in a foreign country. Racial confederacies, whether of Achaeans, or Phocians, or Boeotians, or of any other Greek people, were one and all put down.

7.16.10

A few years later the Romans took pity on Greece, restored the various old racial confederacies, with the right to acquire property in a foreign country, and remitted the fines imposed by Mummius. For he had ordered the Boeotians to pay a hundred talents to the people of Heracleia and Euboea, and the Achaeans to pay two hundred to the Lacedaemonians. Although the Romans granted the Greeks remission of these payments, yet down to my day a Roman governor has been sent to the country. The Romans call him the Governor, not of Greece, but of Achaia, because the cause of the subjection of Greece was the Achaeans, at that time at the head of the Greek nation. note This war came to an end when Antitheus was archon at Athens, in the hundred and sixtieth Olympiad note, at which Diodorus of Sicyon was victorious. note

ch. 17 7.17.1

It was at this time that Greece was struck with universal and utter prostration, although parts of it from the beginning had suffered ruin and devastation at the hand of heaven. Argos, a city that reached the zenith of its power in the days of the heroes, as they are called, was deserted by its good fortune at the Dorian revolution.

7.17.2

The people of Attica, reviving after the Peloponnesian war and the plague, raised themselves again only to be struck down a few years later by the ascendancy of Macedonia. From Macedonia the wrath of Alexander swooped like a thunderbolt on Thebes of Boeotia. The Lacedaemonians suffered injury through Epaminondas of Thebes and again through the war with the Achaeans. And when painfully, like a shoot from a mutilated and mostly withered trunk, the Achaean power sprang up, it was cut short, while still growing, by the cowardice note of its generals.

7.17.3

At a later time, when the Roman imperial power devolved upon Nero, he gave to the Roman people the very prosperous island of Sardinia in exchange for Greece, and then bestowed upon the latter complete freedom. When I considered this act of Nero it struck me how true is the remark of Plato, the son of Ariston, who says that the greatest and most daring crimes are committed, not by ordinary men, but by a noble soul ruined by a perverted education. note



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