Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/357

Rh cities of the Peloponnese, Boeotia, and many other parts of Greece. Delos, that owed its commercial existence to Rome and was full of Italian men of business, almost alone held out, and was accordingly overrun by Archelaus, the general of Mithradates, who put Delians and Italians to the sword indiscriminately, sold women and children into slavery, and plundered the temples, which, as in other places, were used as banks. The Athenians were gratified by having half the spoil and seeing their “general” Aristion treated as an equal of the king's general. Nevertheless, they had to admit a royal garrison into the Piraeus, and at the beginning of B.C. 87 Mithradates was elected general-in-chief, after the precedent of Philip and Alexander. Athens, there- fore, practically became subject to the King of Pontus. The rest of Southern Greece submitted ; Chalcis was forcibly occupied, which involved the submission of all Euboea. Thespiae was the only state in Boeotia which did not follow the lead of Thebes; and the Mithradatic fleet sailed among the islands without meeting with any resistance. Once more Greece had found a champion of her liberties.

The nemesis was not long delayed. Sulla entered Greece with an army in the summer of B.C. 87, when the Pontic forces by sea and land had already sustained a check at the hand of the pro quaestor, Bruttius Sura, off Sciathus and in Boeotia. But Athens was now the headquarters of Pontic power in Greece, and upon Athens Sulla directed his attack. Southern Greece generally was let alone, as sure to fall to the power that commanded the pass of