Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/358

328 Thermopylae and held Athens. But a Pontic army overran Macedonia, which was almost denuded of troops, and was prepared, like Persian and Macedonian invaders of old, to march thence upon the Peloponnese. Meanwhile Athens was closely invested, and when it fell in the spring of B.C. 86, after many months of great suffering, the recuperation of seventy years was all undone. By Sulla's order a great part of its inhabitants was put to the sword; and though the rest were spared and the buildings left uninjured, the ancient inhabitants were so much reduced and the new ones introduced were of such heterogeneous quality that the Athenian character was permanently modified, and much that was characteristic disappeared. The fall of the city was followed by that of the Piraeus, and in this case Sulla spared nothing. The docks and magazines were burnt, the fortifications were entirely destroyed; and from this the place never recovered. The famous letter of consolation to Cicero written by Sulpicius in B.C. 45 forms an eloquent comment upon the permanence of the ruin wrought by Sulla. “On my return voyage from Asia, while sailing from Aegina towards Megara, I began surveying the adjacent regions. Behind me was Aegina, in front Megara; on my right the Piraeus, on my left Corinth. All these towns were once upon a time eminently prosperous: they now lie before my eyes mere heaps of ruins.”

This was not the end of the sufferings of Greece.