Destruction of Corinth
Roman forces under Lucius Mummius sacked Corinth in 146 BC, killed or enslaved its population, and razed one of the wealthiest cities in Greece. The cause was the Achaean War, a short and hopeless conflict. The Achaean League, the dominant confederation in the Peloponnese, had been steadily reduced by Rome, which had removed a thousand of its leading men as hostages after the Third Macedonian War — Polybius the historian among them — and then encouraged Sparta to secede from it. When the League moved against Sparta in 146 BC, Rome treated it as defiance and sent an army. The Achaeans were destroyed at Leucopetra near the Isthmus. Corinth was the League's meeting place and was made the example. The men were killed, the women and children sold, the art shipped to Italy and the city burned. Polybius, who arrived shortly afterwards, described Roman soldiers using paintings as boards for dice. The senate had ordered the destruction deliberately, as a demonstration to the Greek world; Mummius was not blamed for it and took the surname Achaicus. The same year Scipio Aemilianus destroyed Carthage. The coincidence was noticed at the time and is generally taken as the moment Rome stopped balancing rivals and began simply removing them. Greece was placed under the governor of Macedonia. Corinth lay largely empty for a century until Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony in 44 BC. Polybius spent the rest of his life writing the history that asks how Rome had conquered the known world in fifty-three years. He concluded that its mixed constitution was the answer. The Greek cities kept their internal self-government and never again conducted a foreign policy of their own. Achaea became a formal province in 27 BC.
- Category: War
