Sulla Sacks Athens — Chaeronea and Orchomenus
Sulla stormed Athens in March 86 BC and let his troops sack the city that had invented most of what Rome admired. Athens had joined Mithridates VI of Pontus, who in 88 BC had overrun the Roman province of Asia and organised the killing of some 80,000 Italians resident there in a single coordinated day — an indication of how thoroughly Roman tax farmers had been hated. The city was governed by a philosopher named Aristion who had taken power with Pontic backing, and the population had been persuaded that Mithridates was a liberator. Sulla arrived with five legions, no fleet, and no money, and paid for the siege by stripping the treasuries of Delphi, Olympia and Epidaurus, sending officers to remove the offerings of centuries and melt them. He cut down the groves of the Academy and the Lyceum for siege timber. The siege lasted months and produced famine inside the walls severe enough that the sources describe people boiling leather and eating grass on the Acropolis. The wall was breached at night near the Piraeus gate, and the killing went on until, Plutarch says, blood ran through the gate and into the suburb, and Sulla stopped it saying he spared the many for the sake of the few and the living for the dead. The Piraeus, which held out longer, was burned to the ground and never recovered its position. Athens survived as a university town and never again as a power. Sulla also took the library of Apellicon, which contained the working manuscripts of Aristotle, back to Rome as plunder. That is how the treatises we have came to be edited and published in the first century BC, so the sack of Athens is indirectly the reason Aristotle survives.
- Year: 86 BCE
- Category: Military
