Lucius Mummius
Lucius Mummius was the consul who destroyed Corinth in 146 BC on the senate's instructions, killed the men and sold the women and children, sent the city's paintings and bronzes to Rome by the shipload with a clause in the contract that any lost in transit must be replaced with others of equal value, and was given the surname Achaicus for it; the story of the clause is the Romans' own joke about a new man who did not know what he was carrying. He was born about 190 BC into a plebeian family without consuls, was praetor in Further Spain in 153, where he lost a battle to the Lusitanians and won the next, and was elected consul for 146 as the man to finish the Achaean War that the praetor Metellus had nearly finished already. The Achaean League had gone to war with Rome over Sparta's secession, in a mood the sources describe as madness, and its army was beaten at Scarpheia. Mummius took over the command, met the last force under Diaeus at the Isthmus, beat it in an afternoon, and entered Corinth, which the citizens had abandoned, on the third day. The senate's commissioners then arrived with the order. The city was burned, the walls thrown down, the land made public and cursed, the league dissolved, and Greece put under the governor of Macedonia, in the same year and by the same policy that razed Carthage. Mummius spent the next year with the ten commissioners settling the province, was praised for taking nothing for himself, and dedicated Greek statues in every town in Italy that asked, with his name on the base. The temple of Hercules Victor he vowed was built from the spoils. He was censor in 142 with Scipio Aemilianus, who despised him, and died soon after, poor enough that the senate found his daughter a dowry. Corinth stayed empty for a century until Caesar refounded it as a colony for freedmen.
- Lived: 190 BCE – 140 BCE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: general, consul
