Pausanias Analysis

Mummius, having taken with him Orestes, who had earlier come during the dispute involving the Lacedaemonians and the Achaeans, reached the camp of the Romans around dawn. Having sent forward Metellus and the forces accompanying him into Macedonia, he himself waited at the Isthmus, until his whole army had assembled. The cavalry numbered three thousand five hundred, and the infantry amounted to twenty-three thousand men; there also arrived Cretan archers and Philopoemen, who led soldiers sent by Attalus from Pergamum beyond the Caicus.

Mummius had placed some of his Italian troops as well as his auxiliary forces twelve stades further forward, in front of the whole army, as a guard. The Achaeans, observing that these sentinels were carelessly posted due to Roman arrogance, attacked their forward guard, killed some, and drove the greater part back into the Roman camp, capturing as many as five hundred shields. Encouraged by this success, the Achaeans were emboldened to sally forth first, before the Romans could initiate the battle.

When Mummius also advanced to confront them, those who had been assigned to the Achaean cavalry immediately turned and fled, unable even to withstand the first charge of the Roman horse. The infantry was dispirited by the rout of their horsemen, yet when they received the attack of the Roman foot-soldiers, fiercely pressed by superior numbers and weakened by their wounds, they nevertheless held their ground through sheer determination—until finally a thousand picked Romans fell upon their flank and forced the Achaeans into a full and total flight.

But if Diaeus, after the battle, had dared to hasten into Corinth and had received within its walls those fleeing from their defeat, the Achaeans might have found some humane treatment from Mummius, by establishing themselves for a siege and the wear of warfare. But now, with the Achaeans only just beginning to yield, Diaeus immediately fled from the great city, proving himself towards the Achaeans no different from Callistratus, son of Empedus, towards the Athenians.

For when this man was commanding the cavalry in Sicily, at the time when the Athenians and all others who shared in their expedition were being destroyed by the river called Asinaros, precisely then Callistratos had sufficient courage to lead his horsemen out, cutting through the enemy ranks. After saving most of them and bringing them safely to Katane, he turned back again along the same road towards Syracuse; and finding the Athenian camp still being plundered, he slew about five of the enemy before both he himself and his horse, having received severe wounds, surrendered their lives.

This man, indeed, gained for the Athenians and himself a noble reputation, preserved those he governed, and willingly met his own end. Diaeus, however, after ruining the Achaeans, brought news to the Megalopolitans of the disasters that had befallen them; then, having slain his wife with his own hand to prevent her from becoming a captive, he ended his own life by drinking poison. He proved to resemble Menalcidas both in his greed for wealth and, similarly, in his cowardice regarding death.

Those of the Achaeans who survived the battle and managed to escape into Corinth fled immediately by night; most of the Corinthians themselves also deserted. Mummius, however, hesitated at first to advance directly into Corinth, although its gates were still wide open, suspecting that an ambush lay waiting within its walls. On the third day after the battle, he assaulted and captured Corinth by storm and set it on fire.

Of those who were captured, the Romans slew the majority; women and children were sold into slavery by Mummius. He likewise sold those slaves who, having previously been freed, had fought alongside the Achaeans and had not immediately perished in the course of battle. Among the votive offerings and other adornments, those exceptionally notable for their wonder were taken away, while those of lesser account were given by Mummius to Philopoemen, the general serving under Attalus. Thus even in my own time the Pergamenes still possessed Corinthian spoils.

As for the cities which took up arms and fought against the Romans, Mummius pulled down their walls and took away their weapons even before the commissioners sent by the Romans had arrived. When those advisers joined him to conduct their deliberations, he abolished democracies and established magistracies based upon property qualifications. Tribute was imposed upon Greece, and those who held property were forbidden to acquire possessions abroad. The assemblies according to each people's nationality—the Achaean assembly, as well as those held among the Phocians or Boeotians, or anywhere else in Greece—all these were equally abolished.

Not many years later, the Romans turned to pity Greece: they restored to each people their ancient rights to assemble and granted them again permission to acquire property overseas; they also relieved those nations upon whom Mummius had imposed fines. For he had ordered the Boeotians to pay one hundred talents to the people of Heraclea and Euboea, and the Achaeans two hundred to the Spartans. From these penalties, then, the Greeks received pardon from the Romans. Still, a governor continued to be sent even in my time; but the Romans called him governor, not of Greece, but of Achaia, since they had subdued the Greeks through the Achaeans who were at that time foremost among the Hellenic nations. This war came to an end when Antitheus was archon at Athens, in the one-hundred-sixtieth Olympiad, in which Diodorus of Sicyon won the victory.