Book 39
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On the arrival of the Consul Mummius, Metellus was sent B. C. 146. Coss. Cn. Cornelius Lentulus, L. Mummius. back into Macedonia. Mummius was accompanied by L. Aurelius Orestes, who had been nearly murdered in the riot at Corinth (38, 7), and, pitching his camp in the Isthmus, was joined by allies who raised his army to three thousand five hundred cavalry and twenty-six thousand infantry. The Achaeans made a sudden attack upon them and gained a slight success, which was a few days afterwards revenged by a signal defeat. Instead of retiring into Corinth, and from that stronghold making some terms with Mummius, Diaeus fled to Megalopolis, where he poisoned himself, after first killing his wife. The rest of the beaten Achaean army took refuge in Corinth, which Mummius took and fired on the third day after the battle with Diaeus. Then the commissioners were sent from Rome to settle the whole of Greece. Pausanias, 7, 16-17; Livy, Ep. 52.
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The incidents of the capture of Corinth were melancholy. The soldiers cared nothing for the The destruction of the works of art in Corinth, September, B. C. 146. works of art and the consecrated statues. I saw with my own eyes pictures thrown on the ground and soldiers playing dice on them; among them was a picture of Dionysus by Aristeides—in reference to which they say that the proverbial saying arose, Nothing to the Dionysus,—and the Hercules tortured by the shirt of Deianeira. . . .
