Whether or not he really belonged to the royal family, he soon had all of Macedonia in his hands. And since the Romans, distracted by the Third Punic War, who were fighting at the time, at first sent only a few forces against him, he won over them a victory (149), which consolidated his authority and won them on all sides. sympathies. But even now the national aspirations remained in the state of simple ambitions: the only power that militarily counted for anything in Greece, the Achaean league, instead of profiting from the occasion provided by the resistance of Carthage and the Macedonian insurrection, he preferred to demonstrate his loyalty to Rome, giving effective reinforcement to the Romans in the war against the pretender. And at the same time he took advantage of their worries to resolve the disputes with Sparta on his own behalf, which, even after his accession to the league, were resurrected at every turn, favored by the support that the discontented Spartans found in Rome. The Romans let it go; but when Cecilio Metello, defeated the pretender in the second battle of Pydna (148), had re-established Roman authority in Macedonia, and when Scipio Emiliano had begun to weaken the extreme Carthaginian resistance, they believed the time had come to impose their will to the Achaean league. Aurelio Oreste, Roman legate, went to assembly of the Achaeans the resolution of the Senate that detached from the league not only Sparta but also Argos, Corinth, Orcomeno and Heraclea at the ETA that had recently joined it (147). It was a decisive blow to the power and even to the independence of the Achaeans, and the Senate certainly hoped that it would have its effect without the need for war. But the furious popular masses refused to submit to this imposition. And when Heraclea, relying on Roman deliberation, broke away from the league, the stratego Critolao declared war on it and set out to besiege it (146). This too was a lost war before it began, because, without speaking of the social dissensions that disturbed the league and prevented the union of minds against the foreigner, the two major Greek military powers, Macedonia and Aetolia, they had already been overthrown, and because the infinite disproportion of forces between the Achaeans and the Romans could not really be compensated for by some population of central Greece taking up arms for the Achaeans. Immediately he moved against Critolao Cecilio Metello with his victorious legions and defeated him at Scarfea and proceeded to the Isthmus. According to nexticle, the Achaeans made an extreme effort by calling up even the slaves and held the line of the Isthmus with a notable army under the stratego Dieo, when the consul Lucio Mummio arrived with two legions; the latter, sent back to Thessaly Metellus, wanted only the honor of ending the war reserved for himself, and, having defeated Dieus on the Isthmus in the battle of Leucopetra (146), he entered Corinth. The city was sacked and razed to the ground; the population killed or sold into slavery; the dissolved alloy;
Elsewhere (see acaia) it is said of the regulations, which the Romans then gave to Greece; here it will suffice to point out that, although the Romans respected the local autonomies, nevertheless, by dissolving the leagues or removing any political consistency from them, regulating, according to their consent, the conditions of Greece, they put an end to its independence at that moment. Independent remained only Athens, whose friendship with Rome dates back to the century. III and that, in its selfish isolation, it had remained extraneous to the struggles of its compatriots for independence. But now the Athenians too began to participate in the feelings of gloomy and helpless despair with which their compatriots submitted to Roman rule.
Meanwhile, the oligarchy of the wealthiest was also held in Athens closely united to Rome; indeed, with the support of Rome about the time of the Roman social war, it was preparing a constitutional reform in an oligarchic sense and in the meantime governed without the popular assembly. and without the ordinary courts. But the news was enough that Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus, had victoriously started his war against Rome and called the Greeks of Asia to freedom, who rising up put to death thousands of Italians who fell into their hands, because Athens too rose up against the oligarchs and against Rome at the same time, connecting with Mithridates (88). Mithridates immediately sent a corps of troops under the orders of his general Archelaus, who assumed the defense of Piraeus. The defense of the city was assumed with full powers by the philosopher Aristione. Silla moved against the rebel city, landed in Apollonia (87), which the previous year by taking over Rome had opened the era of civil wars in Italy, and who, momentarily becoming master of the Roman state, had secured command of the mithridatic war. Aristion and Archelaus desperately resisted one in Athens, the other in Piraeus, and, as the two fortresses no longer communicated with each other to be demolished the long walls, Archelaus did everything possible to help and provide provision for the Athenians. And certainly, if the army that Mithridates had sent through Thrace to Greece arrived in time, the conditions of Sulla could become very serious; but on 10 March 86, before help had arrived, the Athenians being exhausted by now, Sulla stormed the city and made an immense massacre there. When the defenders of Athens were reduced to the fortress and those of Piraeus to Munichia, he was able to face and win the Pontic army in the battle of Chaeronea, and, after the Acropolis also fell, he won another decisive victory at Orchomenus over a second Pontic army which he had landed at Chalcis and passed from there to Boeotia. Thus the Roman dominion on the Greek peninsula was definitively consolidated. This last episode of rebellion, which cost the Greeks very dear, had only served to demonstrate the impotence to which they were now reduced by having failed in due time the will to union and sacrifice in front of the foreigner, and had to its relative importance only to good times, who offered him the social war and the beginning of the civil wars between the Romans. This same coincidence, however, between the last episode of the struggle of the Greeks for independence and the beginning of the civil wars in Rome highlights the repercussions that the events of the vanquished had on those of the victors. It proved even more concrete and tangible when the same general, who had entered Athens victorious, entered Rome a few years later victorious.
