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.
13
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. . . .
14
Owing to the popular reverence for the memory of Philopoemen, they did not take down the statues of him in the various cities. So true is it, as it seems to me, that every genuine act of virtue produces in the mind of those who benefit by it an affection which it is difficult to efface. . . .
14
One might fairly, therefore, use the common saying: He has been foiled not at the door, but in the road. . . .Seems to mean he lost before he began, before he got even at the threshold of his enterprise. There is nothing to show to what the fragment refers.
