The success of Mithridates encouraged the Athenians to declare against Rome, and the king accordingly sent his general Archelaus with a large army and fleet into Greece. Most of the Grecian states now declared in favor of Mithridates. Such was the position of affairs when Sulla landed in Epirus in B.C. 87. He immediately marched southward, and laid siege to Athens and the Piraeus. But for many months these towns resisted all his attacks. Athens was first taken in the spring of the following year; and Archelaus, despairing of defending the Piraeus any longer, withdrew into Boeotia, where he received some powerful re-enforcements from Mithridates. Piraeus now fell into the hands of Sulla, and both this place and Athens were treated with the utmost barbarity. The soldiers were indulged in indiscriminate slaughter and plunder. Having thus wreaked his vengeance upon the unfortunate Athenians, Sulla directed his arms against Archelaus in Boeotia, and defeated him with enormous loss at Chaeronea. Out of the 110,000 men of which the Pontic army consisted, Archelaus assembled only 10,000 at Chalcis, in Euboea, where he had taken refuge. Mithridates, on receiving news of this great disaster, immediately set about raising fresh troops, and was soon able to send another army of 80,000 men to Euboea. But he now found himself threatened with danger from a new and unexpected quarter. While Sulla was still occupied in Greece, the party of Marius at Rome had sent a fresh army to Asia under the Consul L. Valerius Flaccus to carry on the war at once against their foreign and domestic enemies. Flaccus was murdered by his troops at the instigation of Fimbria, who now assumed the command, and gained several victories over Mithridates and his generals in Asia (B.C. 85). About the same time the new army, which the king had sent to Archelaus in Greece, was defeated by Sulla in the neighborhood of Orchomenus. These repeated disasters made Mithridates anxious for peace, but it was not granted by Sulla till the following year (B.C. 84), when he had crossed the Hellespont in order to carry on the war in Asia. The terms of peace were definitely settled at an interview which the Roman general and the Pontic king had at Dardanus, in the Troad. Mithridates consented to abandon all his conquests in Asia, to restrict himself to the dominions which he held before the commencement of the war, or pay a sum of 5000 talents, and surrender to the Romans a fleet of seventy ships fully equipped. Thus terminated the First Mithridatic War.