Previously, the Athenians had left them alone, but they now made frequent inroads into their country, and cruelly ravaged it; and the marches of the Peloponnesians through it seem to have completely ruined it. Afterwards it was a place of no importance. Its situation, which, if Peloponnesus had formed one state, might have made it an excellent bulwark, appears to have always exposed it to ravages. It was taken and destroyed by Demetrius Poliorcetes; Antigonus Gonatas carried on a severe war against the country, to obtain in it a place for a Macedonian garrison. Such a garrison was at that time the most fearful scourge for a Greek town; it generally consisted of barbarians, such as Gauls, Thracians, or Getae, who conducted themselves entirely according to their own discretion, and against whom it was impossible for any individual to protect his property, unless the governor took pity upon him, as was the case at Athens, which had the good fortune of having in Antigonus Gonatas a humane commander. Hence Megara, like the other places, was in a wretched condition. During the first great period of the Achaeans, Megara, together with Corinth, became free again; but afterwards it was so insignificant, that it is not even mentioned as to whether, when Corinth became Macedonian, Megara experienced the same fate or not: it had probably joined Boeotia. Before the battle on the Isthmus, the Romans again destroyed everything that was still standing. Ser. Sulpicius, in his consolatory letter to Cicero, mentions Megara, too, as one of the “corpses of towns” which he saw on the Saronic gulf; according to Strabo, however, it still existed in his time ἀμῶς γέ πως, though it had sunk very low: it still contained some ancient buildings and temples, and among them, within the ring-walls, a small Population. The devastation of Greece under the Romans can scarcely be conceived too fearful: Pausanias misleads us on this point; the true description is furnished by Dion Chrysostomus, who states, that a person might travel about in Arcadia and Thessaly for a whole day without seeing a human being, except a few shepherds. My belief is, that in the time of Pausanias, Peloponnesus, with the exception of a few districts, had no more inhabitants than previously to the Venetian conquest in the year 1650. Megara was important in a military point of view; two roads led thence to Corinth: the one, running along the sea-coast, and by the Scironian rocks, was very dangerous, for it passed between the precipitous rock and the shore, and formed a pass which no one would ever attempt to storm; the other led across the Oneian mountain, right through the middle of the country, towards the Isthmus. ATTICA.