Before Metellus reached the Isthmus, Mummius hastened to take the command of the army. Mummius was not of so mild a disposition as Metellus; he sought laurels for himself, and booty for the Romans. He tried to come up before Metellus could have concluded a peace: for the latter, although a plebeian like Mummius, was of a family which had long been in possession of the curule dignities, and being a _nobilis_, he could easily have carried the peace in the senate; Mummius was a _novus homo_, and not one of the aristocracy. Diæus had enlisted all the slaves who were able to bear arms, and yet he had only got together an army of fourteen thousand men, though there had been more than half a century of peace: this, more than anything, shows in what a wretched moral and political condition the country was; for wealthy the Achæans undoubtedly were. These had their heads turned by an advantage which they won in a cavalry fight, and they provoked the Romans to a battle, which was soon so utterly lost as to leave no hope of safety. They ought to have defended the impregnable Acrocorinthus; but the whole population of Corinth fled into the Arcadian mountains, and the town and the citadel were abandoned, not a soul having remained behind. On the third day after the battle, Mummius, who would not believe it possible that they had given up every thought of defence, ordered the gates to be broken open, and convinced himself that the city was deserted. The pillage of Corinth; Mummius’ barbarian honesty; and the burning of the most wealthy commercial town then in Europe, are well known facts. The booty was immense: all the Corinthians were sold for slaves, and the most noble works of art were carried away. In the same manner, Thebes and Chalcis were destroyed: with regard to other towns, we have no distinct information. Thebes, in Pausanias’ times, was only a small village within the Cadmea. The inhabitants of the whole of the Peloponnesus would have been sold into slavery, had not Polybius, through his friend Scipio, managed to get some merciful decrees from the senate.