Mummius, thinking it idle to pursue the fugitive, preferred following up his advantage, and arrived at the gates of Corinth, which had been left wide open by the citizens. The place was deserted; and Mummius not only sacked its palaces, but ransacked its private houses, and, looking into its magazines, extracted from them some very valuable articles. So little, however, did he understand or appreciate art, that when sending valuable pictures or pieces of sculpture to Rome, he told the sailors, that if any damage was done on the voyage, he would make them execute objects precisely similar to those with which he entrusted them. Among the pictures was the celebrated "Bacchus" of Aristides,--which was so perfect as to be looked upon as one of the wonders of the world--and, when consigning it as part of a cargo of curiosities, he declared that, if any injury was done to it, the ship's painter should immediately paint another. Such was the barbarism of the destroyers of Corinth, that this picture was only rescued by Polybius from the hands of the soldiers, who were gambling on its face, and who, with every throw of the die, took off a portion of its colour. The scenes enacted during the pillage of Corinth were barbarous in the extreme, and involved the total destruction of what may have been termed one of the chief pillars of civilisation--or, at all events, its Corinthian capital. Many of the Roman soldiers, intoxicated with success and something more, perished in the flames, to which the city was doomed by the barbarous order of Mummius. When the conflagration first commenced, it is said that a liquid metal was seen to flow through the streets, which induced the invaders to rush forward in the hope of profiting by such a strange metallic currency. Those, however, who laid their hands upon the tempting issue, as it ran from the banks on either side of the thoroughfare, found it a mass of floating fire, with which they terribly burned their fingers. On cooler examination the material proved to be a fusion of beautiful ores, to which the name of Corinthian brass has since been given. [Illustration: Bacchanalian Group, from a very old Vase.]