The Roman conquest, again, further depressed Greek fortunes by absolute violence, hurling whole armies of the conquered into slavery,[275] and later setting up a new foreign attraction to the Greeks of ready wit and small means. They presumably began to flock to Rome or Egypt or Asia Minor as the conditions in Greece worsened; and that process in turn would be promoted by the gradual worsening of the Roman financial pressure. It is notable that a rebellion of Attic slaves occurred in 133 B.C., synchronously with the first slave-rising in Sicily--a proof of fresh oppression all round.[276] The Romans had retained the Greek systems of municipal government, and had begun by putting on light taxes.[277] But these surely increased;[278] and the Mithridatic war, in which Athens had taken the anti-Roman side, changed all for the worse. Sulla took the city after a difficult siege, massacred most of the citizens, and entirely destroyed the Piræus; whereafter Athens practically ceased for centuries to be a commercial centre. Corinth, which had been razed to the ground by Mummius, was ultimately reconstructed by Cæsar as a Roman colony, and secured most of what commerce Greece retained. Twenty years before, Pompey had put down the Cilician pirates, a powerful community of organised freebooters that had arisen out of the disbanding of the hired forces of Mithridates and other Eastern monarchs on the triumph of the Romans, and was further swelled by a large inflow of poverty-stricken Greeks. While it lasted, it greatly multiplied the number of slaves for the Roman market by simple kidnapping. [The great mart for such sales was Delos, which was practically a Roman emporium (Strabo, bk. xiv, c. v, § 1). Mahaffy (_Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 154) regards the pirates as largely anti-Roman, especially in respect of their sacking of Delos. But previously they sold their captives there; and Dr. Mahaffy (p. 7) recognises the connection. The pirates, in short, became anti-Roman when the Romans, who had so long tolerated them as slave-traders (as the rulers of Cyprus and Egypt had done before), were driven to keep them in check as pirates.]