After being opposed strongly to Philip, and submissive to Alexander, Athens was taken successively by his successors, Antipater, Demetrius, and Antigonus; its wealth being a rich bait for these captains, whose vanity was continually wounded by the haughtiness of the city, which gave rise to aggressions often but little merited. THIRD SIEGE, A.C. 87. Archelaus, a general of Mithridates, king of Pontus, entered Athens by means of a sophist named Aristion, to whom he gave the principal authority of the place. The Athenians claimed the assistance of the Romans, and Sylla took the matter upon his own hands. Upon Sylla’s arrival in Greece, all the cities opened their gates to him, with the exception of Athens, which, subject to Aristion, was obliged unwillingly to oppose him. When the Roman general entered Attica, he divided his forces into two bodies, the one of which he sent to besiege Aristion, in the city of Athens, and with the other he marched in person to the port Piræus, which was a kind of second city, where Archelaus had shut himself up, relying upon the strength of the place, the walls being sixty feet high, and all of hewn stone. This had been the work of Pericles, during the Peloponnesian war. The height of the walls did not amaze Sylla. He employed all kinds of engines in battering them, and made continual assaults. If he would have waited a little, he might have taken the higher city without striking a blow, for it was reduced to the last extremity by famine; but being in haste to return to Rome, where he apprehended changes might happen in his absence, he spared neither danger, attacks, nor expense, to hasten the conclusion of this war. Without enumerating the rest of the warlike stores and equipage, twenty thousand mules were perpetually employed in working the machines alone. Wood falling short, from the great consumption of it in the machines, which were constantly being broken, in consequence of the vast weight they carried, or burnt by the enemy, he did not spare the sacred groves. He cut down the beautiful avenues of the Academy and the Lycæum, and caused the high walls which joined the port to the city to be demolished, for the sake of the ruins, which were useful to him in the works he was carrying on. Having occasion for a great deal of money, both for the expenses of the war, and as a stimulus to the soldiers, he had recourse to the hitherto inviolable treasures of the temples, and caused the finest and most precious gifts, consecrated at Epidamus and Olympia, to be brought thence. He wrote to the Amphyctions, assembled at Delphi, “That they would act wisely in sending him the treasures of the god, because they would be more secure in his hands; and that if he should be obliged to make use of them, he would return the value after the war.” At the same time he sent one of his friends, named Caphis, a native of Phocis, to Delphi, to receive all those treasures by weight. When Caphis arrived