Megara shared the fate of Eleusis, the Isthmus was left without defenders, and Corinth, Argos, and Sparta were sacked. Those who resisted were cut down, their wives carried off into slavery, their children made to serve a Gothic master. Even a philosopher died of a broken heart at the spectacle of this terrible calamity. Fortunately, Alaric’s sojourn in the Peloponnese was shortened by the arrival of Stilicho with an army in the Gulf of Corinth. The Goths withdrew to the fastnesses of Mount Pholoe, between Olympia and Patras, and it seemed as if Stilicho had only to draw his lines around them and then wait for hunger to do its work. But from some unexplained cause—perhaps a court intrigue at Constantinople, perhaps the negligence of the general—Alaric was allowed to escape over the Gulf of Corinth into Epeiros. After devastating that region he was rewarded by the Government of Constantinople with the office of Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial forces in the Eastern half of Illyricum, which comprised the scenes of his recent ravages. The principle of converting a brigand into a policeman has often proved successful, but there were probably many who shared the indignant feelings of the poet Claudian[24] at this sudden transformation of “the devastator of Achaia” into her protector. But Alaric could not rebuild the cities, which he had destroyed; he could not restore prosperity to the lands, which he had ravaged. We have ample evidence of the injury which this invasion had inflicted upon Greece in the legislation of Theodosius II in the first half of the next century. Two Imperial edicts remitted sixty years’ arrears of taxation; another granted the petition of the people of Achaia that their taxes might be reduced to one-third of the existing amount on the ground that they could pay no more; while yet another relieved the Greeks from the burden of contributing towards the expenses of the public games at Constantinople. There is proof, too, in the pages of a contemporary historian, as well as in the dry paragraphs of the Theodosian Code, that much of the land had been allowed to go out of cultivation and had been abandoned by its owners. Athens, however, had survived the tempest which had laid waste so large a part of the country. True, we find the philosopher Synesios, who visited that seat of learning soon after Alaric’s invasion, writing sarcastically to a correspondent, that Athens “resembled the bleeding and empty skin of a slaughtered victim,” and was now famous for its honey alone. But the disillusioned visitor makes no mention of the destruction of the buildings, for which the city was renowned. Throughout the vicissitudes of the five and a half centuries, which we have traversed since the Roman Conquest, one conqueror after another had spared the glories of Athens, and even after the terrible calamity of this Gothic invasion she remained the one bright spot amid the darkness which had settled down upon the land of the Hellenes.