[Sidenote:  Athens taken March 1, B.C. 86.] Athens meanwhile was in dreadful straits.  Wheat was selling at nearly 3_l_. 10_s_. a gallon, and the inhabitants were feeding on old leather bottles, shoes, and the bodies of the dead.  A deputation came out, but Sulla sent them back because they began an harangue on the deeds of their ancestors, put into their mouths, no doubt, by the rhetorician Aristion.  Sulla told them they were the scum of nations, not descended from the old Athenians at all, and that instead of listening to their rhetoric he meant to punish their rebellion.  On the night of March 1, 86 B.C., he broke into the town amid the blare of trumpets and the shouts of his troops.  He told his men to give no quarter, and the blood, it was said, ran down through the gates into the suburbs. [Sidenote:  Aristion slain.] Aristion fled to the Acropolis.  Hunger forced him in the end to capitulate, and he was killed.  Sulla meanwhile had forced on the siege of Piraeus still more vigorously.  He got past the crescent wall, only to find other walls similarly constructed behind it; but he gradually drove Archelaus into Munychia, or the peninsular part of Piraeus, and as he had no ships he could do nothing more. [Sidenote:  Archelaus sails from Piraeus, and joins Taxiles, sent by Mithridates with reinforcements.] Either before or after the capture of the Acropolis Archelaus sailed away, in obedience to a summons from Taxiles, a new general whom Mithridates had sent with an army of 100,000 foot, 10,000 horse, and ninety scythed chariots into Greece.  With these forces and the troops previously sent with his master’s son he formed a junction at Thermopylae, marched into Phocis down the valley of the Cephissus, attempted but failed to take Elateia, and came up with Sulla near Chaeroneia. [Sidenote:  Sulla forms a junction with Hortensius.] Sulla had marched into Boeotia and joined Hortensius, who had a brought some troops from Thessaly.  But he is said by Appian to have had not a third of the enemy’s numbers, while Plutarch affirms that he had only 15,000 foot and 1,500 horse.

[Illustration:  Map to illustrate the March of SULLA and ARCHELAUS before Chaeroneia.]

[Sidenote:  Position of the two armies.] Sulla was on the west bank of the Cephissus, on an eminence named Philoboeotus, and Archelaus on the other side of the river not far off.  Sulla’s soldiers were alarmed by the numbers and splendour of the enemy, for the brass and steel of their armour ’kindled the air with an awful flame like that of lightning.’ [Sidenote:  Manoeuvres of Sulla and Archelaus.] Archelaus, marching down the valley of the Cephissus, tried to seize a strong position called the Acropolis of the Parapotamii, situated on the Assus, which joined the Cephissus to the south of both armies.  But Sulla, who had wearied out his men by drudgery in dyke-making, and made them eager for a fight, crossed the Cephissus, seized the position first, and then, crossing the