The Achaean League was the closest thing classical Greece ever managed to a federal union - a loose democracy of southern Greek cities that had survived for over a century by paying careful attention to Roman power. By the 140s BC that careful attention was failing. The League wanted Sparta in. Sparta wanted out. Rome, which had recently demolished the Macedonian kingdom in the Fourth Macedonian War, told the League it could not have what it wanted. In 146 BC negotiations collapsed; the League's general Critolaos was killed at the Battle of Scarpheia by a Roman force from Macedonia; his successor Diaeus had pro-peace politicians arrested or executed in Corinth and prepared to fight to the end. Lucius Mummius arrived from Italy with two legions and Italian allies, perhaps 26,500 men. Diaeus had 14,600 - many of them survivors of Scarpheia, exhausted, demoralized, with the city wall behind them and no more roads to retreat down.

The Achaeans got an opening night when Roman pickets, careless from contempt, let a night raid surprise their advance camp. For one moment the war looked open. Mummius led a counterattack himself the next morning and chased the raiders back to their lines. The full battle the following day was short. Achaean infantry held the Roman legions for some time - they were skilled and they were defending their families - but their cavalry, badly outnumbered, broke at the first Roman charge and fled. A picked force of a thousand Roman foot soldiers crashed into the Achaean flank, the line buckled, and the survivors ran for the city gates. Diaeus did not run with them. He fled inland to Arcadia, killed his wife to spare her from capture, and then took poison. The remaining Greek soldiers and most of the city's civilians scattered into the hills.

Mummius did not enter Corinth immediately. The Romans, fearing an ambush in the empty streets, waited three days outside the walls. When they finally walked in, they found a city largely abandoned - perhaps half the population gone, the rest hidden in cellars and temples. What followed was not battle but policy. Every adult man the Romans found was killed. Every woman and child was sold into slavery, thousands of them, families disassembled forever. The city was set on fire. The plunder of the temples and homes was so vast that Roman soldiers used masterpieces as gaming boards and dice tables; Polybius, who was there as a Greek hostage, recorded his disgust. Corinth had been one of the wealthiest cities of the ancient Mediterranean for seven centuries. It was destroyed in a week. Carthage was destroyed by Scipio Aemilianus the same year, and Rome's Mediterranean had a different shape by winter.

The site of ancient Corinth lies at the foot of Acrocorinth, a steep limestone monolith that rises 1,886 feet above the Gulf of Corinth and looks out over the isthmus that gave the city its strategic value. The seven monolithic columns of the Temple of Apollo survived the destruction - they had stood for three centuries before Mummius and they outlasted his fire. Julius Caesar refounded the city as a Roman colony in 44 BC, just months before his own death; Roman Corinth eventually thrived again, and it is from that second city that Saint Paul's Letters to the Corinthians were addressed. The original city, the one Mummius burned, exists today as low foundations and reconstructed columns scattered across an archaeological park. The hill of Acrocorinth still rises behind it, and the view from the top - the Gulf to the north, the Saronic to the south, two seas visible from one ridge - has not changed at all.