The catastrophe grew out of a wider war. Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, had risen against Rome and, in a single coordinated massacre known as the Asiatic Vespers, his agents are said to have killed tens of thousands of Roman and Italian settlers across Asia Minor. As his power swept westward, the Greek cities defected to him, and Athens fell under a Mithridatic-backed ruler, the tyrant Aristion. When Sulla landed in Greece in 87 BC, his first target was the famous city that had thrown in with Rome's enemy. He marched southeast and closed in on Athens and its harbor town of Piraeus.

The long walls that once joined Athens to its port lay in ruins, so Sulla had to besiege the city and the harbor separately. He struck first at Piraeus, knowing that without its port Athens could never be resupplied. When his initial assault was thrown back, he settled in for a brutal campaign of engineering. He needed timber for his siege works and took it without mercy, felling forests for a hundred miles around - including the sacred groves where Plato's Academy and other holy sites had stood. Short of money, he stripped the great Greek temples of their treasures, melting sanctuary offerings into coin so well struck it stayed prized for generations. The gods of Greece paid for the conquest of a Greek city.

Inside Athens the people starved while Aristion clung to power. Greek deserters slipped word to Sulla that a stretch of wall, the Heptachalcum, had been left poorly guarded, and his sappers went to work undermining it. Some nine hundred feet of fortification collapsed between the Sacred and Piraeic gates on the city's southwest side. Around midnight on the first of March, 86 BC, after five months of siege, the Romans poured through the breach near the Kerameikos, the old potters' quarter and burial ground. The veterans who entered were hardened men, fresh from years of civil war in Italy, and Aristion's earlier taunts had left Sulla in no mood for mercy.

What followed fell hardest on people who had no say in any of it. The Roman soldiers killed through the night, and Plutarch wrote that blood ran in the streets of the inner city and flowed out through the Dipylon Gate. These were not soldiers dying in a fair fight but ordinary residents of a starving city - the same people who had been chewing leather to survive - cut down in their own neighborhoods near the Kerameikos. The slaughter stopped only when Sulla's Greek companions, Midias and Calliphon, and the Roman senators in his camp begged him to relent. He declared, at last, that enough had died, and spared the survivors. Aristion fled to the Acropolis and held out until his water ran dry; he and his followers were executed after they surrendered.

Sulla burned much of Piraeus to the ground and marched off to finish the war, defeating Mithridates' armies at Chaeronea and Orchomenus before the two men signed peace in 85 BC. For centuries afterward the sack lived in memory as the moment Rome broke Athens, plunging the proud old city into a long economic decline. Yet modern archaeology complicates the story: excavators have found that the physical destruction, though real, was less sweeping than the ancient accounts of total ruin suggest. The deepest wound was not to the buildings but to the people who lived among them - the men, women, and children of a city that had simply backed the losing side.