Winter was now at hand, and Sulla despatched
Lucullus to Egypt to get ships. The refusal of the King of Egypt shows
what was now thought of the Roman power. Sulla then formed a camp
at Eleusis and continued the siege, and so shook the great tower of
Archelaus by a simultaneous discharge of twelve leaden balls from
his catapults that it had to be drawn back. [Sidenote: Blockade of
Athens.] By means of the two slaves he was also able to frustrate the
attempts of Archelaus to throw supplies into Athens, which was now
suffering from hunger, for Sulla had surrounded it with forts and
turned the siege into a blockade. Mithridates now sent his son into
Macedonia with an army, before which the small Roman force there had
to retire. After this success the prince marched towards Athens, but
died on the way. [Sidenote: Desperate defence of the Piraeus.] At the
Piraeus scenes occurred which were afterwards repeated at the siege of
Jerusalem. Archelaus undermined the earthwork and Sulla made another
determined attempt to take the wall by storm. He battered down part
of it, fired the props of his mine and so brought down more, and sent
troops by relays to escalade the breach. But Archelaus, like the
Plataeans in the Peloponnesian war, built an inner crescent-shaped
wall, from which he took the assailants in front and on both flanks
when they tried to advance. [Sidenote: Sulla turns the siege into a
blockade.] At last, wearied by this dogged resistance, Sulla turned
the siege of the Piraeus also into a blockade, which meant simply that
he hindered Archelaus from helping Athens, for he could not prevent
the influx of supplies from the sea.

[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. [Sidenot