According to Pliny (35.24), Aristides’ picture of Dionysus, which was dedicated in the temple of Ceres on the Aventine, was the first picture from abroad to become Roman property, but foreign art had in fact been brought to Rome since Marcellus’ capture of Syracuse in 212.

Pausanias comments that even in his own day there was still Corinthian booty at Pergamum (Paus. While Mummius gained the reputation of being a philistine (he was a novus homo, though his father had been praetor), and Polybius (39.2.1-2) records that his soldiers played dice on masterpieces of Greek art, he ensured that the best works were taken to Rome, with the less distinguished awarded to Philopoemen, the general of Rome’s ally Attalus II of Pergamum. The league was defeated and its centre, Corinth, sacked and burnt all its property was auctioned by senatorial decree, the captives slaughtered, and the women and children sold into slavery, as well as slaves who had fought for the Achaeans (Paus. When the league declared war on Sparta in 146, Metellus marched south from Macedonia, to take charge of affairs until the arrival of the consul L. When the remaining Achaean exiles arrived back in Greece, it was to find that Sparta, once again, was on bad terms with the rest of the Achaean league, and when it seceded, the league took steps to force it to rejoin, against the advice of embassies from Rome and Q. The province of Asia was to follow, after the death of Attalus III of Pergamum in 134/3 (Map 6). 155 Spain from 154 to 133 Macedonia, where a pretender, Andriscus, had initial successes in 149, but was captured in 148 Carthage between 149 and 146 and mainland Greece in 146, when Corinth was sacked and enslaved by the consul Lucius Mummius, after which Greece, with Macedonia, became a Roman province. In the mid-second century Rome was increasingly involved in numerous simultaneous theatres of war.

When did rome conquer greece