Sack of Athens by the Heruli, 267–268

Sack of Athens by the Heruli

Heruli from the Sea of Azov, who had sailed through the Bosporus into the Aegean, took Athens despite its new wall and laid much of it waste, while the historian Dexippus rallied the Athenians against them. The sack ended the city’s ancient splendour: Athens shrank to a small walled area around the Roman Agora.

Date

between 267 and 268exact date unknown: an interval is given

Place

Athenstoday: Athens, Greece · Balkans and Anatolia

Participants

Heruli, Goths, Dexippus, Gallienus, Roman Empire

Threads

Europe in the Roman age (1st–5th c.)

Also known as

Herulian sack of Athens; Herulian invasion of Greece; Sack of Athens (267); Герульское нашествие; Взятие Афин герулами

In 267 (or, by another dating, 268) a great fleet — 500 ships, according to George Syncellus — carried the Heruli from the Sea of Azov (the sources also speak of Goths) through the Bosporus, where they fought their way past a Roman squadron, into the Aegean. After ravaging Lemnos and Skyros they landed in Greece and sacked Athens, Corinth, Argos and Sparta. Athens had been given a new wall around 260, but it did not save the city: its monuments and stoas, among them the Olympieion, were badly damaged. Dexippus, a former archon, gathered about 2,000 men and harried the invaders from ambush, and a Roman force under Cleodamus attacked them from the sea. The raiders withdrew northwards through Boeotia, Epirus and Macedonia, and on the river Nestus, on the border of Macedonia and Thrace, Gallienus defeated them; the Herulian chief Naulobatus submitted and received the consular insignia — the first barbarian known to have been so honoured.

Athens never regained its former extent. Around 280 a much smaller circuit, the so-called Post-Herulian Wall, enclosed only the centre of the ancient city around the Roman Agora. Dexippus described the wars with the Goths in his Scythica, the main source used by later historians of these invasions.

Connections

Part of

Related events

Hadrian dedicates the Olympieion and founds the Panhellenionbetween 131 and 132 · Balkans and Anatoliathe Olympieion, completed by Hadrian, was pillaged in the sack

Same participants

Same place

Costoboci sack Eleusisbetween 170 and 171 · Balkans and Anatolia

Sack of Athens by the Heruli

Connections

Part of

Related events

Same participants

Same place

Meanwhile in the world

Western and Central Europe

Eastern Europe

Middle East and Egypt

Africa

Central and Northern Asia

South Asia

East Asia

Southeast Asia and Oceania

North America

Latin America

The same period

Sources