On 1 March 86 BC, after a long and destructive siege, Athens was taken by the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who had Aristion executed.
There is no universally accepted resolution to this confusion, and it is possible that two separate tyrants held power in Athens in quick succession during the First Mithridatic War, whose stories became conflated together.
His letters to Athens represented the power of Mithridates in such glowing colours that his countrymen began to conceive of hopes of throwing off Roman rule.
He sent Apellicon of Teos to plunder the sacred treasury of Delos, though Appian says that this had already been done for him by Mithridates[4] and added that it was by means of the money resulting from this robbery that Aristion was enabled to obtain supreme power.
Meanwhile, Sulla landed in Greece and immediately laid siege to Athens and Piraeus, the latter occupied by Archelaus, the general of Mithridates.