Scipio, when he looked upon the city as it was utterly perishing and in the last throes of its complete destruction, is said to have shed tears and wept openly for his enemies. After being wrapped in thought for long, and realizing that all cities, nations, and authorities must, like men, meet their doom; that this happened to Ilium, once a prosperous city, to the empires of Assyria, Media, and Persia, the greatest of their time, and to Macedonia itself, the brilliance of which was so recent, either deliberately or the verses escaping him, he said:

A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,

And Priam and his people shall be slain.​

And when Polybius speaking with freedom to him, for he was his teacher, asked him what he meant by the words, they say that without any attempt at concealment he named his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all things human. Polybius actually heard him and recalls it in his history.

...

Thereupon Sulla assembled his army, returned to the city, took armed possession of it, drove from the city the twelve persons responsible for these revolutionary and vicious measures - among them Marius, his son, and Publius Sulpicius - and caused them by formal decree​ to be declared exiles. Sulpicius was overtaken by horsemen and slain in the Laurentine marshes, and his head was raised aloft and exhibited on the front of the rostra as a presage of the impending proscription.

Marius, who had held six consul­ships and was now more than seventy years of age, was dragged, naked and covered with mud, his eyes and nostrils alone showing above the water, from a reed-bed near the marsh of Marica, where he had taken refuge when pursued by the cavalry of Sulla. A rope was cast about his neck and he was led to the prison of Minturnae on the order of its duumvir.​ A public slave of German nationality was sent with a sword to put him to death. It happened that this man had been taken a prisoner by Marius when he was commander in the war against the Cimbri; when he recognized Marius, giving utterance with loud outcry to his indignation at the plight of this great man, he threw away his sword and fled from the prison.

Then the citizens, taught by a foreign enemy to pity one who had so short a time before been the first man in the state, furnished Marius with money, brought clothing to cover him, and put him on board a ship. Marius, overtaking his son near Aenaria, steered his course for Africa, where he endured a life of poverty in a hut amid the ruins of Carthage. There Marius, as he gazed upon Carthage, and Carthage as she beheld Marius, might well have offered consolation the one to the other.

But Pyrrhus, seeing the stormy sea that surged about him, took off the coronal with which his helmet was distinguished, and gave it to one of his companions; then, relying on his horse, he plunged in among the enemy who were pursuing him. Here he was wounded by a spear which pierced his breastplate — not a mortal, nor even a severe wound — and turned upon the man who had struck him, who was an Argive, not of illustrious birth, but the son of a poor old woman. His mother, like the rest of the women, was at this moment watching the battle from the house-top, and when she saw that her son was engaged in conflict with Pyrrhus, she was filled with distress in view of the danger to him, and lifting up a tile with both her hands threw it at Pyrrhus. It fell upon his head below his helmet and crushed the vertebrae at the base of his neck, so that his sight was blurred and his hands dropped the reins. Then he sank down from his horse and fell near the tomb of Licymnius, unrecognised by most who saw him.

But a certain Zopyrus, who was serving under Antigonus, and two or three others, ran up to him, saw who he was, and dragged him into a door-way just as he was beginning to recover from the blow. And when Zopyrus drew an Illyrian short-sword with which to cut off his head, Pyrrhus gave him a terrible look, so that Zopyrus was frightened; his hands trembled, and yet he essayed the deed; but being full of alarm and confusion his blow did not fall true, but along the mouth and chin, so that it was only slowly and with difficulty that he severed the head. Presently what had happened was known to many, and Alcyoneus, running to the spot, asked for the head as if he would see whose it was. But when he had got it he rode away to his father, and cast it down before him as he sat among his friends. Antigonus, however, when he saw and recognised the head, drove his son away, smiting him with his staff and calling him impious and barbarous; then, covering his face with his cloak he burst into tears, calling to mind Antigonus his grandfather and Demetrius his father, who were examples in his own family of a reversal of fortune.