Athens vs Sparta: The War That Broke Ancient Greece | History Of Warfare | Odyssey

This is a tale of two cities. A tale of war on land and sea. A long bitter feud fought between two of the most enlightened, civilized and progressive states in the ancient world. They fought in a nasty, bestial and vicious way. It is not a pretty tale. Four hundred and fifty-five years before the birth of Christ, there were two great powers in ancient Greece, then the center of the known world. Today, in more peaceful times, the sleepy remnants of this great conflict are admired by tourists, many unaware of their magnificent past. These two mighty Hellenic powers were Athens and Sparta. Both were proud city-states who eyed each other with great suspicion. Each was certain that it should wield supreme authority. But as we all know, there can only be one leader. It is said that he who ignores the past is doomed to repeat its mistakes. How true in this case. Both Athens and Sparta knew the war would result in the destruction and humiliation of one of them. But which was it to be? They had fought before many times, but a treaty drawn up in 455 BC had kept the peace. Rather like the great powers of Europe in the build-up to World War I, the long peace was seen as the pause before war. For twenty years, both Athens and Sparta built up a complex series of alliances to bolster their own chances in the event of war. Like the events of 1914, ironically, it was the complex system of alliances which was to actually precipitate the fighting. Watch hundreds of exclusive history documentaries with a subscription to History Hit. Our goal is to bring you award-winning documentaries that cover the events and figures that have shaped our world all in one place. Delve into the history of the ancients with History Hit's exclusive offering of documentaries. Explore with us the enchanting Temple of Karnak or take a deep dive into the fascinating prehistory of Scotland. We also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast network. Sign up now for a free trial and Odyssey fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code ODYSSEY at checkout. The fragile peace crumbled when Athens offered military assistance to one of her allies. This was a clear breach of the treaty and the Spartan response was to issue a terse ultimatum. Athens returned an uncompromising reply. The Spartans felt that there was only one course of action for them to pursue. War. Both Athenians and Spartans were fearful of the economic advantages that would accrue to the victor in a war between them. Despite the possible consequences for the civilian population, the people of both Sparta and Athens were pro-war. We are lucky that some of the speeches of the day have been preserved. This jealous rivalry had spurred the popular pro-war party. The hatred of her rival lay only just below the surface in both cities, even in peacetime. So it was no surprise that the impassioned speeches from both camps were soon heard in a renewed effort to galvanize the people into war. Again, the parallels with the Great War are not lost. Peace had lasted too long. People wanted war. The politicians were only too happy to give it to them. Let us not have any talk about thinking twice. It is the wrongdoers and not the wrong who should think twice. You must vote now and like true Spartans, vote for war. Don't let Athens grow greater still. Don't abandon our allies. With God on our side, let us attack. So pleaded the Spartan politician, Stannilius. Fiery oratory like this helped win the case against the peaceful council of King Archidamus. The great showdown was not far away. But it was not just the Spartans who sought the final reckoning. In Athens, Pericles, who ruled there as an autocrat in all but name, spoke in equally warlike terms. We must realize that this war is being forced upon us, and the more readily we accept the challenge, the less eager our opponents will be to attack us. We must resist our enemies in every way and try to leave those who come after us an Athens that is as great as ever. Change the word Athens for Germany, and we could easily hear the words of Kaiser Wilhelm or Hitler in our own century. Well, 435, 435 years before Christ in Greek history is a dark hour. Oh, it was the start of what is called the Peloponnesian Wars. I mean, awful. The most awful wars of all time. I mean, terribly tragic, terribly sad. It all started stupidly. It was all about commerce. Athens had become very, very rich. They'd always, in actual fact, since Solon had brought in democracy, they had brought in lots of artists and carpenters and tradesmen from other countries, and it all blossomed in Athens. Athens had become this wonderful, artistic, brilliant state. Sparta would be very, very jealous of Athens, now wanted war with Athens. Sparta represents oligarchy ruled by a few people. Athens represents democracy ruled by decision of the majority. Sparta represents fighting on land. Athens represents fighting at sea. Sparta represents supposedly allies who have a right to say, to a say in the decision making processes of the Spartan League, though, in fact, they very rarely got such a say. The Athenians represent empire and domination. With the arrival of the long-awaited war, both sides prepared with gusto. In recent times, Athens had been growing in power and influence. In so doing, she had infringed the rights and liberties of many small states. It was Sparta which won the hearts and minds of the neutral states. The Greek historian Thucydides wrote at length of the buildup to the war. Nothing in their designs was on a small or mean scale. Both sides put everything into their war effort. In other states, people's feelings were very much on the side of the Spartans. They had proclaimed that their aim was the liberation of Hellas, and so bitter was the general feeling against Athens, both from those who wished to escape from her rule or from those who feared that they would come under it. The Athenian and Spartan forces on land were pretty evenly matched at the outbreak of hostilities, but the Spartans would always have the edge, thanks to their special military regime. From there, Spartan has earned its own place in the English language. Sparta, a place which regularly expelled foreigners, which relied only on the rich, and which kept the majority of its population under fairly severe subjection, that discouraged freedom of speech and was noted for its austerity, its lack of luxury, and its continual focus on military training. Athens, according to Pericles, was a great military success, but this was achieved by love of its freedom, love of its people, rather than through force of military habit. Although the Spartans, by their superior training and discipline, undoubtedly had a major advantage on land, on the high seas it was a different matter. Athens was then acknowledged to be the greatest sea power in the world. The Athenian fleet, however, consisted of over 300 seaworthy galleys. No other state could match such power. The world of the Athenian navy was a strange one. The popular conception of the ancient triremes is that, like the galleys of Rome, they were crewed by slaves. In fact, they were rowed entirely by free men who were paid to do the work. Although conditions were far from pleasant, the triremes of Athens and Sparta were not ocean-going vessels. They put into port every night so the men could get ashore. These were not the downtrodden slaves of Rome, but willing, able, and patriotic professional sailors. Triremes were the most important type of Greek warship. They were made of wood, were approximately 100 feet long and 15 feet wide, and they were propelled by 170 rowers. The full crew complement was about 200. They were equipped with a ram in the prow of the ship, and the idea was to ram and disable or to sink the opposing ships. The Athenians had at their height between 300 and 400 of these ships, and they were basically what made the Athenians into a superpower. Conditions on board ship were basically pretty wretched. The Athenian fighting vessel was one in which you had to pack as many men, because it's the men who give the power, as many men as possible into as small a space as possible, because a small space is much easier to control. And the way in which the Athenians packed themselves into the ships was they had one row on top of another on top of another, basically three rows of rowers, all rowing like mad in order to ensure that they drove the ship. As you can imagine, large numbers of men in very, very cramped conditions are not comfortable. Despite the superiority of the Athenian navy, the Spartans knew that the war was ultimately won or lost on land. In due course, they would meet Athens at sea, but in June 431 BC, preparations were complete, and the Spartan army invaded Attica, the heartland of the Athenian state. But the Athenians had anticipated just such a move. They had withdrawn all their possessions from the countryside and ensconced themselves within the walls of Athens itself, so that the raid proved fruitless. The first major engagement of the war, a small, indecisive cavalry battle, took place on the dusty plain outside Athens, but it was inconclusive. The Spartans laid waste to the land and finally departed. The first phase of the war was over. Both cities still lived. Athens retaliated for the invasion of her soil in the most natural way for her. She used her fleet to mount an attack on the island of Aegina and made several violent incursions into Spartan territory. The Spartans, a land-based power, could not meet a serious challenge to her men. If the Spartans were to be victorious, they would ultimately need to match the Athenians' naval expertise, particularly in the use of the famous Greek galleys. Now the strength of the Athenian navy was unleashed. Communities all around the Peloponnesian coast were soon made to feel the wrath of the Athenians, as a fleet of a hundred galleys set out loaded with soldiers. They carried out raids, burning crops and buildings, and spreading terror wherever they landed. Pericles himself was in charge of this last campaign. Given the Spartan superiority on land, his chosen tactic was a wise one. Pericles avoided pitched battles in favor of a hit-and-run naval war, first blood to Athens. In 429 BC, the Spartans changed their offensive tactics and laid siege to Athens' ally, Plataea. Like those of Athens, the walls of Plataea held the Spartans at bay. In a chilling precursor to what was to become the fate of Athens, the protracted siege was turned into a full blockade. The inhabitants of Plataea would grow to curse their walls. So that not even a mouse could escape, the Spartans built a wall completely around the city and waited for the inhabitants to starve or surrender. With the great distance in time which separates us from the classical world, these events seem remote and clinical. Those of us who are fortunate to live in peaceful times cannot really comprehend what it actually meant to be in a city under siege, but pain and suffering transcend the ages. As food ran low, the inhabitants would be forced to eat rats and boil the leather from their shoes. Malnutrition, disease, and starvation stalked the streets. This pain and suffering was as real as the news reports from war zones on our television screens. For them, the reality was violent, bitter, and heart-rending. Mothers watched weak children die. The realities of the siege for the besieged were, as the realities of naval warfare for those who take part in it, extremely wretched. In effect, you were cooped up into a small place because there were no Greek cities which had enormous fortified areas. You were cooped up into a small place where you couldn't grow your own food and of course your opponents were ensuring that you didn't get food from your surrounding territory. So it's a matter of starvation. What happens in a siege is that there is an attempt at grinding the people down. It was unlikely that they would be given relief because armies would be unlikely to come and be able to assist them. So all they had to look forward to was surrender, capture, and possibly afterwards execution. The wall which the Spartans erected around Plataea was in fact two wooden walls 16 feet apart. The central alley in between was covered in huts occupied by the besiegers. Tall lookout towers at regular intervals kept the same silent vigil as the towers at a concentration camp. They too looked on great human suffering. From behind the wooden stranglehold, the Spartans sallied in to attack. Plataea's wooden fortifications held them at bay. But for how long? The Spartans then decided to build a mound against the city walls so that they could go over the top of the city walls. The Plataean defenders tried to counter this by two mechanisms. First they built up their own city walls on the side that it was being threatened by the mound, and secondly they dug underneath and into the side of the mound from the city side of the walls in order that it might collapse. The Spartans having successfully stopped the Spartans in this way, the Spartans tried another tactic which is to bring up siege weapons. Now these in effect would merely have been battering rams that perhaps had a covering. But the Plataeans managed to stop these by attaching logs to frames that were hung out from the city walls and then swinging the logs down so that they broke off the end of the battering rams. So the Spartans once again have been stopped and they try a third and final active tactic which is fire. They cover wood with sulphur and pitch and put it against the sides of the Plataean city walls and throw it inside the Plataean town and set light to it. This probably would have been successful as a tactic had the wind not failed to pick up and in addition to this it's possible there's a rainstorm that helped put out the fire. Athens had promised relief for the Plataeans but they lacked the decisive leadership which Pericles had given them. Help from Athens never materialised. Finally it was the summer of 427 that the stricken city of Plataea was finally forced to surrender. When they did the beleaguered defenders probably wished they hadn't. The horrors of the siege were as nothing compared to what was to follow. The women were taken as slaves and every single one of the men was put to death. The city was later razed to the ground. If things were going badly for Athens and her allies on land and sea the Athenian navy was still proving just how effective it could be. In a sea battle in the Gulf of Patras the 20 Athenian ships were faced with a Peloponnesian fleet of 47 ships but even there these odds held no fear for the Athenians. Thucydides, a chronicler who witnessed the events, takes up the story. The Spartans sailed with their ships in circular formation, the prows facing outwards and the sterns in. The circle was as big as could be without leaving gaps wide enough for the enemy to manoeuvre in and inside the circle were all the light craft that formed part of the expedition together with five of the fastest and best equipped warships which were to be constantly ready to sail outside and come to the relief of any portion of the circumference where the enemy might attack. The Athenians formed a line and sailed in an ever decreasing circle around the enemy ships forcing them to bunch together and become mixed up with their smaller boats and when the wind rose at dawn the Spartans were in utter confusion. Thucydides tells what happened next. Ships fell foul of each other and had to be pushed off with poles. What with shouting and swearing and the yells from one ship to another it was impossible to hear what the captains wanted done or the orders given by the bosuns. Lacking experience as they did they could not clear their oars in the rough sea and so made the ships more difficult for the steersmen to handle. It was at this moment that Formio gave the signal. The Athenians attacked. They destroyed every craft they encountered and without resisting in any way the rest of the Spartan ships fled. Despite the successes at sea the Athenians could not dictate the course of the land war. The fighting ebbed and flowed on with neither side remotely close to total victory. But in 424 BC the tide began to turn when a major defeat was inflicted on the Athenians at Delium. Delium was the site of a temple of Apollo. The Athenian general and philosopher Hippocrates was commander of the Athenian forces. He was to prove a better philosopher than a soldier. Within one day of leaving Athens the nervous Hippocrates had reached Delium and without delay he set about building fortifications. As soon as he had secured the garrison he left a small contingent of 300 cavalry as defenders and began a hasty march back to Athens. On a field about one mile east of Delium he encountered an army, Sparta's allies, the Boetians. The Boetians had only one thing in their mind. That was to avenge the desecration of their temple. They were ready to strike immediately. Forces from all over the territory arrived to participate in the battle and gathered behind a hill that separated the two armies. Late in the afternoon once the Boetians had set up their battle formation they appeared at the crest of the hill. The cavalry were positioned at each wing with the light troops. Between them were 3,000 Theban warriors massed 25 shields deep. Here were the most able-bodied, disciplined and dangerous warriors to be found in the ancient world. Hippocrates had formed his hoplite soldiers in a line eight men deep and posted his cavalry units on their flanks. Just before they engaged the enemy Hippocrates addressed his men. If we are victorious the Spartans without the support of the Boetian cavalry will never again invade our land and in one battle you will both gain this country and do much to free your own. Go forward then to meet them in the spirit of the citizens of a city which we are all proud to call the first in Greece. The Boetians paused to sing their war song then the two armies advanced and joined in fierce combat. But it was to prove a disaster for the Athenians. The doom of a great city was one step closer. The battle of Delium was the one big land defeat that Athens suffered in the first half of the Peloponnesian war. It was part of a grand scheme of the Athenians to capture and occupy the territory of their western neighbor Boeotia and the idea was that there would be a three-pronged attack all happening on the same day coming from the west, from the south and from the northeast which is where Delium was. Unfortunately the plan was betrayed to the Boetians and the timing went wrong so that the southern and western attacks were dealt with before the Athenians reached Delium and the Boetians could turn their entire attention to the Athenian army there. Seeing that things had gone wrong the Athenians were actually on the point of retreating and they'd lost quite a lot of their light-armed troops who'd returned home and were left only with the main hoplite body, the main heavily armored infantry and this was up against a Theban force of about the same size. But the Thebans, the Boetians, were people who had developed some quite novel tactics for heavy-armed fighting and they were able to defeat the Athenians basically by packing one side of their army and forcing their way through the Athenian defenders and the Athenians turned and ran. Hippocrates himself was left on the field of Delium along with a thousand of Athens' precious hoplite warriors. The loss of manpower was a serious blow to Athens. Added to this was the increasing financial cost of the war. The problem though was the rate at which the Athenians were spending money. This was because of two problems. First of all it was quite expensive to man and equip a fleet. To keep a fleet, a ship afloat, for a month cost approximately a talent. The Athenians in any one year might be sending out a hundred ships for at least three or four months so this was a considerable drain. Even worse, siege operations were particularly expensive. The siege of Potidaea at the beginning of the war cost the Athenians no less than 2,000 talents to besiege one reasonably small town. This meant that as early as 427 BC that the Athenians had to levy an emergency war tax of 200 talents from their own population. Given the strain on resources, if the Spartans could ever find out a way of encouraging revolt among Athens' allies and stopping imperial contributions, Athens would be in very serious difficulty. The tide of war inevitably began to turn against Athens but the great city was not yet finished. In 426, an Athenian named Demosthenes finds his way into the contemporary reports. A soldier of bold initiative, his actions saved Athens on many occasions and there was still the valiant Athenian navy which exercised superiority at sea. In an attempt to foil the Athenian strength at sea, the Spartans were attempting to gain dominance of the naval bases at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf. Having been foiled by Demosthenes at Naupactus, they tried their luck at Olpaeae but together with their Ambrasiate allies, were once again repulsed by Demosthenes' innovative battle tactics. Here at last was an Athenian general who could bring victory on land. But Demosthenes was not only vicious on the battlefield. At the negotiating table, he was equally efficient. In the wake of the battle, the defeated Spartans bought their lives by a mean trick typical of the deaths to which this war had now sunk. A secret pact between Spartans and Athenians brought the Spartans leave to flee the field but it left the Ambrasiates to the mercy of the victors. The Spartans slunk away and the hapless Ambrasiates were slaughtered on the spot. 425 BC saw Demosthenes once again prove his worth. On his way to Sicily, he was driven by inclement weather into the harbor of Pylos off the Peloponnesian coast. Demosthenes lost no time in making advantage out of mishap and at once started building defenses. The Spartans, alarmed at the arrival of the Athenian forces so close to them, ordered both army and fleet to the peninsula. The Athenians made a landing there and were able to attract any disaffected Spartans, of whom there were very many because of the Spartan social system, any disaffected Spartans to join the Athenians in their settlement, in their fortification at Pylos and Sphacteria. There were further advantages in that the Athenians, when they won the campaign at Sphacteria, were able to capture large numbers of Spartan citizen soldiers and since there were so few Spartan citizen soldiers, the Athenians were able to use those soldiers as hostages. By 421 BC, following 10 years of indecisive warfare in what historians called the Arcadamian War, both sides began to feel that it was time to make peace. A treaty was drawn up and agreed to by both sides. No doubt, people on all sides breathed the sigh of relief and agreed with the words that the Greek dramatist Aristophanes, in one of his anti-war dramas, put into the mouth of his heroine Lysistrata. Never again, pray God, shall we lose our way in such madness. But it was not to be. Before long, the build-up of a system of alliances began again. Athens concluded a defense pact with Argos in what became known as the Quadruple Alliance. When Sparta invaded Argos, she did so to defend one of her own allies. But Athens was now dragged into the war and in the winter of 419-418 BC, the hostilities were renewed. This time, her luck would not hold. The Athenians had long dreamed of an Athenian empire in the west, and by 415 BC, a boost to morale was required to give new hope to the unsuccessful years of war. And the expansion to the west was an aphrodisiac temptation that excited the imagination. The obvious goal was Syracuse in Sicily, which the Athenians had long coveted and to which they had dispatched unsuccessful expeditions in the past. With great enthusiasm, the Athenian assembly agreed to send out one of the largest expeditions they had ever produced. Thucydides takes up the story. Certainly this expedition that first set sail was by a long way the most costly and finest looking force of Hellenic troops that up to that time had come from a single city. In numbers of ships, it was no greater than the 4,000 Athenian hoplites, 300 cavalry, and 100 triremes with the addition of 50 more ships from Lesbos and Chios, and many allied troops as well. Every sailor received a drachma a day from the treasury, and the captains too went to great expense on the figureheads and fittings. To the rest of Hellas, it looked more like a demonstration of the power and greatness of Athens than an expeditionary force setting out against the enemy. Almost every household in Athens had at its gate a plain column or pillar topped with a head, often said to be that of Hermes, hence the name Herm, and was provided with a set of male genitalia. During the night before the Athenian expedition was meant to sail, the phallae were knocked off from outside many of the houses, and since they were believed to give protection and fertility to the household, there was great distress. It was a very bad omen. With a total personnel of some 30,000 men, this impressive fleet took to the open sea, first sailing in a column and then racing each other as far as Aegina. The fleet sailed firstly for the island of Corsair and then on to southern Italy. The campaign at Syracuse was to extend over the following two years until, like the fighting in Greece, it degraded into a series of attacks and counterattacks which even Demosthenes could not swing in the favor of Athens. Then in 413, the Athenians came tantalizingly close to success. A night attack brought them up to the plateau at Eurylus without mishap, where they managed to capture one of the Syracusan forts, but some of the defenders escaped to raise the alarm, and before long a full-scale battle broke out on the plateau. The Athenians were driven back with appalling losses. As many as 2,000 of their men lay scattered over the plateau when the conflict was over. The expedition against Syracuse was, that some of the Athenians thought, ill-fated from the day it set sail. The vast majority of soldiers and seamen who went never returned. The memory of the night of the mutilation of the Hermes must have stayed in the minds of the Athenians who had lost brothers and fathers and sons for many many years. There was no alternative but to re-embark and withdraw from the island. Nicias realized that this would be viewed as a death knell to Athenian prestige, and Aristophanes, in his drama The Knights, showed how highly the Athenians prized their reputation. Let us praise our mighty fathers, men who ne'er would quake or quail, worthy of their native city, worthy of Athenia's veil, men who with our fleets and armies everywhere the victory ran, and adorned our ancient city with achievement nobly done. Nicias, however, bowed to the advice of his soothsayers when an eclipse of the moon darkened the night appointed for the escape. The time was inauspicious, they told him. The three-week delay provided the Syracusans with time to prepare for the final annihilation of the Athenian army. Gailippus, the Spartan commander, prepared a grand assault on the Athenian navy. Thucydides relates what happened next. The Syracusans went out with a fleet of 76 sail. The Athenians put out to meet them with 86 ships, came to close quarters, and engaged. The Syracusans and their allies first defeated the Athenian center, and then caught Eurymedon, the commander of the right wing, who was sailing out from the line more towards the land in order to surround the enemy in the hollow and recess of the harbor, and killed him, and destroyed ships accompanying him. The Athenian attack suited the Syracusans in their heavier ships. They turned their vessels to meet the Athenians prowl to prowl, and the resulting collisions crushed and damaged many of the enemy ships. The small darters of the Syracusans rode among the Athenian triremes, breaking oar blades and shooting darts in through the oar holes at the rowers. After which, Thucydides informs us, they now chased the whole Athenian fleet before them and drove them ashore. The Athenians were forced into a long and treacherous march to try and escape their misery over land. But Gallipus had foreseen the possibility, and the Athenians were attacked at every step. In the confusion, Nicaeus and Demosthenes' armies were separated, and while Demosthenes was compelled finally to surrender, Nicaeus and his men marched into slaughter. Javelins and other missiles poured into the unfortunate men as they walked, and when they stopped to slake their desperate thirst at a river, they were surrounded by the Syracusans and their allies and butchered. The water was red with blood, and the Syracusans' revenge complete. Brave Demosthenes was taken and executed. This was the greatest Hellenistic achievement of any in this war, wrote Thucydides, or in my opinion, any Hellenistic victory. At once most glorious to the victors and most calamitous to the conquered. Everything was destroyed, and few out of the many returned home. 40,000 Athenians dying and 240 ships rotting, and then all the Athenians have gone over to Sicily being imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse. If you ever go to Sicily, go to the quarries at Syracuse. At night you can hear the Athenians crying out. The ghosts of the Athenians, awful, awful, mismanagement, greed, stupidity. The news of the disaster in Syracuse was greeted in Athens first with disbelief and then with despair. Some have argued that Thucydides is exaggerating the response to this disaster, but given that the Athenians had lost perhaps 40,000 men, and between a half and two thirds of their operational fleet, it's easy to believe that they fell into something approaching a state of panic. In addition to this difficulty of having lost a good deal of their fleet, which was a standing encouragement of many of the large islands of the Aegean to revolt, which they duly did. In addition to this problem, the Spartans had sent an army north to occupy the town of Decalia, which was within sight of Athens. This made Athenian agricultural production and silver mining much more difficult than it had been in the past. Thirdly, the Persians took this opportunity to pay the Athenians back for some interference in internal Persian affairs that the Athenians had been involved in, and so they began to finance Athens' enemies, the Spartans, to help them build a fleet. The defeat at Syracuse was a turning point. Cities hitherto loyal to Athens sensed the waning power and defected to the Spartan cause, hoping to finally win freedom. Many considered that the war was now certain to be short-lived, and they would gain credit with Sparta without the risk of great loss. Euboea and Lesbos, Chios, Amphipolis, Erythraea and Thesos deserted the Athenians, and the Lacedaemonians entered their neutrality in favor of the Spartans. But the war was still far from finished. As the net closed in on her, the great city-state still was prepared to fight to the death. There was still some hopes for success. Athens had rekindled her hopes of a victory at sea. That victory came in the narrow waters of the Hellespont, in a hand fight between 86 Spartan triremes who fought 76 belonging to the Athenians. The Spartans, under their commander Mendaras, sailed to the attack, attempting to outflank the Athenian galleys near the European shore. But Thrasylus, the Athenian commander, spread his ships in a long line in a vain effort to thwart this maneuver. The Athenian was forced to weaken his center, a fact which was immediately spotted by the Spartan commander who led the attack. This attack was carried out with such success that the ships became confused. But when the Athenians had beaten off the attacks on their flanks, they were easily able to rally and see off the entire Peloponnesian squadron. Following this action, with another decisive victory near Sisycus fought on land and at sea, the Athenians proved that they were not a spent force at sea. But time was still running out. It may seem very strange that within three years of the Athenian defeat at Sicily, and only about five years before the final Athenian defeat, the Spartans actually tried to come to peace terms with the Athenians and the Athenians rejected this. Happened after a successful Athenian victory at the Battle of Kitsikos. And I think the reason that they didn't accept the peace were two. First of all, from their perspective at that point, it didn't necessarily look as though defeat was staring them in the face. And secondly, there would have been a number of Athenian politicians for whom the idea of coming to peace with Sparta would mean their own political eclipse. They had made their success by hostility to Sparta and for them an Athenian victory over Sparta seemed both possible and preferable. So rather than being seen as an act of folly, this should be seen as a political calculation, a military calculation, but one that was ultimately the wrong one. Despite her naval victories, events were inexorably against Athens. She could not expect her luck to hold forever. In the summer of 407 BC, Alcibiades was made commander-in-chief of all the Athenian forces. He was to be the last. His counterpart on the Spartan side was Lysander. It was he who was to finally bring about the downfall of Athens. Lysander was a rare breed among Spartans, an astute politician who won the confidence of the huge Persian empire. He received generous subsidies and as a result he was able to build up the Spartan navy. Once the Athenians were destroyed in battle, it was only a matter of time. The stage was set for the decisive sea battle of the war. It took place in the Straits at Aegospotami in 405 BC. Acting against wise advice to retire from battle, the Athenians tried to lure Lysander from Lampsacus and into combat, but he wanted to pick his moment. After several days, it appeared to the Athenians that there would be no battle. They became lax in their guard and allowed most of the crews to land. Lysander took the auspicious moment and attacked. The Athenians, completely surprised and unready for battle, were overrun and 160 of their galleys captured. The crews were rounded up and all of the Athenians among them mercilessly executed. Athenian supremacy at sea was over. The shock waves crashed through the city of Athens like an earthquake. Everyone knew what would happen next. As the great historian Xenophon recalled, on that night not a man slept, not merely from sorrow but from terror for the future fate with which they themselves were now menaced, a retribution for what they themselves had inflicted on the Agenitans, Melians and others. The Athenian empire disintegrated and Athens was besieged by a vast Spartan force on land and at sea, cut off and alone. The people held out until they began to die of starvation and by April 404 BC Athens was forced to surrender. Lysander and the Peloponnesians now occupied the streets of the once great city. Athens was deprived of all but 12 galleys, lost all of its major land possessions. It was only through the intercession of Lysander that the great city itself was not destroyed and its inhabitants killed. But Athens was reduced to the status of a subject ally to Sparta under the terms of the surrender. The magnificent walls of that great city were not spared. They had preserved the Athenians safe against the aggressors for 100 years but now they had to go. The destruction of the long walls for Athens was as it were the destruction of the symbol of their very existence because the Athenians had supported themselves by importing cereals from abroad with their ability to control the sea but now that their long walls were destroyed by the Spartans they were unable to control the area between the Piraeus, their port, and the city itself and so once the long walls were destroyed they couldn't any longer import cereals for the feeding of the population and so that was the end of the Athenian ability to support themselves. Here in the Agora, what would now be a modern marketplace, it is easy to imagine the hustle and bustle of ancient times and how the rumors and gossip must have reached fever pitch. Her increased wealth and status was reflected in the fabulous buildings erected during this prosperous period. We can see remains of these structures which still dominate the landscape of modern-day Athens today. The cost in lives and materials to Athens of the long wars with Sparta had been colossal. In the end, the goddess Athene seemed to have abandoned her people. It was under her protection that Athens had risen to glory. She was never again to experience the heady power of her former days. The glory of Athens was lost forever.