Still, even the small loss of 26 Athenian ships at Arginusae, or 16 percent of the fleet, less than a decade after the loss of 200 imperial ships in Sicily and another 100 in the Ionian War, was a setback. Sparta, in yet another moment of despair, may now have once more sent envoys asking for peace, offering to evacuate Decelea and leave the truncated Athenian empire alone. And the democracy in the aftermath of the engagement may have won a key victory in the greatest trireme battle in half a century; but the throng in the assembly still felt more anguish after than before the triumph. Thus, they rejected peace feelers and yet failed to follow up the victory with another direct attack on the Spartan fleet, in essence squandering hard-won momentum as relish to destroying its own top command.17
A city that often blamed itself more in victory than defeat was showing manifestations of a terminal illness, conducting postbellum hearings to assess blame in the midst of a war for its survival. In the real monster battles of the Ionian War, like Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Arginusae, Athens had won every time. But it now somehow felt more demoralized than Sparta, which had suffered twice its losses, as each sailor was seen to be irreplaceable and thus every elected general was held responsible for any loss. The war, as Archidamus had once warned, would ultimately hinge on money; but even he had had no idea that a quarter century later his own Spartans, not imperial Athens, would have the greater reserves of money and manpower and, in Lysander, a commander far more audacious and versatile than any of the most experienced Athenian admirals.
Two years later Athens’ luck finally ran out at Aegospotami (“Goat Rivers”), a few miles to the north of Arginusae. With generals like Alcibiades and Thrasybulus exiled or driven out, there was a dearth of command talent, but somehow still plenty of green crews, slapped-together triremes, and an array of amateurs eager to command and fight for the idea of imperial Athens. Not far from Sestos, on the Hellespont, Lysander came upon a complacent Athenian fleet on or near the beach; most crews were convinced, after four days of Spartan feigned inaction, that a showdown was unlikely. But on the fifth, Lysander suddenly struck and caught thousands of Athenians scattered on shore, searching for food and supplies. Unwisely the admirals had encamped over two miles (some fifteen stades) from their supplies at Sestos, and thus found logistical support constantly at odds with battle readiness. Only a few ships made it out to sea to meet the surprise Spartan attack. Most of them had only one or two banks fully manned.18
The result was an abject slaughter. The Spartan fleet destroyed, disabled, or captured 170 of 180 triremes, dispersed thousands of the oarsmen, and then executed 3,000 to 4,000 of the captured Athenian crews, sparing only the allies and slaves. The butchering of the victors in a few minutes exceeded the toll of all those who had perished during the two great hoplite battles of the war, at Delium and Mantinea. This most decisive naval defeat in the history of any Greek city-state was not even really fought at sea, and in some sense was not a battle between triremes at all. Rather, Lysander’s triremes surprised thousands as they ate, slept, and lounged on the beach. And nearly all the Athenian ships that managed to leave shore were sunk in the shallow surf.19
In the aftermath of the battle, Lysander’s victorious armada swelled to 200 ships, perhaps the largest single concentration of a city-state’s triremes to sail in unison since the Athenian fleet joined the allies at Salamis nearly eighty years prior. The new monster fleet of the Peloponnesians systematically sailed throughout the Aegean, stationing triremes at key ports and declaring the Athenian empire to be over. Aegospotami ranks with the destruction of Xerxes’ triremes at Salamis (480), the obliteration of the Ottoman fleet off Lepanto (1571), the ruin of the Spanish Armada during the battle and retreat of 1588, and the French disaster off Trafalgar (1805) as one of the most decisive naval engagements in European history. Unlike earlier naval catastrophes, Aegospotami is one of the few battles in history in which such a grievous setback led not only to withdrawal and retrenchment but to the veritable collapse of an entire imperial state.20
What of our Alcibiades, who as a nineteen-year-old had started off the war so heroically at the siege of Potidaea? While another Alcibiades, his namesake cousin and fellow exile, was caught in the aftermath of the battle at Notium by the Athenian general Thrasyllus and stoned to death as a traitor, Alcibiades himself proved once more a survivor.21
The bloody Ionian War made him hero, scapegoat, and, finally, irrelevant. The genius and heroism that had first catapulted him to fame as a teenager at Potidaea were never more evident than at Cyzicus, when the newly arrived Alcibiades played a key role in defeating the Spartan fleet and ending the career of the admiral Mindarus. Between 410 and 408 Alcibiades integrated skilled oarsmen into the Athenian fleet, began raising money from Pharnabazus, the Persian satrap in the Hellespont, and was responsible for capturing the key cities of Chalcedon and Byzantium.
At age forty Alcibiades was now at the height of his powers, versed in some twenty years of political intrigue and a host of campaigns. He was decorated at the siege at Potidaea, patrolled the Attic countryside, manned the rearguard at the defeat at Delium, crafted a political alliance at Argos, engineered the Sicilian expedition, created a fleet ex nihilo for Sparta, and sought to win over Persia by promising the ruin of both Athens and Sparta.
Quite literally, there were very few key battles of the entire war that Alcibiades missed. In 411 he returned triumphantly to the side of Athens, as the crowd forgave Sicily, returned his property, and praised him for the resurrection of the Athenian fleet off Ionia. But given his own flamboyance and the fickleness of the assembly, such a simple reconciliation could not last. After leaving his triremes at Notium with the lowly subordinate Antiochus, who unwisely engaged Lysander and lost, in 406 Alcibiades was once more cursed and relieved of command. Two decades of the old charges resurfaced—public immorality, triangulation with Persians and Spartans, dereliction of duty—and both out of envy and for good cause he now left Athens for the second and last time.22
Alcibiades’ end was a fitting metaphor for the entire Athenian experience of this awful three-decade war. For the last two years of the conflict (406–404) he was in exile at one of his private strongholds around Thrace, no doubt plotting some fantastic third return. Aegospotami, ironically fought in sight of his temporary residence on the Ionian coast, precluded all that. Once more, in the hours before Lysander’s attack he offered sound tactical advice to the generals, only to be refused on grounds that had everything to do with envy and distrust of this proven resource and little to do with the acuteness of his military thought.
At this late date, the one single Athenian who perhaps could have saved or ruined Athens was told to leave. The competent generals ignored his wise counsel to instill discipline among their foraging crews and move immediately to a more defensible position, and thus they lost Aegospotami, their fleet, and the war itself. Alcibiades was murdered in Phrygia shortly after the surrender. Whether the responsible parties were rightist agents of the Thirty Tyrants, who feared his popular appeal with the Athenian masses; assassins of the Persian satrap Pharnabazus, who worried that Alcibiades would disclose his own intrigue against the king; envoys from Lysander who remembered the old treachery against Sparta; or the enraged male brethren of yet another young virgin he had seduced is not known. No Athenian had displayed such an ability both to save and to ruin his mother city, and no one had so many powerful friends and dangerous enemies. Like Athens’ own experience in the Peloponnesian War, so too Alcibiades’ life mirrored the conflict and, in the same tragic manner, proved a colossal waste. At the end, both the city and its most flamboyant and gifted citizen shared an identical fate of enormous potential ruined rather than fully realized.
Yet in the bitter aftermath of the war the dream still would not die. In the nadir of summer 403, when Spartan hoplites patrolled the Acropolis and the Thirty Tyrants ran the city, it was said that Athenians still did not despair as long as they knew that somewhere the exiled Alcibiades still lived:
> Nevertheless, despite their present plight, some vague hope yet prevailed that the affairs of the Athenians were not completely lost so long as Alcibiades was alive. In the past he had never been willing as an exile to live an idle and quiet life, nor now would he—if there was just a mechanism available to him—overlook the arrogance of the Lacedaemonians and the madness of the Thirty Tyrants.23
But this time both the once majestic fleet and the legendary Alcibiades were long gone, the mere phantoms of a shocked population that could not really accept that somewhere there was not another armada of triremes on the horizon.
The Dream Ends
After Aegospotami, there were no more Athenian ships between the Spartan fleet and the Piraeus. The war and Athens itself were now for all practical purposes through. One of the most moving passages in Greek literature is the historian Xenophon’s eyewitness report on the calamity at Athens when the news of the disaster at Aegospotami first reached the Piraeus:
It was at night that the Paralos arrived at Athens with an account of the disaster and wailing ran from the Piraeus through the Long Walls into the city proper as one man passed news to another. And during the night no one slept, not only in grief about those who were lost, but far more still for themselves, wondering whether they would suffer the exact things they had done to the Melians, the colonists of the Lacedaemonians, after reducing them through a siege, and also to the Histiaeans, and the Scioneans, and the Toroneans and the Aeginetans, and many other Greek peoples.24
By any fair reckoning, the carnage of Aegospotami was a fitting end to the Ionian War, a decadelong disaster in which more than 270 Athenian ships and over 50,000 imperial seamen were captured, lost, routed, or killed. In total, 500 Hellenic triremes were probably sunk or damaged in the theater. Perhaps 100,000 casualties were inflicted on both sides.
In terms of luminaries, the Ionian War was no less a bloodbath. The Spartans lost generals, tough men like Callicratidas, Mindarus, Labotas, and Hippocrates, while the Athenians, between 412 and 403, either sacrificed in battle, banished, or executed almost every talented admiral left in the city. After Aegospotami there was not a single experienced naval commander around. All of the old veterans were either dead or exiled—Alcibiades, Aristogenes, Aristocrates, Conon, Diomedon, Erasinides, Lysias, Pericles the Younger, Protomachus, Thrasybulus, and Thrasyllus. For one who wishes to understand why Athens lost the Peloponnesian War and Sparta emerged in no real position to enforce her will, the bloodbath of the Ionian War, both sailors and commanders, will probably explain quite a lot.
After the October 405 defeat at Aegospotami, Athens did not surrender for about six months, until March 404—blockaded by Lysander’s fleet of some 150 triremes, while its wall was approached by two Spartan kings, Agis from Decelea and Pausanias, with a huge force marching up from the Peloponnese. Yet the city’s fortifications were still impregnable, given the rudimentary nature of Greek siegecraft. So instead the Spartans waited for famine and political dissension to take effect.
Six months after Aegospotami, hunger and revolution at last prompted Athens to seek terms of concession. Some oligarchs won Spartan guarantees that the city itself would not be razed, despite the fury of the Thebans, the Corinthians, and a host of others eager for an end to Athens. Erianthos, the Theban admiral at Aegospotami, had proposed that Athens—in the manner of the infamous plan of the American secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau for turning postwar Germany into a perpetually pastoral state—not only be leveled but that all the Athenians be enslaved and the site devoted to pastureland. In the end it was enough that imperial Athens and all that it stood for was to be no more—as the city agreed to tear down its Long Walls, dismantle the fortifications at the Piraeus, free its tribute-paying subject states, maintain a navy no greater than 12 ships, allow the return of the right-wing exiles, establish an oligarchy, and enter into a military alliance with Sparta.25
CHAPTER 10
RUIN?
WINNERS AND LOSERS (404–403)
Death or Renewal?
Was Athens—or Greece itself—destroyed by the war? An entire industry of classical scholarship once argued for postwar Hellenic “decline,” and the subsequent tide of fourth-century poverty, social unrest, and class struggle as arising after the Peloponnesian War. Victorians, in turn, felt the loss was more a “what might have been,” a conflict that had ended not just the idea of Athens but “the glory that was Greece” itself and the Hellenic civilizing influence in the wider Mediterranean.
Bernard Henderson, for example, ended his military history of the Peloponnesian War with the melancholy reflection that the romance of Greek history “for a half-century illumined the Imperial Democracy of Athens and the people’s leaders. Athens falls, and the gleam lights on her no more. The City, for all Demosthenes’ fiery if mistaken eloquence, lies henceforward in perpetual shadow.” Alfred Zimmern, a utopian who was deeply involved in the work of the League of Nations, summed up best the Victorian view that the war had been the tragic divide of ancient, and indeed world, history.
For a wonderful half-century, the richest and happiest period in the recorded history of any single community, Politics and Morality, the deepest and strongest forces of national and of individual life, had moved forward hand in hand towards a complete ideal, the perfect citizen in the perfect state. All the high things in human life seemed to lie along that road: “Freedom, Law, and Progress”; Truth and Beauty; Knowledge and Virtue; Humanity and Religion. Now the gods had put them asunder.1
In the short term, perhaps such bleak assessments rang true. Soon after the fighting stopped in autumn 405, democracy, saddled as it was with the humiliation of military defeat and the loss of thousands of unfortunate supporters who had gone down in the Aegean during the nearly decadelong Ionian War, began to unwind. After the formal capitulation of spring 404, it was replaced by a narrow and mean-spirited oligarchy (the Thirty Tyrants), as Athens’ old tributary subjects abroad were “liberated” and left to their own devices. Aegospotami marks the official end of direct Athenian-Spartan hostilities, yet the war was not formally concluded until a besieged Athens gave up the democracy in spring 404.
In place of an enlightened democratic hegemony, an incompetent Spartan protectorate clumsily tried to impose on Athens’ former subjects oligarchies that left the most vulnerable states in Asia Minor open to either direct or insidious Persian suzerainty. In peace, the conquering Lysander quickly proved to be a different sort of statesman from Pericles, an oligarchic rather than a democratic imperialist whose brutality was not mitigated by any sense of majesty.
After a brief civil war and the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants, by late 403 democratic government was firmly once more in control at Athens, in glorious fashion. It would provide another six decades of relative tranquillity and stability, if not a dangerous laxity, before the onslaught of Philip of Macedon in the 340s. A second Athenian maritime league, without the odious tribute or forced confiscations of land, was in place in 378, within thirty years of the war’s end. The Aegean was to be patrolled by yet another fleet of some 300 active triremes, and reminiscent more of the balanced Delian League than the old exploitative empire. Athenian citizens were even now paid to attend the assembly, perhaps because so many of the urban poor who had once routinely done so had been killed off in the sea battles of the Ionian War.
Some scholars even believe that the fourth-century Athenian fleet at times grew larger than that of the fifth. The walls that Lysander had once pulled down to the music of flute players were rebuilt within eleven years, along with a growing line of refitted Attic border forts, which allowed the city more strategic flexibility and in theory the chance to stop enemies before they reached the richer cropland around the city. Since the real wartime damage to Attic agriculture had been confined to annual losses of grain and an inability to reach fields, almost immediately after the war agrarians were back at work in their vineyards and orchards. Once Athens had capitulated and the six-month siege was lifted
in late spring 404, there was surprisingly little postwar famine, nor a massive pool of ruined Attic farmers eager to list abroad as mercenary hoplites.2
In the troubled world after the war, the old imperial Athens did not look so bad after all. In comparison, the real threat of Persia reappeared, Sparta proved cruel, and there was less imperial largess for plays and majestic temples. Despite Mytilene, Melos, and Sicily, it remains one of the great controversies of history whether, in fact, the old Athenian empire that Sparta destroyed really was a coercive hegemony that extorted money and trampled on local autonomy. Or was Pericles’ Athens a cultural engine for Greece that channeled capital into the arts even as it served as an aegis for the poor and dispossessed throughout the Aegean?3
For their own part, Sparta and Athens soon enjoyed a reconciliation based on their mutual suspicion of the growing power of Thebes and its resurgent and reunited Boeotian Confederacy. Twenty years after the Peloponnesian War’s conclusion had the ruin and genocide of the past merely become a bad dream? In such a revisionist view, did Thucydides (the supposed determinist, who may well have lived into the early 390s) cease his history in medias res in 411 for reasons other than illness or an untimely death? Perhaps as he toiled in the 390s to finish up his grand tale of Athenian folly and its inevitable punishment and decline, the resurrected democracy instead right before his eyes arose from the ashes of war and oligarchy, calling into question many of the historian’s sweeping pessimistic judgments forged during his wartime exile.
Xenophon, whose narrative takes up at 411, seems to have been one of the few contemporary historians who accepted Thucydides’ notion of a twenty-seven-year-long war beginning in 431 and ending in 405 with the defeat at Aegospotami, followed by the capitulation of the city in 404. Other observers, like the historians Theopompus and Cratippus, felt that the Peloponnesian War did not really end until 394, a thirty-eight-year war in all. In this view, hostilities actually ceased when the Spartan fleet was defeated by Athens at the sea battle at Cnidus (394). Then its expeditionary army was forced home to Sparta from Ionia to meet a new rising threat from Thebes, while the Long Walls of Athens were rebuilt, thereby ending once and for all the saga of the old fifth-century bipolar world of Athenian and Spartan hegemony.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 39