Between 478 and 404 BC, Xerxes dies, and Athens and Sparta declare a Thirty Years’ Peace which only lasts fourteen years
WITH THE PERSIANS DRIVEN BACK, the newly united Greeks had to decide what to do about the Ionian cities. By joining with the Greeks, the Ionians had publicly declared their defiance of the Persian empire. The poet Aeschylus celebrated their new freedom:
And those who live on Asia’s broad earth
will not long be ruled
by Persian law
nor longer pay tribute
under empire’s commanding grip
nor fling themselves earthward
in awe of kingship
whose strength now lies dead.1
But the Persian strength was far from dead, and Persian troops were still occupying Asia’s “broad earth.” The Aegean lay between the Persians and the Greek mainland, but for the Ionians, the battered bully was standing just on the other side of their city walls.
The Spartans suggested that they simply evacuate the Ionian cities and abandon the land itself to the Persians, since they could not “stand guard over Ionia forever.”2 The Athenian soldiers at once took exception. These were mostly Athenian colonies that the Spartans were blithely proposing to abandon (much as they had abandoned Athens itself during the invasion, content simply to save the Peloponnese). “They put their objections forcefully,” Herodotus says. After a vicious intercity argument, the Athenians managed to convince most of the other Greek contingents to join them in pushing the Persians back from the Ionian coast.
The Spartans, outargued, agreed to stay on; they didn’t want to fight the Persians, but nor did they want Athens gaining power as the leader of the Hellenic League. By staying, they guaranteed that their own commander—Pausanias, victor at the Battle of Plataea, and still serving as regent for the young son of the Leonidas who had died at Thermopylae—would remain the supreme commander of the Hellenic League forces.
And so Pausanias and his navy sailed off to besiege Byzantium, which had been re-occupied by Persian soldiers. The Athenians regrouped under the command of their own native general, Xanthippus, and headed up to the Bosphorus to help out. The siege was successful, and then Persian Byzantium changed hands again and became Greek Byzantium once more.
It was the last time that Athens and Sparta would act as allies.
FURTHER THAN THIS, Herodotus does not go; his history ends right after Mycale. For the next sequence of events we have to go to Thucydides, who wrote his history some seventy years later, and Plutarch, whose Life of Themistocles adds a few details.
According to Thucydides, while the Athenian and Spartan soldiers were besieging Byzantium, the Athenians and Spartans were arguing back at home. After the defeat of Mardonius at Plataea, the Athenian soldiers under command of Themistocles had returned to Athens. Their city had been laid waste; the walls were broken down, the temples on the Acropolis had been hacked and burned, and the sacred olive tree which grew at the Temple of Athena had been chopped down, its stump charred. But in a mere matter of days, a green shoot was seen coming from the stump.3 Athens still lived, and the returning Athenians set about the long task of rebuilding the shattered walls.
News of the rebuilding flew to Sparta. In just a few more days, a Spartan delegation arrived at Athens and demanded not only that the building stop, but that the Athenians “join them in throwing down the remaining walls of the cities outside the Peloponnesus.”4
This was a blatant Spartan attempt to claim the overall lordship of Greece. The Athenians, who had few armed men and no wall, were in no shape to resist the demand. But Themistocles, who never told the truth in a sticky situation, had a plan. He told the Spartans that he would, naturally, come to Sparta right away along with a band of Athenian officials to discuss the problem. He then set out himself for Sparta, travelling at snail pace, and told the other Athenian officials to linger in Athens until the walls were built up to at least a minimum height. Meanwhile, every Athenian who could walk was to drop everything else and work on the walls, ripping down houses if necessary to serve as building material. “To this day,” Thucydides writes, “the [wall] shows signs of the haste of its execution; the foundations are laid of stones of all kinds, and in some places not wrought or fitted, but placed just in the order in which they were brought by the different hands; and many columns, too, from tombs, and sculptured stones were put in with the rest.”5 Excavation has revealed these mismatched stones and columns built into the wall of Athens.
Down in Sparta, Themistocles sat around wondering out loud why his colleagues had not yet arrived, and hoping piously that they hadn’t run into misfortune. By the time they did get there, the wall was up, and Themistocles was able to tell the Spartans that Athens now had defenses and wasn’t about to get Spartan permission to run its own affairs. The Spartans swallowed this defiance, not really being in any condition to fight a walled city, and Themistocles went home.
Over at Byzantium, the Ionians were starting to complain about being under Spartan command. They came to the Athenian commander, Xanthippus, and complained that the Spartan general Pausanias was acting like a tyrant—and, more seriously, was carrying on secret negotiations with Xerxes. This was an accusation that could hardly be ignored, and when the Spartan assembly got wind of it, they summoned Pausanias home to stand trial. Xanthippus took supreme command in his place, which was one up for the Athenians.
Back in Sparta, Pausanias was acquitted. But his career was in ruins; a breath of scandal had done it in. The Spartans sent a replacement commander to Byzantium, but Xanthippus refused to surrender his command. Now Athens, not Sparta, was at the head of the combined forces. The Spartans, piqued, packed themselves up and went home—and so did all of the other soldiers from the Peloponnesian cities.
This was the death knell for the old Hellenic League. But the Athenians simply declared the formation of a new alliance, the Delian League, with Athens at its head. Back at home, Sparta claimed leadership of a Peloponnesian League that included the Peloponnesian cities and no one else.
Pausanias himself, under increasing suspicion and the target of more unproven accusations of treachery (largely fueled by the fact that he had occasionally been seen, in Byzantium, in Persian clothing), eventually realized that he was inevitably going to be re-arrested and tried again. He took sanctuary in an inner chamber of one of Sparta’s temples. At this, Spartan officials walled him in, took the roof of the chamber off, and allowed him to starve to death.6 The man who had saved the Peloponnese died while his own countrymen watched.
65.1 Greece and the Peloponnesian Wars
Nor was this the end of the matter. Back in Athens, Themistocles had started to push his own plans for Athenian security (these involved burning the ships of other Greek cities, and sailing around to shake money out of the smaller Greek islands).7 Themistocles was, above all, a pragmatist, always willing to sacrifice personal dignity for the sake of getting his way. When other soldiers criticized his suggestions, Themistocles started making public speeches about the great debt that Athens owed him, and how the Athenians ought to do whatever he asked. After a whole course of these, he had managed to annoy enough Athenian men (who, after all, had fought at Mycale too) to get himself ostracized. “This,” Plutarch remarks, “was their usual practice…. Ostracism was not a means of punishing a crime, but a way of relieving and assuaging envy—an emotion which finds its pleasure in humbling outstanding men.”8
This was the shadow side of Greek democracy. The Greeks were not kind to their great men, unless those men had been fortunate enough to remove themselves from the political scene by dying. Marathon had not saved Miltiades; Plataea had done nothing for Pausanias; and Salamis would not save Themistocles. After his ostracism, the Spartans sent messages to Athens telling them that the investigation of Pausanias had found, “in the course of the inquiry,” unspecified proof that Themistocles also had pro-Persian sympathies. The Athenians sent an assassin after their exiled general, but Themistocles was not to be caught so easily. He went on a long journey, always avoiding Greek ships and Greek ports, and finally (pragmatic as always) arrived at the Persian court and offered himself as an advisor on Greek affairs, on condition that Xerxes would agree to pay over the reward for his own capture.
Fortunately, Xerxes seems to have been entertained by this level of cheek. He made Themistocles a present of the reward and told him to “speak his mind about the state of affairs in Greece.” Themistocles did so, but his conversation seems to have been mostly art without matter. His revelations, Plutarch remarks, did not give the Persians any military advantage, but mostly had to do with Greek dress, literature, and food.9 He died in exile at sixty-five, either from illness or from a dose of poison, taken when he could no longer bear his banishment.10
Meanwhile, the soldiers of the Delian League, led by Athenian commanders, set about recapturing various islands and cities from the Persians. The Persians fought back, but not with a whole lot of conviction. The Persian empire had begun to grow unwell from internal canker. Xerxes’s imperious refusal to take responsibility for the defeat at Salamis was just a symptom of a personality that would not brook any restraint, and accounts from several different sources suggest a man sinking deeper and deeper into sybaritic corruption. The biblical book of Esther tells of a week-long orgy hosted by Xerxes at his palace in Susa, at the end of which Xerxes (who, like his guests, had been drunk out of his mind for days) ordered his favorite wife to come out and parade in front of the entire party of men, so that they could admire her beauty. She refused; Xerxes, furious, sent word to her that she would never again come into his presence, and decided to replace her. He sent out word to all of his satraps to send the most beautiful girls in their satrapies to the court. Once they were in court, he spent a few pleasurable months calling them into his bedchamber, one per night, so that he could sample them all before choosing his favorite.11 Xerxes’s appetite for women is also mentioned by Herodotus, who says that he developed a great passion first for his brother’s wife, and then for his brother’s daughter.12
These stories are not written by friends. However, Xerxes was clearly not popular with either his court or his family by the time he died. The Greek historian Ctesias, who spent time at the Persian court some fifty years later, says that Xerxes was sleeping when the head eunuch, a trusted man who guarded his bedchamber, allowed a Persian army commander named Artabanos (a chiliarch, which meant that he commanded a thousand of the elite Persian fighters) in to see the king. Minutes later, Xerxes was dead. The year was 465.
When the body was discovered, Artabanos accused the oldest son, Darius, of the deed, and turned to the youngest son, the eighteen-year-old hothead Artaxerxes, exhorting him to avenge his father’s murder. “With much shouting,” Ctesias says, “Darius protested that he did not kill his father, but he was put to death.”13
This left Artaxerxes as heir apparent, since the middle brother, Hystaspes, had been sent off to be satrap of the northern province Bactria and was nowhere around. Didorus Siculus picks up the story: as soon as Artabanos found himself alone with the brand-new king, he dropped all pretense and attacked Artaxerxes. The young man fought back, though, and although wounded managed to kill the treacherous captain.14 As soon as the news travelled to Bactria, Hystaspes came charging down to try to get the throne for himself, but Artaxerxes met him in battle and was fortunate. A sandstorm came down while the battle raged, and behind its screen Artaxerxes killed his other brother and emerged victorious.15
As usual, chaos in the royal house produced rebellion all over the empire. The most serious was in Egypt, where news of Xerxes’s death convinced one of Psammetichus III’s surviving sons, Inaros (now well past middle age and living at Heliopolis), to drag his royal heritage out of the closet. Inaros sent to the Athenians, who were very happy to sail down and give him a hand with a rebellion.16
This combined guerilla force took Artaxerxes eleven years to defeat. When Persian forces finally managed to capture Inaros, who had been behaving like an elderly Egyptian Zorro for over a decade, Artaxerxes ordered him crucified.
Back in Greece, more Athenian troops were carrying on battles of their own. The Delian League had not been easy to hold together, and Athens found itself, perhaps without realizing it, using more and more force against its own allies. In 460, the island of Naxos declared that it no longer wanted to take part in the League (which meant “follow Athenian orders”), and war followed: “She had to return [to the League] after a siege,” Thucydides writes. “[T]his was the first instance of the confederation being forced to subjugate an allied city.”17 It was not, however, the last. Other Delian League cities protested against the Athenian demands for tribute and ships, and Athens responded with force. They marched into Thrace; the Athenian navy fought against the city of Aegina and captured seventy ships; when the city of Megara, a member of the Peloponnesian League, complained loudly about a border dispute with Corinth (another Peloponnesian city), the Athenians not only welcomed Megara into the Delian League but helped the Megarans build new defensive walls and (unasked) sent Athenian troops to occupy the city. “They made themselves offensive,” Thucydides concludes. “…. The Athenians were not the old popular rulers they had been at first.”18
Athens and Sparta seemed to have exchanged places; the Athenians had become the bullies of the Aegean. The Delian League was still called the Delian League, but it had become something closer to an Athenian empire.183 The beautiful city was also looking more and more like a fortress. Xanthippus’s son Pericles had been elected to military command, and proposed that the Athenians build walls out from Athens down to the port of Pireus, a distance of eight miles, so that goods and soldiers could get to the water without fear of attack.19 In 457, the construction on these “Long Walls” began.
Just after the walls were finished, the Athenian and Spartan armies themselves clashed. In 457, a Spartan army marched into the area called Boeotia, northwest of Attica, on the pretext that they had been invited in by the people of Doris, even farther to the northwest. This was not their only motivation: “Secret encouragement had been given to them by a party in Athens,” Thucydides says, “who hoped to put an end to the reign of democracy and the building of the long walls.”20
The Athenians marched out into Boeotia too, with fourteen thousand troops. When the dust had cleared, the Spartans claimed victory. Certainly they did cut down all the fruit trees they could find, before marching home; but since the Athenians went back out into Boeotia and claimed the area for themselves only two months later, it could hardly have been a decisive victory. In fact, the two forces were more or less equal. Athens, which had begun with the upper hand, had lost enough men in the unsuccessful fight in Egypt to even the balance.
In 446, the Athenians proposed a peace. The treaty itself has not survived, but remarks of various Greek politicians suggest that the Athenians were willing to give up some of the land they had seized on the Isthmus of Corinth and along the shore of the Peloponnese for an end to fighting. Both cities agreed not to interfere with the other’s allies. This arrangement was supposed to hold for thirty years; and so the treaty became known as the Thirty Years’ Peace.
Shortly after this, Herodotus left Athens. He had found the constant frenzy of politics uncongenial, and preferred to go to Thurii, a new pan-Hellenic colony that was drawing citizens from all across Greece.
Despite the frenzy, Athens was blooming. The commander Pericles, who had gained more and more popularity as a public speaker, oversaw the building of a new temple to Athena on top of the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was decorated with sculpted stone friezes showing legendary Greek victories over semihuman centaurs: a celebration of Greek triumph over non-Greek enemies. A forty-foot seated statue of Zeus was carved from ivory and placed at the temple at Olympia, where it became so well known that later list-makers called it one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The philosopher Socrates spent his days talking and teaching, attracting scores of followers; like the Buddha, evolving a coherent and influential philosophy without writing a word, since all of his teachings were set down by his students.
But this beauty was all rotten at the core. Hatred between Athens and Sparta had not gone away. The Thirty Years’ Peace held for fourteen years; and then it splintered.
THE FIRST FIGHTING actually broke out between Athens and one of Sparta’s allies, the city of Corinth. In 433, a Corinthian colony called Corcyra tried to break away from Corinthian rule, and asked Athens for help.
Corcyra itself technically didn’t belong to either the Peloponnesian or Delian League, so the Athenians could answer the call without breaking the peace. On the other hand, since Corcyra was a colony of Corinth, and Corinth was an ally of Sparta, the Spartans would undoubtedly take offense if Athens joined in a battle against Corinth.
The Athenians were unable to resist this chance to weaken the power of Corinth. After two full days of public debate, the Assembly decided to send ten ships.21 In an attempt to have their cake and eat it too, the Assembly also warned the captain who was given command of this little fleet not to attack unless the Corinthians actually landed in Corcyra, or threatened Corcyra’s own ships.22
The Corinthian ships, arriving, sailed directly into the ships that Corcyra had massed to meet them. The Athenian captain, trying to follow his orders, held back until the Corinthian ships had driven the Corcyreans well back and were pressing forwards, inflicting casualties. In Thucydides’s words, they “butchered” the men “as they sailed through, not caring so much to make prisoners.”23
At this, the Athenian ships not only joined the battle, but summoned reinforcements. Now Athens was at war with Corinth, and Corinth was an ally of Sparta. The Thirty Years’ Peace had ended.
This sea engagement, the Battle of Sybota, was the first in a string of minor battles over the next year and a half. In 431, the string ended when the city of Thebes (a Spartan ally) attacked Plataea, the city in Boeotia which had been the site of the famous battle with the Persians and which was now under Athenian protection. This was the first attack to threaten a city’s actual walls, and Thucydides says that this “overt act” finally broke the treaty beyond repair. “Athens at once prepared for war,” he writes, “as did Sparta and her allies.”18424
The Spartans whipped themselves up into fighting frenzy (“The Athenians aspire to rule the rest of the world!”) and established their front line on the isthmus, ready to march into Attica. Athens made a hasty alliance with the king of Macedonia, Amyntas’s grandson Perdikkas II, and Pericles ordered the country folk of Attica to come inside the walls of Athens for protection. When the first Athenians died in battle, Pericles gave a funeral oration to honor them, a speech in which he listed the superiorities of Athenian civilization: Athenian freedom, Athenian education (which gives its men “knowledge without effeminacy”), the ongoing Athenian war against poverty, the ability of its citizens to understand public matters. He ended with a patriotic call unlike any in history so far: “You must yourselves realize the power of Athens,” he told them. “Feed your eyes on her from day by day till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this.”25 It was a call for loyalty not to a king, but to a concept; to identify themselves as Athenians, based not on race, but on a willing and voluntary association with an idea.
It was a stirring call, but most Athenians who died in the first two years of the Peloponnesian War met a less glorious, less patriotic death. In 430, plague struck Athens.
Thucydides himself, living in the city, survived it and gives an account:
…[P]eople in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough…. Externally the body was…reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers…. [T]hey succumbed, as in most cases, on the seventh or eighth day, to the internal inflammation…. But if they passed this stage, and the disease descended further into the bowels, inducing a violent ulceration there accompanied by severe diarrhea, this brought on a weakness which was generally fatal….[T]he disorder…settled in the privy parts, the fingers and the toes, and many escaped with the loss of these, some too with that of their eyes.26
Quite apart from the loss of able-bodied fighting men (“They died like sheep”), this was an unbearable blow to a city already apprehensive about its future. “By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when anyone felt himself sickening,” Thucydides says, “for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder.”27
The despair was worsened by the grim condition of the city. The residents of the Attica countryside were still making for the shelter of Athens. But when they arrived, the makeshift shelters built for them along the inside of the walls proved to be death pits: “stifling cabins where the mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another…the sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there.”28 Bodies burned in huge heaps at all hours of the day and night; petty thieves had free range through deserted households; no one bothered to sacrifice or observe any rituals. The distance between sacred and profane had been reduced by the need of survival.185 Among the victims was Pericles, the great Athenian general, on whom the city had been depending.
The war, begun badly, continued to go badly. Thucydides, once recovered, was put in command of an Athenian force charged with protecting Thrace, but his soldiers were driven into retreat, and Thucydides was sent into exile as punishment. Greek ships, preoccupied at home, were unable to come to the aid of the Greek cities on the Italian peninsula when tribes from the Apennines (pushed, perhaps, by the Celtic waves from the north) came down from the slopes and attacked them. The Greek settlers were driven out; the Greek presence in the Italian peninsula almost disappeared.
THE GREEKS, tearing each other to shreds, were mostly ignoring the imperial power to the east. In 424, Artaxerxes died an obscure death after a fairly uninteresting reign. His wife died on the same day (we have no details, but it’s a suspicious coincidence), and their one son, Xerxes II, reigned for a total of forty-five days. According to Ctesias (who, granted, generally puts the most interesting spin possible on Persian royal affairs), Xerxes II drank himself insensible one night, and while snoring in his bed was murdered by an illegitimate half-brother who then proclaimed himself king. This half-brother was violent, short-tempered, and unpopular. Messages must have gone out frantically from the household to the only possible rival to the throne: another illegitimate half-brother, who was married to his own illegitimate half-sister but at least was an experienced administrator who had been running a satrapy for some time in a competent manner.
This half-brother, Ochus, was also was on friendly terms with the satrap of Egypt, who sent him troops. He marched into Susa, caught the usurper, and had him put to death. He himself took the throne, giving himself a proper royal name to replace his bastard’s name: Darius II.29 His reign began near the end of the year 424, in which both his father and his half-brother had died: a year in which the Persian empire had had three different Great Kings.
BY 421, the Athenians and the Spartans found themselves back in the same position that they had been in back when the Thirty Years’ Peace was sworn: losing soldiers constantly, facing famine if regular planting and harvesting didn’t resume soon, neither of them with any hope of decisive victory. They agreed once more to a peace, known as the Peace of Nicias, after the Athenian leader who helped negotiate it.
The peace lasted for six years. Nicias’s colleague in Athenian government, Alcibiades, was not inclined to let a peace go on for long; he wanted fame.
Alcibiades was a hard-drinking, extravagant man whose reputation for beauty outlasted his youth, an affected libertine who carried on affairs with both sexes: “[He] minces along with his cloak trailing behind him, tilts his head to one side and speaks with a pronounced lisp,” Plutarch observes.30 He was also driven by an obsessive need for public acclaim, which made him a bad match for the times. Athens needed to rebuild its strength and ignore Sparta, but Alcibiades knew that there was no glory for him in that. In 415, he seized an opportunity to play hero.
A Greek settlement on Sicily, called Egesta, asked the Athenian navy for support against two other Greek cities in Sicily, the cities of Selinus and Syracuse. Syracuse, originally a Corinthian colony, was one of the wealthiest Greek cities west of the Adriatic, and had kept its ties with the mother city. If the Athenians sailed to the aid of Egesta, they could replay the fight with Corinth and, perhaps, triumph.
65.2 The War on Sicily
Alcibiades convinced the Athenians to throw a huge fleet at this distant and pointless target: 25,000 soldiers, over 130 triremes, and an equal number of boats carrying supplies.31 A prank just before the fleet embarked (someone defaced a whole series of sacred images at the end of a long drunken evening) almost kept it on the shores, since many Athenians thought this to be a bad omen. But finally the ships were given their send-off and sailed towards Sicily, into total disaster.
Alcibiades and Nicias were in charge, along with a third experienced general. Almost at once, the three leaders quarrelled over when and how to attack. Then they received a message from Athens: Alcibiades was suspected of defacing those sacred images (he was probably guilty of this childish vandalism), and the Athenians had decided to haul him back to Athens to face trial.
No good ever came of such a summons, so Alcibiades took a ship and deserted the fleet. He sailed to Sparta, where he switched sides and offered to help the Spartans bring an end to their troubles with Athens once and for all. If he couldn’t get fame in one way, he’d try another.
Back off the shores of Sicily, Nicias—who was not a decisive man, although a good peacemaker—delayed and deliberated until the Syracusans had collected a force of their own, including reinforcements from their allies in the Peloponnesian League. By then it was too late to win, even though the Athenians had managed to convince the Etruscans to join them.32 Nicias wrote back to Athens, begging to be allowed to withdraw; given the size of the Syracusan opposition, he said, only a force twice as large as the one he currently commanded could win.
The Athenians had no idea of their precarious situation. They promptly raised, and sent, enough men to double Nicias’s force.33
Nicias, aghast to see the reinforcements appear on the horizon, planned to take the whole army and retreat. But the Syracusans got wind of this scheme, and, in Thucydides’s words, “became more eager than ever to press the Athenians, who had now themselves acknowledged that they were no longer their superiors either on sea or by land, as otherwise they would never have planned to sail away.”34 Syracusan ships blocked the Athenian retreat, whereupon forty thousand Athenian soldiers tried to escape across the island on foot to the other side. Their horrific march, in the summer sun with the enemy behind, ended in disaster: they hoped to reach the Assinarus river and launch a defense on the other side, but when they reached the shore,
driven by their exhaustion and craving for water…they rushed in, and all order was at an end, each man wanting to cross first…. Mean while the opposite bank, which was steep, was lined by the Syracusans, who showered missiles down upon the Athenians, most of them drinking greedily and heaped together…in the hollow bed of the river. The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most even fighting to have it. At last, when many dead now lay piled one upon another in the stream, and part of the army had been destroyed at the river, and the few that escaped from there had been cut off by the cavalry, Nicias surrendered.35
Despite assurances from the Syracusan commander, Nicias was murdered as soon as he had laid down his arms. The captive Athenians were sent to the quarries, where they died in heat and filth, or lived among the piled bodies of those who had died before. The few survivors returned home to find that the Spartans, helped by Alcibiades, had already invaded Attica and were spreading across its edge.
But the Spartans still couldn’t force an Athenian surrender, and after eight years the war was still dragging on. Most Greeks were, by now, very tired of fighting the Spartans. In these years, the playwright Aristophanes wrote the comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens announce that they will all refrain from sex until their husbands bring the war to an end. “We need only sit indoors with painted cheeks,” their leader Lysistrata exclaims, “and meet our mates lightly clad in transparent gowns…they will get their tools up and be wild to lie with us. That will be the time to refuse, and they will hasten to make peace, I am convinced of that!”36
No such solution presented itself. Instead, the Persians got reinvolved, and the troubles between the two cities became even more insoluble.
The Persians were brought into the picture by none other than Alcibiades, who had managed to get himself kicked out of Sparta. While Agis, the king of the junior line, was out of the city fighting, Alcibiades had carried on a raging affair with his wife so blatant that the whole city knew about it: “She got pregnant with his child,” Plutarch observes, “and did not even deny it.”37 Agis himself, who could count, realized when he returned home that the baby wasn’t his. Alcibiades, not wanting to meet with a fatal accident, fled to Sardis. There he introduced himself to the satrap now in charge of Asia Minor, one Tissaphernes, and offered to help the Persians work the ongoing war between Athens and Sparta in a way that might bring both cities down.
The scheme, as planned by Alcibiades and Tissaphernes (who didn’t consult the king at Susa), was partially successful. Tissaphernes sent word to the Spartans, offering to fund their ongoing war on condition that, once Athens fell, the Spartans would abandon the Ionian cities to Persia. The Spartans agreed, which played directly into Tissaphernes’s hands; he encouraged them to rely on the Persian bankroll and then did a lousy job of paying up. “Tissaphernes,” says Thucydides, “was ruining their navy by payments made irregularly, and even then not made in full.”38
Meanwhile Alcibiades wrote to Athens, offering to come and join them (again) with plenty of Persian gold in hand, as long as they would agree to reinstate him in his previous position. That the Athenians agreed was a measure of their desperation.
This was probably supposed to end in a huge sea battle in which the Athenians and Spartans would, theoretically, destroy each other’s fleets. Alcibiades certainly did go back to Athens, in 407, with enough gold to help them refurbish the navy; and in the fall of that same year, he led a fleet of a hundred Athenian ships towards the Spartan navy.
Meanwhile, two changes of command had taken place. Darius II had gotten wind of the unauthorized negotiations, yanked Tissaphernes back to Susa, and sent his younger son Cyrus to Sardis with instructions to put Persian reinforcements firmly on the Spartan side. And the Spartan navy had been put under the command of a new admiral, a man named Lysander. Plutarch tells us that Lysander, bolstered by Persian reinforcements and Persian money, was paying his forces a third more than the Athenians got from Alcibiades, and that Alcibiades “was pinched to pay even the daily allowance.”39
Outfunded and outmanned, the Athenian navy was doomed. In a series of battles between the fall of 407 and 405, Athenian ships were sunk and captured, sailors killed and drowned. In August, in a final devastating battle, the Athenian navy lost 171 ships in a single engagement.
Alcibiades himself disappeared, prudently; he turned up at the court of the satrap of Phrygia a little later and was treated “as an honoured member of the court.”40 His luck ran out shortly later, when Lysander (who remained on good terms with the Persians) asked the satrap to kill him off. The satrap agreed and sent men to burn down Alcibiades’s house; Alcibiades woke up and crashed out through the flames, only to be spitted by a javelin.
Lysander followed up on his destruction of the Athenian fleet by burning every ship he could and then sailing for Athens. He reached the city in October and besieged it. The Athenians, seeing that resistance was only going to result in starvation, surrendered: “Besieged by land and sea,” wrote the Greek soldier and historian Xenophon, “they had neither ships nor allies nor food.”41 The war was over.
Lysander ordered the Athenians to knock down the Long Walls, a condition which was carried out to the sound of celebratory flute music. Athens was also forced to give up all influence over the cities which had once belonged to the “Athenian empire.”42 This was not nearly as severe a punishment as it could have been; Athens still had its main city walls, it had not been sacked, and it had the freedom to reestablish its own government. Unfortunately the Athenians at once began a huge internal quarrel about how to do this. Eventually Lysander was forced to return and set up a junta of thirty aristocrats, known later simply as the Thirty.43 They became infamous for the bloodbath which they instituted, putting to death on any pretext Athenians whom they suspected of wanting democracy restored. Lysander, whose initial reaction to Athens had been mild, turned a blind eye and even sent Spartan foot soldiers to help the new regime get rid of all opposition.
The executions soon moved beyond the political: “They aimed at removing all whom they had reason to fear,” Aristotle later wrote, “and also those whose possessions they wished to lay hands on. And in a short time they put to death not less than fifteen hundred persons.”44
In desperation, the remaining Athenians massed together, sent to nearby Thebes for help, and attacked the Thirty and the Spartan garrison that protected them. This could have started war with Sparta all over again, but the king of Sparta, seeing the mess, overruled Lysander and pulled the garrison out. Darius II had just died, and his son and heir, Artaxerxes II, was an unknown quantity; Sparta was not going to rely on Persian gold again.
The Thirty who had not died in the fighting fled. The following year, 403, was hailed by the Athenians as the start of a new era, in which democracy could finally make its return to Athens. But the Athens which welcomed it was broken and bankrupt.
