CHAPTER 9
Sparta Builds a Fleet
After the defeat of much of the Corinthian fleet by Phormio in 429, the Peloponnesians had essentially given up the idea of defeating the Athenians at sea, much in the same way as the latter avoided pitched battle with Spartan hoplites. In response, the Athenians were often given a free hand to patrol the empire. They would do so with near impunity for almost the next sixteen years; the Peloponnesians, in contrast, resembled more the smaller German navy of the two world wars, venturing out to terrorize merchants and neutrals only when the British fleet was elsewhere or asleep.
Then, suddenly, the unexpected Athenian catastrophe of 413 in Sicily—216 imperial triremes (perhaps at least 160 of them Athenian) and almost 45,000 men of the empire were lost or captured—gave new impetus to Sparta’s efforts to catch up and build a new Pan-Peloponnesian fleet fueled by Persian money. The vast armada of Athens had always been a fluke beyond what should have been the limited resources of any single city-state. Indeed, its creation in 482 was a result only of a rich strike in the silver mines of Laurium, and it was later sustained by the imperial tribute of hundreds of subject states. In contrast, without mines or tribute-paying subjects, Sparta’s old pipe dream at the beginning of the war of creating a vast armada of 500 ships could be realized only by an unholy alliance with the empire of Persia.
It was not just that Athens had lost two-thirds of its once magnificent imperial fleet or that the roughly 100 reserve triremes that remained in the Piraeus were in various states of unreadiness. Instead, the greater dilemma was that the human losses at Sicily, coupled with the thousands of dead from the plague, had wiped out an entire generation of experienced Athenian rowers, teachers, and students of the sea, all almost impossible to replace at once. In a similar example, after the defeat of Lepanto (1571), the Ottoman catastrophe was not just the loss of almost 30,000 seamen and 200 galleys—or the thousands more sailors who were unaccounted for. Rather, the destruction of thousands of trained bowmen, archers who made Turkish ships deadly but took years to train properly, ensured that even after the hasty reconstruction of their fleet by the next year, the Ottomans would rarely again venture into Italian-controlled waters.
A third to half of the thousands of imperial rowers who were lost at Sicily were probably Athenian citizens and resident aliens. The death or capture of the remaining 20,000 foreigners and allied seamen not only drained the empire of manpower but also created waves of resentment against Athens among bereaved subjects. Long gone was the memory of the festive spectacle of cheering and merriment, and expectations of easy loot and glory on the cheap, when the grand flotilla had sailed from the Piraeus in 415. Sailing with the Athenians could quite literally get you and your sons killed.
Something had also come over the Greeks after Sicily. Perhaps it was the length of the war; it was now almost twenty years since Sparta had invaded Athens, and both desperate sides were beginning to sense that the end could not be too far away. Or maybe the increasing savagery was attributable to the mounting losses and the barbarism unleashed at Scione, Torone, and Melos. In any case, in the Archidamian War one does not sense that Spartans and Athenians hated each other. But in the last phase of the conflict, there is a real feeling of growing fury on both sides, that trireme war in the eastern Aegean was perhaps more like the Japanese, rather than the European, theater of World War II, when most soldiers gave no quarter and harbored a deep visceral and racial dislike of their enemies.
If an islander were to row in the future, it might be wiser to enlist for higher pay in the new and larger Peloponnesian fleet, which was likely to patrol in greater numbers in the eastern Aegean, which was now increasingly empty of the old Athenian triremes. As the war heightened in the eastern Aegean and the limits of Greek manpower became clear after some two decades of steady combat losses, the final sea fights became as much a bidding war for mercenary oarsmen as a test of seamanship. In other words, the war would descend into a one-sided financial contest between the limitless gold of Persia and an impoverished Athens.1
Athens started the war with 5,000 talents in reserve. But after Sicily it now had less than 500 in its treasury, scarcely enough to build 100 triremes and keep them at sea for even four months. The special emergency reserve of 1,000 talents to guarantee the safety of the Piraeus was suddenly not so sacrosanct. Thucydides concluded that besides the absence of men to make up the losses and the few triremes left in the ship sheds, there was also “no money in the treasury.” In addition, the two traditional sources of Athenian naval financing—silver from Laurium and tribute from the Aegean—were now imperiled by Spartan ravagers and ships. Most Greeks thought that after Sicily “the war was over.” Thus, should Sparta somehow find the capital to build a fleet and pay for its new crews, there was a good chance that by 413 its rowers would be no more inexperienced than most Athenian replacement oarsmen.2
After a few years of valuable help to the Peloponnesian navy, the Persians decided to take a far more active role when the maverick Spartan admiral Lysander and the renegade teenaged Achaemenid prince Cyrus struck a partnership of convenience in 407, one that meant the Peloponnesians would have a nearly unlimited supply of capital to build ships and hire crews. With overwhelming numerical superiority, the Spartans could afford to keep challenging the Athenians at sea, backed up by the assurance that their losses would be made good as they wore down the Athenian fleet in a theater vital to the continuance of imported food and precious tribute.3 Even earlier, after the defeat at Cyzicus in spring 410, the Persian satrap Pharnabazus had encouraged the demoralized Spartans to remember that there was plenty of timber for ships in Persia, and lots of replacement arms, money, and clothing to reequip any sailors who survived the defeat.4
In the immediate aftermath of the Athenian catastrophe at Sicily, when it came time to pony up for Peloponnesian triremes, the Boeotians, Corinthians, Locrians, Phocians, Megarians, and the states of the Argolid sent out no more than 75 ships. Along with the Spartans’ own paltry 25 triremes, that still made up a combined fleet of only about 100 ships. The Sicilian allies proved an equal disappointment. Despite having been saved by the timely arrival of a Peloponnesian fleet in the harbor at Syracuse, in recompense they added little more than 22 vessels to the Spartan cause—given their worries over a nearby aggressive Carthage. So there loomed the chance that in 412 the Peloponnesians might soon achieve numerical parity at sea, a situation in the short-term that meant Sparta could at least engage the green reconstituted Athenian fleet with an equal number of ships and crews no more inexperienced.
The inclusion of seasoned naval officers from Syracuse and Corinth who long had organized fleets might account for some sharing of nautical experience among the high command of the grand Peloponnesian fleet. At times, for example, there is special mention of skilled navigators like Ariston the Corinthian, who was “the best pilot of the Syracusan fleet.” He had devised a stratagem for feeding his seamen rapidly on shore and getting their triremes back in action as quickly as possible. The same innovator was most probably responsible for attaching shorter and lower rams to the Syracusan ships, to ensure that they struck below the waterline and with greater force.5
Nevertheless, what has never been adequately explained is how a landlocked reactionary state like Sparta, one that not only had little experience with the sea but openly loathed the entire social cargo that accompanied naval power, in the space of less than a decade turned green crews and brand-new triremes into a formidable and seasoned opponent of the great fleet of Athens. The creation of an eastern Aegean Spartan flotilla, alongside the Roman armada during the Punic Wars and the Japanese imperial fleet at the beginning of the twentieth century, ranks as one of the great naval achievements in history.
Ancient observers remarked on the sheer audacity of Spartan naval power, usually through acknowledgment by Spartans themselves that they had no real idea of what they were doing. “Sending out men who had no experience with the sea” to replace “men who were just beginning to understand naval matters” summed up Spartan policy in the eastern Aegean—as if one Spartan hoplite on deck was as good as another.6 Contemplating Spartans out in the middle of the Aegean on rocking triremes, one might paraphrase Samuel Johnson and wonder not that it was done well, but that it was done at all.
Bloodbath
Yet if the Aegean had been relatively quiet since 429, suddenly from 411 to 404 the Athenians met the Spartans and their allies in at least seven major engagements. Across time and space, rarely are rival fleets willing to engage each other repeatedly until one side is not merely defeated but annihilated. Such is the conservatism of admirals who so jealously protect their precious assets while on the high seas. Like the British systematic destruction of the Napoleonic armada or the American Seventh Fleet’s brutal death struggle with the Japanese, which finally ended with the utter annihilation of the most lethal carrier and battleship force of the pre–World War II world, both Athens and Sparta now no longer sought mere tactical advantage but were willing to risk their all to finish off the enemy.
To win, Sparta had to kill off, capture, or scatter a final cohort of at least another 50,000 or so Athenian and allied sailors and sink another 200 ships, which otherwise, over a decade, might replace the losses of Sicily. These last battles across the Aegean—they are often lumped together and called the Ionian War—were decided in the waters off western Asia Minor (Ionia) and in or near the Hellespont (the modern Dardanelles). If Boeotia, home of nine major hoplite battlefields by the fourth century, was once dubbed by the Theban general Epaminondas “the dancing floor of war,” one could call the Hellespont and the adjoining Propontis (the Sea of Marmara) “the seas of death.” In those environs alone 50,000 men were probably killed, missing, or captured in just three battles at Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Aegospotami, all within a sixty-mile radius. In addition, between 412 and 404 thousands more Athenians, Persians, and Peloponnesians died in ambushes, seaborne attacks, and random killing up and down the Ionian seaboard.7
With the establishment of a permanent garrison at Decelea, the new Peloponnesian fleet was confident that it now had muscle enough to block grain ships from arriving at Attica. Thus, this time under a year-round combined land and sea assault, the city, it was thought, would shortly go bankrupt if not starve: keep Attic farmers away from their land, destroy ships that imported food, deny access to grain-growing areas abroad, assure subjects that they can revolt in safety and withhold tribute, and all the while sink Athenian triremes. Decelea was the antithesis of Archidamus’ earlier failed strategy, which had offered no permanent presence and no ancillary naval strategy.
Not long after the defeat in the Great Harbor of Syracuse, an emboldened and reconstituted Spartan armada engaged what was left of the Athenian fleet in a series of inconclusive sea battles in the Aegean, at Spiraeum (412), Syme (411), Chios (411), and Eretria (411). Whereas losses at these rather obscure sea battles on both sides were minimal, the succession of collisions began to wear on a shaky Athens and had the practical effect of destroying another 30 or so Athenian triremes.
More importantly, perhaps 5,000 seamen were killed, scattered, or captured. Despite spending its final 1,000-talent critical reserve on rebuilding the fleet, strategically Athens could no longer control even the seas off its own coast. It was also on the verge of losing much of Ionia and, with it, a tribute-rich empire. After the defeat at Eretria in nearby Euboea—the Athenians lost 22 ships and most of the crews were killed in battle or captured—a panic descended upon the city that was greater than the near riot that had broken out after the news of the Sicilian disaster reached the Piraeus, two years earlier.8
The final phases of the war next turned to the northern coast of the Hellespont. There, near the peninsula called the Thracian Chersonese, the Spartans now tightened the noose, hoping to cut off the sea-lanes between Propontis and Athens. In summer 411 at Cynossema, 76 Athenian ships, under the brilliant general Thrasybulus, beat back the larger Peloponnesian fleet of 86 triremes. Perhaps 32,000 seamen were involved. At least 36 ships were lost in fighting that spanned some eleven miles of the strait. The total casualties are unknown—though as many as 7,000 may have been killed, scattered, or wounded. The Athenians claimed victory on the basis that they had at least kept their last fleet intact. They had regained morale in their first major fight after the disaster in Sicily, defeated a fleet that included several hated Syracusan triremes last encountered in the disaster of the Great Harbor, and ensured that commerce with Athens remained open. As Thucydides rightly put it, “They stopped considering that their enemies were worth much in naval matters.”9
Yet in such battles of attrition, the greater resources now were starting to tip toward the Peloponnesians. Their newfound pluck at sea would encourage more contributions from their allies and closely observant Persia. In contrast, to win the war on the seas the Athenians would have to inflict crushing losses on the Spartans while losing almost none of their now precious triremes. Thucydides, for example, said of the Athenian victory at Cynossema (fought not far from Gallipoli) that it came “at just the right time,” inasmuch as small losses to the Peloponnesians in the prior two years and the great catastrophe on Sicily had made them “afraid of the Peloponnesian fleet.”10
To compound the Peloponnesian misery, not far away, at Abydos, a few weeks later the Spartans once again forced battle. There they were to lose another 30 ships, along with thousands of crewmen. Still, Alcibiades—in 411 he had returned to Athens in yet another incarnation, as chief Athenian admiral—summed up the Athenian dilemma best before the battle of Cyzicus. After explaining why his crews had “to fight at sea, fight on land, and fight against walled fortresses,” he finished with the admission of a bitter reality: “The reason is that there is no money among us, while the enemy has all they wish from the king of Persia.”11
Sparta was not to be deterred by the loss at Abydos in its ambitious efforts to destroy what was left of the once grand Athenian fleet. In between battle and revolution, the Spartans offered Persian bonuses for oarsmen on the open market, rightly figuring that higher pay in the Peloponnesian navy would cause desertion from the Athenian fleet, which now depended on mercenary rowers.12
About six months later, in March 410 and thirty-five miles distant from Cynossema, the Spartan fleet unabashedly forced battle again, near Cyzicus. In this third consecutive battle of the Ionian War, after Cynossema and Abydos, the Peloponnesians suffered yet another setback, despite their now accustomed numerical superiority. Inspired leadership by the veteran generals Thrasybulus and Alcibiades and remarkable seamanship by a new generation of Athenian oarsmen, who went to sea in a storm and performed flawlessly the difficult periplous, explain the remarkable victory. In fact, Cyzicus proved one of the greatest naval disasters for any Greek fleet during the entire war. Yet it was the beginning, not the end, of the bloodbath in the Aegean.
Another 60 ships, including 20 Syracusan triremes, were now lost, some of which their dejected crews burned after seeing the defeat of their allies. The casualties are not known, but they must have been high. Perhaps well over 10,000 seamen were captured, scattered, or killed, including the Spartan general Mindarus. The historian Xenophon, in one of the most famous passages in his Hellenic history, quotes a laconic letter sent back home to Sparta from the surviving vice admiral Hippocrates—intercepted by the victorious Athenians—that read: “The ships are gone. Mindarus is dead. The men are starving. We are at a loss what we should do.”13
What to do? In less than a year, Sparta had suffered staggering losses. Somewhere between 130 and 160 triremes were gone—almost the entire contribution two years earlier of its Peloponnesian and Syracusan allies. How many were dead, wounded, or lost is not recorded. In theory, between 20,000 and 30,000 seamen were on those ships that went down; in reality, no doubt at least a few thousand probably escaped or were captured.
Suddenly the entire course of the war began to change. After Sicily, the Greeks had assumed that Athens was finished. Now they were not so sure. Athens’ food supply was still safe. Rebellion among the allies was less likely. Athenian naval prestige was once again unquestioned. And most importantly, generals like Thrasybulus, Theramenes, and Alcibiades had proved that they were far better tacticians than almost all the admirals that had accompanied the Spartans to the Aegean.
After Cyzicus, a dejected Sparta apparently remembered why it had not sought naval engagements against Athens some twenty years earlier. In frustration, Sparta quickly sent out peace feelers to Athens: “We want to have peace with you, men of Athens,” their ambassadors pleaded in offering a return to the prewar status quo. But the Athenian assembly, perhaps led by rabble-rousing demagogues like Cleophon, was now aroused, drunk on success and paranoid after the failed oligarchic coup of 411. For the first time in some three years, the Athenians had thoughts of reclaiming the entire Aegean. Maybe they really could destroy the Spartan fleet for good, and drive the Persians out of Greek affairs. Unsure how to follow up their spectacular successes, the Athenians unwisely played defense for nearly four years, between 410 and 407, while the Spartans rebuilt their forces and found themselves a true military genius in Lysander, albeit one who did not emerge in a major role until 407, near the end of the war.
Unfortunately for the Athenians, few of the city’s politicians saw the true complexion of this new Ionian War, and ignored the advice of the three brilliant generals, Alcibiades, Thrasybulus, and Theramenes, who had brought them such stunning victories. The truth was that the war had now changed dramatically and could no longer be seen in terms of the old simple Spartan land/Athenian sea dichotomy of decades past. The newfound Spartan ability to tap into the imperial treasuries of Persia, through the direct succor of its western satrapies, ensured the enemies of Athens an inexhaustible supply of mercenaries, new triremes, and money to hire crews who were experienced rowers, not rustic farmers from the Peloponnese.
To nullify the Spartan advantage in numbers and its determination to prompt battle repeatedly, Athens had to rely on superior seamanship and command in every major battle, without any margin of error. It could not fight on the defensive, since it was trying to maintain an empire, which involved more than just keeping out the Spartan fleet. And an unforeseen result of the Athenian victory at Cyzicus was a reexamination of the Spartan command, leading to the appointment of a new admiral, Lysander, who, even more so than Brasidas, would prove to be the unqualified military genius of the entire war on either side, the most ruthless, brilliant, and multidimensional battle leader Greece had produced since Themistocles. Most Spartan generals were fighters (with tough names like Thorax, “Breastplate,” and Leon, “Lion”), but rarely was one both heroic and full of strategic insight about how to defeat something as insidious as the Athenian empire. The presence of Lysander—a man cut from the same cloth as Brasidas and Gylippus (none of them were Spartan royalty and thus all were considered somewhat expendable)—along with a greater infusion of Persian capital was felt almost immediately as the Spartan maverick systematically hunted down grain ships, stormed Athenian strongholds, and enslaved captured peoples. In the next major battle, at Notium (spring 406)—the Spartans had used the three-year hiatus in naval confrontation to rebuild their fleet—Alcibiades temporarily left command to Antiochus, a minor captain, with strict orders to avoid an engagement in his absence.
Instead, the Athenians rashly fought Lysander off Ephesus, and right away lost 22 irreplaceable ships. By any measure this was small potatoes after the stunning string of victories at Cynossema, Abydos, and Cyzicus. On the other hand, every Athenian trireme was now precious. Despite the fact that when Alcibiades returned to Notium after the defeat of his subordinate the Athenians still had as many ships as Lysander, the loss caused outrage at a desperate Athens, raising the specter of Alcibiades’ past machinations and triangulations.
Once more Alcibiades was banished, and with that Athens lost its most capable and popular admiral. True, Athens had lost few ships, and its fleet of 108 remaining triremes was roughly the same size as the Peloponnesian armada. But Athens’ dilemma was not merely that it had to stop the Persian fleet but that it had an empire to protect in Ionia as well, a fact that in strategic terms meant that superiority, not parity, in ships was required.14
A few months later at Mytilene, the Athenians under Conon lost another 30 ships to a Spartan fleet that once more had grown to somewhere between 140 and 170 ships. In response, the Athenians began a desperate search for even more manpower, putting old and young, slave and free, poor and wealthy on triremes in hopes of manning enough ships to thwart the Spartan juggernaut. By late spring of the same year, the death struggle continued as the fleets once more sailed to engage each other off the Ionian coast. In the previous five years, at the smaller battles of Spiraeum, Syme, Chios, Eretria, and Abydos and the three great fights at Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Notium, at least 84 Athenian triremes had been lost, along with perhaps as many as 16,000 seamen. Sparta, in turn, had suffered nearly double those casualties—160 ships sunk or captured and, with them, perhaps as many as 30,000 sailors.15
The Last Battles
Altogether, the first unheralded years of the Ionian War had proved more catastrophic than the better-known Athenian disaster in Sicily. Almost 50,000 aggregate Greeks drowned or were captured, killed in action, executed, or scattered, along with nearly 250 triremes—the equivalent in actual, rather than relative, human losses for the huge American navy of losing 10 modern aircraft carriers along with their crews of 5,000 sailors. And the worst was yet to come.
By late summer it made no difference to the Athenians that over the last seven years they had given better than they had taken. What mattered now was that after the last two losses of Mytilene and Notium the fleet had been reduced to fewer than 80 triremes and might not be able to ensure grain imports from the Crimea or to hold on to the tribute-paying Greek city-states in Asia Minor. Rather than giving up their empire, in desperation the Athenians somehow manned and launched 60 new triremes—slaves and freedmen alike embarked as rowers—and rushed them to Ionia to join what was left at sea. Shipwrights had built dozens of green triremes in just over a month, as the city scavenged the precious metal veneers from the statues on the Acropolis and melted them down to issue coinage to build and man the slapped-together warships. The hope was to reconstitute a fleet of over 140 triremes that might have some chance against the ever-growing Peloponnesian fleet. That was not an impossible feat given that some seventy years earlier (between 483 and 480) Themistocles, with far less experience, had built the first great Athenian fleet of some 200 triremes in just over two years. In fact, with aid from the Samians, the new armada now reached 155 triremes, an astounding number in light of the recent disasters.
Sparta’s launching of a series of new fleets is understandable given their Persian capital and their relatively light losses during the first two decades of the war. But how Athens after the plague, Sicily, and continued attrition in the Ionian War could project such naval forces near the end of the third decade of the war staggers the imagination. Few contemporaries had envisioned that by 406, after twenty-five years of war and thousands of dead, Athens would launch a fleet almost as large as any in Greek history.
Off the Arginusae Islands, despite the preponderance of inexperienced replacement crews (thousands of Attic slaves now enlisted on promises of freedom even as the wealthiest horsemen in the city volunteered to row) and hastily constructed ships that were qualitatively inferior to those of the Peloponnesian fleet, the Athenians enjoyed the old numerical superiority for the first time since the Sicilian disaster. Some 120 Peloponnesian triremes were assembled to meet them under Callicratidas, who most recently, at Mytilene, had defeated the skilled Athenian admiral Conon. Other than citing a numerical advantage of a few dozen triremes, to this day scholars are perplexed about how the Athenians, with green triremes, crews augmented with slaves, and coming off defeat, could have so decisively annihilated the veteran Peloponnesian fleet.
Arginusae proved to be the most violent sea battle of the Peloponnesian War. The engagement marked perhaps the largest collection of warships in one encounter since Salamis, as over 270 triremes and 50,000 rowers collided. Diodorus thought it was the greatest naval battle of Greek against Greek in history, as Athenian triremes rowed in large part by slaves gave the democracy its greatest victory since Salamis.
After a brutal collision of ships, the Athenians destroyed some 77 Spartan and allied triremes at a loss of only 26 of their own, an astounding 3-to-1 kill ratio. Sixty-four percent of the Peloponnesian fleet was destroyed in a few hours, well over twice the grievous loss rate earlier at Abydos, Cynossema, and Cyzicus, which had reached an unsustainable average of 28 percent. With this loss of over two-thirds of their forces at Arginusae, Sparta and her allies in the space of a mere five years had now suffered 250 ships sunk that were manned by 50,000 rowers and marines, in a rarely recognized disaster that dwarfed that of the Athenians in Sicily in 413.
The difference, however, was twofold. Spartan commanders reported back to an oligarchy, where the average citizen could hardly shout down a speaker and whip up the crowd. Second, most of the money lost and the crews killed were not Laconian but mercenary seamen and Persian-financed triremes. This disparity may explain why the Athenians in hard-fought triumphs went into despair, while in catastrophe the Spartans continued on their policy of steady attrition.16
The paradox of Arginusae was not that the Athenians had nearly annihilated the Spartan fleet but that they had lost some 26 triremes with most of their crews in the process. Lurid stories soon filtered back to Athens of the abandonment of survivors in the “thousands” bobbing in stormy water and clinging to wreckage, along with the “abandoned” corpses of the dead, which were likewise not retrieved. In the uproar that followed, 6 of the 10 generals were executed for dereliction of duty (among them Pericles’ last surviving son). The rest, who were the most talented officers in Athens, fled into exile in fear of a similar death sentence.
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