Alastair Blanshard
Appearances
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And so, I mean, what happens really is that the fleet gets trapped in the great harbor of Syracuse, and then they're forced to abandon the fleet and commence a sort of death march, really, as it turns out, across Sicily, harried by the Syracusans and Spartan forces. So eventually they're all captured. forced to work in the mines.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Part of what's driving this is an inability for Athens, once it's committed, to pull back. We always think of the Spartans as the people who don't retreat. But in Athenian democracy, there's a problem, which is that if you're an unsuccessful general, the first thing that happens when you arrive back in Athens is you're put on trial. This means that if you're a general, you're really reluctant
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
to come back with a defeat. You're also reluctant, I think, to retreat because your political opponents are just waiting there to charge you with having been bribed by the enemy forces. This seems to be what happens in Sicily. Their generals wanted to get out, but they couldn't because of the fear of what recriminations would be back for them in Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, and they're starting to question even their government as well. So in the wake of the 415 expedition, they institute some democratic reforms or reforms to the way they're going to hold and run their democracy. So they're going to try and put some brakes on any kind of impetuous decisions. They're going to have their agendas be thoroughly vetted before they go to voting on the assembly agenda.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
There's, I think, increasingly a dissatisfaction with democratic politics and with democracy as an idea. We see the rise of increasingly violent political clubs happening in Athens. So yes, there's a real problem there, I think, and certainly a lot of the kind of Athenian sense of certainty about their position in the world and their own natural superiority, I think, takes a bit of a blow.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, I mean, Athenian ideology is all about Athenian superiority. These were the people who were literally emerged from the earth of Attica. That was their mythological belief, wasn't it? Exactly, that's right. They were blessed by Athena's chosen people. The agriculture, ground zero is Athens. Tryptolemus, the bringer of agriculture, is an Athenian, starts off spreading grain from Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So it really conceived of itself as the very center of the Greek world. Whether the Periclean funeral rations by Pericles or whether it's by Thucydides, the sentiments expressed there about Athens being the education of the rest of Greece is certainly the kinds of ideas that Athenians would happily have signed up to.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, certainly Thucydides is probably our most important source, and he gets us to practically the end of the Peloponnesian War.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So he's an Athenian general. He actually fought in the Peloponnesian War, in the first phases of the Peloponnesian War. He's a general who's actually been exiled by the Athenians for being unsuccessful in campaigns in the north. So he's perhaps got a little bit of an axe to grind against Athens and particularly against its democracy and particularly its democratic politicians.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So a wonderful historian whose account is often held up as the first example of scientific history. I mean, these days, we're increasingly worried about what we see as his biases, his his tendency to be a bit fast and loose with the truth, but still a really important source. Unfortunately, his work, which was always designed to go to the very end of the Peloponnesian War, was never finished.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So it's continued in its final phases by another general. It seems to be generals writing histories. This is a gentleman by the name of Xenophon, again, another Athenian, who writes an account of the final phases of the Peloponnesian War.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, so we've got a lot of inscriptional evidence from it. I mean, the wonderful thing about the Athenians is that they're an inscription-loving people.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They are. So we've got a fantastic set of inscriptions, and those are really, really very helpful for us and often can be a corrective to Thucydides. So they're really helpful in that respect. We also have a number of literary sources produced at this time. The comedies of Aristophanes, the tragedies of Euripides, particularly from this period, are all part of the mix as well.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That's right, yes. Athenian drama is always set in a mythological period, but often the themes it's touching on are extraordinarily contemporary. Take a tragedy like Trojan Women, for example, which there is no better tragedy to explore what it's like to deal with the consequences of warfare and the tragedy of subject populations at the hands of their captors.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
It's a really powerful indictment of war, and strikingly produced by the Athenians as the Peloponnesian War is ongoing. You have to think there's something really wonderful about this culture that is prepared during times of warfare to actually interrogate warfare so strongly. These days, the expectation would be that you'd put on something a bit more patriotic.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
But they don't go for sort of patriotic drama or jingoistic drama. They go for quite hard-hitting drama that confronts the realities of the kind of lived experience that they're dealing with.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, look, it's under stress. And it's under stress because Athens' great problem is always the challenge of feeding itself. Although it dominates the surrounding countryside, the area we know as Attica, the grain production of Attica is probably not sufficient to maintain the large urban population. So they're always hugely dependent on grain supply. And this is a real issue for Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And it's very reliant on grain supplies from the Black Sea. And they have to come through the whole Hellespont. And that's its kind of Achilles heel, as it were. In addition to this, I mean, after the failure of the Sicilian expedition, we also see Sparta establishing a permanent military encampment nearby Athens on a place called Decelea.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
In fact, the Decalayan War is often a phrase that's used for these final phases of the war. It's also a city that's really increasingly under siege. They can see in the distance, up on the hills of Decalaya, the campfires of the Spartans, Slaves, for example, start to revolt and escape to the Spartan encampment for the first time we've ever seen slaves fleeing Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Up to 20,000 or so slaves flee. The countryside is no longer as safe as it used to be. Spartan raiding parties come out. So there's a lot of that. There's also, I think, an increasing dissatisfaction with things like the military capacity of their soldiers. So we start to see the rise of use of mercenaries. In fact, for the Sicilian expedition, they bring in a whole lot of mercenaries.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
It all goes badly. So yes, there's all sorts of things. there. The mercenaries arrive too late to join the Sicilian expedition, and so they've got all these mercenaries, they don't know what to do with them. So they send them back home, and along the way, these mercenaries commit the most astonishing atrocities.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Most famously at the city of Mycalesus, they slaughter everyone, including a school full of children, as well as all the women and even the animals as well.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Again, it's a warfare that is changing its nature from the early ways in which warfare was done where two armies of hoplites would meet on a flat bit of battle and kind of duke it out to increasingly kind of vicious, nasty, brutish kind of war.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
It is. And we see them thrashing around for all sorts of solutions. So, for example, in 4.11, they decide to abandon democracy and establish an oligarchy, which is extraordinary. But they think, look, democracy today hasn't succeeded. They increasingly become so desperate that the cult of the individuals starts to take hold. The idea that a great man will solve our problems for us.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That again represents a significant shift. In some ways, more of a significant shift than I think the lurch towards oligarchy is this idea that what we need is a saviour. The saviour figure on everyone's lips in this period is, of course, the extraordinary Alcibiades.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
There was a bit of a cult of a personality around Pericles, but I'm not sure that Pericles was ever thought of as the saviour of Athens in quite the way that Alcibiades does. I talked about the political clubs, and one of the things we know that they'd start doing is starting to assassinate people who'd spoken out against Alcibiades. Wow.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Alcibiades is a figure who basically dominates this period. He's an extraordinary individual. Where to start with Alcibiades? He is aristocratic, comes from perhaps the most important of the aristocratic houses through his mother. He's in what we call one of the Alcmaeonidae, which had been an important aristocratic house. Fabulously wealthy, spectacularly good at self-promotion.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
He wanders around the marketplace in the finest purple clothes He's famous for having the most beautiful dog in Athens, whose tail he cuts off to the great alarm of everyone. And then when challenged about, why did you cut the tail of your beautiful dog off? He said, well, it's to get everyone talking about me. He's extraordinarily vain. He's fantastically good looking, it must be said.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
part of his vanity for example he famously refused to learn to play the flute because he felt the puffing out his cheeks ruined his features so he's wealthy he's extraordinarily good looking he's has a talent for for military he's charming he was supposed to be on the sicilian expedition but then you know gets caught up in a kind of religious scandal just before it
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So just before the Sicilian expedition, there's this thing called the mutilation of the Hermes, which is possibly an anti-Sicilian expedition. Hermes, the god of travel, suddenly all these Hermes, these representations of Hermes are attacked. So is this a kind of anti-Sicilian expedition? It's a huge act of sacrilege. There's a major inquiry as part of the inquiries
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
into religious sacrilege and profanation that's happening in Athens. Turns out that Alcibiades has been holding very sacrilegious, profane dinner parties. Anyway, he can see the writing on the wall, so he escapes. Interestingly, he escapes from Athens to Sparta, joins the Spartans, His family's always historically had good connections with Sparta. So he joins the Spartans.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
He's the mastermind who suggests that they fortify Decolea because he knows how strategically important this is. But while in Sparta, he manages to seduce the queen of Sparta, the king's wife, and installs a bastard son who will then grow up to be one of the kings of Sparta, Leotychides, who's then eventually kind of pushed off the throne because it turns out he's the bastard son of Alcibiades.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So he's with the Spartans. But then, of course, seducing the wife of the queen isn't a great way to maintain your popularity in Sparta. So he then flees them, goes back to Athens. Everyone thinks he's the saviour on Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, I mean, it's a sign of his strategic genius. Importantly, what he claims to offer the Athenians and what I think both Sparta and Athens realize at this point is that what's going to be the great kind of game changer is going to be whoever can get Persia on their side. Because that is what's going to finally solve the Peloponnesian War. Athens and Sparta could go on forever.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
What you need is something that can break the stalemate, change the game, and that's the wealth and power of Persia.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
extraordinarily wealthy. It has the resources to mobilize forces that both Athens and Sparta can only dream about. And it's really the realization that if one of us can get Persia on our side, that we will win. And Al-Sabadi quite rightly says, the Persians negotiating with Persian kings is my kind of bag. I'm absolutely the right man for it.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And indeed, manages to convince them it's part of the reason why they give up on the democracy in 411 is in fact the idea that they're trying to make themselves more amenable for Alcibiades to negotiate a kind of alliance between Persia and Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, that's right. And indeed, the Persians themselves are being activist, actually. They see that there's real potential for them in this conflict. They lost, of course, the Persian Wars. They lost a lot of control over their coastline as a result of the Persian Wars. And so it's an opportunity for them to reclaim the cities on the coast of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And so they see some real potential in that. Also, what they'd also noticed is increasingly figures who were usurpers in Persia were starting to make alliances with Athens. We'd seen a couple of rogue satraps, let's just say rogue Persian governors, starting to enter into alliances with Athens and destabilizing the great king.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They increasingly realized that actually this activist expansionist Athens is not a good thing for them. And so we see two particular satraps, Afanabazos and Tisaphernes, start to mobilize diplomatic relations. Initially with Sparta, Alcibiades comes in and says, look, actually it's in your best interest not to go for one side or the other, but rather to sort of maintain a status quo.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And so he's relatively effective early on in stopping the detente between Persia and Sparta, but eventually what we see Persia doing is siding with Sparta.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes. So initially, things are going well for Athens. And under Alcibiades, they have a number of successes.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
It's a bit of a revival. It's a good period. But Persia and Sparta are getting closer. And indeed, Persia decides to fund a Spartan fleet. This is the game changer. Now, Sparta's not very good at naval battles and it takes a while for them to get reasonably good at it. There are a couple of false starts.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
In 410 and 408 and stuff, we see a number of unsuccessful naval battles, particularly around the Hellespont. And the Hellespont itself becomes increasingly fractious in this period. So we have some city-states like Cestos, for example, which is on the Hellespont. I'm being very pro-Athenian, but its opposite number on the opposite coast of the Hellespont, Abydos, goes totally spartan.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And so around 411, we see the Hellespont kind of divide between Athens and Sparta. And we're starting to see increasing kind of naval actions in this period. Sparta is trying to blockade the Athenian fleet. The Athenian fleet manages to escape them. And so there's a lot of instability at this time.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Absolutely. So it's both taking out the navy and also controlling the supply lines. And I think those two things really are what are the fatal consequences for it. And the Spartans get better at it. I mean, from a very low base, it must be said. But still, by 407, the Battle of Notion, for example,
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Not a pretty conclusive naval battle, but certainly one in which the Spartans managed to capture about 20 or so Athenian ships. And this is, in fact, where we start to see Alcibiades' star wane.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So after the Battle of Nution, Athens has realized that, in fact, all the promises that Alcibiades was making about being able to get Persia on their side, about being able to hold back the Spartans, just haven't been true. Alcibiades can see the writing on the wall, so he flees again. This time he has a castle in the Hellespont, so he flees off to his castle in the Hellespont and hangs out there.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Then what we see is increasingly the might of the Spartan fleet. The Spartans managed to do some really good things. They blockade the Athenian fleet in the harbor at Lesbos, and this would have been again, the end of Athens had Athens not been very lucky in some ways to be able to defeat them nearby at the place called Argonousai Islands.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
This is a surprise victory, I think, in some ways for the Athenians.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes. And look, I think that's why Notium matters so much. It's because it's not a huge Spartan victory, but the fact that it is a victory is, I think, hugely damaging to Athenian psychology. And that's, I think, why the dissatisfaction with Alcibiades is so strong.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, so the Argonous Islands are a small group of islands off the island of Lesbos. The Athenian fleet is in some ways blockaded into the main harbour at Lesbos by the Spartans. So a small fleet is sent out and they manage to lure the Spartan fleet away and are successful. in freeing the Athenian fleet and also defeating the Spartans as well.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So it's a very clear Athenian victory that saves the majority of the Athenian fleet. Now, it's also a kind of extraordinary battle because it has this amazing aftermath as well, which is that just at the end of the battle, a storm comes up and the generals make the strategic decision
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
not to pick up the bodies of the Athenian sailors who were of the Athenian ships that had been attacked and destroyed by the Spartans. And this proves to be a fatal decision for these generals because when they arrived back in Athens, the families of the drowned sailors or the sailors whose bodies weren't recovered
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
indict the generals and talk about how terrible it was that they wouldn't stop to pick up the bodies of their loved ones. And so the assembly turns on the generals. And so this is an amazing moment where they've got this incredible victory that has saved the Athenian fleet, and yet the people turn on them. there is a trial and the generals are sentenced to death.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, so this goes down as one of the great indictments of democracy. It's pretty clear that, in fact, legal procedures weren't followed, and certainly the anti-democratic forces always hold up the trial of the Arcanusite generals as a good example of the intemperate nature of democracy that's driven by its passions rather than by reason, that it's driven by emotion.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And this idea of turning on these victorious generals, a disaster. And so they turn on their generals. So the generals are the big loser of the Battle of Argonousai. The winners, however, are the slaves who rode at Argonusa. So Argonusa is this extraordinary battle because it has these two outcomes. One, which is the generals that get put on trial.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
But then the slaves who actually had rode at the battle in Argonusa and been responsible also for this extraordinary success, they get their freedom and seem to be made Athenian citizens. So they go from being slave rowers to suddenly Athenian citizens practically overnight as a result of Argonusa.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, this is it. This is the great advantage of having Persia on your side is you lose one fleet, you get another one. And it must be said that the Persians at this time are fully committed. So in the initial stages of the Persian-Spartan alliance, Spartans actually accused the Persians of shortchanging them and being not too flash with their cash in terms of supporting their military efforts.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Certainly by this stage, however, they're fully committed to the alliance. Also, the other thing is that there's a very capable Spartan commander by the name of Lysander who is on the scene. He is someone who the Persians seem to have extraordinary confidence in, particularly the son of the Persian king, Darius II. This is a guy by the name of Cyrus the Younger.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That's right. Yes, the Peloponnesian War, the war that dominates the final third of the 5th century BC, the clash of the two greatest mainland powers in Greece, the mighty Sparta, Athens with a great naval empire, and an extraordinary secret for battles that goes on for 30 years and eventually leads to the destruction, the pulling down the walls of Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
He and Lysander have a very close relationship. Lysander, again, if we talk about Alcibiades being the figure who dominates Athenian politics, Lysander is the figure who dominates the Spartan side of things. Again, a good example of the way in which war provides opportunities for individuals who might not have otherwise great opportunities for advancement.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Lysander is what's technically called a mothax, that is to say a bastard or certainly some kind of para-citizen. Normally, a mothax is someone whose father is a citizen, but his mother might be a helot or a serf, or possibly they're citizens who are impoverished. Anyway, he has to have a sponsor to go through the Spartan education system.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So he's someone who clearly the wealthy elites of Sparta saw some potential in as a young man. He's sponsored to go through the education system. He ends up being the lover of one of the future Spartan kings, a man by the name of Giselao. And certainly he's clearly very, very diplomatically capable. And he's a very capable naval commander.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And he establishes very good relationship with the Persian prince Cyrus.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yeah. Well, it must be said that Lysander had, of course, been in charge of the fleet at the time of Argonus' size. So one of the problems had been that Sparta had claimed this rotation of officers. So initially, Lysander is the naval commander. He's then replaced by a person called Callicratidas. Again, another Mothax, interestingly.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
There seems to be something about the way in which the Spartan military campaign is letting these kind of, as it were, individuals who wouldn't normally have an opportunity to rise to greater prominence. It's Callicratius who is responsible for the Spartan fleet at Lysander gets the fleet in charge of the fleet, and then at that point he's starting to harry the Athenians.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
In particular, it's around the Hellespont. He happens to observe the way in which the Athenian fleet is behaving in the Hellespont. In particular, he notices that they tend to pull up their ships at a certain spot, and they also tend to take their meals quite regularly at a certain spot. He realizes this is going to be a huge point of vulnerability.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Interestingly, Alcibiades also recognized the way in which the Athenian fleet was vulnerable and comes down to the Athenian fleet from his castle.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
He comes down and says, look, this is a bad idea what you're doing. Of course, they shoo him away. Turns out to be right, of course. Anyway, Lysander manages to capture the Athenian fleet, essentially by surprise. The 180 or so ships that constitute the Athenian fleet at this point are captured by Lysander, and at this point it's game over.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That's right. This is at Aegis Potamai, and this is essentially game over for the Athenians. On the back of their tremendous success at Argonousae, full of false confidence, retreat. The fleet goes back to the Hellespont. A little while later, Lysander comes along with his new powerful fleet, recognizes what the Athenians are doing, captures them at Aegis Potamai.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
About 3,000 Athenian soldiers, 180 ships, only about 10 ships escape. So it's a complete route for the Athenians.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yeah, absolutely. And it's a brutal, brutal loss. I mean, Lysander slaughters all the Athenian naval people. And this is terrible. I mean, he captures them, they debate about what to do with them, and the fleet is eager for blood. They start reciting all the kinds of war crimes that the Athenians had committed.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
In particular, one that they keep coming back to is the time that some Athenians seized a Corinthian ship and essentially threw all the Corinthian soldiers and sailors overboard and let them drown. And so it's in memory of these kinds of atrocities that the Athenians have committed that no mercy is given to the Athenian soldiers and the Spartans slaughtered them all.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes. There's a little bit of mopping up that needs to do. Samos needs to be sorted out, which is what they do.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Athenian ally at this point. In fact, Lysander is actually worshipped as a god on Samos. He's famously declared to be the first living person who's worshipped as a god, and a festival, the Lysandreia, is established. But Lysander heads to Athens. At this point, the allies of Sparta, particularly Corinth and Thebes, are baying for Athenian blood. They want the city wiped out.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, the 5th century is really the Athenian century. So we see Athens, which is in earlier periods much more of a backwater, suddenly rise to power after the end of the Persian Wars. Athens really dominates the geopolitical space. It establishes this extraordinary naval empire, and it really is almost unrivaled within mainland Greece.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Oh yes, yes, easily. Importantly, Lysander is the person who doesn't decide to do that. He establishes that they will, of course, have to pay some penalties. They must be neutralized militarily. Their navy's been destroyed. He ensures that their walls are torn down.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And also the walls around the city as well. So the long walls are the walls that go down to the Piraeus, the harbor, and then the city walls as well. These are all torn down, leaving the city exposed, unable to defend itself. More importantly, he establishes a pro-Spartan, effectively, junta to rule Athens. This is the so-called Rule of the Thirty.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, they have to acknowledge the Spartan hegemony. They can't have an independent foreign policy. They're ruled by this pro-Spartan government. So that's really what happens to Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They are. And we know that when stories of the losses came to Athens, word went throughout the city. People were discussing what's going to happen to us. They thought back to all the kinds of terrible things they'd done to the cities that they conquered. Is that what's going to happen to us?
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Partly why the Spartans don't completely destroy them is a memory of the tremendous service that the Athenians had done during the Persian Wars and a memory of that. I think also it's the case that Sparta is always a bit concerned that places like Corinth and Thebes shouldn't have the entire world to themselves. I think they think of Athens as at least keeping Corinth and Thebes in check.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
I think also they think that they don't have to listen to precisely what Corinth and Thebes say. They're not, as it were, the lackeys of Corinth and Thebes.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
I mean, Sparta continues, but it's got this problem of Lysander, who is now being worshipped as a god on Samos, has been reorganising Athenian politics. And so there's a real struggle within Sparta about what to what to do in terms of these arrangements that Lysander has made. It's not just Athens he's reorganized. It's Samos.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
It's all sorts of islands as he's going back down from the Hellespont, reorganizing their political systems and establishing pro-Spartan governments. There's a real concern that Lysander himself is getting too big for his boots. There's a real problem about what you do with these spectacular generals.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
How do you reintegrate them into society, particularly a very hierarchical society like Sparta where you have two kings? It's a very old constitution.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, so the regime of the 30s regarded as perhaps one of the darkest days of Athens, so it's remarkably brutal. They established kind of kill squads to go out and kill any anti-Spartan, pro-democratic forces. They also established kill squads to go out to other cities as well, because it must be remembered that a lot of Athenians escaped Athens.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And this is quite unusual, because up until this point, Greece had been a patchwork of independent city-states. But over the course of the fourth century, we see that patchwork of independent city-states developing into a kind of bipolar system, dominated by two great powers, Athens and Sparta.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They could see the writing on the wall in the final stages of the Peloponnesian War. And so there were Athenian exiles up in Macedonia, for example. Euripides is up in Macedonia. You know, a huge number of exiles in Cyprus, in the court of Evagoras. So there are Athenians all over the place. And, you know, so they try and mobilize opposition and the 30 send out assassins.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yeah. They commissioned people to go to Salamis. Most famously, they asked Socrates to be part of one of these squads to go and retrieve a person called Leon of Salamis and to bring him for trial. Socrates refuses to have any part in the regime of the 30, even though a number of his students are, in fact, leading members of the 30. So it's a really brutal day.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They harass the wealthy Metics, the wealthy foreigners who are living in Athens, seizing property from them, violating their houses. It's just a terrible, dark, dark period. Now, fortunately, it's a relatively short kind of period because a remnant of the Athenian democratic forces arrives in the Piraeus. They buy a man called Thrasybulus. and he manages to essentially overthrow the Thirty.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
You might think, well, why don't the Spartans stand up to the Thrasybulus and quash this kind of pro-democratic anti-Thirty movement? It's really because Lysander's star has fallen at this point, and the fact that someone's come along and starting to undo Lysander's Lysander's organisation.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
I think the Spartans are quite keen on that and they also quite like to stick it to Lysander I think at this point.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, yes, yeah. I mean, as fools go, it's how you want to do your fool, I think, really. I mean, within a couple of decades, actually, Athens will be back. And that's because Sparta gets too ambitious and itself falls foul of its own ambitions. It gets involved in a kind of coup in Persia Cyrus, the son of Darius, decides to become a usurper.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
When Darius passes on the kingship to Cyrus' older brother Artaxerxes, Cyrus doesn't like this and thinks he can make a better job, and so brings the Spartan forces to join him in overthrowing Artaxerxes. Sparta itself will get itself, through its own ambitions, caught up into all sorts of things. Out of that turmoil, Athens will see an opportunity to rise.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes. And I mean, I think really what ultimately will, of course, sort out everything is, of course, the rise of the Macedonians. But what you never have after the fall of Athens is that strong kind of bipolar nature of the Greek world. The 5th century is a century of a bipolar world of very dominant Spartans, Peloponnesian League, and Athens and its empire.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
If you go through to the fourth century, what you see is it's much more bitty. You see at some point, Sparta is in the ascendancy. At some point, Athens is the ascendancy. Thebes suddenly comes out of nowhere. Thessaly has a go. Jason of Pharaon.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And then eventually the Macedonians come and sort everything out. But the fourth century is complicated in a way that the fifth century isn't in terms of geopolitics. And I think if we talk about the fall of Athens, I think that's what we're talking about is the idea that there are only two players and that what the end of Athens does is it opens up the space for all these other players.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, essentially, it's a kind of protection racket, basically. Greece had been invaded by Persia, and so Athens offers itself up as the great defender against the Persians. They'd, of course, been terribly important in mobilising the opposition to Persia. They'd Persia at the Battle of Marathon.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And eventually, of course, we'll create a situation which will allow Macedonia to come in and reach its ascendancy.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
No. So he then flees to the Persians. Oh, good idea, I don't think. So he ends up in the court of Pharnabazus, who's one of the sack traps there. And the story goes, I mean, it depends on if you want the political version or the kind of slightly racier version. But anyway, at some point, either on Spartan orders conveyed to Pharnabazus, they decide to kill Alcibiades. That's the political version.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
The slightly racier version is that he's involved in a kind of an adulterous affair with a woman Possibly the family discovers this. They decide when he's in this tent with this woman to set fire to the tent. Alcibiades rushes out to meet his attacker, supposedly naked, only armed with a sword. They fire arrows into him.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That's the death of Alcibiades as part of this kind of adulterous affair and outraged husband. Or it's a political assassination organized by the Spartans, but both seem entirely plausible.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Absolutely. Because as I said, it's this fall of Athens which will lay essentially the foundation for the rise of Macedonia.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
The Battle of Salamis had been a great turning point where the might of the Persian Empire had been humbled by a combined fleet of Greeks led primarily by Athens. They'd really hounded the Persians out of Greek area, mainland Greece, and also freed the Ionian coast.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And so as part of that, they've said, well, look, we're going to establish a league, the so-called Delian League, based initially on the island of Delos, which is going to protect
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That's in the center of the Aegean. Well, the center of Bicyclades. And this league was going to protect all of the Greeks from the Persians. Now, in order to run the league, you'd have to make contributions. And of course, Athens controls the league. And it's through the league, through this kind of protection basically,
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
with the claim that we're going to defend you against the Persians, that Athens dominates all the city-states. Once you sign up for the Delian League, you can't get out of it. We see a number of city-states try and get out of it. Athens jumps on them, tears down their walls, commandeers their fleet, and establishes pro-Athenian governments in the city-state.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, yes, I think that's a very charitable view of it, or depending on what you think of NATO. But certainly, I mean, Athens is calling the shots. And really, I mean, I think whatever it was like in its initial phases, certainly by the mid-fifth century, it really is a tool of Athenian hegemony. They're using the empire to enforce their own will.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So there's increasing tensions from about the 450s onwards. And we see in particular city-states like Corinth really increasingly anxious about the rise of Athens. And Corinth naturally is upset about Athens because they're commercial rivals and they don't like the rise of Athens, which is using its military might to also affect a kind of economic hegemony over the Greek world.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Both of them are big naval powers. Corinth, located on the Gulf of Corinth, occupies a really important strategic place because it's where the Gulf of Corinth is by a small land bridge separating it from the Ionian Sea. They control this land bridge. This land bridge really is very important because one of the things it allows you to do is you can drag your ships over the land
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
from the Ionian Sea through to the Gulf of Corinth, and thereby avoid having to sail all around the Peloponnese. So it's strategically really important, commercially a very rich and wealthy city, and allied with Sparta. Its alliance with Sparta is what really is the trigger for the Peloponnesian War.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Sparta is really reluctant to go to war. They're a militaristic society, but they don't like going to war. The reason for that is that they're a culture which is based on dominating a huge land area and controlling a large amount of subservient helots or serfs. They can't afford to go away for too long, otherwise their serfs will revolt. Sparta really doesn't like going away on long campaigns.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They don't really like long battles either. Really, Sparta is a reluctant power to go into war. It's really actually only the kind of figures like Corinth driving them to war that I think leads to the outbreak of conflict.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
War breaks out in 431, and essentially the first phase of the war is a stalemate. Neither side can land a big blow on the other. Things go on for a decade or so, increasingly unsatisfactory. A decade? It's a long time, isn't it? Much longer than any war that had been fought up until this point. I mean, normally wars in the Greek world last one or two years.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Ideally, in fact, they're over the campaign season. So for something to go this long is really unprecedented. And the reason why there's no effective solution in the first period is because neither side can lay a kind of killer blow on the other. So the Athenians initially in the first phase retreat behind their walls. Each year, Sparta marches out hoping to meet them in battle.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
The Athenians refuse to do so. And that goes on for the first few years. Sparta ravages the Athenian countryside, but to no great effect. They march out. No one meets them in battle. They march back again. That happens, and eventually they decide, well, look, we can't keep doing this. We have to change things. But unfortunately, they both decide to change at exactly the same time.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So Athens gets much more adventurous, starts having a few military expeditions, quite successfully, actually, in the southern Peloponnese. But unfortunately, Sparta also decides to vary its game plan as well and starts to attack the Athenian supply lines in the north.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
is very successful, led by a Spartan commander named Brasidas, who seizes the town of Amphipolis, which is really important in northern Greece for controlling the grain supply. And as a result, they're sort of back in the stalemate. So this kind of, you know, they've tried kind of, you know, one thing, they've tried another thing, nothing seems to be working.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
And so eventually they enter what's called the Peace of Nicias. And that's really the end of the first phase of the Peloponnesian War. If you had to give it on points, you might give it on points to Athens in the first phase, but it's a fairly inconsequential stalemate.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yes, yes. And that was a byproduct of Athens retreating behind its walls. It takes its population in from the countryside. They retreat behind the walls, safe, but also extraordinarily unhygienic and a kind of absolute recipe for the outbreak of plague, which is what they suffer from.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That's what the Arcadamian War, named after the king Arcadamus, who's the leading Spartan king at that point.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, because Athens just can't keep itself. fingers out of Greek politics. It keeps on trying to expand. It's an expansionist power. It seems to have done okay in the first phase of the war. It decides to egg on Argos, another power in the Peloponnese, who'd been up until that point neutral, hoping that an Athenian-Argive alliance might be able to take on Sparta.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
So it's much more activist, and it's that inability for the Athenians to settle, to be happy with what they have, and that general kind of expansionist drive which I think kicks off really the second phase of the Peloponnesian War, but also is responsible for some crazy decisions.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
That brings us to, I guess, perhaps the craziest decision, at least according to the historian Thucydides that the Athenians undertook, which was their mad expedition to Sicily.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Well, good question. I mean, and that certainly was Thucydides' question. I mean, it must be said that the Athenians had been increasingly interested in the West from about the mid-5th century onwards. In particular, they have diplomatic relations with cities like Leontini, Regium, those kinds of places.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They were also involved in the establishment of an Athenian colony at Thurii in southern Italy. So they've always had a kind of Western interest.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Part of the reason why, in fact, they've got into conflict with Corinth was because they were also interested in establishing diplomatic relations with an ex-Corinthian colony by the name of Corsaira, modern-day Corfu, which also shows an interest in the West as well. So Athens had been interested in the West for a long time. Indeed, if we believe Plutarch, when they heard the
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
This expedition, everyone was in the marketplace drawing maps of Sicily, talking about the wealth of Sicily. And of course, Sicily is a hugely wealthy, important series of Greek communities in this period.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Abrogento, Igestra. I mean, all these are really powerful, wealthy cities that you can see, if you're an expansionist power like Athens, are precisely the kinds of allies you want to have. So an expedition to Sicily makes a lot of sense. Athens is invited by one of the city-states, Augusta, to come and intervene in a local dispute.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
It mounts this enormous, enormous expedition, and it all goes badly for them. They arrive Turns out that the promises that Augusta made about the wealth that was waiting for them there turned out not to be true. Turned out that, in fact, they weren't as great at land battles as they thought they might be. They can't make good use of their navy. They don't have any cavalry.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
They can't seem to make any diplomatic friends on the island. They fall into a conflict with the main power in the island, which is Syracuse, which then receives some help from Sparta. And through a series of tactical blunders, they end up losing the entire expeditionary force. The entire expeditionary force.
The Ancients
The Fall of Athens
Yeah, so Thucydides says, you know, that never had Athens experienced such a great defeat, and this was the greatest defeat of the Peloponnesian War.