The chief generals on the Athenian side were Demosthenes (not the great orator of a later time) and Nicias; the Spartan chief was the famous Brasidas, who had much success against the Athenian colonies on the coast of Thrace. The brilliant Alcibiades began to display his powers as a statesman at Athens. In 422 B. C. a battle near Amphipolis, on the coast of Thrace, ended in the defeat of the Athenians, and the deaths of Cleon and of Brasidas, the latter an irreparable loss to Sparta. In the place of Cleon, the mild Nicias became one of the leading statesmen at Athens, and his efforts resulted in a truce between Athens and Sparta, in 421 B. C.
SECOND PERIOD
OF WAR
Questions as to keeping the truce, and the mutual distrust and jealousy between these states increased their antagonism. Athens, now mistress of the sea, had the ambition, under the incitement of the great Alcibiades, to acquire complete sway in the Mediterranean.
Perhaps the most important and decisive event of the war was an attack made (415 B. C.) by Athens upon Syracuse in Sicily, when the Spartans helped the Syracusans, and which resulted in the total failure of the expedition (413 B. C.), and great damage to the power of Athens. The Athenians had sent a more powerful armament against Sicily than had ever before been turned out in the history of Greece. The consequences of the defeat of this force were felt all over Greece, the enemies of Athens were stimulated to much greater activity, and thought that the fate of that city was sealed.
THIRD AND LAST
PERIOD
Henceforward Athens could only fight for her life as an independent state. In 412 B. C. many of her subject states revolted, including the wealthy Miletus, on the coast of Asia Minor, and the islands of Chios and Rhodes. Sparta formed an alliance with Persia, and used Eastern gold to furnish ships and mercenaries against Athens. Alcibiades, having quarreled with the Spartans, rejoined his country, and conducted her war, in some of its closing years, with brilliant success. In 411 B. C. a revolution took place in Athens which really swept away the democratic constitution of Solon, and substituted an oligarchical faction in power.
DOWNFALL OF
ATHENS
The war was chiefly carried on in Asia Minor, where Alcibiades and others defeated the Spartans and their allies by land and sea; but in 405 B. C. the tide of success for Athens turned again, and the Athenian fleet was captured by the Spartan admiral Lysander, at Ægospotami, in the Hellespont, the Athenian galleys being seized, by surprise, on the beach. In 404 B. C. Athens, blockaded by the Spartans both by land and sea, surrendered to Lysander after a four months’ siege, and the war ended in the downfall of Athens, and the formal abolition of the great Athenian democracy.
RESULT OF PELOPONNESIAN
WAR
Henceforward Athens was a subordinate power. Sparta was, for a time, supreme; a Spartan garrison held the Acropolis; Alcibiades, who might have restored Athens, was assassinated in Persia through the influence of Lysander; and though, after a brief period of rule by the Thirty Tyrants, set up by Lysander, a counter-revolution restored, in part, the constitution of Solon, the political greatness of Athens had departed.