The Fall of Athens

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Your best skin awaits! awaits. 404 BC.
Panic sweeps through Athens. After decades of dominance, total defeat is nearing for this city and its people.
Their navy has been destroyed, their food supply cut off, and now, on the horizon, an armada of enemy ships can be seen. The Spartans are coming.
It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're telling the story of the fall of Athens.
At the end of the 5th century BC, Athens was the loser of a major decades-long war known as the Peloponnesian War. It's been termed something of an ancient Greek world war, Athens versus Sparta plus their many allies, and the various theatres of combat that stretched from Sicily to the Black Sea.
Ultimately, it was Sparta who emerged the victor, thanks largely to help from the looming superpower of the time, the Persian Empire. And Athens would lose its empire and its dominant position in the Greek world.
It is a huge event that completely reshaped the ancient Greek world, featuring larger than life generals on both the Spartan and the Athenian side, figures like Lysander and Alcibiades. To talk through Athens' downfall and the many twists and turns in this story, I was delighted to interview my old professor Alistair Blanchard from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
Now in the past, Alistair and I have covered topics ranging from Heracles to Achilles to the plague of Athens and homosexuality in ancient Greece. This was great fun to do and I hope you enjoy.
Alistair, what a pleasure. It is great to have you back on the podcast.
Thank you very much. Always great to be here.
And this time, first time ever, we're doing it in person. We've brought you to the Ancients HQ, to History Hit HQ, and we are doing it in person.
You're not the other side of the world in Australia. Yes, it's so nice to be actually in the same time.
So I'm no longer either waking up or going to bed. Well, normally I'm waking up about seven or eight o'clock in the morning and it's evening your time, isn't it? But that's what you get for living in Brisbane, which is a lovely part of the world.
But we, of course, are going to another topic close to your heart. We've done Heracles in the past.
We've done Achilles. But Athens, the city of Athens and the fall of Athens, it feels quite a weird thing to say because we think of Athens even today as this great glorious city of Greece.
But back in ancient times, it was the loser in one of the great, or it was the great world war of the Greek world. That's right.
Yes, the Peloponnesian War, the war that dominates the final third of the fifthth 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. Well, set the scene first of all, Alistair.
So you've kind of highlighted it there, but let's get it right for the background and in the good detail. So what is this great war that occurs, the so-called Peloponnesian War? Why is it so significant? Well, the 5th century is really the Athenian century.
So we see Athens, which is, you know, in earlier periods, much more of a backwater, suddenly rise to power after the end of the Pozen Wars. Athens really dominates the geopolitical space.
It establishes this extraordinary naval empire, and it really is almost unrivaled within mainland Greece. 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. And this kind of system, I mean, how does Athens gain so much power going from one city-state to becoming such a powerful entity in the central Mediterranean? 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.
Persia at the Battle of Marathon, 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.
And so as part of that, they 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 them. And that's in the center of the Aegeanus, isn't it? That's in the center of the Cyclades.
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 racket basically, with the claim that we're going to defend you against the Persians,

that actually... make contributions.
And of course, Athens controls the League. And it's through the League, through this kind of protection racket, basically, with the claim that we're going to defend you against the Persians, that Athens dominates all the city-states.
And once you sign up for the Delian League, you can't get out of it. So 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. It's interesting.
It's sometimes labelled as an ancient NATO equivalent, isn't it? Well, yes. I think that's a very charitable view of it.
Or depending on what you think of NATO. But certainly, Athens is calling the shots.
And really, I think whatever it was like in its initial phases. Certainly by the mid-5th century, it really is a tool of Athenian hegemony.
They're using the empire to enforce their own will. So it transforms from the League into the Athenian Empire, and that's a whole podcast episode in its own right.
And how long is it until other city-states looking at this, seeing Athens gaining power, deciding that enough is enough, or with warfare breaking out? 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.. 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.
Is this naval trade more than land trade? Is that kind of where they're challenging each other? 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.
And so they control this land bridge. And 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 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.
That's interesting, because sometimes we focus too much on it being Athens versus Sparta, but you also have those other major powers like Corinth and Thebes as well. They all play a part in the outbreak of this great war.
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, and they don't really like long battles either. Really, Sparta is a reluctant power to go into.
And it's really actually only the kind of figures like Corinth driving them to war that I think leads to the outbreak of conflict. So the war breaks out.
It said Athens on one side, Sparta on the other, but also major other players like Corinth, as you've highlighted there. So as we're focusing just on the end of the war and, spoiler alert, the fall of Athens, so it doesn't end well for the Athenians.
But if we go, let's say, to the year 415 BC, first of all, Alistair, how far into this great war are we by that point? And how is Athens doing at that point? 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 as well? 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 are in the Greek world last one or two years. Ideally, in fact, they're over in a 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, seniors refused to do so.

And that goes on for the first few years.

Sparta marches out, hoping to meet them in battle. Athenians refuse to do so.
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 sides decide to change at exactly the same time.
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.
It's very successful, led by a Spartan commander named Brassadus, 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. And so eventually they enter what's called the Peace of Nikiats.
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.
And they had the plague as well. That was also a topic.
That was the first ever episode we recorded together. We did the plague of Athens.
They've also had that plague. I know it's much earlier on, but that's also a bad thing that happened to Athens at that time.
Yes, yes. That was a by-product 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.
That first stage is almost as you say, it's a stalemate. It's the Archidamian War, is that what it's called? That's what the Archidamian War, named after the king Archidamus, who's the leading Spartan king at that point.
And Niciassus is a leading politician. He's a statesman in Athens.
In Athens, that's right. And so that is 421, did you say? That's right, yes.
And so to get to 415 BC, so six years later, I mean, what happens in the interim? I mean, you've got a peace. So why are you back at war again? Well, because Athens just can't keep its fingers out of kind of Greek politics.
It keeps on trying to kind of 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 if an Athenian Argive alliance might be able to take on Sparta.
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 Pelopetian War, but also is responsible for some crazy decisions. 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.
David Sicily. I mean, just geographically, you've been fighting in the area around the area around the central Mediterranean, around mainland Greece and the Cyclades and the islands.
This is a massive change in strategy to then go all the way across a huge amount of sea to campaign in Sicily. What's the thinking behind this? Well, good question.
I mean, and that suddenly was the Sicily's 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. 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. 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. And indeed, if we believe Plutarch,

when they heard 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.
Syracuse.

Syracuse. Abragantum.
Abragantum, Egestra. 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.
And so an expedition to Sicily makes a lot of sense. And so Athens is invited by one of the city-states, Agestra, to come and intervene in a local dispute.
It mounts this enormous, enormous expedition, and it all goes badly for them. They arrive.
Turns out that the promises that Agestra 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.
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.
Yeah. So Thucydides says that never had Athens experienced such a great defeat, and this was the greatest defeat of the Peloponnesian War.

So what happens really is that the fleet gets trapped in the great harbour of Syracuse, and then they're forced to abandon the fleet and commence a death march, as it turns out, across Sicily, harried by the Syracuse and Spartan forces. So eventually they're all captured, forced to work in the mines.
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. And so this means that if you're a general, you're really reluctant to come back with a defeat.
And 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. And this seems to be what happens in Sicily.
They wanted to get out, well, their generals

wanted to get out, but they couldn't because of the fear of what recriminations would be

back for them in Athens.

I mean, the problems of being an Athenian commander, I think we're going to get more

to that as we go along, isn't it? It seems to be a recurring theme in this period in

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wherever you get your podcasts. And so does it then seem that by 415 BC, are the Athenians very much be licking their wounds at this point in time? It seems to be just in the wake of this massive military catastrophe.
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.
And 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.
And so, so yes and there's there, I think. Certainly a lot of the Athenian sense of certainty about their position in the world and their own natural superiority, I think it takes a bit of a blow.
Would you see once again that idea that you're invincible and you're the dominant power and is slightly being etched away by the recent disastrous, by the setbacks that they've suffered. Yes, I mean, Athenian ideology is all about Athenian superiority.
These were the people who literally emerged from the earth of Attica. That's 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. So it really conceives itself as the very centre of the Greek world.
Whether the Periclean funeration is 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. Now, you mentioned Thucydides there, and you've mentioned it a couple of times already.
So, Alistair, I mean, who are these key sources who are integral to our story today? Well, certainly Thucydides is probably our most important source, and he gets us to practically the end of the Peloponnesian War. Yes, and who is Thucydides? 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 deciled 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 its democratic politicians. 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 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 Pelopetian War, was never finished.
It's continued in its final phases by another general. It seems to be generals writing histories.
This is a gentleman named Xenophon,

again, another Athenian, who writes an account of the final phases of the Pelican War. Do we have any other types of sources as well? Do you have inscriptions or references to the war in other types of sources? 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. They're big bureaucrats, aren't they? 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.
And 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.
Because Athenian drama, they like sometimes bringing on contemporary events or political events that they kind of bring into their works, although maybe a bit covertly sometimes. That's right, yes.
So Athenian drama is always set in a mythological period, but often the themes it's touching on are extraordinarily contemporary. So 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.
And it's a really powerful indictment actually 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, but they don't go for 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.
That's once again another conversation. But actually, the whole setting of that one in Athens brings me to another question I feel like I need to ask before we go more into the narrative of that last decade or so.
What does Athens look like at that time? I mean, how does it function? How does it survive? What do we know about Athens as a place at that time? 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, and it's very reliant on grain supplies from the Black Sea, and they have to come through the whole hairless pond. And that's It's 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 Decaeleia. In fact, the Decaeleian War is often a phrase that's used for these final phases of the war.
So it's also a city that's really increasingly under siege. They can see in the distance up on the hills of Decaulea, 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. 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.
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.
Most famously, at the city of Michaelessus, they slaughter everyone, including a school full of children, as well as all the women and even the animals as well. So again, it's a warfare that is changing its nature from the early ways in which warfare was done where two two armies of hoplites would meet on a flat bit of battle and duke it out, to increasingly vicious, nasty, brutish kind of war.
With that setting, you say there are tensions in Athens following the failure of the Syracusan expedition. Their reliance on grain coming in, as it through was that choke point to modern Dardanelles, the ancient Hedespont from the Black Sea.
You've got Spartans in the distance. They're now occupying Decalere around that time.
So is it that in the last few years of the 410s BC, so let's say from 415 to 410, is that a period of real stress for the Athenians? Is it really difficult?

Is that dire straits time? It is. And we see them thrashing around for all sorts of solutions.

So for example, in 411, they decide to abandon democracy and establish an oligarchy,

which is extraordinary. But they think, look, democracy has had it today, it hasn't succeeded.

They increasingly become so desperate that individuals cult of the individuals starts to take hold. The idea that a great man will solve our problems for us.
And 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.
And the saviour figure on everyone's lip in this period is, of course, the extraordinary Alcibiades. They never saw Pericles in a way similar to that.
That's a different kind of setting, is it? Yes. I mean, always there was a bit of a kind of cult of a personality around Pericles, but I'm not sure that Pericles was ever 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.
Okay, so who exactly was Alcibiades,

this cult hero at this time, it seems? So Alcibiades is a figure who basically

dominates this period. I mean, he's an extraordinary individual.
Where to start with Alspine? I mean, 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 Alchemy Onidae, which had been an important aristocratic house, fabulously wealthy, spectacularly good at self-promotion.
So, 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.
Then when challenged about, why did you cut the tail of your beautiful dog off? He said, what's to get everyone talking about me? He's extraordinarily vain. He's fantastically good looking, it must be said.
Part of his vanity, for example, he famously refused to learn to play the flute because he thought the puffing out his cheeks ruined his features. So he's wealthy.
He's extraordinarily good-looking. He has a talent for military.
He's charming. He was supposed to be on the Sicilian expedition, but then gets caught up in a kind of religious scandal just before it.
This is cutting off the genitals of these weird statues called Hermes, isn't it? That's right. 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-Sythian expedition? It's a huge act of sacrilege.
There's a major inquiry as part of the inquiry into religious sacrilege and profanation that's happening in Athens. Turns out that Alcibiades has been holding very sacrilegious, profane dinner parties.
And so 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. He's the mastermind who suggests that they fortify Decaeleia 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, Leotigades, who's then eventually pushed off the throne because it turns out he's the bastard son of Alcibiades. 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 of Athens. Even though he's the person who's advised the Spartans to pitch camp in Decaeleia in their territory.
Their memory is quite short in that respect. Well, I mean, it's a sign of his strategic genius.
And importantly, what he claims to offer the Athenians, and what I think both Sparta and Athens realise at this point, is that what's going to be the great 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. What you need is something that can break the stalemate, change the game, and that's the wealth and power of Persia.
And Persia at that time, it is still the superpower, isn't it? Greece is just a small speck at the edge of the Persian Empire. It is huge.
And I guess most importantly, it's hugely wealthy. Extraordinarily wealthy.
It has the resources to mobilize forces that both Athens and Spartan only dream about. And it's really the realization that if one of us can get Persia on our side, then we will win.
And Alcibiades, quite rightly, says, you know, the Persians, negotiating with Persian kings is my kind of bag you know, I'm absolutely the right man for it. And indeed, man just convinced 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.
And so what happens in this new field, which seems incredibly important, away from the battlefield? You is the diplomatic battlefield. So the Spartans as well realise they've got to try and get the Persians on side.
So how does that all unravel? You've got Alcibiades on one side, the Spartans on the other, and I guess the Persians, or representative of the Persians, just hearing their cases. Well, that's right.
Indeed, the Persians themselves are being activists, 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. 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. So we'd seen a couple of rogue satraps, as to say rogue Persian governors, starting to enter into alliances with Athens and destabilizing the great king.
So they increasingly realize that actually this activist expansion of Athens is not a good thing for them. And so we see two particular satraps, Afanabazos and Disaphernes, 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 maintain a status quo. 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. So what happens? Let's do the next five years, because then we can finish on those last few years where you get into real big detail.
But let's say between 410 and 406 BC, that's an appropriate time, isn't it, with the story of Alcibiades. How do Athens' fortunes fare in those four years when Alcibiades is right at the forefront? Initially, things initially, things are going well for Athens.
And under Alcibiades, they have a number of successes. It's a bit of a revival at this time.
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.
So there are a couple of false starts 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 period. We have some city-states like Sesthos, for example, which is on the Hellespont.
I'm being very pro-Athenian, but its opposite number on the opposite coast, as the line of the Hellespont, Abydos, goes totally Spartan. So around 411, we see the Hellespont 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.
Do you think Sparta had always realised that the key to defeating Athens would be to take the war to sea, but they never had that ability. But with the Persian backing, they now have that ability.
And with that, they're now taking the war into the sea. And are they realising that to strike at Athens and its navy? It's not actually striking directly at the city of Athens, the very powerful city of Athens, but it's that supply route.
It's taking control of that supply route and basically starving Athens out. Is that their strategy? Absolutely.
So it's both taking out the navy and also controlling the supply lines. I think those two things really are what are the fatal consequences for it.
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, 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.
So after the Battle of Naution, 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 Sparta just haven't been true. Alcibiades can see the writing on the wall, so he flees again.
So this time he has a castle in the Hellespont, so he flees off to his castle in the Hellespont and hangs out there. And 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 harbour at Lesbos, and this would have, 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 Arganousae Islands.
This is a surprise victory, I think, in some ways for the Athenian. That's so interesting.
We'll get to Arganousae in a second, but it almost feels like, so completely by this time, you mentioned there were a couple of full starts with the Spartan navy, but within a few years, if there was still any, like an aura of invincibility of the Athenian fleet, you know, the backbone to their power, that has now gone. They've shown that the Athenian fleet can be beaten and Sparta can be victorious with Persian backing in this field.
So you say, when we get to Arganuza, which we're going to now, Spartan heads are up by that. Yes.
And look, I think that's why Notium matters so much, is 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. And so you mentioned the word Arganuzai.

So what is this great battle that seems one of two of these massive sea battles that occurs right at the end of this war? Yes, yes. So the Arganuzai 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.
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 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 arrive back in Athens, the families of the drowned sailors or the sailors whose bodies weren't recovered 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.
They're sentenced to death. They're victorious generals.
They've just saved their fleets when it seems like the Spartans have got their tails up.

It's mind-blowing, that decision. 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 Aghanusai generals is a good example of the intemperate nature of democracy, that it's driven by its passions rather than by reason, that it's driven by emotion, and this idea of turning on these victorious generals, a disaster.
And so they turn on their generals. So the generals of the big loser are the battle of Arganousai.
The winners, however, are the slaves who rode at Arganousai. So Arganousai is an extraordinary battle because it has these two outcomes.
One, which is the generals that get put on trial. But then the slaves who actually had rode at the battle in Arganousa 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 Argenousae.

Well, good for them. It's a great victory, as you mentioned.
It's a significant victory for the Athenians. They've saved their fleet.
The language that you've used, Alistair, almost sounds like one great defeat for the Athenians and their fleet is gone. Was it the same for the Spartans? They've just been defeated at Argenuzzi.
So what happens next? Is it almost like the Linnaean Hydra that the Spartans, they can just get another fleet quickly, thanks to the Persians? 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 have 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.
Certainly by this stage, however, they're fully committed to the alliance. And also the other thing is that there's a very capable Spartan commander by the name of Lysander who is on the scene.
And 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.
And he and Lysander have a very close relationship. and 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 so lysander is what's technically called a mothax, that is to say a bastard or certainly some kind of paracitizen. So 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 kind of impoverished.
Anyway, he has to have a sponsor to go through the Spartan education system. So he's someone who clearly the wealthy and 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. Certainly, he's clearly very, very diplomatically capable.
He's a very capable

naval commander. He established a very good relationship with the Persian prince Cyrus.
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So thanks to Lysander, you know, this strong relationship with Cyrus and with the Persians, with that backing, how long does it take for Sparta to be able to bounce back after this disastrous defeat? Yeah. Well, it must be said that Lysander hadn't, of course, been in charge of the fleet at the time of Arganusai.
So one of the problems had been that Sparta had planned this rotation of officers. So initially, Lander is the naval commander, he's then replaced by a person called Callicratidas, again another moth accent interestingly.
So there seems to be something about the way in which the Spartan military campaign is leading, letting these individuals who wouldn't normally have an opportunity to rise to greater prominence. And it's Callicratius who's the person who's responsible for the Spartan fleet.
Lysander gets the fleet in charge of the fleet. At that point, he's starting to harry the Athenians.
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 realises this is going to be a huge point of vulnerability.
Interestingly, Alcibiades also recognised the way in which the Athenian fleet was vulnerable and comes down to the Athenian fleet from his castle. He sees this all from his castle.
It's from his castle. And 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.
And 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. That is game over.
That is the major Athenian fleet that they have, isn't it? That's right. So this is at Aegis Potomai, and this is essentially game over for the Athenians.
So Lysander managed. So on the back of their tremendous success, Arganousae, they're full of, I think, false.
Retreat, the fleet goes back to the Hellespont. A little while later, Lysander comes along with his new powerful fleet, recognises what the Athenians are doing, captures them at Aegis Potomai, about 3,000 Athenian soldiers, 180 ships, only about 10 ships escape.
So it's a complete route for the Athenians. It's a complete route.
And I'm always just astonished by how quickly the Lysander and the Persians, they're able to create that new navy or get that new navy together. So as you say, this is like within a year or so, isn't it, to Bargadiza? So it's incredibly quick that they bounce back and are able to inflict this devastating loss on the Athenians.
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. 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.
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 game's up.
They've got control of the Hellespont now, so they've got control of that grain supply. Is the next aim, I mean, is it full speed ahead to Athens at that point? Yes.
There's a little bit of mopping up that needs to do. Samos needs to be sorted out, which is what they do.
That's an Athenian ally, is it? It is an 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 Lysandrea, is established. But Lysander heads to Athens.
And at this point, the allies of Sparta, particularly Corinth and Thebes, are baying for Athenian blood. They want the city wiped out.

They want the whole place to be erased from the map.

How many people do we think are in Athens at that time? Tens of thousands?

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 neutralised

militarily. Well, their navy's been destroyed.
He ensures that their walls are torn down.

These are the long walls, aren't they? They're really powerful.

I don't know. to pay some penalties.
They must be neutralised militarily. Well, their navy's been destroyed.

He ensures that their walls are torn down. These are the long walls, aren't they? They're really powerful.
And also the walls around the city as well. So the long walls are the walls that go down to the Piraeus, the harbour, and then the city walls as well.
These are all torn down, leaving the city exposed, unable to defend itself. And more importantly, he establishes a pro-Spartan, effectively, Junta to kind of rule Athens.
This is the so-called rule of the 30. Are there any other things that they have to do? Do they have to pay tribute? Or is that more just the humiliation, the taking away of their defences, but the city is not completely burned to the ground? Is that almost kind of the compromise almost that is reached? Yes, that 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. It's not a fall unlike other places.
I mean, I did the fall of Carthage not too long ago, and that ends with the Romans going through all of the streets, fighting building by building, story by story, killing everyone that they see. That is almost avoided with Athens.
You do still have the Athenian viewpoint of it afterwards because the city endures. In that respect, they've seen their city fall from the empires no more.
But how do the Athenians view all this? Are they a city just in absolute abject? Are they completely demoralised? 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 about 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? 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 was 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.
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.
What happens in new look Sparta after they've been brought to heel? 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 do in terms of these arrangements that Lysander has made.
Because it's not just Athens he's reorganized, it's Samos, it's all sorts of islands as he's going back down from the Hellespont, reorganizing their political systems and establishing pro-Spartan governments. And so there's a real concern that Lysander himself is getting too big for his boots.
And so there's a real problem about what you do with these kind of spectacular generals, how do you reintegrate them into society. But it's a very hierarchical society like Sparta, where you have two kings, and it's a very old constitution.
So how does Athens fare? They've got this new constitution by Lysander, who then is the subject of... I mean, Sparta now has its own problems, even though it's the victor, as you say, we think it's like Lysander.
But Athens at that time, how does the city fare? And its citizens' fare now is under the control of the Spartans, or aligned to the Spartans. Yeah.
So the regime of the 30s regarded as perhaps one of the darkest days of Athens. So it's remarkably brutal.
they established 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.
They could see the writing on the wall in the final stage of the Peloponnesian War. And so there were Athenian exiles up in Macedonia, for example.
Euripides is up in Macedonia. A huge number of exiles in Cyprus, in the court of Evagoras.
So there are Athenians all over the place. And so they try and mobilize opposition, and the 30 send out assassins.
Bounty hunters kind of thing. They commissioned people to go to Salamis, and 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 way.
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 led by a man called Thrasybulus, and he manages to essentially overthrow the 30. And you might think, well, why don't the Spartans stand up the Thrasybulus and quash this kind of pro-democratic anti-30 movement.
And 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 organization, I think the Spartans are quite keen on that.
And they also quite like to stick it to Lysander, I think, at this point. This is interesting because looking at things in the past, it's like the fall of Carthage, permanent fall for the Carthaginians and the ancient Carthaginian city of Carthage, at least.
Fall of Roman Britain, permanent. Romans never come back.
Fall of Athens, then? Would you argue that it's not a permanent thing? Do you then see Athens' power reviving after this? Yes, it's extraordinary how quickly they bounce back, actually. It's so much for a fall, isn't it? Yes, yes, yeah.
I mean, as falls go, it's how you want to do your fall, 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. So when Darius passes on the kingship to Cyrus's 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 a kind of overthrowing Artaxerxes.
So Sparta itself will get itself through its own kind of ambitions, caught up into all sorts of things. And out of that kind of turmoil, Athens will see an opportunity to rise.
Athens rises again. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because obviously my main area is after Alexander's death.
And then you get another fool of Athens then when they try to rebel against the Macedonians after Alexander's death. And once again, it's a humiliating treaty and you've got a Macedonian garrison in Municchia.
And then of course, you get the Romans later. So it's almost that Athens experiences multiple falls in its time.
But in several cases, they are able to bounce back from them. Yes.
And 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 fifth century is a century of a bipolar world, of very dominant Spartans, Peloponnesian League, and Athens and its empire. If you go through to the 4th 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 Aferi.
Jason Aferi, what a player. And then eventually the Macedonians come and sort everything out.
But the 4th century is complicated in a way that the 5th century isn't in terms of its 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, and eventually, of course, will create a situation which will allow Macedonia to come in and reach its ascendancy. Last question, very quickly, 20 to 30 second answer, I must admit.
We talked about Alcibiades. He goes off to his castle at the Hellespont.
He's told to go away, sort of bugger off by these commanders. His life after that, it doesn't last long, does it? No.
So he then flees to the Persians. Oh, good idea, I don't think.
So he ends up in the court of Phanabadsus, who's one of the sactraps 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 Phala Badsus, they decide to kill Alcibiades, that's the political version. 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.
That's the death of Alcibiades as part of this kind of adulterous affair and outraged husband. Or it's a political assassination organised by the Spartans, but both seem entirely plausible.
And definitely in line with Alspardy's character that has survived, isn't it, Alistair? This has been a fantastic story. And as you've mentioned before, this fall of Athens, although you could argue there are multiple falls, this is the one that is so significant in the changing of the world order of the Greek world.
Absolutely. Because as I said, it's this fall of Athens, which will lay essentially the foundation for the rise of Macedonia.
Well, Alistair, just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Always wonderful.
Thank you. Well, there you go.
There was Professor Alistair Blanchard talking through the dramatic story that is the fall of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
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