Let us, before facing the melancholy spectacle of the Peloponnesian War glance at the Greek world outside of Attica. Our knowledge of these other states in this period is so fragmentary that we are left to assume – what we cannot prove – that they shared to a minor degree in the cultural blossoming of the Golden Age.

In 459 Pericles, anxious to control Egyptian grain, sent a great fleet to expel the Persians from Egypt. The expedition failed and thereafter Pericles adopted the policy of Themistocles – to win the world by commerce rather than by war. Throughout the fifth century Egypt and Cyprus continued under Persian rule. Rhodes remained free, and the merger of its three cities into one in 408 prepared it to become in the Hellenistic period one of the richest commercial centers in the Mediterranean. The Greek cities of Asia preserved their independence, won at Mycale in 479, until the destruction of the Athenian Empire left them helpless again before the tribute collectors of the Great King. The Greek colonies in Thrace and on the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Euxine prospered under Athenian domination, but were impoverished by the Peloponnesian War. Under Archelaus Macedonia passed our of barbarism and became one of the powers of the Greek world: good roads were laid down, a disciplined army was formed out of the hardy mountaineers, a handsome new capital was built at Pella, and many Greek geniuses, like Timotheus, Zeuxis, and Euripides, found welcome at the court. Boeotia in this period produced Pindar, and gave to Greece, in the Boeotian Confederacy, an unappreciated example of how independent states might live in peace and co-operation.

In Italy the Greek cities suffered from frequent wars, and from Athenian ascendancy in maritime trade. In 443 Pericles sent out a group of Hellenes, gathered from different states, to establish near the site of Sybaris the new colony of Thurii, as an experiment in Panhellenic unity. Protagoras drew up a code of laws for the city, and Hippodamus the architect laid out the streets on a rectangular plan that was to be widely imitated in the following centuries. Within a few years the colonists divided into factions according to their origin, and most of the Athenians, probably including Herodotus, went back to Athens.

Sicily, always turbulent but always fertile, continued to grow in wealth and culture. Selinus and Acragas built massive temples; and under Theron Acragas became so rich that Empedocles remarked: "The men of Acragas devote themselves wholly to luxury as if then were to die tomorrow, but they furnish their houses as if they were to live forever." Gelon I, when he died in 478, left Syracuse a system of administration almost as effective as that which Napoleon bequeathed to modern France. Under his brother and successor, Hieron I, the city became a center not only of trade and wealth, but of literature, science, and art. There, too, luxury reached dizzy heights: Syracusan banquets became a byword for extravagance, and "Corinthian girls" were so numerous in the city that any man who slept at home was considered a saint. The citizens were quick of mind and sharp of tongue; they enjoyed good oratory to their ruin, and crowded to hear, in their magnificent open-air theater, the comedies of Epicharmus and the tragedies of Aeschylus. [The theater was probably built under Hieron I (478-67), and rebuilt under Hieron II (270-16). Much of it survives; and many ancient Greek dramas have been staged in it in our century.] Hieron was a tyrant of bad temper and good will, cruel to his enemies and generous to his friends. He opened his court and purse to Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar, and Aeschylus and with their help made Syracuse for a moment the intellectual capital of Greece.

But man cannot live on art alone. The Syracusans thirsted for the ovine of freedom, and after the death of Hieron they deposed his brother and set up a limited democracy. The other Greek cities in the island took courage and likewise expelled their dictators; the trading classes overthrew the landowning aristocracies, and established a commercial democracy superimposed upon a system of ruthless slavery. After some sixty years, war ended this interlude of liberty as it had ended another through Gelon I. In 409 the Carthaginians, who had kept alive through three generations the memory of Hamilcar's defeat at Himera, invaded Sicily with an armada of fifteen hundred ships and twenty thousand men under Hamilcar's grandson, Hannibal. He laid siege to Selinus, which had become pacific under prosperity, and had neglected to keep its defenses in repair. The surprised city appealed for help to Acragas and Syracuse, whose comfortable citizens responded with Spartan leisureliness. Selinus was taken, all the survivors were massacred and mutilated, and the city became a part of the Carthaginian Empire. Hannibal proceeded to Himera, captured it with ease, and put three thousand prisoners to torture and death to appease the shade of his grandfather. A plague decimated his troops and took off Hannibal himself as they besieged Acragas, but his successor mollified the gods of Carthage by burning alive his own son as an offering. The Carthaginians took the city, took Gela and Camarina, and marched on toward Syracuse. The terrified Syracusans, interrupted in their banquets, gave absolute power to their ablest general, Dionysius. But Dionysius made peace with the Carthaginians, ceded to them all southern Sicily, and used his troops to establish a second dictatorship (405). It was not all treachery. Dionysius knew that resistance was useless; he surrendered everything but his army and his city, and resolved to strengthen both until he too, like Gelon, could expel the invaders from Sicily.

Just as the simple soul must picture deity in the form of a man, so the simple citizen must conceive the causes of war to be personal-usually one person. Even Aristophanes, like some gossips of his time, would have it that Pericles brought on the Peloponnesian War by attacking Megara, because Megara had offended Aspasia.

It is probable that Pericles, who had not hesitated to conquer Aegina, had dreamed of completing Athens' control of Greek trade by dominating not only Megara but Corinth, which was to Greece what Istanbul is to the eastern Mediterranean today-a door and a key to half a continent's trade. But the basic cause of the war was the growth of the Athenian Empire, and the development of Athenian control over the commercial and political life of the Aegean. Athens allowed free trade there in time of peace, but only by imperial sufferance; no vessel might sail that sea without her consent. Athenian agents decided the destination of every vessel that left the grain ports of the north; Methone, starving with drought, had to ask Athens' leave to import a little corn. Athens defended this domination as a vital necessity; she was dependent upon imported food, and was determined to guard the routes by which that food came. In policing the avenues of international trade Athens performed a real service to peace and prosperity in the Aegean, but the process became more and more irksome as the pride and wealth of the subject cities grew. The funds that these had contributed for defense against Persia were being used for the adornment of Athens, even for the financing of Athenian wars upon other Greeks. Periodically the assessment had been increased until it was now, in 432, some 460 talents ($2,300,000) per year. Athens reserved to Athenian courts the right to try all cases, arising within the Confederacy that involved Athenian citizens or major crimes. If any city resisted, it was reduced by force; so Pericles with efficient dispatch suppressed rebellions in Regina (457), Euboea (446), and Samos (440). If we may believe Thucydides, the democratic leaders at Athens, while making liberty the idol of their policy among Athenians, frankly recognized that the Confederacy of free cities had become an empire of force. "You should remember," says Thucydides' Cleon to the Assembly (427), "that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are always conspiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but only in so far as you are their master; they have no love for you, but they are held down by force," The inherent contradiction between the worship of liberty and the despotism of empire co-operated with the individualism of the Greek states to end the Golden Age.

The resistance to Athenian policy came from nearly every state in Greece. Boeotia fought off at Coronea (447) the attempt of Athens to include it in the Empire. Some subject cities, and others that feared to become subject, appealed to Sparta to check the Athenian power. The Spartans were not eager for war, knowing the strength and valor of the Athenian fleet; but the old racial antipathy between Dorian and Ionian inflamed them, and the Athenian custom of establishing in every city democracies dependent upon the Empire seemed to the landowning oligarchy of Sparta a threat to aristocratic government everywhere. For a time the Spartans contented themselves with supporting the upper classes in every city, and slowly forging a united front against Athens.

Surrounded by enemies abroad and at home, Pericles worked for peace and prepared for war. The army, he calculated, could protect Attica, or all of Attica's population gathered within Athens' walls; and the navy could keep open the routes by which Euxine or Egyptian grain might enter Athens' walled port. It was his judgment that no real concessions could be made without endangering that supply of food; it seemed to him, as now to England, a choice between empire and starvation. Nevertheless he sent envoys to all the Greek states, inviting them to an Hellenic Conference which would seek a peaceful solution of the problems that were leading to war. Sparta refused to attend, feeling that her acceptance would be construed as an acknowledgment of Athenian hegemony, and at her secret suggestion so many other states rejected the invitation that the project fell through. Meanwhile, says Thucydides, in a sentence that explains much history, "The Peloponnesus and Athens were both full of young men whose inexperience made them eager to take up arms."

These basic factors being present, the coming of war awaited some provocative incident. In 435 Corcyra, a Corinthian colony, declared itself independent of Corinth; and presently she joined the Athenian Confederacy for protection. Corinth sent a fleet to reduce the island; Athens, appealed to by the victorious democrats of Corcyra, sent a fleet to help them. An indecisive battle cook place, in which the navies of Corcyra and Athens fought against those of Megara and Corinth. In 432 Potidaea, a city in Chalcidice tributary to Athens but Corinthian in blood, attempted to expel the Athenian power. Pericles sent an army to besiege it, but its resistance continued for two years, and weakened the military resources and prestige of Athens. When Megara gave further help to Corinth Pericles ordered all Megarian products excluded from the markets of Attica and the Empire. Megara and Corinth appealed to Sparta; Sparta proposed to Athens a repeal of this Megarian decree; Pericles agreed on condition that Sparta permit foreign states to trade with Laconic. Sparta refused; instead, she laid down as a prerequisite to peace, that Athens should acknowledge the full independence of all Greek cities – i.e., that Athens should surrender her Empire. Pericles persuaded the Athenians to reject this demand; and Sparta declared war:

Nearly all Greece ranged itself on one or the other side. Every state in the Peloponnesus except Argos supported Sparta; so did Corinth, Megara, Boeotia, Locris, and Phocis. Athens, at the outset, had the half-hearted help of the Ionian and Euxine cities and the Aegean isles. Like the World War of our own time, the first phase of the struggle ryas a contest between sea power and land power. The Athenian fleet laid waste the coastal towns of the Peloponnesus, while the Spartan army invaded Attica, seized the crops, and ruined the soil. Pericles called the population of Attica within the walls of Athens, refused to let his troops go out to battle, and advised the excited Athenians to bide their time and wait for their navy to coin the war.

His calculations were strategically sound, but they ignored a factor that almost decided the conflict. The crowding of Athens led (430) to a plague – probably malaria – which raged for nearly three years, killing a fourth of the soldiers and a great number of the civilian population. [Cf. Lucretius' powerful description of this plague in De Return Natura, vi, 1138-1286] The people, desperate with the combined sufferings of cpidemic,and war, accused Pericles of responsibility for both. Cleon and others indicted him on the charge of misusing public funds; since he had apparently employed state money to bribe the Spartan kings to peace, he was unable to give a satisfactory accounting; he was convicted, deposed from office, and fined the enormous sum of fifty talents ($300,000). About the same time (429) his sister and his two legitimate sons died of the plague. The Athenians, finding no leader to replace him, recalled him to power (429); and, to show their esteem for him, and their sympathy in his bereavement, they overrode a law that he himself had passed, and bestowed citizenship upon the son that Aspasia had borne to him. But the aging statesman had himself been infected by the plague; lie crew weaker day by day, and died within a few months after his restoration to office. Under him Athens had reached her zenith; but because that height had been attained in part through the wealth of an unwilling Confederacy, and through a power that invited almost universal hostility, the Golden Age was unsound in its foundations, and was doomed to disaster when Athenian statesmanship failed in the strategy of peace.

Perhaps, as Thucydides suggests, Athens might have come through to victory nevertheless, if it had pursued to the end the Fabian policy laid down by Pericles. But his successors were too impatient to carry out a program that required a proud self-control. The new masters of the democratic party were merchants like Cleon the dealer in leather, Eucrates the rope seller, Hyperbolus the lampmaker; and these men demanded an active war on land as well as sea. Cleon was the ablest of them, the most eloquent, unscrupulous, and corrupt. Plutarch describes him as "the first orator among the Athenians that pulled off his cloak and smote his thigh when addressing the people"; Cleon made it a point, says Aristotle, to appear on the rostrum in the garb of a workingman. He was the first in a long line of demagogues that ruled Athens from the death of Pericles to the loss of Athenian independence at Chaeronea (338).

Cleon's ability was proved in 425 when the Athenian fleet besieged a Spartan army on the island of Sphacteria, near Messenian Pylus. No admiral seemed capable of taking the stronghold; but when the Assembly gave Cleon charge of the siege (half hoping that he would be killed in action), he surprised all by carrying through the attack with a skill and courage that forced the Lacedaemonians to an unprecedented surrender. Sparta, humbled, offered peace and alliance in return for the captured men, but Cieon's oratory persuaded the Assembly to reject the offer and continue the war. His hold on the populace was strengthened by a proposal, easily carried, that the Athenians should henceforth pay no taxes to the support of the war, but should finance it by raising the tribute exacted of the subject cities in the Empire (424). In these cities, as in Athens, the policy of Cleon was to get as much money out of the rich as he could find. When the upper classes of Mytilene rebelled, overthrew the democracy, and declared Lesbos free of allegiance to Athens (424), Cleon moved that all adult males in the disaffected city be put to death. The Assembly – perhaps a mere quorum – agreed, and sent a ship with orders to that effect to Paches, the Athenian general who had put down the revolt. When word of the ruthless edict got about Athens the steadier heads called for another meeting of the Assembly, secured the repeal of the decree, and dispatched a second ship which reached Paches just in time to prevent a massacre. Padres sent to Athens a thousand ringleaders, who, at Cleon's suggestion, and in accordance with the custom of the age, were all put to death.

Cleon redeemed himself by dying in battle against the Spartan hero Brasidas, who was capturing one after another of the cities subject or allied to Athens in the mainland north. It was in this campaign that Thucydides lost his naval commission and his Athenian residence by coming up too tardily to the relief of Amphipolis, which commanded the gold mines of Thrace. Brasidas having died in the same campaign, Sparta, left leaderless in the face of a threatened Helot revolt, offered peace again; and Athens, for once taking the advice of the oligarchic leader, signed the Peace of Nicias (42 r ). The rival cities not only declared the war ended, but signed an alliance for fifty years; and Athens committed herself to go to the help of Sparta should the Helots rise:

Three factors turned this pledge of a half century of friendship into a brief truce of six years: the diplomatic corruption of the peace into "war by other means"; the rise of Alcibiades as the leader of a faction that favored renewed hostilities; and the attempt of Athens to conquer the Dorian colonies in Sicily. Sparta's allies refused to sign the agreement; they fell away from Sparta as now a weakened state, and transferred their alliance to Athens. Alcibiades, while keeping Athens formally at peace, maneuvered them into a war with Sparta, and united them in battle against her at Mantinea (418). Sparta won, and Greece relapsed into an angry truce.

Meanwhile Athens sent a fleet to the Dorian isle of Melos to demand its entrance as a subject state into the Athenian Empire (416). According to Thucydides, who here probably sinks the historian into the sophistical philosopher or the revengeful exile, the Athenian envoys gave no other reason for their action than that might is right. "Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it; we found it existing before, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do." The Melians refused to yield, and announced that they would put their trust in the gods. Later, as irresistible reinforcements came to the Athenian fleet, they surrendered at the discretion of the conquerors. The Athenians put to death all adult males who fell into their hands, sold the women and children as slaves, and gave the island to five hundred Athenian colonists. Athens rejoiced in the conquest, and prepared to illustrate in a living tragedy the theme of her dramatists, that a vengeful nemesis pursues all insolent success.

Alcibiades was one of those who, in the Assembly, defended the resolution condemning the male population of Melos to death. His support for any motion usually sufficed to carry it, for he was now the most famous man in Athens, admired for his eloquence, his good looks, his versatile genius, even his faults and crimes. His father, the rich Cleinias, had been killed at the battle of Coronea; his mother, an Alcmaeonid and near relative of Pericles, had persuaded the statesman to bring up Alcibiades in his home. The boy was troublesome, but intelligent and brave; at twenty he fought beside Socrates at Potidaea, and at twenty-six at Delium (424). The philosopher seems to have felt a warm attachment for the youth, and called him to virtue, says Plutarch, with words that "so overcame Alcibiades as to draw tears from his eyes, and disturb his very soul. Yet sometimes he would abandon himself to flatterers, when they proposed to him varieties of pleasure, and would desert Socrates, who would then pursue him as if he had been a fugitive slave."

The wit and pranks of the young man became the shocked and fascinated gossip of Athens. When Pericles reproved his immodest dogmatism by saying that he too had talked cleverly in his youth, Alcibiades answered, "Pity I couldn't have known you when your brain was at its best." Purely to meet the challenge of his fellow roisterers, he publicly struck in the face one of Athens' richest and most powerful men, Hipponicus. The next morning he entered the house of the frightened magnate, bared his body, and begged Hipponicus to scourge him in punishment. The old man was so overwhelmed that he gave the youth his daughter Hipparete in marriage, with a dowry of ten talents; Alcibiades persuaded him to double it, and spent most of it on himself. He lived on a scale of luxury never known in Athens before. He filled his home with costly furniture, and engaged artists to paint pictures on the walls. He kept a stud of racing horses, and often won the chariot race at Olympia; once his entries took the first, second, and fourth prizes in one contest, whereupon he feasted the whole Assembly. He fitted out triremes, and paid the expenses of choruses; and when the stare called for war contributors his donations topped all the rest. Free from any inhibition of conscience, convention, or fear, he frolicked through youth and early manhood with such animal spirits that all Athens seemed to enjoy his happiness. He lisped a little, but with a charm that made all fashionable young men lisp; he wore a new cut of shoe, and soon all the gilded youth of the city were wearing "Alcibiades shoes." He violated a hundred laws and injured a hundred men, but no one dared bring him before a court. His popularity with the hetairai was so general that he wore on his golden shield an Eros with a thunderbolt, as if to announce his victories in love. His wife, after bearing his infidelities with patience, returned to her father's house, and prepared to sue for divorce; but when she appeared before the archon Alcibiades caught her up in his arms and carried her home through tile market place, no one venturing to oppose him. Thereafter she gave him full freedom, and contented herself with the crumbs of his love; but her early death suggests a heart broken by his inconstancy.

Entering politics after the death of Pericles, he found only one rival – the rich and pious Nicias. But Nicias favored the aristocracy, aid peace; therefore Alcibiades set himself to favor the commercial classes, and preached an imperialism that touched Athenian pride; the Peace of Nicias was sufficiently discredited in his eyes by bearing his rival's name. In 420 he was elected one of the ten generals, and began those ambitious schemes that led Athens back into war. When the Assembly acclaimed him Timon the misanthrope rejoiced, predicting great calamities.

It was the imagination of Alcibiades that ruined the work of Pericles. Athens had recovered from the plague and the war, and trade was again bringing her the wealth of the Aegean. But the law of every being is self-development; no ambition, no empire, is ever content. Alcibiades dreamed of carving out a new realm for Athens in the rich cities of Italy and Sicily; there Athens would find grain, materials, and men; there she would control the foreign food supply of the Peloponnesus; there she might double the tribute that was making her the greatest city in Greece. Only Syracuse could rival her; and that was a thought hard for Athens to bear. If she could take Syracuse all the western Mediterranean would fall into her lap, and a splendor would come to Athens such as even Pericles had not conceived.

In 427 Sicily, imitating the mainland, had divided into warring camps, one led by Dorian Syracuse, the other by Ionian Leontini. Leontini sent Gorgias to Athens to seek help, but Athens was then too weak to respond. Now, in 416, Segesta dispatched envoys to Athens to say that Syracuse was planning to subjugate all Sicily, make the island Dorian in government, and supply food and money to Sparta should the great war be renewed. Alcibiades leaped to his opportunity. He argued that the Sicilian Greeks were hopelessly divided, even within each city; that it would be a simple matter – given a little courage – to annex the whole island to the Empire; that the Empire must continue to grow, or begin to decay, and that a little war now and then was a necessary training for an imperial race. Nicias pled with the Assembly not to listen to any man whose personal extravagance tempted him to wild schemes of aggrandizement; but the eloquence of Alcibiades and the imagination of a people now dangerously free from moral scruples won the day. The Assembly declared war against Syracuse, voted funds for a vast armada, and, as if to ensure defeat, divided the command between Alcibiades and Nicias.

Preparations went on with the characteristic fever of war, and the occasion of the fleet's departure was awaited as a patriotic festival. But shortly before this appointed day a strange occurrence shocked a city that had lost much of its piety but none of its superstitions. Some unknown persons, under cover of night, had knocked off the noses, ears, and phalli from the figures of the god Hermes that stood before public buildings and many private dwellings as an emblem of fertility and a guardian of the home. An excited investigator brought forward the unreliable evidence of aliens and slaves that the prank had been perpetrated by a drunken party of Alcibiades' friends, led by Alcibiades himself. The young general protested his innocence, and demanded to be tried at once, that he might be convicted or cleared before the departure of the fleet; but his enemies, foreseeing his acquittal, succeeded in postponing the trial. And so in 415 the great flotilla set sail, led by a timid pacifist who hated war, and by an audacious militarist whose genius of leadership was frustrated by the divided command, and the dread, among the crews, that he had incurred the enmity of the gods.

The fleet had been gone some days when new evidence, as unreliable as before, was brought our to the effect that Alcibiades and his friend had participated in an impious mimicry of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Urged on by an enraged populace, the Assembly sent the swift galley Sadaminia to overtake Alcibiades and bring him back for trial. Alcibiades accepted the summons and went aboard the Salaminia; but when the vessel stopped at Thurii he secretly made his way to shore, and escaped. The Athenian Assembly, baffled, pronounced judgment of exile upon him, with confiscation of all his property, and a decree of death in case the Athenians should ever capture him. Bitter at the thought that his plans for empire and glory had been frustrated by a condemnation which he continued to call unjust, Alcibiades took refuge in the Pelaponnesus, and, appearing before the Spartan Assembly, proposed to help Sparta defeat Athens and establish there an aristocratic government. "As for democracy," Thucydides makes him say, "the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have the more cause to complain of it; bur there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity." He advised them to send a fleet to help Syracuse and an army to capture Deceleia – an Attic town whose possession should give Sparta military command of everything in Attica but Athens. The silver mines at Laurium would cease to finance Athenian resistance, and the subject cities, foreseeing the defeat of Athens, would stop their payment of tribute. Sparta took his advice.

The intensity of his own resolution appeared in the completeness with which he, so accustomed to luxury, took up the Spartan way of life. He became frugal and reserved, eating coarse food, wearing a rough tunic and no shoes, bathing in the Eurotas winter and summer, and observing all Lacedaemonian laws and customs faithfully. Even so his good looks and personal fascination ruined his plans. The Queen fell in love with him, bore him a son, and proudly whispered to her friends that he was the father.

He excused himself to his intimates on the ground that he could not resist the chance to establish his race as kings over Laconic. King Agis, who had been away, with the army, started home, and Alcibiades conveniently secured a commission in a Spartan squadron that was sailing to Asia. The King disowned the child and sent out secret orders for the assassination of Alcibiades; but the tatter's friends warned him, and he escaped and joined the Persian admiral Tissaphernes at Sardis.

At the other end of the war front Nicias was encountering a resistance which only Alcibiades' genius for strategy and intrigue could have overcome. Nearly all of Sicily came to the aid of Syracuse. In 414 a Spartan fleet under Gylippus helped the Sicilian navy to bottle up the Athenian ships in the harbor of Syracuse, cutting them off from any supply of food. A final chance to escape was lost because of an eclipse of the moon, which frightened Nicias and many of his soldiers into awaiting an opportunity more satisfactory to the gods. On the next day, however, they found themselves surrounded, and were forced to give battle. They were defeated, first on sea and then on land. Nicias, though ill and weak, fought bravely, and at last surrendered to the mercy of the Syracusans. He was at once put to death; and the surviving Athenians, almost all of the citizen class, were sent to die at hard labor in the quarries of Sicily, where they tasted the fate of the men who for generations had worked the mines of Laurium.

The disaster broke the spirit of Athens. Nearly half the citizen body was now enslaved or dead; half the women of the citizen class were in effect widows, and the children were orphans. The funds that Pericles had accumulated in the treasury were almost exhausted; in another year the last penny would be gone. Thinking the fall of Athens imminent, the subject cities refused further tribute; most of her allies abandoned her, and many flocked to the side of Sparta. In 413 Sparta, claiming that the "fifty years" peace had been repeatedly violated by Athens, renewed the war. The Lacedaemonians now took and fortified Deceleia; the supply of food from Euboea and of silver from Laurium stopped; the slaves in the mines at Laurium revolted, and went over to the Spartans in a body of twenty thousand men. Syracuse sent an army to join in the attack; and the Persian King, seeing an opportunity to avenge Marathon and Salamis, provided funds for the growing Spartan fleet, on the shameful understanding that Sparta would assist Persia in regaining mastery over the Greek cities of Ionia.

It was a proof of Athenian courage, ano of the vitality of Athenian democracy, that Athens stood off her enemies for ten years more. The government was put upon an economical footing, taxes and capital levies were collected to build a new fleet, and within a year of the defeat at Syracuse Athens was ready to contest Sparta's new mastery of the sea. Just as recovery seemed assured, the oligarchic faction, which had never favored the war, and, indeed, looked to a Spartan victory to revive aristocracy in Athens, organized a revolt, seized the organs of government, and set up a supreme Council of Four Hundred (411). The Assembly, cawed by the assassination of many democratic leaders, voted its own abdication. The rich supported the rebellion as the only way of controlling the class war that had crossed the lines of the war between Athens and Sparta-much as the struggle of the middle classes against aristocracy united the liberal factions in England and America in the American Revolution. Once in power, the oligarchs sent envoys to make peace with Sparta, and secretly prepared to admit the Spartan army, into Athens. Meanwhile Theramenes, leader of a center party of moderate aristocrats, led a counterrevolution, and replaced the Four Hundred – which had ruled some four months – with a Council of Five Thousand (411). For a brief while Athens enjoyed that combination of democracy and aristocracy which seemed to Thucydides and Aristotle (aristocrats both) to have been the best and fairest government that Athens had known since Solon. But the second revolt, like the first, had forgotten that Athens depended for its food and life upon its navy, whose personnel, barring a few leaders, had been disfranchised by both revolutions. Incensed at the news, the sailors announced that unless the democracy were restored they would besiege Athens. The oligarchs waited hopefully for a Spartan army; the Spartans as usual were tardy; the new government took to its heels, and the victorious democrats restored the old constitution (411).

Alcibiades had secretly supported the oligarchic revolt, hoping that it might smooth a way for his return to Athens. Now the re-empowered democracy, perhaps ignorant of these intrigues, but knowing how badly Athens had fared since his exile, called him home with a promise of amnesty. Deferring his triumph at Athens, he took charge of the fleet at Samos, and moved into action with a celerity and success that brought Athens a brief moment of happiness. Speeding through the Hellespont, he met and completely destroyed a Spartan fleet at Cyzicus (410). After a year's siege he captured Chalcedon and Byzantium, and thereby restored Athens' control of the food supply from the Bosporus. Sailing back south he encountered another Spartan squadron near the isle of Andros, and defeated it with ease. Returning now (407) to Athens, he was welcomed with universal acclaim: his sins were forgotten, only his genius was remembered, and Athens' desperate need of an able general. But Athens, white celebrating his victories, neglected to send him money for the pay of his crews. Once again Alcibiades' lack of moral scruple ruined him. Leaving the greater number of his vessels at Notium (near Ephesus) in command of one Antiochus, with strict instructions to stay in port and under no circumstances to give battle, he himself went with a small force to Caria to raise funds for his men by something less than due process of law. Antiochus, itching for fame, left his haven and challenged a Spartan flotilla under Lysander. Lysander accepted the taunt, killed Antiochus in a hand-to-hand fight, and sank or captured most of the Athenian ships (407). When news of this catastrophe came to Athens the Assembly acted with characteristic haste; it censured Alcibiades for leaving his fleet, and removed him from command. Alcibiades, fearing now both Athens and Sparta, fled to a refuge in Bithynia.

Desperate, the Athenians ordered that the gold and silver in the statues and offerings on the Acropolis should be melted down for the building of a new flotilla of 150 triremes, and offered freedom to those slaves, and citizenship to those aliens, who would fight for the city. The new armada defeated a Spartan fleet off the Arginusae Islands (south of Lesbos) in 406, and Athens again thrilled with the news of victory. But the Assembly was furious when it learned that its generals had allowed the crews of twenty-five ships, sunk by the enemy, to drown in a storm. [The term strategos was applied to naval as well as military commanders.] Hotheads protested that these souls, for lack of proper burial, would wander restlessly about the universe; and accusing the survivors of negligence in not attempting a rescue, they proposed that the eight victorious generals (including the son of Pericles by Aspasia) should be put to death. Socrates, who happened to be a member of the presiding prytany for the day, refused to put the motion to a vote. It was presented and passed over his protests, and the sentence was carried out with the same precipitation with which it had been decreed. A few days later the Assembly repented, and condemned to death those who had persuaded it to execute the generals. Meanwhile the Spartans, weakened by the defeat, offered peace again; but the Assembly, moved by the oratory of the drunken Cleophon, refused.

Led now by second-rate men, the Athenian fleet sailed north to meet the Spartans under Lysander in the Sea of Marmora. From his hiding place in the hills Alcibiades saw that the Athenian ships had taken up a strategically perilous position at Aegospotami, near Lampsacus. He risked his life to ride down to the shore and advise the Athenian admirals to seek a more sheltered place; but they distrusted his counsel, and reminded him that he was no longer in command. On the next day the decisive battle was fought all but eight of the 108 Athenian ships were scuttled or taken, and Lysander ordered the execution of three thousand Athenian captives. Learning that Lysander had issued orders for his assassination, Alcibiades sought refuge in Phlygia with the Persian general Pharnabazus, who assigned him a castle and a courtesan. But the Persian King, persuaded by Lysander, ordered Phamabazus to kill his guest. Two assassins besieged Alcibiades in his castle, and set fire to it; he came out naked and desperate, seeking the privilege of fighting for his life; but before his sword could touch his assailants he was pierced by their arrows and javelins. He died at the age of forty-six, the greatest genius and most tragic failure in the military history of Greece.

Lysander, now absolute master of the Aegean, sailed down from city to city, overthrowing the democracies and setting up oligarchic governments subject to Sparta. Entering the Piraeus unresisted, he proceeded to blockade Athens. The Athenians resisted nvith their accustomed bravery, but within three months their stock of food was exhausted, and the streets were full of dead or dying men. Lysander gave Athens bitter and yet lenient terms: he would not, he said, destroy a city that had in time past performed such honorable services for Greece, nor would he enslave its population; but he demanded the leveling 0f the Long Walls, the recall of the oligarchic exiles, the surrender of all but eight of the surviving Athenian ships, and a pledge to support Sparta actively in any further war. Athens protested, and yielded.

Supported by Lysander, and led by Critics and Theramenes, the returning oligarchs seized the government, and established a Council of Thirty to rule Athens (404). These Greek Bourbons had learned nothing; they confiscated the property and alienated the support of many rich merchants; they plundered the temples, sold for three talents the wharves of the Piraeus which had cost a thousand,' exiled five thousand democrats, and put fifteen hundred others to death; they assassinated all Athenians who were distasteful to them politically or personally; they put an end to freedom of teaching, assemblage, and speech, and Critics himself, once his pupil, forbade Socrates to continue his public discourses. Seeking to compromise the philosopher to their cause, the Thirty ordered him and four others to arrest the democrat Leon. The others obeyed, but Socrates refused.

All the sins of the democracy were forgotten as the crimes of the oligarchs increased and multiplied. The number of men, even of substantial means, who began to seek an end to this bloody tyranny grew from day to day. When a thousand armed democrats under Thrasybulus approached the Piraeus, the Thirty found that hardly any but their immediate partisans could be persuaded to fight for them. Critias organized a small army, went out to battle, and was defeated and killed. Thrasybulus entered Athens, and restored the democracy (403). Under his guidance the Assembly behaved with unwonted moderation: it decreed death for only the highest surviving leaders of the revolution, and allowed them to escape this sentence by exile; it declared a general amnesty to all others who had supported the oligarchs; it even repaid to Sparta the hundred talents that the ephors had lent to the Thirty. These acts of humanity and statesmanship gave to Athens at last the peace that she had not known for a generation.

Strange to say, the only cruelty of the restored democracy was committed upon an old philosopher whose seventy years should have put him beyond the possibility of being a danger to the state. But among the leader of the victorious faction was the same Anytus who years before had t]reatened to revenge himself upon Socrates for dialectical slights and the "corruption" of his son. Anytus was a good man: he lead fought bravely under Thrasybulus, had saved the lives of oligarchs who had been taken captive by his soldiers, had been instrumental in arranging the amnesty, aid had left in undisturbed enjoyment of his property those to whom it had been sold after confiscation by the Thirty. But his generosity failed when it came to Socrates. He could not forget that when he had gone into exile his son had stayed in Athens with Socrates, and had become a drunkard. It did not appease Anytus to observe that Socrates had refused to obev the Thirty, and (if we may take Xenophon's word for it) had denounced Critics as a bad ruler. To Anytus it seemed that Socrates, more than any Sophist, was an evil influence both on morals and on politics; he vas undermining the religious faith that had supported morality, and his persistent criticism was weakening the belief of educated Athenians in the institutions of democracy. The murderous tyrant Critics had been one of Socrates' pupils; the immoral and treasonable Alcibiades had been his lover; Charmides, his early favorite, had been a general antler Critias, and had just died in battle against the democracy. [Critias and Alcibiades had left the tutelage of Socrates early in his career as a teacher. not liking the restraints which he preached to them.] It seemed fitting to Anytus that Socrates should leave Athens, or die.

The indictment was brought forward by Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon in 399, and read as follows: "Socrates is a public offender in that he does not recognize the gods that the state recognizes, but introduces new demoniacal beings" (the Socratic daimonion); "he has also offended by corrupting the youth. [Croiset believed that the real cause of the indictment was the hostilite of the Attic peasantry to anyone who cast doubt upon the stare gads. One of the chief markets for cattle was provided by the pious who bought the animals to offer in sacrifice; any decrease in faith would lessen this market. Aristophanes, in this interpretation, was the mouthpiece of these peasants, before whom his plays, if successful, would be repeated.] The trial was held before a popular court, or dikasterion, of some five hundred citizens, mostly of the less educated class. Vie have no means of knowing how accurately Plato and Xenophon have reported Socrates' defense; we do know that Plato was present at the trial, and that his account of Socrates' "apology" agrees in many points with Xenophon's. Socrates, says Plato, insisted that he believed in the state gods, even in the divinity of the sun and moon. "You say first that I do not believe in gods, and then again that I believe in demigods . . . . You might as well affirm the existence of mules, and deny that of horses and asses." And then he referred sadly to the effects of Aristophanes' satire:

I have had many accusers, who accused me of old, and their false charges have continued during many years; and 1 am more afraid of them than of Anytus and his associates . . . . For they began when you were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods, telling of one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heavens above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. These are the accusers I dread; for they are the circulators of this rumor, and their hearers are too apt to fancy that speculators of this sort do not believe in the gods. And they are many, and their charges against me are of ancient date, and they made them in days when you were impressionable – in childhood, or perhaps in youth – and the cause when heard went by default, for there was none to answer. And hardest of all, their names I do not know and cannot tell, unless in the chance case of a comic poet . . . . That is the nature of the accusation, and that is what you have seen yourselves in the comedy of Aristophanes.

He lays claim to a divine mission to teach the good and simple life, and no threat will deter him.

Strange, indeed, would he my conduct, O men of Athens, if I who, when I was ordered by the Generals whom you chose to command me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, remained where they placed me, like any other man, facing death – if, I say, now when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfil the philosopher's mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death . . . . If you say to me, Socrates, this time we will let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more . . . I should reply: Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but 1 shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet, after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you, who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth? Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not; but whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.

The judges appear to have interrupted him at this point, and to have bidden him desist from what seemed to them insolence; but he continued in even haughtier vein.

I would have you know that if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me . . . . For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owning to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life . . . . And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me.

The sentence of guilty was pronounced upon him by the small majority of sixty; had his defense been more conciliatory it is likely that he would have been acquitted. He had the privilege of proposing an alternative penalty in place of death. At first he refused to make even this concession; but on the appeal of Plato and other friends, who underwrote his pledge, he offered to pay a fine of thirty minas ($3000). The second polling of the jury condemned him by eighty more votes than the first.

It still remained open to him to escape from the prison; Crito and other friends (if we may follow Plato) prepared the way, with bribery, and probably Anytus had hoped for such a compromise. But Socrates remained himself to the last. He felt that he had but a few more years to live, and that "he relinquished only the most burdensome part of life, in which all feel their powers of intellect diminished." Instead of accepting Crito's proposal he examined it from an ethical point of view, discussed it dialectically, and played the game of logic to the end. His disciples visited him daily in his cell during the month between his trial and his execution, and he seems to have discoursed with them calmly until the final hour. Plato pictures him as fondling the hair and head of the young Phaedo, and saying, "Tomorrow, Phaedo, I suppose that these fair locks will be cut in mourning." Xanthippe came in tears, with their youngest child in her arms; he comforted her, and asked Crito to have her escorted home.You die undeservedly," said an ardent disciple; "Would you, then," Socrates answered, "have me deserve death?"

After he was gone, says Diodorus, the Athenians regretted their treatment of him, and put his accusers to death. Suidas makes Meletus die by public stoning. Plutarch varies the tale: the accusers became so unpopular that no citizen would light their fires, or answer their questions, or bathe in the same water with them; so that they were at last driven in despair to hang themselves. Diogenes Laertius reports that Meletus was executed, Anytus exiled, and a bronze statue put up by Athens in memory of the philosopher." We do not know if these stories are true. [Grote" doubts them, and they are rendered dubious by the efforts of Plato and Xenophon to defend Socrates' reputation. But these accounts were generally accepted in antiquity (e.g., by Tertullian and Augustine), and accord admirably with the habits of the Athenians.]

The Golden Age ended with the death of Socrates. Athens was exhausted in body and soul; only the degradation of character by prolonged war and desperate suffering could explain the ruthless treatment of Melos, the bitter sentence upon Alytilene, the execution of the Arginusae generals, and the sacrifice of Socrates on the altar of a dying faith. All the foundations of Athenian life were disordered: the soil of Attica had been devastated by the Spartan raids, and the slow-growing olive trees had been burned to the ground; the Athenian navy had been destroyed, and control of trade and the food supply had been lost; the state treasury was empty, and private fortunes had been taxed almost to extinction; two thirds of the citizen body had been killed. The damage done to Greece by the Persian invasions could not compare with the destruction of Greek life and property by the Peloponnesian War. After Salamis and Plataea Greece was left poor, but exalted with courage and pride; now Greece was poor again, and Athens had suffered a wound to her spirit which seemed too deep to be healed.

Two things sustained her: the restoration of democracy under men of judgment and moderation, and the consciousness that during the last sixty years, even during the War, she had produced such art and literature as surpassed the like product of any other age in the memory of man. Anaxagoras had been exiled and Socrates had been put to death; but the stimulus that they had given to philosophy sufficed to make Athens henceforth, and despite herself, the center and summit of Greek thought. What before had been formless tentatives of speculation were now to mature into great systems that would agitate Europe for centuries to come; while the haphazard provision of higher education by wandering Sophists was to be replaced, by the first universities in history-universities that would make Athens, as Thucydides had prematurely called her, "the school of Hellas." Through the bloodshed and turmoil of conflict the traditions of art had not quite decayed; for many centuries yet the sculptors and architects of Greece were to carve and build for all the Mediterranean world. Out of the despair of her defeat Athens lifted herself with startling virility to new wealth, culture, and power; and the autumn of her life was bountiful.