Athens Surrenders to Sparta
Athens surrendered to Sparta in April 404 BC, pulled down its own walls to the sound of flutes, and was given a government of thirty men. The city had been starving since Aegospotami the previous autumn, when Lysander had taken almost the entire Athenian fleet at anchor on a beach in the Hellespont and cut the grain route from the Black Sea. The terms were the demolition of the long walls and the Piraeus fortifications, the surrender of all but twelve ships, the return of exiles, and an alliance following Sparta's lead. Corinth and Thebes argued for destroying the city and enslaving its population, and Sparta refused on the ground that Athens had done Greece a service against Persia — and, more practically, that a wrecked Athens would leave Thebes too strong. The Thirty imposed afterwards were an oligarchic commission that killed some 1,500 people in eight months, confiscated estates, and disarmed everyone outside a list of 3,000. Critias, its leading figure, had been a pupil of Socrates, which is one of the things Socrates was tried for five years later. The democrats took the Piraeus, beat the Thirty in the street fighting and restored the democracy within a year, with an amnesty that held. Sparta's own hegemony lasted thirty-three years and was destroyed by Thebes at Leuctra. Athens rebuilt the walls in 393 BC with Persian money. Athens recovered as a commercial and intellectual centre and never again as a power. The fourth century is the century of Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes and the schools of philosophy, and it happened in a city that had lost its empire and knew it.
- Year: 404 BCE
- Category: Political
