Departure of was exposed to dangers which might threaten serious consequences. His garrisons in Antandros, Miletos, and Knidos had been expelled; and he resolved to go in person to the Hellespont, both to complain of these wrongs and to make an effort for recovering the influence which was fast slipping away from him. Tissaphernes lespont. for the Hel Defeat of Mindaros in the bay of Dardanos. For the present the crafty schemes of Tissaphernes told in favour of Alkibiades. The homeward return of the Phenician fleet enabled him to go back to Samos and say not only that this part of his promise was fulfilled but that Dorieus and the satrap was better inclined to the Athenian cause than he had ever been. Sailing from Kos he reached the Hellespont just in time to decide a battle which had begun in the early morning by the defeat of Dorieus in the bay of Dardanos, and which had been continued during the day by the fleet of Mindaros. Thirty ships fell into the hands of the Athenians who, having recovered their own captured triremes, sailed away to their station at Sestos. Here however they kept only 40 ships: the rest were sent to gather money, where they might and as they could. The necessities of war had displaced the orderly collection of a fixed tribute for a system of arbitrary and indefinite exactions; and the indifference and even the friendly feeling of the allies gave way to active dislike or a fiercer indignation. Escape of Alkibiades from imprisonment at Sardeis. B.C. 410. Twenty years earlier a victory even such as this might have changed the face of the war. All that Thrasylos could now do was to go to Athens to ask for more help both in ships and men. A force of thirty triremes was immediately sent out under Theramenes who sailed to help the Makedonian chief Archelaos in his siege of Pydna and probably to live upon his pay. The city was reduced at last: but before its fall Theramenes had been compelled to sail away to the Athenian naval station which, in fear of the large fleet now being collected by Mindaros, had been transferred from Sestos to Kardia on the northern side of the Chersonesos. To this place Alkibiades had found his way, no longer as a friend of Tissaphernes or of his master, but as a fugitive from the power of the satrap who, professing now to have received orders from the king to carry on war vigorously against the Athenians, had thrown him into prison. The tidings that Mindaros was engaged in the siege of Kyzikos made the Athenian generals resolve upon attacking Battle of him at once with their whole fleet of 83 triremes. Having contrived by sailing past Abydos at night to 1 Thục. viii. 109. 2 Xen. H. i. 1,7. Diod. xiii. 46. G G Kyzikos. evade the 3 Xen. H. i. 1, 8. notice of the Peloponnesian guard-ships, they rested at the island of Prokonnesos, a few miles to the northwest of the peninsula of Kyzikos. On the next day Alkibiades told the men that they must undertake simultaneously the tasks of a sea-fight, a landbattle, and a siege. The first measure was to disembark the hoplites on the mainland with orders to advance upon the town. According to Diodoros1 the issue of the day was decided by a trick of Alkibiades, who by a pretended flight concerted with his colleagues lured the squadron of Mindaros to some distance from the rest of the fleet and then turned fiercely round on the hoisting of a signal. Finding themselves between two forces, the seamen of Mindaros had no option but to fly to a place called Kleroi where the army of Pharnabazos was placed for co-operation by land. Mindaros was slain, bravely fighting on shore. All the Peloponnesian ships fell into the hands of the Athenians with the exception of the Syracusan triremes which the crews themselves set on fire; and still more important in the exhaustion of all resources was the enormous plunder in slaves and other booty taken in the camps of the Spartans and the Persians. On the day after the fight the victors found Kyzikos evacuated by the enemy. But no real benefit could accrue from the victory unless the Athenians could command the gates of the Black Sea as well as those of the Egean. Byzantion and Chalkedon on the opposite side of the strait were both in revolt, and the latter city was so effectually protected by the troops of Pharnabazos that an attack upon it at once failed. But its unfortified port of Chrysopolis was seized and converted into a fortified post from which the Athenians levied tolls on all ships entering the Propontis.2 They were thus again masters of the most important road for the introduction of supplies to Athens. A few hours after the battle of Kyzikos, Hippokrates, the admiral's secretary, addressed to the ephors the following letter: Alleged em- 'Our glory is gone: Mindaros is dead: the men are bassy of hungry: we know not what to do.'s The dispatch Endios to Athens. was intercepted and carried to Athens, where the people received the tidings with a tumult of joy which found expression in magnificent religious processions and displays. What may have been the precise effect produced upon the Spartans, we cannot say with certainty. The history of Thucydides here fails us, and we are made at once to feel the irreparable want of a guide so incorruptibly truthful, so unwearied in his search for evidence, and so exact in his discrimination of it. The propositions of the envoy whom they now sent to Athens were confined, we are told, 3 Ib. i. 1, 23. 1 xiii. 50. 2 Xen. H. i. 1, 22. to a mere exchange of prisoners and the withdrawal of hostile garrisons on either side,—in other words, to the plan that the Athenians should abandon Pylos and the Spartans quit Dekeleia. But even if the Athenians had been willing to listen to these terms and, by the condition that each side was to keep its present possessions, to yield up her claim to the allegiance of the most valuable members of her maritime confederacy, they knew by bitter experience that Sparta, even if willing, was unable to coerce her allies. They knew further that at the present time the Spartans were under covenant with the Persian king not to make peace without his consent; and they had no reason for thinking that the necessities of Sparta would be to him a constraining motive for coming to terms with her enemy and his own. Athens was no longer receiving the riches of other lands: her reserved fund was long since exhausted and her fleets were able to carry on the war only by a system which had become little better than organised plundering. She was manifestly approaching the end of a struggle which must end in the ruin of one side or the other, and every sign seemed to tell that that ruin would be her own. Energy of Whatever may have been the discouragement of the Spartans, Pharnabazos felt none. Comforting the troops of Mindaros with the promise of unbounded supplies of ship-timber from the forests of Ida, he gave them each a garment Pharnatogether with provisions for two months, and distributed the seamen as guards throughout the coast cities of his province, while orders were given for building at Antandros a number of ships equal to that of the triremes lost at Kyzikos. bazos. Agis before the walls of Athens. At Dekeleia the effects of the victory of Kyzikos were more visible than at Sparta. From his lofty stronghold Agis could see the corn-ships from the Euxine sailing into the Repulse of Peiraieus and felt that, until this stream could be cut off, his occupation of Athenian soil was to little purpose. An inroad to the very walls of Athens had been tried and had failed;1 and Agis thought it best to dispatch Klearchos with fifteen ships from Megara and other allied cities to the Hellespont. Of these vessels three were taken and destroyed by the Athenian guard-ships: the rest made their way first to Abydos, then t Byzantion. The events of the following year made no essential change in the position of the combatants in this weary war. On the coast of Attica Thorikos was fortified for the protection of the cornships sailing to Peiraieus from the Hellespont; and Thrasylos 1 Xen. H. i. 1, 33. 2 Xen. H. i. 1, 36, says that they went to Sestos: but as Sestos was the Athenian naval station, this Operations of Thrasylos in the Egean. 409 B.C. at the beginning of summer set out with his fleet of fifty triremes for Samos. At Ephesos the Athenians sustained a serious reverse, in which five-and-twenty Syracusan ships took the most prominent part. But this defeat, again, was compensated, when not long afterwards Thrasylos, from his station at Methymna, espied this Syracusan squadron sailing out from Ephesos, to which he drove back all the triremes with the exception of four which were taken with their crews. These were dispatched as prisoners to Athens where, in remembrance probably of the treatment which Athenians had undergone in the Latomiai of Syracuse, they were shut up in the stone quarries of Peiraieus. The sufferings of these captives may not have been so severe they were certainly not so protracted. Before the autumn was well ended, they had succeeded in excavating a way out of their prison-house, and in making their escape, some to Dekeleia, some to Megara.1 Spartans. But in spite of all fluctuations the tide was running strongly against Athens. Fifteen years ago Sparta had been utterly humbled by the shutting in of a number of hoplites on the island Recovery of Pylos by the of Sphakteria. During those years the Messenian garrison at Pylos had been to the Spartans an annoyance only less serious than that which Dekeleia was causing to Athens. But the strong efforts which the Athenians were making to restore their shattered empire in the East led the Spartans to think that a determined attack on this post might be successful; and the tidings soon reached Athens that their Messenian allies were being blockaded by a fleet of fifteen ships and besieged by a large land force the divisions of which kept up a series of assaults upon the fortress. In spite of the drain both of men, ships, and money in the direction of the Hellespont, the Athenians managed to send out thirty ships under Anytos, the future accuser of Sokrates. He was sent to no purpose. Stormy weather, he said, had prevented him from doubling cape Maleai, and the ships came back to Athens. Indignant at his failure, the people brought him to trial; but Anytos was acquitted. Thus deserted by their ancient friends, the Messenians of Pylos held out stoutly for a time: but their numbers were sorely thinned in conflicts with the enemy and so wasted by actual famine that they were at last compelled to make terms for the surrender of the place. It is a satisfaction to learn that these stout-hearted Helots could so maintain their ground as to secure their safe departure from a land which, if the Spartans could have had their will, they would never have left alive. The loss of this outpost was followed or accompanied by that of Nisaia. These 2 See p. 345. 1 Xen. H. i. 2, 14. losses told on Athens with far heavier effect than the betrayal of the colonists in the Trachinian Herakleia at this time told upon the Spartans.1 Reduction of 408 B.C. The events of the following year seemed to point more clearly to a good issue for Athens from the troubles which had well-nigh crushed her. The whole Athenian fleet took up its position off Byzantion and Chalkedon, while the land force besieged the latter city, shutting it in all round with a wooden wall which, so far as it was practicable, blocked the river also. The satrap was anxious to break the Athenian lines, while Hippokrates, who was then harmost within the city, made a vehement sally from the gates. The attempt wholly failed. The troops of Pharnabazos were beaten off, Hippokrates himself was slain, and his men pushed back within the walls. The reduction of the place now became a mere question of time; and on the advice of Pharnabazos the Chalkedonians agreed to surrender under covenant that they should become, as they had been, tributepaying allies of Athens, making up all arrears for the time during which they had been in revolt against her. But the satrap seemed now to be convinced that Athens was not so easily to be put down as he had hoped that she would be, and that he had made a mistake in assuming towards her so determinately hostile an attitude. He therefore made with the Athenians a convention on his own behalf by which he agreed to send up their envoys to Sousa to arrange a treaty with the king, while the Athenians pledged themselves to do no mischief during their absence in the territories of the satrap. The Athenian envoys met the satrap at Kyzikos, where they were joined by an embassy from Sparta under Pasippidas and by the Syracusan Hermokrates whom a grateful city had rewarded with the boon of exile. Surrender of Byzantion. citizens to At Byzantion the Athenians might very possibly have been defeated, had it not been that popular feeling still ran in their favour; but in the town were many who were exasperated by the severities of Pharnabazos and by the calmness with which he sacrificed the interests of the those of his troops. These men opened the gates and admitted Alkibiades and his men to the quarter called the Thrakion, and the garrison was compelled to surrender.3 Athens was thus once more mistress of the great high road which brought to her harbours the wealth of the corn-growing districts bordering on the Black Sea. Had the Athenian envoys been allowed to make their journey to Sousa, the issue of the war would, it is more than likely, have 3 Xen. H. i. 3, 22. 1 Xen. H. i. 2, 18. 2 Xen. H. i. 3, 9. |