Sparta Defeats Athens: The Peloponnesian War Ends

Athens starved. After Lysander's Spartan fleet annihilated the Athenian navy at Aegospotami in 405 BC, capturing 170 of 180 warships and executing 3,000 prisoners, the grain supply from the Black Sea was severed. The city that had dominated the Aegean for seven decades was blockaded by land and sea through the winter of 405-404 BC, its population swelling with refugees and dwindling in food. By April 404 BC, Athens surrendered unconditionally, ending the Peloponnesian War after 27 years of conflict that had devastated the Greek world. The terms were harsh but not annihilating. Sparta's allies, particularly Corinth and Thebes, demanded that Athens be razed and its population enslaved, the same fate Athens had inflicted on Melos in 416 BC. Lysander refused, reportedly arguing that Greece should not destroy "one of her two eyes." Athens was forced to demolish its Long Walls connecting the city to its port at Piraeus, surrender its remaining fleet except for twelve ships, recall its political exiles, and accept an oligarchic government aligned with Spartan interests. The walls came down to the music of flute girls, and Spartans celebrated the date as the beginning of Greek freedom. The war's causes were structural. Athens's Delian League, originally a defensive alliance against Persia, had evolved into an empire that extracted tribute from allied cities and punished dissent with military force. Sparta, leading the Peloponnesian League, represented the opposing principle of autonomous city-states resisting Athenian domination. Thucydides, the war's great historian and himself an Athenian general, identified the fundamental cause as Spartan fear of growing Athenian power, a dynamic that political scientists now call the "Thucydides Trap." Sparta's victory proved hollow. Within thirty years, Thebes had shattered Spartan military supremacy at Leuctra, and within seventy years, Philip II of Macedon had subjugated all of Greece. The Peloponnesian War exhausted the Greek city-state system so thoroughly that none of its participants recovered fully. Athens rebuilt its democracy and its walls within a decade, but it never regained the imperial power that had made it the cultural and political center of the Greek world. The golden age was over.