The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [176]
And now not only did the Athenians anchor their ships where they were vulnerable, but they left them unattended while going out into alien territory to forage for supplies. They had not a chance of victory, particularly given that Sparta had two phosphorescently luminous young male characters on her side. The Spartan general Lysander was on the attack, and as he ploughed through the sea, it was said that the twin brothers of Helen, the divine Dioscuri, came rushing to the aid of Spartans abroad once more. Athens was once a thalassocracy – a power that ruled the seas. But now the Spartans, landlocked for so long, had learned to adapt. And it was their warrior-citizens, along with those fit underclasses called helots (slaves) and mothakes (bastards) who were forcing the oars of triremes to power-surf through the Aegean at spine-tingling speeds. Now it was the Spartans who had control of coasts and waterways and beaching points, of naval strategy.
At Aegospotami, Athenian ships scattered, and all but two were taken captive. All Athenian citizens on board, at least 1,000 of them, were lined up and executed. Spartan Lysander had won. Athens surrendered. The region that had witnessed a heavenly shower of meteorites when Socrates was just two years old, a line from the heavens that encouraged Athenians and visitors to Athens to debate the scientific nature of the universe, had now trailblazed the death of the Athenian Empire.
Spartan administrators lost no time in broadcasting their city-state’s triumph. In Delos a decree was issued, written in the distinctively bucolic Spartan dialect, stating, laconically, that the Delians had their freedom, their sanctuaries and their funds once more – never again would this be an Athenian offshore bank.
And in the navel of the world itself, in Delphi, the Spartan commander Lysander was commemorated with a gaudy monument. As you walked up the rousing Sacred Way, with the plain of Kirrha on your left, Mount Parnassus to your right and behind you, this hubristic memorial would have been impossible to miss. Right next to the Athenian show-off zone, with its eponymous heroes, by a statue of Miltiades (the victor at the Battle of Marathon) now stood a new, Spartan plinth boasting thirty-eight bronze statues precisely commissioned by Laconic overlords. Here there were Zeus, Apollo and Artemis, here too those helpful twin brothers Castor and Pollux, and there was Lysander, being crowned by the god who had lost the battle for the Acropolis and for Athens, Poseidon. But Poseidon had won the ultimate victory. He now adored these Spartans, who had, at last, seen sense and floated their boats and their chances on his briny battle-plain: together gods and god-fearing Spartans had brought that busybody superpower Athens down. Athena, on this occasion, was nowhere to be seen.
After the disastrous naval defeat at Aegospotami all of Athens’ allies deserted her, with the exception of idealistic Samos, once so troublesome but now staunchly democratic. The Athenians, desperate to remember their few friends, commissioned a beautiful relief of the two goddesses Athena and Hera (protectress of Samos) warmly shaking hands; the Samians – whose restlessness all those years back in 440 BC helped to spark the zero-sum Peloponnesian War – were now given Athenian citizenship.
Athens had been great, but one wondered, this year, who would want its citizenship? Outside the city walls were camped those two Spartan kings. The Spartan fleet, warming to its new sea-legs, ringed the harbour of Piraeus. The 150 ships prevented grain supplies getting through to the Athenian people – and there were many Athenians inside the city as Lysander had swept through all the nearby territories, ordering the children of Athena to go and hide in the skirts of their wise, war-loving goddess. In 404 BC the Athenians, with the Spartans at their gates and confidently billeting themselves in those once-beloved, once-thriving places, the gymnasia and wrestling grounds,11 were