The Fall of Athens

In 404 BC, Athens faced total defeat. Once the dominant power of the Greek world, their navy was shattered, their food supply cut off, and on the horizon an armada of Spartan ships signalled the city’s final reckoning. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Alastair Blanshard to explore the dramatic downfall of Athens in the final years of the Peloponnesian War. They discuss the decades-long struggle between Athens and Sparta, the key figures who shaped its outcome - like Lysander and Alcibiades - and how Persian support helped turn the tide. From epic battles to political intrigue, discover how this war reshaped the ancient Greek world for generations. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign upHERE https://historyhit.com/subscription for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscription https://historyhit.com/subscribe You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards, and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach?

• 0:44Tristan Hughes?

  Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all the things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with the Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently. Well, Smart Travel podcast from NerdWallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it, and which are just an airport gate with better snacks and worse lighting, and what actually happens when an airline loses your luggage for 12 days, and how to get real money back instead of a free drink and an apology.

• 1:24Tristan Hughes?

  Plus, the tip I really needed: how to book flights without it turning into a part-time job. Travel smarter and spend less with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:54Tristan Hughes?

  404 B.C. Panic sweeps through Athens. After decades of dominance, total defeat is nearing for the city and its people. Their navy has been destroyed, their food supply cut off, and now, on the horizon, an armada of enemy ships can be seen. The Spartans are coming. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're telling the story of the fall of Athens. At the end of the 5th century BC, Athens was the loser of a major decade-long war known as the Peloponnesian War. It's been termed something

• 2:35Tristan Hughes?

  of an ancient Greek world war, Athens versus Sparta, plus their many allies, and the various theatres of combat that stretched from Sicily to the Black Sea. Ultimately, it was Sparta who emerged the victor, thanks largely to help from the looming superpower of the time, the Persian Empire. And Athens was lose its empire and its dominant position in the Greek world. It is a huge event that completely reshaped the ancient Greek world, featuring larger-than-life generals on both the Spartan and the Athenian side, figures like Lysander and Alcibiades. To talk through Athens's downfall and the many twists and

• 3:17Tristan Hughes?

  turns in this story, I was delighted to interview my old professor, Alastair Blanchard, from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Now, in the past, Alistair and I have covered topics ranging from Heracles to Achilles, to the plague of Athens, and homosexuality in ancient Greece. This was great fun to do, and I hope you enjoy.

• 3:43Tristan Hughes?

  Alistair, what a pleasure. It is great to have you back on the podcast.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Always great to be here.

• 3:49Tristan Hughes?

  And this time, first time ever, we're doing it in person. We have brought you to the Ancients HQ, to History Hit HQ, and we are doing it in person. You're not the other side of the world in Australia.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yes, it's so nice to be actually in the same time zone. So I'm no longer either waking up or going to bed.

• 4:05Tristan Hughes?

  Well, normally I'm waking up about seven or eight o'clock in the morning, and it's evening your time, isn't it? But that's what you get for living in Brisbane, which is lovely part of the world. But we of course are going to another topic close to your heart. We've done Heracles in the past, we've done Achilles, but Athens, the city of Athens and the fall of Athens. It feels quite a weird thing to say because we think of Athens even today as this great glorious city of Greece, but back in ancient times, it was the loser in one of the great, or it was the great world war of the Greek world.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  That's right, yes, the Peloponnesian War, the war that dominates the final third of the fifth century B.C., the clash of the two greatest mainland powers in Greece, the mighty Sparta, Athens with a great naval empire and an extraordinary sequence of battles that goes on for 30 years and eventually leads to the destruction, the palling down the walls of Athens.

• 4:59Tristan Hughes?

  Well, set the scene first of all, Alistair. So you've kind of highlighted it there, but let's get it right for the background and in a good detail. So what is this great war that occurs, the so-called Peloponnesian War? Why is it so significant?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Well, the fifth century is really the Athenian century. So we see Athens, which is, you know, in earlier periods, much more of a backwater, suddenly rise to power after the end of the Persian Wars. Athens really dominates the geopolitical space. It establishes this extraordinary naval empire and it really is almost unrivalled within mainland Greece. And this is quite unusual because up until this point, Greece had been a patchwork of independent city-states. But over the course of the fourth century, we see that patchwork of independent city-states developing into a kind of bipolar system dominated by two great powers, Athens and Sparta.

• 5:53Tristan Hughes?

  And this kind of system, I mean, how does Athens gain so much power going from one city-state to becoming such a powerful entity in the central Mediterranean?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Well, essentially, it's a kind of protection racket, basically. Greece had been invaded by Persia and so Athens offers itself up as the great defender against the Persians. They'd of course been terribly important in mobilising the opposition to Persia. Perot, the Battle of Marathon, the Battle of Salamis had been a great turning point where the might of the Persian Empire had been humbled by a combined fleet of Greeks, led primarily by Athens. They'd really hounded the Persians out of Greek area, mainland Greece, and also freed the Ionian coast. And so as part of that, they said, well, look, we're going to establish a league, the so-called Delian League, based initially on the island of Delos, which is going to protect

• 6:46Tristan Hughes?

  And that's, that's in the centre of the Aegean, isn't it?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  That's in the centre of the Cyclades. And this league was going to protect all of the Greeks from the Persians. Now, in order to run the league, you'd have to make contributions. And of course, Athens controls the league, and it's through the league, through this kind of protection, basically, with the claim that, you know, we're going to defend you against the Persians, that Athens dominates all the city-states. And once you sign up for the Delian League, you can't get out of it. So we see a number of city-states try and get out of it. Athens jumps on them, tears down their walls, commandeers their fleet, establishes pro-Athenian governments in the city-states.

• 7:23Tristan Hughes?

  It's interesting. It's sometimes labelled as an ancient NATO equivalent, isn't it?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, yes, I think that's a very charitable view of it. I mean, well, depending on how you, what you think of NATO. But, but certainly, I mean, Athens is calling the shots. And, and really, I mean, I think whatever, you know, it was like in its initial phases, certainly by the mid-fifth century, it really is a tool of Athenian hegemony. They're using the empire to enforce their own will.

• 7:50Tristan Hughes?

  So it transforms from, so the league into the Athenian empire, and that's a whole podcast episode in its own right. And how long is it until other city-states, looking at this, seeing Athens gaining power, deciding that enough is enough, or with warfare breaking out?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  So there's increasing tensions from about the 450s onwards. And we see in particular city-states like Corinth really increasingly anxious about the rise of Athens. And Corinth, naturally, is upset about Athens because they're commercial rivals. And they don't like the rise of Athens, which is using its military might to also affect a kind of economic hegemony over the, over the Greek world.

• 8:32Tristan Hughes?

  And is, is this naval trade more than land trade? Is that kind of where they're challenging?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Both of them are big naval powers. So Corinth, located on the Gulf of Corinth, occupies a really important strategic place because it's where the Gulf of Corinth Is by a small land bridge, I'm separating it from the Ionian Sea. And so they control this land bridge and this land bridge really is very important because one of the things it allows you to do is you can drag your ships over the land from the Ionian Sea through to the Gulf of Corinth and thereby avoid having to sail all round the Peloponnese. So it's strategically really important, commercially a very rich and wealthy city and allied with Sparta. Its alliance with Sparta is what really is the trigger for the Peloponnesian war.

• 9:16Tristan Hughes?

  That's interesting because sometimes we focus too much on it being Athens versus Sparta, but you also have those other major powers like Corinth and Thebes as well. They all play a part in the outbreak of this great war.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Sparta is really reluctant to go to war. They they're a militaristic society, but they don't like going to war. And and the reason for that is, you know, that there are a culture which is, you know, based on dominating a huge land area. Oh, and have been, you know, controlling a large amount of subservient helots or serfs. And, you know, they can't afford to go away for for too long, otherwise their serfs will revolt. And so and so Sparta really doesn't like going away on long campaigns. So and they don't really like long battles either. So really Sparta doesn't, is a reluctant power to go into war. And it's really actually only the kind of figures like Corinth driving them to war that I think leads to the outbreak of conflict.

• 10:10Tristan Hughes?

  So the war breaks out, it said Athens on one side, Sparta on the other, but also major other players like Corinth, as you've highlighted there. So as we're focusing just on the end of the war and spoiler alert, the fall of Athens, so it doesn't end well for the Athenians. But if we go, let's say, to the year four fifteen B C. First of all, Alistair, how far into this great war are we by that point? And how is Athens doing at that point?

• 10:34Speaker 01

  War breaks out in four thirty one and essentially the first phase of the war is a stalemate. Neither side can land a big blow on the other. Things, you know, go on for a decade or so, increasingly unsatisfactory.

• 10:49Tristan Hughes?

  A decade as well, that's a long time, isn't it?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Much longer than any war that had been fought up until this point. I mean, normally wars are, in the Greek world, last, you know, one or two years. Ideally, in fact, they're over the campaign season. So for something to go this long is really unprecedented. And the reason why, you know, there's no effective solution in the first period is because neither side can lay a kind of killer blow on the other. So the Athenians initially in the first phase retreat behind their walls. Each year, you know, Sparta marches out, hoping to meet them in battle. Athenians refuse to do so. And that goes on for the first few years. Sparta ravages the Athenian countryside, but to no great effect. They march out, no one meets in battle, they march back again. That happens. And then eventually that, you know, they decide,

• 11:36Speaker 01

  well, look, we can't keep doing this, we have to change things. But unfortunately, they both sides decide to change at exactly the same time. So Athens gets much more adventurous, starts having a few military expeditions, quite successfully, actually, in the southern Peloponnese. But unfortunately, Sparta also decides to vary its game plan as well and starts to attack the Athenian supply lines in the north. It's very successful, led by a Spartan commander by name, Brasidas, who seizes the town of Amphipolis, which is really important in northern Greece for controlling the grain supply. And as a result, they're sort of back in the stalemate. So this kind of, you know, they've tried kind of, you know, one thing, they've tried another thing, nothing seems to be working. And so

• 12:21Speaker 01

  eventually they enter what's called the peace of Nikiyas. And that's really the end of the first phase of the Peloponnesian war. If you had to give it on points, you might give it on points to Athens in the first phase, but it's a fairly inconsequential stalemate.

• 12:35Tristan Hughes?

  And they had the plague as well. That was also a topic. That was the first ever episode we recorded together. We did the plague of Athens. So they've also had that plague. I know it's much earlier on, but that's also a bad thing that happened to Athens at that time.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And that was a byproduct of Athens retreating behind its walls. But it takes its population in from the countryside, they retreat behind the walls, save, but also extraordinarily unhygienic and a kind of absolute recipe for the outbreak of plague, which is what they suffer.

• 12:59Tristan Hughes?

  So that first stage is almost as you say, it's a stalemate. It's the Archadamian War. Is that what it's called?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  That's what the Archadamian War, named after the king Archadamas, who's the leading Spartan king at that point.

• 13:09Tristan Hughes?

  And Nikeias is a leading politician. He's a statesman in Athens.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  In Athens, that's right.

• 13:13Tristan Hughes?

  And so that is 421, did you say?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  That's right, yes, yes.

• 13:16Tristan Hughes?

  And so to get to 415 B.C., so six years later, I mean, what happens in the interim? I mean, you've got a peace, so why are you back at war again?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Well, because Athens just can't keep its, you know, fingers out of kind of Greek politics. It keeps on trying to kind of expand. It's an expansionist power. It seems to have done okay in the, in the first phase of the war. It decides to egg on Argos, another power in the Peloponnese, who'd been up until that point neutral, hoping that, you know, if an Athenian, Argive alliance might be able to take on Sparta. So it's, it's much more activist and it's that inability for the Athenians to settle, to be happy with what they have. And that general kind of expansionist drive, which I think kicks off really the, the second phase of the Peloponnesian War, but also is responsible for some crazy decisions.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  And that brings us to, I guess, perhaps the craziest decision, at least according to the historian Thucydides, that the Athenians undertook, which was their mad expedition to Sicily.

• 14:18Tristan Hughes?

  Sicily. I mean, just geographically, you've been fighting in the area around, you know, the central Mediterranean, around mainland Greece and, and the Cyclades and the islands. This is a massive change in strategy to then go all the way across a huge amount of sea to campaign in Sicily. What's the thinking behind this?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Well, good question, David. And that sadly was Thucydides's question. I mean, it must be said that the Athenians had been increasingly interested in the West from about the mid fifth century onwards. In particular, they have diplomatic relations with cities like Leontini, Regium, those kinds of places. They were also involved in the establishment of an Athenian colony at Thurea in southern Italy. So, so they've always had a kind of Western interest. Part of the reason why, in fact, they've got into conflict with Corinth was because they were also interested in establishing diplomatic relations with a ex Corinthian colony by the name of Corcyra, modern day Corfu, which also shows the interest in

• 15:18Speaker 01

  the West as well. So Athens had been interested in the West for a long time. And indeed, if we believe Plutarch, when they heard this expedition, everyone was in the marketplace drawing maps of Sicily, talking about the wealth of Sicily. And of course, Sicily is a hugely wealthy, important series of Greek communities in this period.

• 15:41Tristan Hughes?

  Syracuse.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Syracuse.

• 15:43Tristan Hughes?

  Agrippa.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Agrippa, Agestra. I mean, all these are really powerful, wealthy cities that you can see if you're an expansionist power like Athens are precisely the kinds of allies you want to have. And so an expedition to Sicily makes a lot of sense. And so Athens is invited by one of the city-states, Agestra, to come and intervene in a local dispute. It mounts this enormous, enormous expedition, and it all goes badly for them. They arrive. Turns out that the promises that Agestra made about the wealth that was waiting for them there turned out not to be true. Turned out that, in fact, they weren't as great

• 16:26Speaker 01

  at land battles as they thought they might be. They can't make good use of their navy. They don't have any cavalry. They can't seem to make any diplomatic friends on the island. They fall into a conflict with the main power in the island, which is Syracuse, which then receives some help from Sparta. And through a series of tactical blunders, they end up losing the entire expeditionary force.

• 16:52Tristan Hughes?

  The entire expeditionary force.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Thucydides says that never had Athens experienced such a great defeat, and this was the greatest defeat of the Peloponnesian War. And so, I mean, what happens really is that the fleet gets trapped in the great harbour of Syracuse, and then they're forced to abandon the fleet and commence a sort of death march, really, as it turns out, across Sicily, harried by the Syracuse and the Spartan forces. So eventually, they're all captured. Forced to work in the mines. And part of what's driving this is an inability for Athens, for once it's committed to pull back. We always think of the Spartans as the people

• 17:34Speaker 01

  who don't retreat. But in Athenian democracy, there's a problem, which is that if you're an unsuccessful general, the first thing that happens when you arrive back in Athens is you're put on trial. And so this means that, you know, if you're a general, it's really, you're really reluctant to come back with a defeat. And you're also reluctant, I think, to, to, to retreat because your political opponents are just waiting there to charge you with having been bribed by the enemy forces. And, and this seems to be what, what happens in, in Sicily. They, you know, they, they wanted to get out and they, well, their generals wanted to get out, but they couldn't because of the, the fear of what recriminations would be back for them in Athens.

• 18:13Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, the problems of being an Athenian commander, I think we're going to get more to that as we go along, isn't it? It seems to be a recurring theme in this, in this period in history.

• 18:30Speaker 02

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• 19:27Tristan Hughes?

  And so, does it then seem that by 415 B.C., are the Athenians very much the licking their wounds at this point in time? It seems to be just in the wake of this massive military catastrophe.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yes, and they're starting to question even their government as well. So, in the wake of the, you know, 415 expedition, they institute some democratic reforms, or reforms to the way they're going to hold and run their democracy. So they're going to try and put some brakes on any kind of impetuous decisions. They're going to have their agendas be thoroughly vetted before they go to voting on the assembly. And there's, I think, increasingly a dissatisfaction with democratic politics and with democracy as an idea. We see the rise of increasingly violent political clubs happening in Athens. And so, so yes, and there's a real problem there, I think. And certainly a lot of the kind of Athenian sense of certainty about their position in the world

• 20:24Speaker 01

  and their own natural superiority, I think, it takes a bit of a blow.

• 20:28Tristan Hughes?

  Would you see, once again, you know, that idea that you're invincible, you're the dominant power, and it's slightly being etched away by the recent disastrous, by the setbacks that they've suffered?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, Athenian ideology is all about Athenian superiority. You know, these were the people who were literally emerged from the earth of Attica, you know.

• 20:45Tristan Hughes?

  That was their mythological belief, wasn't it?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Exactly, that's right. They were blessed by Athena's chosen people. You know, the agriculture, ground zero is Athens. You know, Triptolemus, the bringer of agriculture, you know, starts, Athenians starts off spreading grain from Athens. So it really concedes itself as the very centre of the Greek world. I mean, you know. You know, whether the Periclean funerals by Pericles or whether it's by Thucydides, I mean, the sentiments expressed there about Athens being the education of the rest of Greece is certainly the I kinds of ideas that Athenians would happily have signed up to.

• 21:23Tristan Hughes?

  Now, you mentioned Thucydides there and you've mentioned it a couple of times already. So, Anister, I mean, who are these key sources who are integral to our story today?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Well, certainly, Thucydides is probably our most important source. And he gets us to practically the end of the Peloponnesian War.

• 21:40Tristan Hughes?

  He's a, yes, and who is, who is Thucydides?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  So he's an Athenian general. He actually fought in the Peloponnesian War, in the first phases of the Peloponnesian War. He's a general who's actually been exiled by the Athenians for being unsuccessful in campaigns in the north. So he's perhaps got a little bit of an axe to grind against Athens and particularly against its democracy and particularly its democratic politicians. So a wonderful historian, whose account is often held up as, you know, the first example of scientific history. I mean, these days, you know, we're increasingly worried about what we see as his biases, his, his tendency to be a bit faster loose with the truth. But, but, you know, still a really important source. And unfortunately, his work, which was always designed to go to the very end of the Peloponnesian War, was never finished.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  And so it's continued in its final phases by another general. It seems to be, you know, generals writing histories and this is a gentleman named Xenophon, again, another Athenian, who writes an account of the final phases of the Peloponnesian War.

• 22:43Tristan Hughes?

  Do we have any other types of sources as well? Do you have inscriptions or references to the war and other types of sources?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've got a lot of inscription evidence from it. I mean, the wonderful thing about the Athenians is that they're, they're an inscription loving people.

• 22:55Tristan Hughes?

  They're bureaucrats, aren't they?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  They are. So, so we've got fantastic sort of inscriptions and those are really, really very helpful for us and often can be a corrective. Two Thucydides. So, so they're really helpful in that respect. And we also have a number of literary sources produced at this time, the Comedies of Aristophanes, the tragedies of Euripides, particularly from this period, are all part of the mix as well.

• 23:16Tristan Hughes?

  Is Athenian drama, they like sometimes bringing on contemporary events or political events that they kind of bring into their works, although maybe a bit covertly sometimes?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  That's right. Yes. I mean, so, you know, Athenian drama is always set in a mythological period, but often the themes it's touching on are extraordinarily contemporary. So take a tragedy like Trojan Women, for example, which, you know, there is no better tragedy to explore what it's like to deal with the consequences of warfare and the tragedy of subject populations at the hands of their captors. And it's a really powerful indictment, actually, of war and, and try and strikingly, you know, produced by the Athenians as the Peloponnesian War is ongoing. And, and you have to think, you know, there's something really wonderful about this culture that is prepared during times of warfare to actually interrogate warfare so strongly. I mean, these days, you know, the expectation would

• 24:10Speaker 01

  be that you'd put on something a bit more patriotic, but they don't go for sort of patriotic drama or jingoistic drama. They go for quite hard hitting drama that confronts the realities of the kind of lived experience that they're dealing with.

• 24:21Tristan Hughes?

  That's another, once again, another conversation. But actually, I mean, the whole setting of that one in Athens brings me to another question I feel I need to ask before we go more into the narrative of those last, that last decade or so, which is like, what does Athens look like at that time? I mean, how does it function? How does it survive? What do we know about Athens as a place at that time?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yes, look, it's under stress. And it's under stress because Athens's great problem is always the challenge of feeding itself. You know, it, although it dominates the surrounding countryside, the area, you know, as we, and we know as Attica, the grain production of Attica is probably not sufficient to maintain the large urban population. So they're always hugely dependent on grain supply. And, and, and this is a real issue for, for Athens. And that it's very reliant on grain supplies from the Black Sea and they have to come through the whole Hellespont. And that's its kind of Achilles heel, as it were. In addition to this, I mean, after the, the The failure of the Sicilian Expedition.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  We also see Sparta establishing a permanent military encampment nearby Athens on a place called Decolletia. And in fact, the Decolletian War is often a phrase that's used for these final phases of the war. So it's also a city that's really increasing the under siege. You know, they can see, you know, in the distance up on the hills of Decolletia, the campfires of the Spartans. Slaves, for example, start to revolt and escaped in the Spartan encampment. For the first time, we've ever seen slaves fleeing Athens. So up to 20,000 or so slaves, slaves flee. The countryside is no longer as safe as it used to be. Spartan raiding parties come out. So, so there's a lot of that.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  There's also, I think, an increasing dissatisfaction with things like the military capacity of their soldiers. So we start to see the rise of use of mercenaries. There's a, in fact, for the Sicilian Expedition, they bring in a whole herd of mercenaries, it all goes, goes badly. And so, yes, yeah, there's all sorts of things there. The mercenaries arrive too late to join the Sicilian Expedition. And so they've got all these mercenaries, they don't know what to do with them. So they send them back home. And along the way, these mercenaries commit the most astonishing atrocities. Most famously at the city of Mycalessus, they slaughter everyone, including a school full of children, as well as all the women and even the animals as well.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  So again, it's a warfare that is changing its nature from, well, the early ways in which warfare was done, where you two armies of hoplites would meet on a flat bit of battle and kind of, you know, duke it out, to increasingly kind of vicious, nasty, brutish kind of war.

• 27:09Tristan Hughes?

  And with that setting, so you say there are tensions in Athens following the failure of the Syracusean Expedition. They're reliant on grain coming in, it's at through almost that choke point to modern Dardanelles, the ancient head of spawn from the Black Sea. You've got Spartans in the distance, they're now occupying Decolletia around that time. There is, is that in the last few years of the, of the 410s BC, so let's say from 415 to 410, is that a period of real stress for the Athenians? Is it really difficult? Is that Dire Straits time?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  It is, and we see them thrashing around for kinds of all sorts of solutions. So, for example, in four eleven, they decide to abandon democracy and

• 27:48Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  and establish an oligarchy, which is extraordinary. But they they think, look, democracy has had it, they it hasn't succeeded. They increasingly become so desperate that kind of individuals, the cult of the individuals starts to take hold, the idea that kind of a great man will solve our problems for us. And that, again, represents a significant shift, in some ways more of a significant shift than I think the the lurch towards oligarchy is this idea that what we need is a savior. And the the savior figure on everyone's lip in this period is, of course, the extraordinary Alcibiades.

• 28:21Tristan Hughes?

  They never saw Pericles in way similar to that. That's a different kind of setting, is it?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, always there was a bit of a kind of cult of a personality around Pericles. But I'm not sure that Pericles was ever thought as a savior of Athens in quite the way that Alcibiades does. I mean, I talked about, you know, the political clubs. And one of the things we know that they'd start doing is starting to assassinate kind of people who'd spoken out against Alcibiades.

• 28:43Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. Okay, so who exactly was Alcibiades, this cult hero at this time, it seems?

• 28:48Speaker 01

  So Alcibiades is a figure who basically dominates this period. I mean, he's he's an extraordinary individual. Where to start with Alcibiades? I mean, he is aristocratic, comes from perhaps the most important of the aristocratic houses by through his mother. He's in one of what we call one of the Alchemionides, so which had been an important aristocratic house, fabulously wealthy, spectacularly good at self-promotion. So, you know, he wanders around the marketplace in the finest purple clothes. He's famous for having the most beautiful dog in Athens, whose tail he cuts off to the great alarm of everyone. And then when challenged about, why did you cut the tail of your beautiful dog off? He said, well, it's to get everyone talking about me.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  He's extraordinarily vain, and he's fantastically good-looking, it must be said. Part of his vanity, for example, he famously refused to learn to play the flute because he felt the puffing out his cheeks ruined his features. So he's wealthy, he's extraordinarily good-looking, he's has a talent for for military, he's charming.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  He was supposed to be on the Sicilian expedition, but then, you know, gets caught up in a kind of religious scandal just before it.

• 29:58Tristan Hughes?

  This is cutting off the genitals of these weird statues called herms.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  That's right. So just before the Sicilian expedition, there's this thing called the mutilation of the herms, which is possibly an anti-Sicilian expedition, you know, that Hermes, the god of travel, suddenly, you know, all these herms, these representations of Hermes are attacked. So is this a kind of anti-Sicilian expedition? It's a huge act of sacrilege. There's a major inquiry as part of the inquiries into kind of religious sacrilege and profanation that's happening in Athens. Turns out that Alcibiades has been holding kind of very sacrilegious profane dinner parties. And so anyway, he can see the writing on the wall. So he escapes. Interestingly, he escapes from Athens to Sparta.

• 30:43Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Joins the Spartans. His family's always historically had good connections with Sparta. So he joins the Spartans. He's the mastermind who suggests that they fortify Decolletia because he knows how strategically important this is. But while in Sparta, he manages to seduce the queen of Sparta, the king's wife, and installs a bastard son who will then grow up to be one of the kings of Sparta, Leo Tigadus, who's then eventually kind of pushed off the throne because it turns out he's the bastard son of Alcibiades. So he's with the Spartans. But then, of course, you know, seducing the wife of the queen isn't a great way to maintain your popularity in Sparta.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  So he then flees them, goes back to Athens. Everyone thinks he's the savior on Athens.

• 31:30Tristan Hughes?

  He's the person who's advised the Spartans to pitch camp in Decolletia in their territory. Their memory is quite assured in that respect.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's a sign of his strategic genius. And importantly, what he claims to offer the Athenians and what I think both Sparta and Athens realise at this point is that what's the great, going to be the great kind of game changer is going to be whoever can get Oger on their side. Because that is what's going to finally solve the Peloponnesian War. You know, Athens and Sparta could go on forever. What you need is something that can kind of break the stalemate, change the game. And that's the wealth and power of Persia.

• 32:08Tristan Hughes?

  And Persia at that time, it is still the superpower, isn't it? Greece is just a small speck at the edge of the Persian Empire. It is huge. And I guess most importantly, it's hugely wealthy.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Extraordinarily wealthy. It has the resources to mobilize forces that both Athens and Sparta can only dream about. And it's really the realization that if one of us can get Persia on our side, that we will win. And Al-Sabadi is quite rightly says, you know, the Persians negotiating with Persian kings is my kind of bag. You know, I'm absolutely the right man for it. And indeed manages to convince them. It's part of the reason why they give up on the democracy in four eleven is in fact, the idea that they're trying to make themselves more amenable for Al-Sabadi's to negotiate a kind of alliance between Persia and Athens.

• 32:52Tristan Hughes?

  And so what happens in this new field, which seems incredibly important away from the battlefield? You know, this is the diplomatic battlefield. So the Spartans as well realize they've got to try and get the Persians on side. I mean, so how does that all unravel? You've got Al-Sabadi's on one side, the Spartans on the other. And I guess the Persians or representative of the Persians just hearing their cases.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Well, that's right. And indeed, the Persians themselves are being activist, actually. They see that there's real potential for them in this conflict. They lost, of course, the Persian wars. They lost a lot of control over their coastline as a result of the Persian wars. And so, so it's an opportunity for them to reclaim the cities on the, on the coast of Asia Minor, modern day Turkey. And so, so they see some real potential in that. Also, what they'd also noticed is increasingly figures who were usurpers in Persia were starting to make alliances with Athens.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  And so, so we'd seen a couple of rogue satraps, as to say rogue Persian governors, starting to enter into kind of alliances with Athens and destabilizing the great king. So they, they increasingly realize that actually this activist expansion at Athens is not a good thing for them. And so we see two particular satraps, Phanabazus and Tisaphernes, start to mobilise diplomatic relations initially with Sparta. Alcibiades comes in and says, look, actually, it's in your best interest not to go for one side or the other, but rather to sort of maintain a status quo. And so is relatively effective early on in in stopping the détente between

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Persia and Sparta. But eventually, what we see Persia doing is siding with Sparta.

• 34:35Tristan Hughes?

  So what happens, let's do the next five years, because and then we can finish on this last few years where you get into real big detail. But let's say between 410 and 406 B.C. That's that's an appropriate time, isn't it with the story of Alcibiades? How do Athens's fortunes, I mean, how do they fare in those four years when Alcibiades is right at the forefront?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so initially, things are going well for Athens. And under Alcibiades, they have a number of successes.

• 35:01Tristan Hughes?

  It's a bit of a revival at this time.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  It's a bit of a revival. It's a good period. But Persia and Sparta are getting closer. And indeed, Persia decides to fund a Spartan fleet. This is the game changer. Now, Sparta's not very good at naval battles. It takes a while for them to get reasonably good at it. So there are a couple of false starts. You know, in 410 and 408 and stuff, we see a number of unsuccessful naval battles, particularly around the Hellespont. So and the Hellespont itself becomes increasingly fractious in this period. So we have certain some city-states like Cestos, for example, which is on the on the Hellespont, I'm being very pro-Athenian,

• 35:46Speaker 01

  but it's opposite number on the opposite coast as a line of the Hellespont, Abydos goes totally Spartan. And so so around 411, we see the Hellespont kind of divide between Athens and Sparta. And we're starting to see increasing kind of naval actions in this period. Sparta is trying to blockade the Athenian fleet. The Athenian fleet manages to get To escape them. And so, so there's a lot of instability at this time.

• 36:13Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think so? Sparta is always, do you think Sparta had always realised that the key to defeating Athens would be to take the war to sea, but they never had that ability, but with the Persian backing, they now have that ability. And with that, they're now taking the war into the sea. And are they realising that to strike at Athens and its navy, it's not actually striking directly at the city of Athens, the very powerful city of Athens. But is it that it's that supply route? It's it's taking control of that supply route and basically starving Athens out. Is that their strategy?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So it's both taking out the navy and also controlling the supply lines. And I think those two things really are what are the fatal consequences for it. And the the Spartans get better at it. I mean, from a very low base, it must be said, but but I mean, so but still by four oh seven, you know, the Battle of Nuthion, for example. Not a pretty conclusive naval bath, but certainly one in which the Spartans managed to capture about twenty or so or so Athenian ships. And and this is in fact where we start to see Alcibiades's star wane. So after the Battle of Nuthion, Athens has realised that in fact, all the promises that Alcibiades was making about being able to get Persia on their side,

• 37:27Speaker 01

  about, you know, being able to hold back the Sparta just haven't been true. Alcibiades can see the writing on the wall, so he flees again. So this time, he has a castle in the Hellespont. So he has to flee off to his castle in the Hellespont and hangs out there. And then what we see is increasingly the might of the the Spartan fleet. The Spartans managed to do some really good things. And they blockaded the Athenian fleet in the harbour at Lesbos. And this would have been again, the end of Athens, had Athens not been very lucky in some ways. To be able to defeat them nearby at the place called Aganousai Islands. And this is, this is a surprise victory, I think, in some ways for the Athenian.

• 38:10Tristan Hughes?

  That's so interesting, isn't it? Right, we'll get to Aganousai in a second, but it almost feels like so completely by this time, I said, you mentioned there were a couple of full starts with the Spartan navy, but within a few years, if there was still any, like an aura of invincibility of the Athenian fleet, you know, the backbone to their power. That has now been, that is now gone. They've shown that the Athenian fleet can be beaten and Sparta can be victorious with Persian backing in this field. So you say, when we get to Aganousai, which we're going to now, I mean, Spartan heads are up by that.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and look, I think that's why Notoian matters so much is because it's not a huge Spartan victory, but the fact that it is a victory is, I think hugely damaging to, to Athenian psychology. And that's, I think, why, you know, the dissatisfaction with Alcibiades is so strong.

• 38:56Tristan Hughes?

  And so you mentioned the word Aganousai. So what is this great battle? That seems one of two of these massive sea battles that occurs right at the end of this war.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. So the Aganousai Islands are a small group of islands off the island of Lesbos. The Athenian fleet is in some ways blockaded into the main harbour at Lesbos by the Spartans. So a small fleet is sent out and they manage to lure the Spartan fleet away and are successful in freeing the Athenian fleet and also defeating the Spartans as well. So it's a very clear Athenian victory that saves the majority of the Athenian fleet. Now, it's also a kind of extraordinary battle because it has this amazing aftermath as well. Which is that just at the end of the battle, a storm comes up and the generals make the strategic decision

• 39:46Speaker 01

  not to pick up the bodies of the Athenian sailors who were of the Athenian ships that had been attacked and destroyed by the Spartans. And this proves to be a fatal decision for these generals because when they arrive back in Athens, the families of the drowned sailors or the sailors whose bodies weren't recovered indict the generals and talk about how terrible it was that they wouldn't stop to pick up the bodies of their loved ones. And so the assembly turns on the generals. And so this is amazing moment where they've got this incredible victory that has saved the Athenian fleet. And yet the people turn on them. There is a trial and the generals are sentenced to death.

• 40:29Tristan Hughes?

  They're sentenced to death, they're victorious generals, who have, is it, they've just saved their fleets when it seems like the Spartans have got their tails up. It's mind blowing, that decision.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Well, so this goes down as one of the great indictments of democracy. It's pretty clear that in fact, legal procedures weren't followed. And suddenly, the anti-democratic forces always hold up the trial of the Aganousi generals is a good example of the intemperate nature of democracy, that it's driven by its passions rather than by reason, that it's driven by emotion. And, and this idea of turning on these victorious generals, a disaster. And so they turn on their generals. So the generals are the big loser of the battle of Aganousi. The winners, however, are the slaves who rode at Aganousi. So Aganousi is this extraordinary battle because it has these two outcomes, one which is the generals that get put on, get put on trial.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  But then the slaves who actually had rode at the battle in Aganousi, hadn't been responsible also for this extraordinary success. They get their freedom and seem to be made Athenian citizens. So they go from being slave rowers to suddenly Athenian citizens practically overnight as a result of Aganousi.

• 41:41Tristan Hughes?

  Well, good for them. And as I said, it's a great victory, as you mentioned, it's a significant victory for the Athenians. They've saved their fleet. I mean, the language that you've used, Alistair, almost sounds like one great defeat for the Athenians and their fleet is gone. Was it the same for the Spartans? I mean, they've just been defeated at Aganousi. So, so what happens next? Is it almost like the Lernaean Hydra, that the Spartans, they can just get another fleet quickly, thanks to the Persians?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Well, this is it. This is the great advantage of having Pejo on your side, is you lose one fleet, you get another one. And it must be said that the Persians at this time have fully committed. So in the initial stages of the Persian Spartan alliance, Spartans actually accuse the Persians of shortchanging them and being not too flash with their cash in terms of, in terms of supporting their military efforts. Certainly by this stage, however, they're fully committed to the alliance. And, and also the other thing is that there's a very capable Spartan commander by the name of Lysander, who is on the scene. And, and he is someone who the Persians seem to have extraordinary confidence in, particularly

• 42:46Speaker 01

  the son of the Persian king, Darius II. This is a guy by the name of Cyrus the Younger. And he and Lysander have a very close relationship. And, and Lysander, again, you know, we talked about Alcibiades being the figure who dominates, you know, Athenian politics. Lysander is the, the figure who dominates the Spartan side of things. And again, a good example of the way in which war provides opportunities for individuals who might not have otherwise great opportunities for advancement. So Lysander is what's technically called a mothax, that is to say, a, a bastard or a, or a kind of, certainly some kind of parasitism.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  So normally a mothax is someone whose father is a citizen, but his mother might be a, a helot or a serf, or possibly they're citizens who, who are kind of impoverished. Anyway, he has to be, have a sponsor to go through the Spartan education system. So he's someone who clearly the wealthy elites of Sparta saw some potential in as a young man. He's sponsored to go through the education system. He takes, is the lover of, ends up being the lover of one of the future Spartan kings, a man by the name of Giselaou. And certainly he's clearly very, very diplomatically capable. And he's a very capable naval commander. And he establishes very good relationship with the Persian prince Cyrus.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Land of Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week.

• 45:19Tristan Hughes?

  So thanks to Lysander, you know, this strong relationship with Cyrus and with the Persians. With that backing, how long does it take for Sparta to be able to bounce back after this disastrous defeat?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it must be said that Lysander had, of course, been in charge of the fleet at the time of Aganousis. So one of the problems had been that Sparta had planned this rotation of officers. So initially, Lysander is the naval commander. He's then replaced by a person called Callicratesus. Again, another moth accent, interestingly. So there seems to be something about the way in which the Spartan military campaign is leading, letting these kind of, as it were, individuals who wouldn't normally have an opportunity to rise to greater prominence. And it's Callicratesus who's the person who's responsible for the Spartan fleet. Lysander gets the fleet, in charge of the fleet. And at that point, he's starting to harry the Athenians. And in particular, it's around the Hellespont.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  He happens to observe the way in which the Athenian fleet is behaving in the Hellespont. And in particular, he notices that they tend to pull up their ships at a certain spot. And they also tend to take their meals quite regularly at a certain spot. And he realizes this is going to be a huge point of vulnerability. Interestingly, Alcibiades also saw, recognized the way in which the Athenian fleet was vulnerable. And comes down to the Athenian fleet from his castle.

• 46:40Tristan Hughes?

  Well, he sees this all from his castle.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  It's from his castle. And he comes down and says, look, you know, this is a bad idea, what you're doing. Of course, they shoo him away. Turns out to be right, of course. And anyway, Lysander manages to capture the Athenian fleet, essentially by surprise. The 180 or so ships that constitute the Athenian fleet at this point are captured by Lysander. And at this point, it's game over.

• 47:03Tristan Hughes?

  That is game over. That is the major Athenian fleet that they have, isn't it?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  That's right. So this is at Aegis Potomac. And this is essentially game over for, for the Athenians. So Lysander, you know, managed, so on, on the back of, you know, their tremendous success at Agonussi. They, you know, full of, I think, false confidence, you know, retreat, you know, the fleet goes back to the Hellespont. You know, a while later, Lysander comes along with his new powerful fleet. Recognizes what the Athenians are doing, captures them at Aegis Potomac. About 3,000 Athenian soldiers, 180 ships, only about 10 ships escape. So, so it's a complete, a complete rout for the Athenians.

• 47:42Tristan Hughes?

  A complete rout. And I'm always just astonished by how quickly that the Lysander and the Persians, they're able to create that new navy or get that new navy together. So as you say, this is like within a year or so, isn't it, to Bargon? So it's incredibly quick that they bounce back and are able to inflict this devastating loss on the Athenians.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's a brutal, brutal loss. I mean, Lysander slaughters all the Athenian naval people. And this is terrible. I mean, He captures them, they debate about what to do with them. And, you know, the, the fleet is eager for blood. They start reciting all the kinds of war crimes that the Athenians had committed. In particular, one that they keep coming back to is the time that some Athenians seized a Corinthian ship. And essentially through all the Corinthian soldiers and sailors overboard, let them drown. And so it's in memory of these kinds of atrocities that the Athenians have committed, that no mercy is given to the Athenian soldiers and the, and the, and the Spartans slaughtered them all.

• 48:42Tristan Hughes?

  So the game's up, they've got control of the heli spawn now, so they've got control of that grain supply. Is the next aim, I mean, is it full speed ahead to Athens at that point?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yes, there's a little bit of mopping up that needs to do. Samos needs to be sorted out and that, which is what they do. And in fact,

• 48:56Tristan Hughes?

  That's an Athenian ally, is it?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Athenian ally at this point. And, and in fact, Lysander is actually worshipped as a god on Samos. He's famously declared to be the first living person who's worshipped as a god. And a festival, the Lysandreia, is, is established. But Lysander heads to Athens. And at this point, the allies of Sparta, particularly Corinth and Thebes, are begging for Athenian blood. They want the city wiped out. They want, you know, the whole place to be erased from the map.

• 49:26Tristan Hughes?

  And how many people do we think are in Athens at that time? Tens of thousands?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes, easily. And importantly, Lysander is the person who doesn't decide to do that. He, you know, establishes that, you know, they will of course have to pay some penalties. You know, they must be neutralized militarily. Well, you know, their navy's been destroyed. He ensures that their walls are torn down.

• 49:44Tristan Hughes?

  These are the long walls, aren't they? They're really powerful.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  And also the walls round the city as well. So the long walls, the walls that go down to the Piraeus, the harbour, and then the city walls as well, these are all torn down, leaving the city exposed, you know, unable to defend itself. And more importantly, he establishes a pro-Spartan, effectively junta, to, to kind of rule Athens. And this is the so-called rule of the thirty.

• 50:07Tristan Hughes?

  Are there any other things that they have to do? Is there, do they have to pay tribute? Or is, is that more just the humiliation, the taking away of their defenses? But the city's not completely burnt to the ground. Is that almost kind of the compromise almost that is reached?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yes, that they have to acknowledge the Spartan hegemony. They can't have an independent foreign policy. They're ruled by this pro-Spartan government. So that's really what happens to Athens.

• 50:33Tristan Hughes?

  It's not a fall unlike other places. I mean, I did the fall of Carthage not too long ago, and that ends with the Romans going through all of the streets, fighting building by building, story by story, killing everyone that they see. And so that is almost avoided with Athens. And so you do still have the Athenian viewpoint of it afterwards because the city endures. So in that respect, I mean, they've seen their city fall from, the empire is no more. But how do the Athenians view all this? I mean, are they a city just in absolute abject? Are they completely demoralised?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  They are. And we know that when stories of the losses came to Athens, word went throughout the city. People were discussing what's going to happen to us. They thought back to all the kinds of terrible things they'd done to the cities that they conquered. Is that what's going to happen, happen to us? Partly why the Spartans don't completely destroy them is a memory of the tremendous service that the Athenians had done during the Persian Wars and a memory of that. I think also it's the case that Sparta was always a bit, a bit concerned that places like Corinth and Thebes shouldn't have the entire world to themselves. And, and so I think they think of Athens as at least keeping Corinth and Thebes in check.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  And I think also they think, you know, that they don't have to, you know, listen to precisely what Corinth and Thebes say. They're not the, as it were, the lackeys of Corinth and Thebes.

• 51:59Tristan Hughes?

  And so what happens in new look Sparta after they've been brought to heel?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I mean, Sparta continues, but it's got this problem of Lysander, who is now, you know, being worshipped as a god on Samos, you know, has been reorganising Athenian politics. And so there's a real struggle within Sparta about what to, what to do in terms of, in terms of these arrangements that Lysander has made. Because it's not just Athens he's reorganised. It's Samos, it's all sorts of violence as he's going back down from Hellespont, reorganising their political organisations and establishing pro-Spartan governments. And, and so there's a real concern that Lysander himself is getting too big for his boots. And so there's a real problem about what you do with these kind of spectacular generals? How do you reintegrate them into society?

• 52:43Speaker 01

  But it's a very hierarchical society like Sparta where you have two kings. And it's a very kind of old constitution.

• 52:51Tristan Hughes?

  And so how does Athens fare? So I mean, they've been rebuilt. They've got this new constitution by Lysander, who then is, you know, the subject of, I mean, Sparta now has its own problems, even though it's the victors, you say with figures like Lysander. I mean, but Athens at that time, I mean, how does that, how does the city fare? And its citizens fare now is under, I guess, kind of under the control of the Spartans or aligned to the Spartans.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the regime of the thirty is regarded as perhaps the dark, one of the darkest days of Athens. So it's remarkably brutal. They establish kind of kill squads to go out and kill any anti-Spartan, pro-democratic forces. They also established kill squads to go out to other cities as well, because it must be remembered that a lot of Athenians escaped Athens. They could see the writing on the wall in the final stage of the Peloponnesian War. And so there were Athenian exiles up in Macedonia, for example, Euripides is up in Macedonia. You know, a huge number of exiles in Cyprus, in the quarter of Evagros. So, so there are Athenians all over the place. And, and, you know, so they try and mobilize opposition and the thirty send out assassins.

• 53:57Tristan Hughes?

  Bounty hunters kind of thing.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, to, to, they commission people to go to Salamis, most famously. They commissioned, they asked Socrates to be part of one of these squads to go and retrieve a person called Leon of Salamis. And to bring him for trial, Socrates refuses to have any part in the, in the regime of the thirty, even though a number of his students are in fact leading members of the thirty. So it's a really brutal day. They, they harass the wealthy metics, the wealthy foreigners who are living in Athens, seizing property from them, violating their houses. Uh, it's just a terrible, dark, dark period. Now, fortunately, it's a relatively short kind of period because

• 54:39Speaker 01

  a remnants of the Athenian democratic forces arrives in the Piraeus, led by a man called Thrasobulus. And he manages to.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Essentially overthrow the thirty. And you might think, well, why don't the Spartans stand up to the threats of bullets and, and, you know, wash this kind of pro democratic, anti thirty movement. And it's really because Lysander's star has fallen at this point. And the fact that someone's come along and starting to undo Lysander's, Lysander's organisation, I think the Spartans are quite keen on that. And, you know, they also quite like to stick it to Lysander, I think, at this point. So they-

• 55:19Tristan Hughes?

  This is interesting because like looking at things in the past, it's like the fall of Carthage, permanent fall for the Carthaginians and the ancient Carthaginian city of Carthage, at least. Fall of Roman Britain, permanence, Romans never come back. Fall of Athens, then? Would you argue that it's not a permanent thing? Do you then see Athens's power reviving after this?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yes, it's extraordinary how quickly they bounce back, actually.

• 55:42Tristan Hughes?

  So much for a fall, isn't it? Yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yeah. I mean, it's as falls go, it's how you want to do your fall, I think, really. I mean, you know, within a couple of decades, actually, Athens, Athens will be back. And that's because Sparta gets too ambitious and itself falls foul of its own ambitions. It gets involved in a kind of coup in Persia. Cyrus, the son of Darius, decides to become usurper. So when Darius passes on the kingship to Cyrus's older brother, Artaxerxes, Cyrus doesn't like this and thinks he can make a better job and so brings the Spartan forces to join him in a kind of overthrowing Artaxerxes. So Sparta itself

• 56:26Speaker 01

  will get itself through its own kind of ambitions, caught up into all sorts of things. And out of that kind of turmoil, Athens will see an opportunity to rise.

• 56:34Tristan Hughes?

  Athens rises again. It's interesting, isn't it? Because I was in my main areas after Alexander's death. And then you get another fall of Athens then, when they tried to avenge against the Macedonians after Alexander's death. And once again, it's a humiliating treaty and then you've got Macedonian garrison in Muniquea. And then, of course, you have the Romans later. So it's almost like Athens experiences multiple falls in its time, you know? And then there's just one, you know, but in several cases, they are able to bounce back from them.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Yes, and I mean, I think, you know, really, what ultimately will, of course, sort out everything is, of course, the rise of the Macedonians. So, so, so, but you, what you never have after the fall of Athens is that strong kind of bipolar nature of the Greek world. The, the, the fifth century is a century of a bipolar world of very dominant Spartans, Peloponnesian League and Athens and its empire. If you go through to the fourth century, what you see is it's much more bitty. You see, you know, at some point Sparta is, you know, in the ascendancy. At some point Athens is the ascendancy. Thebes suddenly comes out of nowhere, you know, Thessaly has a go, you know, Jason of Phara.

• 57:42Tristan Hughes?

  Jason of Phara, what a player.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  And then eventually the Macedonians come and sort everything out. But the fourth century is complicated in a way that the fifth century isn't in terms of, in terms of geopolitics. And I think that's, you know, if we talk about the fall of Athens, I think that's what we're talking about is the idea that there are only two players and that, that what the end of Athens does is it opens up the space for all these other players. And eventually, of course, will create a situation which will allow Macedonia to come in and reach its ascendancy.

• 58:13Tristan Hughes?

  Last question, very quickly, 20 to 30 second answer, I must admit. We talked about Alcibiades. He goes off to his castle at the Hellespont, you know, he's, he's told to go away, sort of bugger off by these commanders. His life after that, it, it doesn't last long, does it?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  No, so he then flees to the Persians.

• 58:32Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, a good idea, I don't think.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  So, so he ends up in the court of Phanabazus, who's one of the sacktraps there. And the story goes, I mean, depends on if you want the political version or the kind of slightly racier version. But anyway, at some point, either on Spartan orders conveyed to Phanabazus, they decide to kill Alcibiades, that's the political version. The slightly racier version is that he's involved in a kind of adulterous affair with a woman. Possibly the family discovers this, they decide when he's in this tent with this woman to set fire to the tent. Alcibiades rushes out to meet his attacker, supposedly naked, only armed with a sword. They fire arrows into him. That's the death of Alcibiades, you know, as part of this kind of adulterous affair and outraged husband.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Or it's a political assassination organised by the Spartans, but both seem entirely plausible.

• 59:23Tristan Hughes?

  And definitely in line with Asperdi's character that has survived, doesn't it, Alastair? This has been a fantastic story and as you've mentioned before, into this fall of Athens, although you could argue there are multiple falls, they said this is the one that is so significant in that kind of the changing of the world order of the Greek world.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely, because as I said, it's this fall of Athens which will lay essentially the foundation for the rise of Macedonia.

• 59:49Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Alastair, just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Always wonderful, thank you.

• 59:58Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professor Alastair Blanchard talking through the dramatic story that is the fall of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to it. Please follow this show, The Ancients, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.