In 404 BCE, starved and blockaded after Aegospotami, Athens surrendered to Sparta, lost its fleet, and saw its walls dismantled. Xenophon’s Hellenica marks the end of the thalassocracy. The Piraeus’ slips stood empty; the creak of oarlocks gave way to the scrape of stones pulled from the Long Walls.
What Happened
After the Hellespont’s disaster, Sparta’s plan was simple: close the Piraeus and wait. Grain from the Black Sea could not pass; Euboean shipments shrank; the streets of Athens thinned. In 404 BCE, the city capitulated. Xenophon’s Hellenica records the surrender and the conditions: tear down the Long Walls, surrender ships save a handful, accept a new political order under Spartan eyes [11].
The sound of defeat was physical. Stones dragged from the Long Walls scraped and thudded in the dust. The color that had brightened the Piraeus—bronze rams, scarlet pennants—dimmed to bare timber and empty slips. The fleet that began in Laurion’s silver now ended as a list of forfeited hulls [1][11].
Place names framed loss: the Piraeus, suddenly quiet; the Acropolis, its reserves of coined silver now irrelevant to movement; Salamis, no longer a fortress in water but an island off a city without power. The Agora filled with rumors, then resignations. Sparta did not need to occupy every street; it had cut the sea away. Thucydides’ “truest cause” had come to its terminus: growth halted by fear realized as force [5][11].
The empire unraveled. Allies who had paid tribute under compulsion declared relief; others faced new dependencies under Sparta. The institutional machinery—quota lists, reassessments, boards—lost purpose without hulls to finance and enforce. The Old Oligarch’s rowing class, proud a decade earlier, found no benches to pull [7][8][9].
Yet the city did not end. It endured reforms, restorations, and attempts to rebuild a navy on a smaller scale. The memory of Pylos and Salamis persisted beside the lesson of Aegospotami. Athens would spend the fourth century inventing ways to distribute burdens (trierarchies) and to mobilize quickly (symmories), even as Macedon rose [10][12][13].
In 404, though, the thalassocracy died. The silence in the Piraeus echoed north to the Hellespont and east to Ionia. Athens’ horizon contracted to the Attic plain until ships could be found again [11].
Why This Matters
Surrender ended Athenian sea power as a system. Without ships, tribute failed; without tribute, ships could not be rebuilt at scale. The Long Walls’ dismantling symbolized a strategic inversion: fortifications became irrelevant once sea control was lost [6][8][11].
The moment completes “Rise by Sea, Fall by Sea.” The city that rose on oars fell when oars fell silent. It set the agenda for the fourth century: reconfigure institutions, share naval burdens differently, and accept diminished reach under Macedonian shadow [10][12][13].
For historians, 404 clarifies mechanisms of imperial collapse: a single operational disaster triggering fiscal, political, and administrative unravelling. Xenophon’s account anchors the timeline of that contraction and the starting point for Athens’ later, smaller naval experiments [11].
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