In 404 BCE, after Aegospotami ended Athens’ sea power, the city surrendered and accepted Spartan terms. Long Walls fell stone by stone, and Spartan scarlet cloaks appeared at Piraeus. The victory crowned Sparta’s land reputation—and began a hegemony enforced more by garrisons and oligarchs than by consent.
What Happened
Athens fell because its last fleet fell first. In 405 BCE, on the Hellespont near Aegospotami, the Spartans cut the Athenian navy to pieces, severing the grain lifeline to the Piraeus and robbing the city of the wooden walls that had kept it safe for a generation [1][14]. A winter of hunger and fear followed. By spring 404, with allies gone, ships lost, and silver dwindling, Athens surrendered to Sparta.
The terms were brutal theater. The Long Walls linking Athens to Piraeus came down to the sound of flutes, their gray blocks thudding to the earth while Spartan harmosts—the garrison governors—fingered the bronze edges of their spears [1]. Scarlet cloaks, once rare in Attica, became a daily sight at Piraeus, where Lysander, Sparta’s admiral-strongman, presided over new arrangements. In place of an imperial democracy, a board of Thirty (the “Thirty Tyrants”) ruled in the city while Spartan allies controlled the harbor [1][14].
What had begun as Sparta’s answer to Athenian domination now became Sparta’s problem: how to manage restless cities spread from Byzantium to Syracuse. The victory was total in numbers—one city humbled, two walls pulled down, three harbors disarmed—but fragile in sentiment. Sparta’s kings, including Agesilaus II a few years later, inherited not only a triumph but the need to police it [17].
Xenophon picks up where Thucydides stops. His Hellenica records the transition from Athenian empire to Spartan command, framing it not as liberation but as a transfer of weight from one set of shoulders to another [1]. Dignified ceremonies at the Acropolis could not quiet the creak of new gates as harmosts installed garrisons in key strongholds. The strategic calculus had shifted: Athens no longer balanced Sparta at sea; Persia waited in the wings; former allies watched the Peloponnesian lion feed.
In Sparta, admiration for hard men and hard rules met the messy reality of overseas authority. Lysander’s network mattered as much as hoplite prowess did. The Spartan reputation—the undefeated phalanx, the terse orders—echoed through places like Samos and Miletus, but so did resentment at the rough handling of civic freedoms [14][12]. The victory produced fewer friends than subjects.
The crash of the Long Walls resounded into the 390s. At Piraeus, the brine-smell of empty slips lingered; on the Areopagus, the Thirty’s edicts traveled fast and cut deep. Even in Sparta there was an awareness that a new kind of war had begun: not triremes ramming under an azure sky, but cities nudged, coerced, and, when necessary, seized. The hegemony that began in 404 would be kept not only by spears but by pen-strokes and garrison keys [1][17][18].
Why This Matters
Athens’ capitulation removed the only Greek navy that could check Sparta at sea and transferred the symbolic center of Greek leadership to the Eurotas. In immediate terms, Sparta gained access to Athenian fortifications, compelled political change inside the city, and established a template—harmosts and friendly oligarchies—for managing conquered or compliant poleis [1][14].
This moment illuminates the theme of garrisons, oligarchs, and compliance: power now meant sitting in a city’s citadel as much as winning in the field. The fluted columns of the Acropolis looked on while new boards supplanted assemblies. Enforcement, not persuasion, became the Spartan instrument, and with it the seeds of resistance took root [1][14][12].
The fall of Athens also linked the Greek mainland to Persian calculations. With the Delian League dispersed and Athenian tribute halted, the Great King could arbitrate later settlements from a position of strength that neither side had enjoyed in 431. What began in gray dust at Piraeus would end in the black-letter clauses of the King’s Peace, when Spartan control depended, paradoxically, on Persian wording [2][19].
Historians track 404 as the start of a 33-year arc: from triumph to overreach to collapse at Leuctra. The very means of victory—harsh discipline, centralized control, contempt for civic nuance—became liabilities once Sparta tried to rule beyond the Peloponnese. Xenophon’s narration, friendly to Sparta, already signals the tension between ancestral moderation and new insolence that later writers like Diodorus would condemn [1][10].
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