that they took all their colleagues (with the exception, of course, of Konon): nor does he distinctly speak of the execution of any other general than Philokles. According to Pausanias Tydeus was bribed not less than Adeimantos; and Lysandros could scarcely afford to keep his faith, such as it was, with one and to break it with the other. There remain only Menandros and Kephisodotos; and it is significant that of these two the former should have associated himself with Tydeus in his insolent rejection of the counsel of Alkibiades. Of Kephisodotos nothing can be said, because nothing has been recorded; but we are assuredly not justified in asserting that he was slain along with Philokles without a distinct warrant for the statement. It was the conviction of Konon that Lysandros planned and Adeimantos deliberately wrought the destruction of the Athenian fleet. If his conviction was right, the whole narrative of this disgraceful catastrophe becomes luminously clear. On any other supposition it is an astounding and insoluble riddle.

The news of the ruin wrought at Syracuse was conveyed by no official dispatch, and its terrors were in some slight degree lessened by the gradual awakening of the people to the knowledge of their loss. The tidings of the catastrophe at Aigospotamoi came upon them with the suddenness of a thunderbolt. When the men of the Paralian trireme, sailing into the harbour, told their dismal story, the cry of agony and despair, as it passed along the double line of walls, rose into a piercing wail when it reached the city. All that night the mourning went up to heaven, for none could close their eyes in sleep. Nothing more could be done. But if they could no longer hope that endurance might be rewarded by victory, an unconditional surrender which would enable the Spartans to slay every Athenian citizen and to send their wives and children into slavery was still out of the question. An assembly held on the next day decreed that the entrances to the harbours should be blocked up, one only remaining open, and that every preparation should be made for undergoing a siege.

Meanwhile Lysandros had better things to do than to hasten with his fleet to the doomed city. The submission of Chalkedon and Byzantion followed of necessity the disaster at the Goat's River, and the Athenian garrisons in these or in other towns he sent straight to Athens, where the pressure of famine was daily becoming more dreadful. Imports indeed

there were; but these were their own settlers who had been established in the Chersonesos, in Melos, Aigina, and elsewhere.

At last Lysandros set out for the city. To the ephors at Sparta and to Agis at Dekeleia he sent messages announcing his approach with a fleet of 200 ships. The tidings were followed by the hasty departure of the full Peloponnesian force under the Spartan king Pausanias. It was now a question of days which should determine whether Athens could insist on any terms at all, or whether she must submit without conditions to the conqueror. The first embassy sent to Agis, when famine had begun to reap its dismal harvest of death, offered free alliance with Sparta, reserving to Athens the possession of Peiraieus and the Long Walls. By Agis they were referred to the ephors, who on hearing the envoys at Sellasia bade them go home again and to return with more reasonable conditions. This rebutt seemed to crush such spirit as still remained in the hearts of the beleaguered people. One condition there was on which the Spartans declared their readiness to treat; but no man dared to urge compliance with this requisition for pulling down one mile in length of each of the Long Walls, until Archestratos urged that it was better to do this than that all the people should die. To this shame they could not yet bow themselves. But the increasing intensity of the famine convinced them that something must be done; and Theramenes offered to go to Lysandros, and ascertain whether this condition was demanded simply as a guarantee of fidelity on the part of the Athenians or whether it was to be used as the means for reducing them to slavery. The mere putting of the question was indeed a virtual admission that, if the Spartans insisted on it simply as a pledge of good faith, the walls should be pulled down. But in their distress the Athenians chose to shut their eyes to the obvious fact, and Theramenes departed on his mission. Three months of frightful misery had passed before he was seen again. He then came to say that he had been detained by Lysandros, who had now sent him back with the answer that terms of peace could be taken into consideration only by the ephors.

There could now be no longer any holding back, for an enemy was within the walls which could not much longer be resisted. Intrusted accordingly with full powers, Theramenes set

upon to

out with nine colleagues. At Sellasia they were called answer the question which had been put to the envoys of the previous embassy; but on the announcement that the Athenians would be bound by their stipulations, whatever these might be, they were allowed to go on to Sparta. Here they were brought face to face with the representatives of the confederacy to which the power of Athens had long been a rock of offence: and along with many others the voices of the Corinthians and Thebans were raised for her destruction. Against this demand the Phokians made a noble protest; and the point was overruled by the Spartans, who declared that they would never allow a city to be inslaved which had done so much good to Hellas in the season of her greatest need. It may be fairly doubted whether, as they said this, they thought so much of the benefits conferred by Athens at Marathon, Salamis, and Mykalê as on advantages which they might receive from her in times yet to come. The discussion ended with the decree (it can scarcely be called by any other name) that the Athenians must pull down their walls, must yield up all their ships except twelve, must receive back their exiles, and follow implicitly the biddings of Sparta. When at length Theramenes announced to the Athenians in their assembly the precise terms imposed on them, a few still raised their voices against this last humiliation; but they were borne down by the vast majority. The submission of Athens was made; and the long strife which had lasted for seven-and-twenty years was virtually at an end. Into that harbour from which had issued but a little while before the fleet which Adeimantos decoyed to its own ruin and the ruin of Athens Lysandros now entered with the fleet of Sparta, bringing with him those exiles whose crimes had made their names infamous. Twelve ships only were left in the desolate and dismantled harbour: and so began, according to Spartan phrase, the first day of freedom for Hellas.

Thus passed away the most splendid phase of Athenian history. Even in its crudest and most imperfect form the polity of Athens was a protest against that spirit of isolation under which the old Eupatrid houses had sprung up to power. To the form of this older society the Spartan had clung with vehement tenacity, and in this attitude he had the sympathy of the Hellenic world generally. Even when the empire of Athens had reached its greatest extension, and when moreover her allies

felt that they received from her benefits which they could never have secured for themselves, these allies still felt a certain soreness at her interference. Their dependence upon her, although they might be utterly unable to defend themselves, was still an evil; and only when after allowing oligarchical factions to seduce them into revolt they found that the freedom with which they had been lured onwards was but a specious name for tyranny, did the demos in many cities set itself to make common cause with the imperial city. But the empire of Athens, it may be said, was aggressive. It could not be otherwise. The necessities which gave birth to the Delian confederacy and which through this led to the more highly-developed supremacy of Athens compelled her to interfere to a certain extent with the freedom or rather the license of states which, although they might be able to do little good, could yet be powerful for mischief, and which, if they did nothing, would reap the same benefits with those members of the confederacy who did everything. Briefly, -with all their faults and with crimes the stains of which no tears could ever wash out, the Athenians were fighting for a law and an order which, they felt, could not be maintained at all if they were to be confined within the bounds of a single city. So far as they went, they were working to make a nation: but into a nation the Hellenic tribes and cities were determined that they should not be moulded. The resistance which Athens encountered compelled her to keep her allies more closely under control, and imparted to her government an appearance of despotism which, however, was at its worst a slight yoke indeed when compared with the horrors of Spartan rule.

THE fall of Athens rendered inevitable the subjugation of the Hellenic race by some foreign power. The victory of Sparta was virtually the assertion that a Greek nation should never be called into existence; and from this point the history of the several Greek states becomes again, what it had been before the rise of the Athenian empire, the history of a number of cities, by whom the principle of isolation was regarded as the very essence of freedom. The establishment of Spartan supremacy soon dispelled the illusion that the only hindrance to Hellenic freedom lay in Athenian power. With the snaring of the Athenian fleet at Aigospotamoi the mask was thrown off, and Sparta through her administrators entered on a course of tyranny at which even oligarchs stood aghast. The seed thus sown soon bore an abundant harvest, and the reapers appeared in the sovereigns of Macedon.

To all who had taken part in the conspiracy of the Four Hundred or approved their policy, the entry of Lysandros into Athens was a day of rejoicing. Even the more moderate oligarchs looked forward now to a government in which the culture of refined gentlemen would stand out in marked contrast with the vulgarity of popular debaters. To such a society Theramenes, who had never liked the idea of things going further than he wished, was most willing to join himself; and when, along with Kritias, he became a member of the board of thirty men chosen to draw up a new constitution for the city, he may have thought himself sufficiently rewarded. This