Sacrifices were made to the gods in celebration and various festivities were held. Then a high-level delegation arrived in the city from Lacedaemon. It was headed by a former ephor, Endius, who addressed the ecclesia in direct and simple terms. He wanted the long war, which had lasted on and off for more than two decades, to come to an end. He argued that both sides were suffering, Athens even more than Sparta, and that it was time to halt the mutually self-destructive struggle. He proposed a treaty with Athens.
Men of Athens, we want to make peace with you, on these terms; that each of us keep what cities we now possess; that the strongholds we maintain in one another’s territories [Pylos, for example, and Decelea] be abandoned, and that our prisoners of war be ransomed by exchange, one Laconian for one Athenian.
How could all this be, only two years after the Sicilian Expedition? So huge and so complete had been the destruction of manpower in 413 that most people expected Athens to concede defeat.
In fact, this huge historical calamity did not end the war, but it did transform it. Once the news from Sicily had settled in, the first reaction of the Athenians was to give up hope. The thousands of hoplites, cavalry, and men of military age who had lost their lives could not be replaced until a new generation had grown up. The best and most experienced generals were gone. There were hardly any ships in the Piraeus dockyards and most of the crews were dead. The treasury was nearly empty. There was a widespread fear that a vengeful Sicilian fleet was already at sea and heading for Piraeus. The allies would all surely revolt and the Athenian Empire would collapse.
After thoroughly frightening itself, the demos regained its nerve with a titanic effort of will. Despite its limited resources, it decided not to give up the struggle. Somehow or another it scraped together the funds and the timber to put together a new fleet. It raised money and did its best to keep its “allies” loyal.
The old system of an annual subscription fee for members of the Delian League was replaced by a 5 percent tax on imports and exports to or from all harbors in the empire; it was believed that this would raise more money and would be a more equitable system of payment. It underlined the fact that the Athenian “peace” throughout the Mediterranean encouraged trade and economic growth even in time of war. In the city itself the people took measures of economy and reform, appointing a committee of “wise men” to advise the ecclesia on the situation. Thucydides summed up the mood drily: “As is the way with democracies, now that they were panic-stricken, they were ready to put everything in order.”
And here was the surprising thing. Although there were major revolts, much of the empire stood firm alongside its master. There was good reason for this. Persia had by no means gone away. The Athenians may have been high-handed and arrogant, but they did provide protection from the eastern threat. Also they now took more care to treat their subjects well; when they expelled a Spartan garrison from the rebel polis of Byzantium, they did not replace it with one of their own—an example of what a contemporary historian called a “new policy of justness and conciliation adopted as a means of recovering the empire.”
That said, Chios off the Anatolian coast revolted and other league members on the Asiatic seaboard followed suit. The Athenian fleet laid waste the fertile countryside on the island and besieged the main town. By the spring of 411 the situation was that in the northern Aegean and the Hellespont the empire was intact, but a good number of the Ionian poleis had seceded.
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The Spartans reacted to the misfortunes of Athens by coming back to life. They had always had a bad conscience about the outbreak of war in 431 because they had not accepted an Athenian offer of arbitration beforehand; but with the renewal of hostilities after the Peace of Nicias they felt it was Athens that had broken the peace treaty.
They had always claimed that their original strategic aim was to free the Greeks, but now an easy victory seemed to await them after which, in the words of Thucydides, “the overthrow of the Athenians would leave them in quiet enjoyment of the supremacy over all Hellas.”
This was not just a matter of high politics. Individual Spartans foresaw a chance to make their fortunes. According to tradition, nine thousand Equals or full male citizens received country estates, the income from which paid for training and education and for maintaining their communal messes. Only about five thousand Equals fought at the battle of Plataea against the Persian invader in 479, and no more than 3,500 had fought at Mantinea in 418 against the Argive coalition.
The reasons for this decline are both obscure and various, but it is clear that fewer and fewer Spartans were able to afford the high costs of citizenship and that poverty excluded many males who were otherwise eligible to join the Equals.
Spartans came to hope, writes Diodorus Siculus, that if they won the war they would “enjoy great wealth, Sparta as a whole would be made greater and more powerful, and the estates of private citizens would enjoy a great rise in prosperity.”
Poverty was not only an issue for individuals; the Spartan state had insufficient resources to carry on the war, however eager they now were to do so. They could not afford to mount a serious challenge to the Athenians at sea. However, there existed an almost boundless treasure-house of money—the Persian Empire. But if Sparta were to accept the Great King’s shilling, how could it maintain its proud role as liberator of the Greeks?
As in all such pacts with the devil they could only access these riches if they were willing to sell their souls.
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Until the Sicilian disaster, Athens had ruled the Aegean Sea unchallenged and for many years the Great Kings saw little point in contesting its supremacy. But they had not forgotten the humiliations of Salamis and Plataea that their predecessor Xerxes had suffered, and they still had their eyes on the now independent cities of the Ionian seaboard.
The monarch at this time was Darius II, who had ascended the throne over the dead bodies of various other contenders of the blood royal, one of whom was drenched in alcohol and thrown into a pit filled with glowing embers. He wanted Ionia to return to his rule and Athenian weakness after Sicily offered him the opportunity.
Although a Great King was an absolute ruler, his dominions were too extensive for him to rule personally, and we have seen that, at the center of a feudal web of mutual allegiances, he devolved executive authority to the governors of provinces, or satraps. At this time, the two governors in charge of the western end of the Persian Empire were Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes. The province of Hellespontine Phrygia was to all intents a family possession; Pharnabazus had inherited the satrapy from his father and would pass it on to his son. He may have been descended from one of the co-conspirators of Darius the Great. He was an energetic and honorable ruler.
He was on poor terms with the slippery Tissaphernes, who was the grandson of a general in command of the elite Immortals during the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. Tissaphernes was the satrap of Lydia and Caria. He was loyal to his master, but was an inscrutable and unscrupulous political operator.
Darius II made it known to his satraps that he wished them to collect tribute and arrears from the coastal poleis of Asia Minor that Persia had lost after 479. This would mean bringing them back under his rule. The simplest and most cost-effective way of achieving this would be to back Sparta in its war with a seriously weakened Athens.
Rival delegations both from Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes arrived in Sparta at about the same time. They said that the Great King was ready to join the war against the Athenians. Each satrap wanted Spartan support for a rebellion of members of the Delian League in their region.