Battle of Aegospotami (405 BC): Lysander Destroys Athens' Fleet

The Battle of Aegospotami, fought in 405 BC on the Hellespont (the Dardanelles), was the decisive battle of the Peloponnesian War. The Spartan admiral Lysander surprised the Athenian fleet while its crews were ashore and captured almost all of it. With no navy left to protect its food supply, Athens was besieged and forced to surrender the following spring.

Background: a war decided at sea

By 405 BC Athens had survived the Sicilian Expedition and won a hard victory at the Battle of Arginusae. But the city depended on grain shipped from the Black Sea through the Hellespont, and it could only protect that route with a fleet. Sparta, for its part, had learned that it could only win the war at sea.

The key to Sparta’s new strength was Persian money. Cyrus the Younger, the Persian prince commanding in western Anatolia, had become a close friend and backer of Lysander, and he paid generously for Spartan ships and crews. Spartan law did not allow a man to serve twice as admiral, so in 405 BC Lysander was sent back officially as second-in-command, with the real authority.

Lysander was not from one of Sparta’s royal houses, and ancient writers describe his family as poor. He had made his name in 407 or 406 BC (the date is debated) by defeating an Athenian squadron at Notium, near Ephesus, a setback that ended the last command of Alcibiades. His skill lay as much in diplomacy and organisation as in fighting: he built personal networks of loyal supporters in the cities of Asia Minor, and he kept his crews paid when Athens struggled to pay its own.

Into the Hellespont

Lysander sailed north to the Hellespont and captured the city of Lampsacus on its Asian shore, a threat to the Athenian grain route. The Athenian fleet, about 180 ships under several generals including Conon, Philocles, Adeimantus, Menander and Tydeus, followed him.

The Athenians made camp at Aegospotami, a beach and small town on the European shore opposite Lampsacus, where the strait is only a few kilometres wide. It was a poor position: there was no harbour and no market, so supplies had to be brought from Sestos, some distance down the coast.

Five days of waiting

Each morning the Athenians rowed across and offered battle in front of Lampsacus. Lysander kept his crews aboard and ready, but refused to come out. In the evening the Athenians returned to their beach, pulled up the ships and scattered across the countryside to find food. Lysander sent fast ships to follow them and report on their routine.

Alcibiades, the exiled Athenian commander, was then living in a fortified estate nearby. According to Xenophon and Plutarch, he rode down to the camp and warned the generals that their position was dangerous and that they should move to Sestos. The generals, unwilling to take advice from a disgraced exile, sent him away.

The surprise attack

On the fifth day the pattern was repeated. This time, once the scouts signalled that the Athenians had landed and dispersed, Lysander crossed the strait at speed with his whole fleet. Many Athenian ships had only part of their crews on board, and some had none at all. Most were taken on the beach or as they struggled to launch.

Out of about 180 ships, only a handful escaped. Conon got away with eight ships and, fearing to face the Athenian assembly, sailed to Cyprus to the court of King Evagoras of Salamis. The state ship Paralus carried the news home. Lysander’s men captured roughly 170 ships, possibly without losing a single vessel of their own.

Not every ancient account agrees on the details. Xenophon, the main source, describes a simple surprise on the fifth day. Diodorus Siculus, drawing on another tradition, says that the Athenian general Philocles led out a part of the fleet and was caught by Lysander’s full force before the rest could follow. Either way, the result was the same: the Athenian fleet was taken almost without a fight.

The prisoners and the news

The prisoners, several thousand men, were taken to Lampsacus. Lysander’s allies voted to put the Athenians among them to death. Plutarch gives the number as about 3,000. The general Philocles, who had earlier had the crews of captured ships thrown overboard, was executed. Adeimantus was spared, and many Athenians later suspected that he had betrayed the fleet.

The charge of treason was raised in Athens for years afterwards, and speeches of the period accuse certain commanders of having handed the ships over to the enemy. Modern historians remain divided. Bribery is possible, since Lysander had ample Persian silver, but the poor camp site, divided command and careless routine are enough to explain the disaster.

Xenophon describes the Paralus arriving at Piraeus at night, and the sound of lamentation spreading from the port up the Long Walls to the city as each person passed on the news. That night, he says, no one in Athens slept.

The siege and surrender of Athens

Lysander sailed through the Aegean, taking over Athenian allies and sending Athenian settlers and garrisons back to the city, which crowded it further. In the autumn of 405 BC he blockaded Piraeus with a large fleet while Spartan armies under King Pausanias and King Agis besieged Athens by land.

Starvation set in over the winter. The politician Theramenes spent months negotiating, and in the spring of 404 BC Athens accepted Sparta’s terms. Sparta refused the demands of Corinth and Thebes to destroy the city. Instead Athens had to tear down the Long Walls and the walls of Piraeus, hand over all but 12 warships, allow its exiles to return and follow Sparta’s lead in foreign policy. The walls were pulled down to the music of flute girls, as the Spartans and their allies celebrated what they called the beginning of freedom for Greece.

Consequences and legacy

Aegospotami ended 27 years of war and made Sparta the leading power in Greece. Lysander became the most powerful man in the Greek world, installing pro-Spartan governments of ten men in many cities and backing the Thirty Tyrants in Athens. At Delphi he dedicated a large group of bronze statues celebrating the victory, showing Lysander being crowned by the god Poseidon, surrounded by the gods and by the commanders of the allied fleet. The travel writer Pausanias still saw it there in the second century AD.

Aegospotami was already known in antiquity for another reason. Ancient writers, including Pliny the Elder, record that a large stone fell from the sky there in the 460s BC, and it was still shown to visitors in Roman times. It is one of the earliest recorded meteorite falls in Europe.

Spartan dominance proved short-lived. Conon returned to Greek waters with Persian support and destroyed a Spartan fleet at Cnidus in 394 BC, and Athens rebuilt its walls. Aegospotami nevertheless marked the end of the fifth-century Athenian empire.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 406 BC, autumn: Six Athenian generals are executed after Arginusae.
• 405 BC, spring: Lysander returns to command the Spartan fleet with Persian funding.
• 405 BC, summer: Lysander captures Lampsacus; the Athenian fleet camps at Aegospotami.
• 405 BC, late summer or autumn: Lysander’s surprise attack destroys the Athenian fleet.
• 405 BC, autumn: Athens is besieged by land and sea.
• 404 BC, spring: Athens surrenders; the Long Walls are pulled down.

Why it matters

Aegospotami shows how quickly naval power could be won and lost. A single afternoon of carelessness cost Athens the fleet on which its food, its empire and its democracy depended, and brought the Peloponnesian War to an end.