gn possessions evacuated,
all ships surrendered, and, most humiliating of all, that Athens should
become the ally of Sparta, and follow her lead upon the sea and upon the
land.

(M570) Thus fell imperial Athens, after a glorious reign of one hundred
years. Lysander entered the city as a conqueror. The ships were
surrendered, all but twelve, which the Athenians were allowed to retain;
the unfinished ships in the dockyards were burned, the fortifications
demolished, and the Piraeus dismantled. The constitution of the city was
annulled, and a board of thirty was nominated, under the dictation of
Lysander, for the government of the city. The conqueror then sailed to
Samos, which was easily reduced, and oligarchy was restored on that
island, as at Athens.

(M571) The fall of Athens virtually closed the Peloponnesian war, after a
bitter struggle between the two leading States of Greece for thirty years.
Lysander became the leading man in Greece, and wielded a power greater
than any individual Greek before or after him. Sparta, personified in him,
became supreme, and ruled over all the islands, and over the Asiatic and
Thracian cities. The tyrants whom he placed over Athens exercised their
power with extreme rigor--sending to execution all who were obnoxious,
seizing as spoil the property of the citizens, and disarming the remaining
hoplites in the city. They even forbade intellectual teaching, and shut
the mouth of Socrates. Such was Athens, humbled, deprived of her fleet,
and rendered powerless, with a Spartan garrison occupying the Acropolis,
and discord reigning even among the Thirty Tyrants themselves.

(M572) In considering the downfall of Athens, we perceive that the
unfortunate Sicilian expedition which Alcibiades had stimulated proved the
main cause. Her maritime supremacy might have been maintained but for this
aggression, which Pericles never would have sanctioned, and which Nicias
so earnestly disapproved. After that disaster, the conditions of the State
were totally changed, and it was a bitter and desperate struggle to retain
the fragments of empire. And the catastrophe proved, ultimately, the
political ruin of Greece herself, since there was left no one State
sufficiently powerful to resist foreign attacks. The glory of Athens was
her navy, and this being destroyed, Greece was open to invasion, and to
the corruption brought about by Persian gold. It was Athens which had
resisted Persia, and protected the marit