on land when its great strength lay in its fleet.

Its great error, however, was an attempt at foreign conquest, when it
had quite enough to occupy it at home. War broke out between Athens and
Sicily, and a strong fleet was sent to blockade and seek to capture the
city of Syracuse. This expedition fatally sapped the strength of the
Athenian empire. Ships and men were supplied in profusion to take part
in a series of military blunders, of which the last were irreparable.
The fleet, with all on board, was finally blocked up in the harbor of
Syracuse, defeated in battle, and forced to yield, while of forty
thousand Athenian troops but a miserable remnant survived to end their
lives as slaves in Syracusan quarries. It was a disaster such as Athens
in its whole career had not endured, and whose consequences were
inevitable. From that time on the supremacy of Athens was at an end.

Yet for nine years more the war continued, with much the same
succession of varying events as before. But during this period Sparta
was learning an important lesson. If she would defeat Athens, she must
learn how to win victories on sea as well as on land. After every defeat
of a fleet she built and equipped another, and gradually grew stronger
in ships, and her seamen more skilful and expert, until the old
difference between Athenian and Spartan seamen ceased to exist. Persia
also came to the aid of Sparta, supplied her with money, and enabled her
to replace her lost ships with ever new ones, while the ship-building
power of Athens declined.

In 405 B.C. the crisis came. Athens was forced to depend solely for
subsistence on her fleet. That gone, all would be gone. In the autumn of
that year she had a fleet of one hundred and eighty triremes in the
Hellespont, in the close vicinity of a Spartan fleet of about the same
force, under an able admiral named Lysander. AEgospotami, or Goat's River
(a name of fatal sound to all later Athenians), was the station of the
Athenian fleet. That of Sparta lay opposite, across the strait, nearly
two miles away.

And now an interesting scene began. Every day the Athenian fleet crossed
the strait and offered battle to the Spartans, daring them to come out
from their sheltered position. And every day, when the Spartans had
refused, it would go back to the opposite shore, where many of the men
were permitted to land. Day by day this challenge was repeated, the
Athenians growing daily more confident and more carele