Book 8, Chapter 25 — Twentieth and Twenty-first Years of the War—Intrigues of Alcibiades—Withdrawal of the Persian Subsidies—Oligarchical Coup d'Etat at Athens—Patriotism of the Army at Samos
Athens, at war for its survival, pauses to abolish its own democracy — and the army at Samos refuses to recognize the new government.
Summary
Alcibiades's role in the oligarchic revolution is one of the History's more complex moral episodes. He had been negotiating with Tissaphernes on behalf of the fleet at Samos, claiming that he could deliver Persian subsidies if Athens changed its constitution — the Persians would trust an oligarchy more than a democracy, he asserted. The assertion was probably false: Tissaphernes, as Alcibiades knew, was deliberately withholding the subsidies to exhaust both sides. But the claim gave the oligarchic conspirators in Athens a justification to present to the moderate majority — bring in the oligarchy, and Alcibiades plus Persia will save us. The argument worked well enough in Athens; it collapsed immediately when the fleet at Samos, to whom the same arguments were made, voted instead to continue the democracy.
The Four Hundred seized power in Athens in late spring 411 BCE through a combination of assassination of prominent democrats, manipulation of the assembly into meeting in an unusual location with an unusual composition, and the proposal of a constitution that formally dissolved the democracy but promised a wider franchise than the actual governing group intended. The moderate democrats who supported the change expected a council of five thousand property-owners; what they got was four hundred men who governed without accountability and immediately sent envoys to Sparta offering peace on the terms Sparta would dictate — terms that would have ended Athenian power entirely.
The fleet at Samos refused to recognize the Four Hundred and constituted itself as the legitimate Athenian state. Thucydides's analysis of this extraordinary situation — an army in the field refusing to acknowledge its city's government while continuing to fight that city's war — is careful and admiring. The soldiers and sailors, led by the general Thrasybulus and the politician Thrasyllus, recalled Alcibiades to the fleet and elected him general. They were the democracy while Athens was an oligarchy; they sent envoys to Athens not to negotiate surrender but to instruct the Four Hundred to restore constitutional government. The letter from the fleet to the city is an inversion of the normal chain of command that Thucydides presents as the most remarkable institutional response to the crisis.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.