Book 8, Chapter 26 — Twenty-first Year of the War—Recall of Alcibiades to Samos—Revolt of Euboea and Downfall of the Four Hundred—Battle of Cynossema
The oligarchs fall; the fleet wins a naval battle; Thucydides's pen stops mid-sentence in 411 BCE.
Summary
The Four Hundred fell within months of taking power, destroyed by their own internal divisions and the external pressure of events. Their overtures to Sparta went nowhere — the Spartans, sensing that Athens was weakening without their help, had no incentive to settle for anything less than complete victory. The revolt of Euboea, Athens's most economically important tributary island, demonstrated that the oligarchs could not maintain the empire any better than the democrats. The moderate faction of the Five Thousand — always more numerous than the radical oligarchs who had actually governed — split from the Four Hundred and forced a restoration of constitutional government. Thucydides comments, in his single most direct political statement in the History, that the mixed constitution that followed — the Five Thousand governing, with democratic elections but property qualifications — was the best government Athens had in his lifetime.
Alcibiades, recalled to the fleet at Samos and elected general, never returned to Athens during this period — he waited until 407 BCE when the political climate seemed safer. His role at Samos was to hold the fleet together as a coherent fighting force and to prevent the desperate counter-proposal that the soldiers themselves should sail to Athens and overthrow the oligarchs. Thrasybulus had to argue, and was right to argue, that the fleet's duty was to fight Sparta, not to fight Athens — that destroying the fleet in a domestic coup would simply hand Sparta the war. The fleet held together and continued operating.
The battle of Cynossema in late 411 BCE is a small but genuine Athenian naval victory — the first decisive victory Athens had won at sea since the disasters of 413. The Athenian squadron, outnumbered, fought a running engagement in the Hellespont against the Peloponnesian fleet and won primarily through superior seamanship and the discipline that years of continuous naval warfare had built into its crews. It proved that the fleet was still capable of winning at sea, that the strategic situation was not hopeless, and that the war would continue. Here the History breaks off, mid-campaign, with sixteen years of fighting still ahead. Xenophon's Hellenica takes up the narrative where Thucydides stops, but the great structural argument Thucydides was building — the arc from Athens's highest aspiration to its final defeat — was left for readers to complete from other sources, from inference, and from what the completed books already imply.
- 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.