Sparta’s allies, worried for their futures, and Cyrus himself clamoured for the return of Lysander. Spartan law did not allow the reappointment of a previous navarch, so a nonentity Aracus was appointed navarch with Lysander as his deputy, but it was clear who actually commanded the Spartan fleet.
Cyrus provided the money and when recalled to Susa by his father, he entrusted his satrapy to Lysander. With the resources of the province at his disposal, Lysander was able to quickly reconstitute his fleet. Unable to approach the Hellespont because of the Athenian fleet at Samos, Lysander attacked Aegina and Salamis, and even landed in Attica. When the Athenian fleet moved to intercept, Lysander sailed past it and reached the Hellespont. After establishing a base at Abydos, he sailed northwards and seized Lampsacus. The Athenian fleet soon caught up and established a base at Sestus. To keep watch on the enemy, they beached their ships at Aegospotami north on the Chersonese side of the Hellespont. Alcibiades, who was living nearby, went down to the beach and made several suggestions. But his advice was rejected and he took refuge in Phrygia where he was murdered in 404 BC.
On four successive days the Athenians crossed the strait at dawn and offered battle in the waters outside Lampsacus, but Lysander kept his fleet inside the harbour. On the fifth day, when he refused to come out, the Athenians returned to Aegospotami, beached their ships, and scattered across the countryside in search of food and wood. Lysander, who was waiting for an opportunity, raced his fleet across the strait. Nine ships managed to escape; the other one hundred and seventy-one ships were captured while they were still beached. One of the escaped ships, the state vessel Paralus, went to inform Athens of the disaster; the rest, with Conon, sought refuge with Evagoras-I of Salamis (r.410-374 BC) on Cyprus.
The prisoners were assembled and Lysander summoned his allied commanders to decide their fate. The cruelties of the Athenian state were recalled. In a council of war the Assembly had passed a decree to cut off the right thumb of captives in the war to prevent them holding a spear; of the generals only Adeimantus had spoken against this order. Recently, the crews from two triremes, a Corinthian and an Andrian, had been put to death by being thrown off a cliff. Except for Adeimantus, all three thousand Athenian prisoners were put to death; the other Greek captives were set free.
With Athenian sea power destroyed and Lysander controlling the Hellespont, Athens was now cut off from its vital grain supplies from the Crimea. From the Hellespont, Lysander sailed to the Bosporus, and at both Byzantium and Chalcedon the Athenian garrisons were expelled and a harmost installed. He then toured the Aegean islands making it known that any Athenian found in the cities would be executed and should flee in front of his forces to Athens, thus increasing the pressure on the city by giving it more mouths to feed.
He met strong resistance at Samos, but the rest of the cities received him. He proceeded to abolish their democracies to install Spartan harmosts and narrow ten-man oligarchies called decarchies. As these men were loyal to Lysander, this system has been described as his private empire. Leaving forty ships to lay siege to Samos and ten ships with Eteonicus to carry out operations in Thrace, Lysander sailed to Athens with one hundred and fifty ships.
When they heard of the victory at Aegospotami, the Spartans sent the Agiad king Pausanias (r.409-395 BC) with the remainder of the Spartan troops to join Agis and advance on the city. Around October Lysander arrived at Piraeus, but despite this now massive display of manpower, the Athenians, probably through fear of reprisals, refused to yield. When it became clear that there was not going to be a quick surrender, Pausanias returned to Sparta and Lysander to Samos, while with remaining land and sea forces Agis waited for the blockade to starve the Athenians into submission.
In the Aegean, Lysander continued his work of removing democracies and installing decarchies in the cities. He freed Aegina from Athenian control and returned the people taken from the island in 431 BC; and restored the survivors of the massacres by the Athenians in 421 BC and 415 BC, to Scione and Melos respectively.
Sometime in November, as their supplies started to run out, the Athenians offered to make peace by promising that if they could keep their walls they would join the Spartan Alliance, but the ephors demanded that large section of the Long Walls had to come down to prevent it being restored by the Athenians before the Spartans could arrive to stop them. Cleophon persuaded the Assembly to reject this demand, but Theramenes was given permission to go to Samos and negotiate with Lysander. During his absence, Cleophon was charged with treason and executed.
From Samos, Theramenes was sent to Sparta. When he returned to Athens after a three-month absence, he and some others were given full powers to arrange the terms of the surrender. At the congress of the Spartan Alliance, the representatives of Corinth, Thebes and other states proposed a sentence of andrapodismos (‘slavery’), the massacre of the adult males, and the enslavement of the woman and children (i.e. genocide), that the Athenians had perpetrated at Melos and Scione. But Sparta refused to destroy the city that had served Greece so nobly in the Persian Wars.
The envoys returned with terms that the Athenian people accepted with relief on 25 April – to demolish the Piraeus fortifications and the Long Walls, to surrender of the fleet save twelve vessels, to remove their settlers and garrisons from the cities that still remained under their control, to restrict their future activity to the territory of Attica and to allow exiles to return. In August when Lysander’s siege of Samos succeeded, he gave the city over to oligarchic exiles.
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