Historical Tales [calibre 5.4.1]

How The Long Walls Went Down

The retreat of the Persians from Athens left that city without a wall or a home. On the return of the Athenians, and the rebuilding of their ruined homes, a new wall became a necessity, and, under the wise advice of Themistocles, the citizens determined that the new wall should be much larger in circuit than the old,—wide enough to hold all Attica in case of war.

But no sooner was this begun than a protest arose from rival states. The Spartans in particular raised such a clamor on the subject that Themistocles went to that city and denied that he was fortifying Athens. If they did not believe him, they might send there and see. They did so, and the Spartan ambassadors, on arriving there, found the walls completed and themselves held as hostages for the safe return of Themistocles. Not only Athens was thus fortified, but a still stronger wall was built around Piraeus, the port, four miles away.

PIRÆUS, THE PORT OF ATHENS.

Years afterwards, when Athens was in a position to defy the protest of Sparta, her famous Long Walls were built, extending from the city to the port, and forming a great artery through which the food and products brought in ships from distant lands could flow to the city from the sea in defiance of foes. These walls it was that enabled Athens to survive and flourish when all the soil of Attica lay in the hands of the Spartan enemy. But the time came when these walls were to fall, and Athens to lie helpless in the hands of her mortal foe.

The Peloponnesian war was full of incident, victories and defeats, marches and countermarches, making and breaking of truces, loss of provinces and fleets, triumphs of one side and the other, and still the years rolled on, and neither party became supreme. Athens had its ill-advisers, who kept it at war when it could have won far more by concluding peace, and who induced it to forget the advice of Pericles and make war 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. Ægospotami, 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.