Meanwhile, the truce between Athens and Sparta had been ended, and war again declared.  Sparta occupied permanently a post of the Attic territory, Deceleia, with merciless effect.  The Sicilian disaster moved the islanders, notably Chios, to revolt, by Spartan help, against Athens.  She, however, renovated her navy with unexpected vigour.  But, with her fleets away, Alcibiades inspired oligarchical intrigues in the city; a coup d’etat gave the government to the leaders of a group of 400.  The navy stood by the democratic constitution, the 400 were overthrown, and an assembly, nominally of 5,000, assumed the government.  A great Athenian triumph at Arginusae was followed later by a still more overwhelming disaster at AEgos Potami.

The Spartan commander Lysander blockaded Athens; starvation forced her to surrender.  Lysander established the government known as that of the Thirty Tyrants, who were headed by Kritias.  Lysander’s ascendancy created in Sparta a party in opposition to him; in the outcome, the Spartan king Pausanias helped in the overthrow of the Thirty at Athens by Thrasybulus, and the restoration of the Athenian democracy.  Throughout, the conduct of the democratic party, at its best and its worst, contrasted favourably with that of the oligarchical faction.

These eighty years were the great period of Athenian literature and art:  of the Parthenon and Phidias; of AEschylus, the soldier of Marathon; then Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; finally, of Socrates, not himself an author, but the inspirer of Plato, and the founder of ethical science; according to popular ideas, the typical Sophist, but in fact differing from the Sophists fundamentally.

III.—­The Blotting Out of Hellas

The triumph of Sparta has established her empire among the Greeks; she used her power with a tyranny infinitely more galling than the sway of Athens.  The Spartan character had become greatly demoralised.  Agesilaus, who succeeded to the kingship, set on foot ambitious projects for a Greek conquest of Asia; but Greece began to revolt against the Spartan dominion.  Thebes and other cities rose, and called for help from Athens, their former foe.  In the first stages of the ensuing war, of which the most notable battle was Coronea, Sparta maintained her supremacy within the Peloponnesus, but not beyond.  Athens obtained the countenance of Persia, and the counter-diplomacy of Sparta produced the peace known by the name of the Spartan Antalcidas, establishing generally the autonomy of Greek cities.  But this in effect meant the restoration of Spartan domination.

In course of time, however, this brought about the defiance of Spartan dictation by Thebes and the tremendous check to her power inflicted at the battle of Leuctra, by Epaminondas the Theban, whose military skill and tactical originality there overthrew the Spartan military prestige.  As a consequence, half the Peloponnese itself broke away from Sparta; a force under Epaminondas aided the Arcadians, and the Arcadian federation was established.