Lysander, as admiral of the Peloponnesian fleet…

It can never have been in much doubt that a combination of Persia and Sparta could win the war easily, even after the particular failures of trust and understanding in 411.

However, Tissaphernes, fearing that a complete victory of Sparta over Athens in the Peloponnesian War will endanger Persian interests, has supplied only limited assistance to his ally.

As a result, when the Persian king Darius II in 407 decides to support Sparta fully, Tissaphernes is replaced as commander in chief in Asia Minor and as satrap of Lydia, Phrygia, and Cappadocia by Darius' son, Cyrus the Younger, and his influence is limited to the satrapy of Caria.

Cyrus, the younger son of Darius and his wife, the cruel and ambitious Parysatis, is the favorite of his mother, who hopes to secure the succession for him instead of her eldest son, Arsaces.

Cyrus and Lysander, the commander of the Peloponnesian fleet in 408-407, get on instantly (it surely helps their relationship that Persia has made concessions, if make them it has, about the autonomy of the Greek cities).

Hippodamus of Miletos dies around 408 BCE. (The Greek geographer Strabo will credit Hippodamus with planning the city of Rhodes in 408—07 BCE but most modern authorities doubt that he was still active at this time.)

Rhodian affiliations during the classical period have vacillated between Athens, Sparta, and Persia, in attempts to preserve a balance of power.

The three city-states of Rhodes—Lindos, …

…Ialysos, and …

…Kameiros—form a union in 408 BCE as the city of Rhodes.

Isocrates, born into a prosperous family shortly before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, had passed his youth in a gloomy period following the death of Pericles, a period in which wealth-both public and private-was dissipated, and political decisions were ill conceived and violent.

He would have been fourteen years old when the democracy voted to put to death all male citizens of the small Thracian city of Scione.

Isocrates is deeply moved by a desire to see Greece united and at peace.

He is influenced by, among others, the Sicilian sophist Gorgias, who has not only inspired his pupil with a taste for Gorgianic prose but also has put before him as the cure for Greece's ills the Panhellenist program; that is, union of Greeks in an attack on the Persian Empire and the settlement therein of the impoverished, thus securing peace between and within cities.

This becomes and remains Isocrates' political creed.

In the closing years of the Peloponnesian War, Isocrates loses his inherited wealth and begins to earn money by writing speeches for others to use in the courts. (A few of these speeches survive.)

This is, in fact, the conventional start to a career as an orator, but since he lacks both the voice and the self-confidence necessary for a public speaker he turns his attention to education, and for more than forty years, his main effort will be to prepare for successful public life those who can afford to pay his heavy fees.

Alcibiades' successes in the Hellespontine region enable him to return in 407 to Athens, where he is welcomed with enthusiasm and given supreme control of the conduct of the war.

The exiled Hermocrates, in attempting to force his way back to Syracuse, he is killed in a street fight during the winter of 408-407 in an attempt, so his enemies say, to establish a tyranny.

Alcibiades in a typically bold gesture, reportedly leads the procession to the Eleusinian festival by road in spite of the danger from the Spartan force at Decelea, thus atoning for, or giving the lie to, his alleged impiety in 415 BCE when he was held to have joined in profaning the Sacred Mysteries.

His subordinate Antiochus, however, is responsible for a naval defeat by Lysander off Notium in 406 BCE Alcibiades had left his squadron at Ephesus); this effectively ends Alcibiades' career.

His political enemies persuade the people to reject him, and he retires to a castle in Thrace.

Its fleet blockaded at Mytilene, Athens raises a totally new fleet to defeat the Spartans at the islands of Arginusae off the west coast of Asia Minor in August 406 BCE.

Conon, admiral in each of the three years 407-405 BCE, is rescued following the Athenian victory.

Theramenes, as captain of a ship, takes part in the victory; returning to Athens after the battle, he leads agitation against the eight generals who had commanded in the engagement; the six who returned to Athens are condemned for negligence in not having picked up survivors from the ships disabled in the battle and are executed in an illegal mass trial.

The demagogue Cleophon again rejects a Spartan offer of peace.

Archelaus has gone on to institute many internal reforms.

He has issued an abundance of good quality coinage.

He has built strongholds, cut straight roads (important for movement of the military), and improved the organization of the military, particularly the cavalry and hoplite infantry.

Euripides, who maintains friendships with the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates and with Sophists such as Protagoras and Prodicus, and whose plays reflect his contemporaries’ ethics, rhetoric, and science, may have been prosecuted for impiety by the demagogue Cleon.

His contemporaries associate him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism, both of them being frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes.

Whereas Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence, Euripides chooses a voluntary exile in old age.

Euripides had left Athens shortly after 408 for the “rustic court “of Archelaus, king of Macedon, and here creates one of his greatest tragic plays, The Bacchae.

He dies in here in 406.

Recent scholarship casts doubt on ancient biographies of Euripides.

For example, it is possible that he never visited Macedon at all, or, if he did, he might have been drawn there by King Archelaus with incentives that were also offered to other artists.