Athens, having become entangled in the affairs of the Persian satrap Pissuthnes, who had revolted in 420 against his Achaemenid overlord, and subsequently with his natural son Amorges, sends mercenary help to Pissuthnes and perhaps to Amorges.

The Persian aristocrat Tissaphernes, dispatched by his king to Lydia, manages to incite a rebellion under Pissuthnes' Greek mercenaries, and achieving this offers negotiations.

Pissuthnes, upon his arrival at the place of the talks, is arrested, sent to Darius, and executed; Tissaphernes succeeds Pissuthnes as satrap of Lydia in about 415 BCE.

During his first years, he still must fight against Pissuthnes' son Amorges, who continues the struggle, possibly with Athenian help.

After the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, Darius, angered by the Amorges affair and determined to recover the Greek coastal cities of Asia Minor, which have been under Athenian control since 448, decides to back the Spartans.

The satraps of Asia Minor are ordered to collect overdue tribute.

As satrap of Lydia and Caria and general of the Achaemenid forces in Anatolia, Tissaphernes allies with Sparta against Athens in 413 and urges Athens’s colonies in Asia Minor to revolt.

…Clazomenae, and …

…Erythrae, invite the Spartans to carry the war across to the eastern Aegean.

This Sparta does, and in some long, drawn-out diplomacy, it agrees to abandon all claims to Anatolia as part of a deal for money and a fleet.

The playwright Sophocles is one of the ten commissioners who govern Athens from 413, following the disastrous Sicilian expedition.

Euripides produces his own interpretation of the curse on the House of Atreus with his version of Electra, produced in 413, which covers the same events but paints a more psychologically realistic portrait of the infamous matricide.

Perdiccas had left the Athenians by 417 BCE and joined the Spartan-Argive alliance.

Bowing to Athenian pressure just four years later, Perdiccas breaks with the Peloponnese, and aids Athens in their attack on Amphipolis.

He dies in 413 BCE, leaving his son Archelaus as heir.

Alcibiades meanwhile confirms his reputation with women (which the rich Athenian whom he had married appreciates only too well) by seducing the wife of the Spartan king Agis II, who is at Decelea with his army.

Nicias, his health worsening, asks to be relieved of his command, but instead reinforcements under the energetic Demosthenes arrive early in 413.

Failing in a night attack on the high ground overlooking the city, Demosthenes favors the immediate withdrawal of the Athenian army, but an eclipse of the Moon occurs on Aug. 27, 413, and the superstitious Nicias accepts his soothsayers' advice to delay setting out.

The final catastrophic sea battle in the Great Harbor of Syracuse is fought in cramped circumstances that do not allow the Athenian fleet enough freedom of maneuver: a Spartan-Corinthian-Syracusan navy destroys the Athenian fleet, enabling the Syracusans to crush Nicias' forces.

When the retreat finally begins, the division under Demosthenes falls behind and is forced to surrender.

The expeditionary force is virtually annihilated, including its main commanders.

Gylippus seeks to spare Nicias and Demosthenes, but is overruled.

The Syracusans execute both commanders and enslave the surviving Athenians, who have lost, in addition to their leaders, two hundred and forty ships and over forty thousand men.

The league of the Athenian empire is not confined to the Aegean: in 413, financial contributions from Rhegium in the south of Italy, among other places, are handled by the imperial “Treasurers of the Greeks.”

Syracuse and Akragas, the strongest and richest cities of Sicily, have taken no action against Carthage, but the renegade general Hermocrates has raised a small army and raids Punic territory from his base at Selinus, managing to defeat the forces of Motya and Panormus.

Ephesus shares in the general revolt of 412 BCE against Athens: siding with Sparta, and will remain an effective ally of Sparta down to the end of the war.