…the dozen kingdoms of the Etruscan league…

The playwright Euripides, inspired by this outrageous act, writes and stages Trojan Women before his fellow Athenians, attacking Athenian cruelty in his pathos-ridden antiwar drama in which the women and children of the Trojan royal family are variously murdered or enslaved by the victorious Achaean Greeks led by Odysseus and Agamemnon. (One can likely still see this compelling tragedy being performed somewhere; powerful antiwar plays are seldom long out of fashion.)

In an different arena, the ever-mercurial Alcibiades had meanwhile restored his reputation by entering seven chariots at Olympia and taking first, second, and fourth places.

His newly improved stature makes it easier for him in the following year to persuade the Athenians, over the opposition of Nicias, to send a major military expedition to Sicily to help Ionians and non-Greeks against the rising power of Syracuse.

Alcibiades is appointed to share the command with the great general Lamachus and a reluctant Nicias.

Shortly before the expedition is due to sail, however, the hermae (busts of Hermes, messenger of Zeus and patron of all who use the roads, set up in public places throughout the city) are found to have been mutilated.

In the ensuing panic, Alcibiades is accused of being the originator of the sacrilege as well as of having profaned the Eleusinian Mysteries.

He demands an immediate inquiry, but his enemies, led by Androcles (Hyperbolus's successor, and a demagogue in the same mold), ensure that he sails with the charge still hanging over him.

Segesta, eternally locked in conflict with Selinus, asks Athens for help against its rival in 415 BCE, leading to the disastrous Athenian expedition in Sicily (415-413 BCE).

Naxos, allying with Athens against Syracuse, sends a contingent, and …

The first historical reference to Hermocrates is at the congress of Gela in 424 BCE, where he gave a speech demanding the Sicilian Greeks stop their quarreling.

In 415 BCE, he proposes a coalition that would even include non-Sicilian cities (as well as non-Greek cities such as Carthage) in an alliance against Athens.

Originally conceived in perfectly acceptable terms, a force of sixty ships, the expedition as ultimately sent is too ambitious, comprising a huge fleet of one hundred and forty ships—one hundred of them Athenian—reinforced by an additional sixty.

Athens has sent two hundred and fifty cavalrymen without mounts, but horses secured locally in Sicily bring the total to six hundred and fifty; Athens has also sent thirty mounted archers.

This total is respectable for a state that has never been a strong cavalry power but is barely more than half of the twelve hundred fielded by Syracuse.

This disparity neutralizes Athens' early successes in the field, as harassment by Syracusan cavalry makes pursuit of the enemy by victorious Athenian infantry a dangerous matter.

Alcibiades gone and Lamachus dead in action leaves sole command to an ailing Nicias, who continues an ineffective campaign around Syracuse, the defenders' efforts blocking completion of the wall his forces attempt to build around the city.

The Syracusan expedition spirals into disaster.

Alcibiades is recalled to stand trial on the charge of impiety shortly after the Athenian force reaches Sicily.

He escapes during the journey home, and, learning that he has been condemned in absentia to death, goes to Sparta, where he advises the Spartans to send a general to aid the Syracusans; he also offers advice on how best to wage war against Athens.

Formally resuming the war with Athens, …

…the Spartans plant a garrison on Attic soil at Decelea, thus depriving Athens of access to its silver mines at Laurium and therefore threatening the Athenian treasury.

Athens, embarrassed economically by this and for other reasons, elects to impose on its subject states a five percent tax on shipping instead of the customary tribute (which will be restored in 410).

A clever Athenian dropout in Aristophanes’ The Birds, produced in 414, persuades the birds to construct a sky-borne urban utopia (“Cloudcuckooland”) and compels the Olympian gods to cede him their prerogatives.

In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, produced around the same time, the great tragedian holds up the old values to a subversive sort of skepticism, overturning the convention that tragedy must always be grand and awe-inspiring.

The Spartans have meanwhile appointed the general Gylippus to take charge of the defense of Syracuse; his arrival in 414 keeps Syracuse from surrendering.

Gylippus breaks the Athenian blockade by land, organizes resistance from other Sicilian states, and lays siege to the Athenian encampment.

The Syracusan cavalry makes the Athenian position intolerable: those who go out from their camps foraging for food often do not return.

Hermocrates, elected as one of Syracuse's three strategoi, is dismissed from this position after a short period because of his lack of success in battle.

Later he is one of the most important advisors to Gylippus, and thus contributes to the victory over Athens during its siege of Syracuse.

Representatives of Tissaphernes and of Pharnabazus, hereditary satrap of Dascylium in Hellespontine Phrygia, as well as ambassadors from Chios, …

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.