The day at length arrived—it had seemed long in coming to the impatient exile—when the final effort must be made to drive the Athenians from the walls of Miletos. Much depended on that day’s work. If the Spartans and their allies could succeed in driving the Athenians to their ships, the whole fleet might be attacked at sea, while they were encumbered by the number of their troops on board, together with the wounded and the dying, after the engagement on the land. It was known, too, that another formidable Spartan squadron which had sailed some time since had been seen making for Iasos, not far off, and might soon be at Miletos. If the Athenian fleet and army were both beaten, the other islands and dependencies of Athens, which had feared up to this time to declare themselves, would rise against her domination. Thus, as far as anyone could see, this great effort might decide her fate. At daybreak the city gates were opened. The Milesians, instructed and inspirited by Alkibiades, who led them, rushed on the Argive fifteen hundred who confronted them on the left of the Athenian siege-works. At the same time the Spartans and Klazomenians, issuing from the eastern gate, reached the Athenian right and centre works. Tissaphernes was so astonished at the way in which Alkibiades took his Milesians into action that he forgot to charge at the head of his Persian cavalry, and reserved them to pursue the enemy when the others should have put them to flight. Thus Alkibiades, by a strange vicissitude of fortune, found himself face to face in deadly combat with his old friends the Argives, with whom he had no quarrel, whose alliance he had gained for Athens, and whom, by his influence, he had kept constant to her. These thoughts, which could not but come upon him as he led his Milesians against them, did not prevent him from doing desperate work among them. They broke and fled before him, leaving three hundred dead upon the field. On the other side of the city other events were taking place. The Spartans and men of Klazomenai were utterly discomforted by the Athenian hoplites. On seeing this rout of their allies, the Milesians feared to pursue the Argives farther, lest the victorious Athenians might come round and outflank them, and, in spite of all their leader could do, they retired into the town by the gate from which they had rushed out. They found, when they returned, a host of Spartans and Klazomenians entering the town in terror and confusion, beaten back by those Athenians they had boasted the day before they could drive into the sea. The gates were closed, but the Athenians sat down again before the town, cutting it off almost entirely from supplies by land, while the fleet blockaded its port.