(M570) Thus fell imperial Athens, after a glorious reign of one hundred years. Lysander entered the city as a conqueror. The ships were surrendered, all but twelve, which the Athenians were allowed to retain; the unfinished ships in the dockyards were burned, the fortifications demolished, and the Piræus dismantled. The constitution of the city was annulled, and a board of thirty was nominated, under the dictation of Lysander, for the government of the city. The conqueror then sailed to Samos, which was easily reduced, and oligarchy was restored on that island, as at Athens. (M571) The fall of Athens virtually closed the Peloponnesian war, after a bitter struggle between the two leading States of Greece for thirty years. Lysander became the leading man in Greece, and wielded a power greater than any individual Greek before or after him. Sparta, personified in him, became supreme, and ruled over all the islands, and over the Asiatic and Thracian cities. The tyrants whom he placed over Athens exercised their power with extreme rigor—sending to execution all who were obnoxious, seizing as spoil the property of the citizens, and disarming the remaining hoplites in the city. They even forbade intellectual teaching, and shut the mouth of Socrates. Such was Athens, humbled, deprived of her fleet, and rendered powerless, with a Spartan garrison occupying the Acropolis, and discord reigning even among the Thirty Tyrants themselves. (M572) In considering the downfall of Athens, we perceive that the unfortunate Sicilian expedition which Alcibiades had stimulated proved the main cause. Her maritime supremacy might have been maintained but for this aggression, which Pericles never would have sanctioned, and which Nicias so earnestly disapproved. After that disaster, the conditions of the State were totally changed, and it was a bitter and desperate struggle to retain the fragments of empire. And the catastrophe proved, ultimately, the political ruin of Greece herself, since there was left no one State sufficiently powerful to resist foreign attacks. The glory of Athens was her navy, and this being destroyed, Greece was open to invasion, and to the corruption brought about by Persian gold. It was Athens which had resisted Persia, and protected the maritime States and islands. When Athens was crippled, the decline of the other States was rapid, for they had all exhausted themselves in the war. And the war itself has few redeeming features. It was a wicked contest carried on by rivalry and jealousy. And it produced, as war generally does, a class of unprincipled men who aggrandize themselves at the expense of their country. Nothing but war would have developed such men as Alcibiades and Lysander, and it is difficult to say which of the two brought the greatest dishonor on their respective States. Both were ambitious, and both hoped to gain an ascendency incompatible with free institutions. To my mind, Alcibiades is