Alcibiades was succeeded by Conon and nine colleagues in command of the Athenian fleet on the coast of Asia Minor. The Athenians, soon afterwards, were driven into the harbor of Mitylene, on the island of Lesbos, by a superior Peloponnesian fleet, commanded by Callicratidas, and were blockaded there with small chance of escape. Conon contrived to send news of their desperate situation to Athens, and vigorous measures were promptly taken to rescue the fleet and to save Mitylene. Within thirty days, a fleet of 110 triremes was fitted out at the Piræus, and manned with a crew which took nearly the last able-bodied Athenian to make it complete. At Samos these were joined by 40 more triremes, making 150 in all, against which Callicratidas was able to bring out only 120 ships from Mitylene, when the relieving armament approached. The two fleets encountered one another near the islands of Arginusæ, off Cape Malea, the southern promontory of Lesbos. In the battle that ensued, which was the greatest naval conflict of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians were completely victorious; Callicratidas was drowned and no less than 77 of the Peloponnesian ships were destroyed, while the Athenians themselves lost 25. As the result of this battle Sparta again made overtures of peace, as she had done after the battle of Cyzicus, and Athens, led by her demagogues, again rejected them. But the Athenian demagogues and populace did worse. They summoned home the eight generals who had won the battle of Arginusæ, to answer to a charge of having neglected, after the victory, to pick up the floating bodies of the Athenian dead and to rescue the drowning from the wrecked ships of their fleet. Six of the accused generals came home to meet the charge; but two thought it prudent to go into voluntary exile. The six were brought to trial; the forms of legality were violated to their prejudice and all means were unscrupulously employed to work up the popular passion against them. One man, only, among the prytanes—senators, that is, of the tribe then presiding, and who were the presidents of the popular assembly—stood out, without flinching, against the lawless rage of his fellow citizens, and refused, in calm scorn of all fierce threats against himself, to join in taking the unconstitutional vote. That one was the philosopher Socrates. The generals were condemned to death and received the fatal draught of hemlock from the same populace which pressed it a little later to the lips of the philosopher. "Thus died the son of Pericles and Aspasia [one of the generals, who bore his father's name], to whom his father had made a fatal gift in obtaining for him the Attic citizenship, and with him Erasinides, Thrasylus, Lysias, Aristocrates, and Diomedon. The last-named, the most innocent of all, who had wished that the