With his followers now one thousand strong, Thrasybulus stole into Piraeus by night, where many more enemies of the oligarchy were to be found. The next day when the soldiers from Athens marched down to attack them, they found the rebels occupying the hill of Munychia. The government troops had the advantage of more heavy infantry because they had confiscated the arms of the former citizens. But the rebels with their light infantry held the high ground. As the government troops advanced uphill they were met with a barrage of javelins, arrows, and stones from above. When the first ranks were cut down, the formation broke and the government troops fled. The rebels held the high ground, both physically and morally.
Government forces lost only seventy men, but among them were two members of the Thirty, including Critias, the master-mind and evil genius of the regime, Socrates’ one-time friend and Plato’s cousin, and one member of the Ten rulers of Piraeus, Charmides, Socrates’ friend and Plato’s uncle. When the government troops picked up their dead under the customary truce after a battle, the Athenian rebels appealed to them individually to abandon their vicious leaders who, as one herald put it, “for their own profit have killed almost more Athenians in eight months than the Peloponnesians killed in ten years of warfare.”[54] The herald’s words struck home.
The Thirty and their army withdrew behind the walls of Athens. Though they had lost few men, they were in disarray. The tyrant-in-chief was dead, along with the regime’s pretensions to create a new Spartan-style elite. The citizen soldiers of the Three Thousand were demoralized and outnumbered by the rebels. When they came face to face with their friends and former neighbors, they were forced to acknowledge their own venality. They had sold their fellow citizens for their own gain. The Three Thousand began to argue among themselves about whether to fight on or capitulate. Having disenfranchised and hence alienated almost everyone, the oligarchs were now, quite literally, the Few against the Many. Having banished everyone but themselves from the precincts within the city walls, they were now besieged by the exiles. They had forfeited whatever legitimacy they might have claimed in their selfish grab for power and money; they could only hope that the Spartans would prop them up once more. Now the citizens in Athens themselves deposed the Thirty and set up a board of ten rulers, allowing the surviving members of the Thirty to retire to the nearby village of Eleusis, where they had previously put to death all their potential enemies. The deposed oligarchs sent to Sparta for help.[55]
The Spartans sent Lysander with an army and his brother with a navy to oppose the rebel forces. But in Sparta there were now deep political divisions. Lysander, the victor of the Peloponnesian War, was making himself into a generalissimo, placing his personal friends into leadership positions in the “liberated” states of the former Athenian empire. The conservative Spartan state trusted no one to become too independent. The two kings of Sparta (two to balance each other) were the only leaders the state (usually) trusted with autonomous commands, and now the kings were suspicious and envious of Lysander.
The Spartans accordingly sent King Pausanias to Athens with an army to oversee the operations and in effect to keep an eye on Lysander, fearing that the latter might turn Athens into another personal fiefdom. On a reconnaissance mission near Piraeus, Pausanias and his troops were attacked by a contingent of Athenian rebels. The Spartans formed up and pushed the rebels back into the Piraeus, where the rebels massed and counterattacked. After a day of back-and-forth combat the Spartans gained a nominal victory, but still failed to control the port.[56]
Pausanias was satisfied to have made his show of force. He now called on the oligarchs and democrats to make peace and work out their differences. While Lysander would no doubt have been happy to keep propping up a puppet government, Pausanias had had enough of a brutal regime that had provoked a civil war. Something had to be done. Thebes was quietly supporting the rebels, and the anarchy in Athens threatened to destabilize the Pax Spartica.
[54].Xenophon Hellenica 2.4.10-12, 19-22; Diodorus Siculus 14.33.2-4.
[55].Xenophon Hellenica 2.4.23, 28; Diodorus Siculus 14.33.5; Aristotle Constitution of Athens 38.1-3.
[56].Xenophon Hellenica 2.4.28-34.