Maybe if Aegopotosami is a real battle, Athens can win. If memory serves me correctly, the actual battle consisted of Spartans and their allies/mercenaries under Lysander massacreing Athenian crews on the shore searching for food. Now, Athens will lose material from even a victory, but such a constant loss of money, men, and ships in battles in the Aegean which the Athenians win as much as they lose can't be good for the Spartans. SOoner or later, the Persians will stop funding a stalemate at best, and or Sparta's allies will desert due to the lack of progress. A crude analogy would be the Western fron in WWI, where thousands were thrown away in assaults on the German trenches which produced little.
I mostly agree. I'd call the Battle of Aegospotami, though, the maneuvers which led the Athenians to beach their ships and fall into Lysander's trap. Otherwise, I agree.
But cutting down on Athenian losses is a necessity. I believe the Athenian manpower losses in the years prior to Aegopotosami were the physical; not proportinal, physical; equivalent of the USN losing 10 supercarriers plus crew. Although limiting the plague could help; it saves lives, and removes some of the cultural aftershocks which later hurt athens. If there had not been so much death and desicration at Athens itself, would they have sacked the victorious admirals bec ause of rumors they abandoned bodies?
I'm not so sure of this. Athens' losses were staggering, no doubt about that. But comparing them to losing 10 out of 12 supercarriers is a bit extreme: for one, it took far less time to build a trireme than it does to build a supercarrier so the triremes are more replaceable. As far as cost goes, one has to remember that Athens pays its entire budget out of Tribute. Only twice in the course of the war is a direct tax on Athenians levied to support the war: the
eisphora which we can take as the modern equivalent of an income tax. Now to some extent even such a small tax was incredibly hard to bear because the simply supply of money might be lacking to pay the tax; however, it was a progressive tax, mostly aimed at the wealthy wh had access to specie. A better comparison to Athens losing say 10 trieremes is if the British RN during the Napoleonic Wars lost 1 Ship-of-the-line.
To some extent I would say that the finanical burden was harder to bear, since at some points of the campaigns in 406 and 405, Lysander can simply outbid the Athenians in the wages he pays to rowers. The more wearing burden which perhaps you meant is one of manpower, but Athens does manage to summon three or four new fleets into existence between 411 and 404. It's taxing but they did it, and once they started freeing slaves to let them row, they open up a huge untapped reserve.
Bear in mind the Athenians were just like the rest of Hellas at this time - they believed in the invincibility of the Spartan military machine. No state could possibly be expected to succeed in defeating the Spartans in open battle.
You make an excellent point here yourself, MarkA. Still, it's important to remember that something like the Battle of Mantinea in 416, one of the few hoplite Battles between Athenian and Spartan forces, was a close run affair. It only takes one small change and perhaps the astonishment of Leuctra would have occured earlier.
If the Athenians could raise the helots in revolt I do not think it would require too much gold or blood to be successful. Simply build fortification like they did at a later date and let the Spartans try and take the strong points with no seige machinary. This would tie down large numbers of Spartiates in combating the gurilla warfare and allow Athens to raid at will particularly against the League allies of Sparta.
The issue of cost would be if the Athenians wanted to maintain their own verisions of the fort at Decelea. They never grasp the principle of forward-fortification that Agis uses to maintain a continuous grip on the Athenian countryside. Such a tactic would be harder for the Athenians in Laconia since their supply lines would involve cost (stretching across sea lanes) and the Spartans probably wound't hide in Lacedaemon as the Athenians did in Athens when Agis built the fort. This is somewhat different from freeing Helots and re-fortifying Ithome (Messenia's capital), but it probably would have been a necessary first step to raise enough helot forces. When Epaminondas managed the feat in the 360s, he had defeated the Spartan army and threatened Lacedaemon itself. The Athenians would have had to do something equivalent to stir up the helots. Since a land invasion of Laconia runs counter to Athens' strengths, then the fortifcations along the coast is their best bet, but a costly one.
However the crucial mistake here was the "General's Trial"
Oligarchs accused the Generals for not collecting the deads after the naval battle and "Ecclesia" sentenced 6 out 10 Generals to death decapitating that way the military leadership of Athens and leading to the Aegos Potamoi crushing defeat...
All due respect, but I very much disagree. Firstly, ideological motivations of oligarch v. radical democrat don't seem to have been the driving issues; factional dispute, yes, but not ideological ones. Second, given the strains on Athens manpower (much more pressing than the physical costs of ships), to say nothing of Greek religious views on the matter, not collecting the survivors/dead was a major issue. Third, I don't really buy the direct link between decapitating military leadership and the loss at Aegos Potamoi. And even if there is a link, I doubt this counts as "the crucial mistake." Otherwise, one would think Athens had been soundly winning up until 406. The easier reason to fault the Generals' Trial is that the politics that produced it were also part of the reason that Athens chose not to make Peace with Sparta in 406. That's a crucial mistake. Killing generals may or may not have avoided defeat; making peace defintely would have.
In this situation, would it be possible for the Athenians, rather then Macedonians- to unify Greece? They could then maintain the Roman system of Administration, with representaion being restricted to the capital. This could probably only happen if they captured Sparta itself though-near imppossible task.
To me, this is the fun question. Unifying Greece might have taken some additional effort. In a situation in which Athens simply curbs Peloponnesian aggression and manages to pursue friendly relations with Sparta, then they can be co-hegemons. One might even see a renewed Hellenic League, if the right circumstaces arise (crusade against Persia? fighting the Romans? conflict with Carthage?). If Athens manages to completely break the power of Sparta and unify all of Greece as subject-allies, then they still have to contend with the issue of citizenship. At some point, the Greek city states will resent not a having any say in the running of the Empire. A Social war, such as the one that broke the 2nd Athenian League in 356 or such as the one that Rome won against her Latin allies in the 2nd century, probably would come about. The Persians are always ready to stir up trouble, and Artaxerxes if he couldn't control Greece by means of diplomacy and dictated Peaces, might have resorted to force.
Rome responded to her war by beginning to grant citizenship rights to subject cities, eventually transforming Roman citizenship such that it could be applied to all peoples of the Empire by the second century AD. A similar grant of citizenship would be much harder for the Athenians to bear. Unlike Rome, whose Senate ruled no mater who were citizens, all Athenian citizens have a voice in politics. For Athens to govern her empire as Rome did, something like a federal solution would have been necessary: Athens seems to have had such a system, with a council of allies which can veto foreign policy measures of the Athenian Assembly, in her 2nd Confederacy formed in 378. Such a measure was not sufficient to keep her allies from revolting. I've always thought, however, that the reason they did revolt was that Athens didn't deliver on the promises of hegemony. A victorious Athens in 404 has a better chance of doing so.
Athens also might have ruled her empire as Sparta had the Peloponnese and Mesenia: the Athenian navy was large and quick enought to ruthless surpress any revolt, a la the Spartan approach to Helots. The Athenians could probably have hamstrung the efforts of many allies to revolt by imposing democracy on them. The newly empowered populace would not support Athens per se--such ideological/class warfare kind of approach just doesn't fit the mentality of Greek polis--but the internal disputes might complicate politics so much that it became harder to rebel. The Spartans acted similarly, intervening in the affairs of neighboring states to make sure that friendly forces prevailed.
Athens also has to deal with the major problem of the fourth century, the decline of the city-state as a viable concern fueled by the decline in the efficacy of hoplite warfare. Alexander could respond with a tribal/national monarchy and a professional army with integrated infantry and cavalry tactics. A professional approach may work for Athens, but it's likely to have a more mercenary character than Alexander's army. Athens could offer, however, the same kind of Hellinizing effect of Alexander's conquest: by the 360s, the orator Isocrates spoke of how being an Athenian was more a matter of culture and education than birth, of how Athens was become a light of civilization to Greece and the whole world. Maybe Athenian culture takes root such that Greeks and Persians don't mind being ruled by Athens just as they countenance the Hellenic Kingdoms.
A victorious and lasting Athenian Empire does have one resounding historical effect: democracy probably fairs better in the minds of historians than OTL. Because Athens lost to Sparta, Athenian democracy was largely discredited in the eyes of intellectual Greece just as Soviet socialism was after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. While aristocratic resentment would have been strong, a new class of men and of writers might have arisen more wedded to democratic ideals than aristocratic ones. Or at least found democratic politics a better way of pursuing old aristocratic factional disputes. The troubling factor is that Athenian democracy by no means guaranteed the kind of liberal state we associate with "democratic principles," rather democracy at Athens was more a system of allowing the whole city to sit on a communal sovereign throne.
