A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

The execution of the Athenian prisoners after Aegospotami—Philocles himself was executed on Lysander’s orders—may have ranked as the worst single-day execution of Greeks in the entire war. More were probably butchered than those cut down at Mytilene, Scione, and Melos and the dead exceeded the number of those murdered by the infamous Thirty Tyrants, who overthrew the democracy at war’s end. The toll from Aegospotami was not matched until Alexander the Great killed almost every Theban male when he razed Thebes in 335 or cut down most of the Greek mercenaries in the aftermath of Granicus, a year later. Lysander would have done better to spare the crew, sell them into slavery, and share the profits with his own oarsmen, a practice that was common by war’s end as well.