Battle of Arginusae The naval Battle of Arginusae took place in 406 BC during the Peloponnesian War near the Arginusae islands east of the island of Lesbos . In the battle , an Athenian fleet commanded by eight strategoi defeated a Spartan fleet under Callicratidas . The battle was precipitated by a Spartan victory which led to the Athenian fleet under Conon being blockaded at Mytilene ; to relieve Conon , the Athenians assembled a scratch force composed largely of newly constructed ships manned by inexperienced crews . This inexperienced fleet was thus tactically inferior to the Spartans , but its commanders were able to circumvent this problem by employing new and unorthodox tactics , which allowed the Athenians to secure a dramatic and unexpected victory . The news of the victory itself was met with jubilation at Athens , and the grateful Athenian public voted to bestow citizenship on the slaves and metic s who had fought in the battle . Their joy was tempered , however , by the aftermath of the battle , in which a storm prevented the ships assigned to rescue the survivors of the 25 disabled or sunken Athenian trireme s from performing their duties , and a great number of sailors drowned . A fury erupted at Athens when the public learned of this , and after a bitter struggle in the assembly six of the eight generals who had commanded the fleet were tried as a group and executed . At Sparta , meanwhile , traditionalists who had supported Callicratidas pressed for peace with Athens , knowing that a continuation of the war would lead to the re - ascendence of their opponent Lysander . This party initially prevailed , and a delegation was dispatched to Athens to make an offer of peace ; the Athenians , however , rejected this offer , and Lysander departed to the Aegean to take command of the fleet for the remainder of the war , which would be decided less than a year later by his total victory at Aegospotami . Prelude . Callicratidas and Conon . In 406 BC , Callicratidas was appointed as the navarch of the Spartan fleet , replacing Lysander . Callicratidas was a traditionalist Spartan , distrustful of Persian influence and reluctant to ask for support from the Persian prince Cyrus , who had been a strong supporter of Lysander . Thus , Callicratidas was forced to assemble his fleet and funding by seeking contributions from Sparta ' s allies among the Greek cities of the region . In this fashion , he assembled a fleet of some 140 trireme s . Conon , meanwhile , who was in command of the Athenian fleet at Samos , was compelled by problems with the morale of his sailors to man only 70 of the more than 100 triremes he had in his possession . Callicratidas , once he had assembled his fleet , sailed against Methymna , on Lesbos , which he laid siege to and stormed . From Methymna , Callicratidas could potentially move to capture the rest of Lesbos , which clear the way for him to move his fleet to the Hellespont , where he would be athwart the all - important Athenian grain supply line ; to defend Lesbos , Conon was forced to move his numerically inferior fleet from Samos to the Hekatonnesi islands near Methymna . When Callicratidas attacked him , however , with a fleet that had swelled to a size of 170 ships , Conon was forced to flee to Mytilene , where he was blockaded with his fleet after losing 30 ships in a clash at the mouth of the harbor . Besieged by land and sea , Conon was powerless to act against the vastly superior forces that surrounded him , and was only barely able to slip a messenger ship out to Athens to carry the news of his plight . The relief force . When the messenger ship reached Athens with news of Conon ' s situation , the assembly wasted no time in approving extreme measures to build and man a relief force . The golden statues of Nike were melted down to fund the construction of the ships , and slaves and metic s were enlisted to crew the fleet . To ensure a sufficiently large and loyal group of crewmen , the Athenians even took the radical step of extending citizenship to thousands of slaves who rowed with the fleet . Over a hundred ships were prepared and manned through these measures , and contributions from allied ships raised the fleet ' s size to 150 triremes after it reached Samos . In a highly unorthodox arrangement , the fleet was commanded collaboratively by eight generals ; these were Aristocrates , Aristogenes , Diomedon , Erasinides , Lysias , Pericles , Protomachus , and Thrasyllus . After leaving Samos , the Athenian fleet sailed to the Arginusae islands , opposite Cape Malea on Lesbos , where they camped for an evening . Callicratidas , who had sailed south to Malea with most of his fleet upon learning of the Athenians ' movements , spotted their signal fires and planned to attack them by night , but was prevented from doing so by a thunderstorm , and so was forced to delay his attack until morning . The battle . At dawn the next day , Callicratidas led his fleet out to meet the Athenians . He had 140 ships to match the Athenians ' 150 , having left 50 to watch Conon at Mytilene . For the first time in the war , the Spartan crews and commanders were more experienced than their Athenian opposites , as the Athenians ' best crews had been at sea with Conon . To counter the Spartans ' superior skill and maneuverability , the Athenian commanders implemented several new and innovative tactics . First , the Athenian fleet was divided into eight autonomous divisions , each commanded by one of the generals ; second , they arranged their fleet in a double line instead of the traditional single line in order to prevent the Spartans from using the maneuver known as the " diekplous " , in which a trireme raced into a gap between two enemy ships and then wheeled to strike one of them in the side ; if the Spartans attempted this against a double line , a ship from the second line could move up to attack the Spartan ship . As the Athenians advanced , they extended their left flank out to sea , outflanking the Spartans . The superior Athenian numbers , combined with the tactics they had implemented , created a dangerous situation for the Spartans , and Callicratidas ' helmsman advised him to retire without a fight , but the navarch insisted on pushing on . Dividing his force in two to meet the threat of encirclement , Callicratidas led his fleet into battle . Heated fighting ensued for some time , but eventually Callicratidas , leading the Spartan right , was killed when his ship rammed an opposing ship , and resistance on the right collapsed . The left continued to resist for longer , but was unable to stand up to the entire Athenian fleet and soon joined the right wing in flight . All told , the Spartans lost some 70 ships , and the Athenians 25 . Aftermath . In the immediate aftermath of the battle , the Athenian commanders had to decide which of several pressing tasks to focus their attention on . Conon was still blockaded at Mytilene by 50 Spartan ships , and decisive action against those ships could lead to their destruction before they had a chance to join the remainder of Callicratidas ' fleet . At the same time , however , the survivors from the 25 Athenian ships sunk or disabled in the battle remained afloat off the Arginusae islands . To address both of these concerns , the generals decided that all eight of them would sail with the majority of the fleet to Mytilene , where they would attempt to relieve Conon , while the trierarch s Thrasybulus and Theramenes would remain behind with a smaller detachment to rescue the survivors ; both of these missions , however , were thwarted by the sudden arrival of a storm which drove the ships back into port ; the Spartan fleet at Mytilene escaped , and rescuing the drowning sailors proved impossible . Trial of the generals . At Athens , the public relief at this unexpected victory was quickly subsumed in a bitter rhetorical battle over who was responsible for the failure to rescue the sailors . When the generals learned that the public was angry over the failed rescue , they assumed that Thrasybulus and Theramenes , who had already returned to the city , were responsible , and accordingly wrote letters to the assembly denouncing the two trierarchs and blaming them for the disaster . The trierarchs responded successfully to the allegations brought against them , and public anger now turned against the generals instead . The eight generals were deposed from their office and ordered to return to Athens to stand trial ; two of them , Aristogenes and Protomachus , fled , but the other six returned . Upon their return , they were imprisoned , and one of them , Erasinides , was brought to trial and convicted of several charges involving misconduct in office ; this trial may represent an attempt by the generals ' enemies to test the wind , since Erasinides , who had proposed abandoning the survivors altogether during the deliberations after the battle , may have been the easiest target among the six . The question of how the generals should be tried for their failure to rescue the survivors was then brought before the assembly . On the first day of debate , the generals were able to win the sympathy of the crowd by placing the blame for the tragedy entirely on the storm that had thwarted the rescue attempts . Unfortunately for them , however , this first day of debate was followed by the festival of the " Apaturia " , at which families met together ; in this context , the absence of those drowned at Arginusae was painfully evident , and when the assembly next met the initiative passed to those who wished to treat the generals harshly . A politician named Callixeinus proposed that , without further debate , the assembly should vote on the guilt or innocence of the generals . Euryptolemus , a cousin of Alcibiades , and several others opposed the motion on the grounds that it was unconstitutional , but they withdrew their motion after another politician moved that the same penalty applied to the generals be applied to them . With the opposition from the floor now silenced , the generals ' accusers sought to bring their motion to a vote . The presiding officers of the assembly were the prytanies , randomly selected councilmen from whichever tribe was assigned to oversee the assembly in a given month ; at each meeting of the assembly , one of the prytanies was appointed " epistates " , or president of the assembly . By chance , the philosopher Socrates , holding public office for the only time in his life , was " epistates " on the day that the generals were tried . Declaring that he would " do nothing that was contrary to the law " , Socrates refused to put the measure to a vote . Emboldened , Euryptolemus rose again to speak , and persuaded the assembly to pass a motion ordering that the generals be tried separately . Parliamentary maneuvering , however , undid this victory , and in the end the original motion was carried ; a vote was taken , and all six generals were found guilty and executed including Pericles the Younger . The Athenians soon came to regret their decision in the case of the generals , and charges were brought against the principal instigators of the executions . These men escaped before they could be brought to trial , but Callixeinus did return to Athens several years later ; despised by his fellow citizens , he died of starvation . Peace offer . At Sparta , the defeat at Arginusae added to a long list of setbacks since the war in the Aegean had begun in 412 BC . The fleet , now stationed at Chios , was in poor condition , Spartans at home were discouraged , and supporters of Callicratidas were displeased by the notion that his rival Lysander would rise to power again if the war were to continue ( Sparta ' s allies in the Aegean were demanding his return ) . With all these concerns in mind , the Spartan government dispatched an embassy to Athens , offering to surrender the Spartan fort at Decelea in return for peace on the basis of the status quo in the Aegean . This proposal , however , was rejected by the Athenian assembly at the urging of Cleophon . The war continued , but Athens ' decision was to prove costly less than a year later when Lysander , in command of the Spartan fleet once more , decisively defeated the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami ; within two years of the dramatic Athenian victory at Arginusae , the city surrendered and its walls were torn down .