The Fall of the Athenian Empire-(A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Donald Kagan - (1987)

310 -THE FALL OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE
would have to abandon the campaign, having accomplished nothing,
for he could not maintain his forces without money. It was far better
to collect funds first and so be able to sustain the effort until some
significant success could be achieved.
His collections completed, Alcibiades sailed north to Samos and
from there to Notium, the port of Colophon, on the coast to the
northwest of Ephesus (see Map 3). 7 ° Colophon and its port were the
only cities in the neighborhood still under Athenian control. Notium
was not a major naval base like Samos, Miletus, or, now, Ephesus,
but it was well situated for sailing out against Ephesus, cutting off
Spartan ships going between Ephesus and Chios and preventing the
Spartans from sailing north to the Hellespont. Under the circumstances,
it was the obvious place to go and the one from which the Athenians
had the best chance of bringing Lysander to battle. 71 At Notium,
Alcibiades commanded eighty ships, having left twenty to conduct the
siege at Andros. 72 Lysander's force had meanwhile grown to ninety."
This size gave the Spartans a numerical advantage, but Lysander did
not offer to fight. As part of his preparations, he had pulled his triremes
out of the water to dry them and effect repairs, and they may very
well have remained on the beach when the Athenians took up their
station at Notium. 74 Lysander clearly believed that time was very much
on his side. After the experience of Cynossema, Sestos, and Cyzicus,
no Spartan admiral should have been eager to encounter an Athenian
Adtenians' expectations were excessive. "They did not reckon with his lack of money.
Since he was fighcing men who had the Great King as their provider, he was forced
to sail off, leaving his camp behind, in order to obtain wages and provisions." Bloedow
(Alcibiades, 76, n. 448) dismisses Plutarch's views about the shortage of money as
"melodramatic" and "improbable" and asks where were the 100 talents Alcibiades had
collected in Caria (Xen. 1.4.8)? However much money Alcibiades may have collected
in Caria the previous May, it will have been delivered m the Athenian treasury upon
his arrival in June. There is no good reason to believe that all of it had been given to
him when he set out in October. It is highly unlikely, moreover, £hat 100 talents is a
plausible figure for what anyone might hope to collect in Caria in 407. The Athenians
had collected nothing like that from the region in more prosperous times (see Meiggs,
Athenian Empire, 254). Either the figure in the manuscript or Xenophon's information
is badly wrong. Even if Alcibiades had received as many as 100 talents at Athens,
moreover, that would pay for only two months of campaigning.
7
0Xen. 1.4.23; Diod. 13·71.1.
11 Amit, Grazer Beitriige, Ill (1975), 8.
72 Xen. 1.5. 18.
7
'Xen. 1.5.10.
74
lbid. See 8.44.4 for an occasion when the Spartans pulled their ships onto the
Rhodian shore, although they outnumbered the enemy, and were inactive for eighty
days.