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

THE TRIAL OF THF. GENERALS 357
for rescuing survivors of the battle. 7 But that criticism seems unjust.
They must have assumed that the same procedure used in previous
battles would be appropriate again. If we believe that their original
battle plan aimed at a double envelopment in which the enemy fleet
would be trapped between the islands and a closed circle of Athenian
ships, as seems likely, the usual procedure would have worked. There
would have been no long pursuit and no dispersion of ships. All of
the fighting would have been close to the islands, and rescue would
have been simple.
The actual course of the battle made the usual plan impossible. The
enemy fled far, and the Athenians were bound to press the pursuit.
It might have been possible to improvise a rescue plan, but that would
have required a confident, experienced leader with a personal authority
recognized by trierarchs and fellow generals. Such a man might have
produced a new plan on the spur of the moment and communicated
with other ships by flag signal or semaphore of some kind, as Thrasybulus
had done at the battle of Cyzicus.' But Thrasybulus was only
a trierarch at Arginusae, and none of the generals had his experience
or the authority, either personal or official, to take charge. With a
collective leadership that lacked a proven and authoritative figure, the
Athenians cannot be blamed for behaving in a conventional way in
the confusion after the battle, although the situation called for an
unconventional response.
When the generals convened at Arginusae after the ships had returned
to the islands, there was probably still time to organize a program
of rescue and recovery that might have had some degree of
success, but the unusual strategic situation interfered. Unlike previous
battles in which the enemy had fled safely to the land or had been
swept from the sea or had been victorious--that is, where there was
no further action that the Athenians needed to take or could undertake--the
battle at Arginusae left an important task undone. No more
than twelve miles northwest of the islands lay a Spartan fleet of fifty
ships blockading Conon at Mytilene. As soon as the Spartan commander,
Eteonicus, learned that the main Spartan force had been defeated,
he was certain to try to escape. If he fled to Chios to join those
ships that had escaped from the battle, the Spartan fleet at Chios would
number over ninety triremes, a force the size of Lysander's victorious
7 Cloche, RHCXXX (1919), 12-IJ.
8
See above, 24 3.