Thucydides, an Athenian who lived through the fighting, wrote this history of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 BCE. This is Book 8 of that History of the Peloponnesian War. In Book 7 Athens lost a fleet and an army at Syracuse in Sicily while still at war with Sparta.

News of that wreck reaches the Aegean. Subject islands smell blood; Chios and Miletus, Greek cities on the coast of what is now Turkey, go over to Sparta. Alcibiades, the Athenian who switched sides, sits with Tissaphernes, the Persian governor of that coast, and teaches him to pay neither side enough to win. At Athens the Four Hundred seize the council-house — rule by a few in a city that had called itself a school of Greece. The fleet at Samos, still democratic, refuses to come home and become slaves. The Five Thousand replace the Four Hundred; Alcibiades is recalled by the men who still have ships. A fight at Cynossema in the Hellespont, the Dardanelles, is a small victory that feels like breath. The book stops mid-war. Xenophon’s Hellenica picks the story up.