…the Spartans plant a garrison on Attic soil at Decelea, thus depriving Athens of access to its silver mines at Laurium and therefore threatening the Athenian treasury.

Athens, embarrassed economically by this and for other reasons, elects to impose on its subject states a five percent tax on shipping instead of the customary tribute (which will be restored in 410).

A clever Athenian dropout in Aristophanes’ The Birds, produced in 414, persuades the birds to construct a sky-borne urban utopia (“Cloudcuckooland”) and compels the Olympian gods to cede him their prerogatives.

In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, produced around the same time, the great tragedian holds up the old values to a subversive sort of skepticism, overturning the convention that tragedy must always be grand and awe-inspiring.

The Spartans have meanwhile appointed the general Gylippus to take charge of the defense of Syracuse; his arrival in 414 keeps Syracuse from surrendering.

Gylippus breaks the Athenian blockade by land, organizes resistance from other Sicilian states, and lays siege to the Athenian encampment.

The Syracusan cavalry makes the Athenian position intolerable: those who go out from their camps foraging for food often do not return.

Hermocrates, elected as one of Syracuse's three strategoi, is dismissed from this position after a short period because of his lack of success in battle.

Later he is one of the most important advisors to Gylippus, and thus contributes to the victory over Athens during its siege of Syracuse.

Representatives of Tissaphernes and of Pharnabazus, hereditary satrap of Dascylium in Hellespontine Phrygia, as well as ambassadors from Chios, …

Athens, having become entangled in the affairs of the Persian satrap Pissuthnes, who had revolted in 420 against his Achaemenid overlord, and subsequently with his natural son Amorges, sends mercenary help to Pissuthnes and perhaps to Amorges.

The Persian aristocrat Tissaphernes, dispatched by his king to Lydia, manages to incite a rebellion under Pissuthnes' Greek mercenaries, and achieving this offers negotiations.

Pissuthnes, upon his arrival at the place of the talks, is arrested, sent to Darius, and executed; Tissaphernes succeeds Pissuthnes as satrap of Lydia in about 415 BCE.

During his first years, he still must fight against Pissuthnes' son Amorges, who continues the struggle, possibly with Athenian help.

After the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, Darius, angered by the Amorges affair and determined to recover the Greek coastal cities of Asia Minor, which have been under Athenian control since 448, decides to back the Spartans.

The satraps of Asia Minor are ordered to collect overdue tribute.

As satrap of Lydia and Caria and general of the Achaemenid forces in Anatolia, Tissaphernes allies with Sparta against Athens in 413 and urges Athens’s colonies in Asia Minor to revolt.

…Clazomenae, and …

…Erythrae, invite the Spartans to carry the war across to the eastern Aegean.

This Sparta does, and in some long, drawn-out diplomacy, it agrees to abandon all claims to Anatolia as part of a deal for money and a fleet.

The playwright Sophocles is one of the ten commissioners who govern Athens from 413, following the disastrous Sicilian expedition.

Euripides produces his own interpretation of the curse on the House of Atreus with his version of Electra, produced in 413, which covers the same events but paints a more psychologically realistic portrait of the infamous matricide.

Perdiccas had left the Athenians by 417 BCE and joined the Spartan-Argive alliance.

Bowing to Athenian pressure just four years later, Perdiccas breaks with the Peloponnese, and aids Athens in their attack on Amphipolis.

He dies in 413 BCE, leaving his son Archelaus as heir.

Alcibiades meanwhile confirms his reputation with women (which the rich Athenian whom he had married appreciates only too well) by seducing the wife of the Spartan king Agis II, who is at Decelea with his army.