The Athenians’ Syracusan debacle, together with the subsequent renewal of war with Sparta, has by 411 occasioned revolts in the Athenian empire and serious political turmoil at home.

The Council of Four Hundred, a conservative oligarchic group, in 411 persuades the Athenian assembly to suspend the traditional institutions and entrust supreme control temporarily to them.

Athenian politician Theramenes, said to have been a pupil of the sophist Prodicus of Ceos, and whose father, Hagnon, a contemporary of Pericles, served repeatedly as one of the ten annual generals of Athens, is a founding member.

The subversive teaching of the sophists (rhetorically adept “experts” who profess to impart their knowledge of such politically useful skills as rhetoric, usually in exchange for money) may be a strong influence on oligarchic leaders like Theramenes and the more extreme Antiphon, and no doubt on others.

The orator and politician Antiphon, the earliest Athenian known to have taken up rhetoric as a profession, is a logographos; i.e., a writer of speeches for other men to deliver in their defense in court, a function that is particularly useful in the climate of accusation and counter-accusation that prevails in Athens at this time.

Aristophanes writes The Thesmorphoriazusae and his classic anti-war play Lysistrata in 411.

In Lysistrata, the playwright’s' third comment on the Peloponnesian War, women from everywhere in Greece, led by the proud Lysistrata, unite in a sex strike to compel their warring menfolk to conclude peace.

Lysistrata’s simple plot, ribald language, and often hilarious situations is typical of Attic Old Comedy: a combination of song, dance, serious political exhortation, and sublimely lyrical religious poetry with an absurd premise, worked for all the laughs it can provide through savage topical references and unabashed scatalogical and sexual humor.

In The Thesmophoriazusae, Aristophanes satirizes Euripides when the women at the festival in honor of Demeter elect to destroy the playwright for slandering women, and an elderly relative of his, disguised as a woman, must plead his case.

Divisions arise within the Council, and when a mutiny breaks out in autumn 411 among the troops who are fortifying Piraeus, the harbor of Athens, the Council sends Theramenes to quell it.

Instead, he puts himself at the head of the mutineers.

The ensuing meeting of the Assembly deposes the Four Hundred and restores the traditional constitution in large part, but restricts some of the privileges of citizenship to a body called the Five Thousand, a more moderate group.

Antiphon, “who conceived the whole matter [the oligarchic revolution] and the means by which it was brought to pass,” mounts an unsuccessful defense; he is executed for treason.

Thucydides, while an admirer of Periclean democracy, is no democratic ideologue.

He approves of the curtailment of the democracy in 411 and finds the oligarchic constitution of Chios admirable.

He abruptly ends his remarkably objective History of the Peloponnesian War (the principal source for the events of the war up to now), with his narrative of the events of 411.

The abrupt end to Thucydides' narrative, which breaks off in the middle of the year 411 BCE, has traditionally been interpreted as indicating that he died while writing the book, although other explanations have been put forward.

Athens, denied the use of Attica, draws more heavily on Euboea for food, a condition relevant to Euboea's revolt in 411.

Thasos revolts against Athens from 411 BCE.

Ándros, which Pericles had forced to admit Athenian settlers, also revolts in 411 (or 410) BCE.

Alcibiades, when some officers in the Athenian fleet begin to plan an oligarchic coup, holds out hopes that he can secure financial support from Persia if the democracy is overthrown.

The main Athenian fleet, stationed at Samos, remains loyal to the democracy and needs the abilities of Alcibiades to help crush the Athenian oligarchs.

Following secret negotiations with Thrasybulus, elected general by the troops, Alcibiades, who has broken with the oligarchs after failing to get what he wants, is recalled from exile.

The fleet sends a message to demand that the democracy be restored.

Thrasybulus wins a naval victory over the Spartans at Syme in 411 BCE.

The Spartans move north from Chios to the Hellespont, gradually overcoming the Athenian navy despite effective countermeasures taken by Alcibiades and others. (This stage of the Peloponnesian war is called "Decelean" from the name of a town in Attica, Decelea, which Sparta fortifies—to the enormous cost of the Athenians.)

The Athenians decisively defeat the combined Persian-Spartan land and sea forces in 410 at the Battle of Cyzicus.

Sparta requests a peace, with the status quo intact, but the demagogue Cleophon, Athens’ new ruler, refuses.

Sophocles’ Philoctetes, produced in 409 BCE, dramatizes the legend of the legendary Achaean hero who, abandoned and embittered, is ultimately reconciled with society and the gods.