Hippodamus of Miletos uses the rectilinear grid system in planning the Athenian port of Piraeus around 450 BCE.

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.

Alexander escapes from being blockaded in Panormus, takes several Attic triremes, and plunders the Piraeus.

Demosthenes’ long service to the Athenian state ends in abandonment by its fickle citizenry.

While fleeing Antipater's soldiers, he kills himself by taking poison, his death a symbol of the decline of Athenian democracy.

Sulla now concentrates his forces on the Port of Piraeus, and Archelaus, seeing his hopeless situation, withdraws to the citadel and then abandons the port to join up with his forces under the command of Taxiles.

Sulla, not yet having a fleet, is powerless to prevent Archelaus’ escape.

Before leaving Athens, Sulla burns the port to the ground, then advances into Boeotia to take on Archelaus's armies and remove them from Greece.

The Visigoths next sack Piraeus (the port of Athens) and …

The British and French occupy the main Greek port at Piraeus from April 1854 to February 1857 to block further Greek moves, and effectively neutralize the Greek army.

The destruction of the Turkish fleet and the threat of Russian expansion had alarmed both the British and French governments, which, after Russia ignores an Anglo-French ultimatum to withdraw from the Danubian principalities, had declared war.

The intervention of Britain and France on the Ottoman side and their joint occupation of the port of Piraeus in 1854 forces Otto to relinquish his "Christian cause"—a humiliation that drastically curtails his power.