Chabrias Alone in the Harbour Mouth

The fourth century gave Chios a partial recovery, a brief return to prominence, and a final loss of its independence.

Sparta's victory in 404 turned out to be worse for the Aegean than Athens' empire had been; Spartan governors and garrisons proved so unpopular so quickly that by the 390s the whole region was in motion again. The Athenian Conon, commanding a fleet funded by Persian money, used Chios as his base, and the island drifted back into an Athenian orientation.

In 378/7 BC Athens founded the Second Athenian League, and Chios was among its founders — indeed Chios is the first state named on the great stele that records the League's charter, a document which explicitly guarantees members against garrisons, resident governors, tribute, and interference in their constitutions. The Athenians had learned something from losing an empire, and had written the lesson on stone.

It lasted about twenty years. Athenian behaviour drifted back toward the habits of the old empire, and in 357 BC Chios, Rhodes, Cos, and Byzantium revolted together in the war the sources call the Social War — the war of the allies.

Athens attacked Chios first, and the attack produced one of the most futile heroic deaths in Greek history.

The expedition was under joint command: Chares, an aggressive and not universally admired commander, and Chabrias, who was one of the finest Athenian generals of the century — the tactician of Thebes and Naxos, a soldier of forty years' standing who had commanded fleets and armies for Athens, for Persia, and for the Egyptian pharaoh Tachos. The plan was a direct assault on the harbour of Chios town.

Chabrias's trireme went in first, through the harbour mouth. The rest of the fleet, seeing what was waiting inside, hung back.

Diodorus gives the fullest account. Chabrias's ship, alone inside the harbour and unsupported, was rammed, surrounded, and holed. His crew went over the side and swam for it, and they lived. Chabrias would not leave his ship. He fought from the deck of a sinking trireme, in the middle of an enemy harbour, until he was killed.

The Athenians never took the island. The Social War ended in 355 with Athens conceding the independence of the rebels, and Chios was free — and immediately fell into the characteristic condition of a small fourth-century Aegean state, which was to be ruled by strongmen financed by Persia. The city that had put the demosie boule on stone two centuries earlier now had tyrants.

Then Macedon arrived. Alexander crossed to Asia in 334, and the Persian counter-offensive at sea, run by Memnon of Rhodes and after his death by Pharnabazus, took Chios in 333 through the simple expedient of betrayal: the pro-Persian faction, whose leader was one Apollonides, opened the gates. Chios became a Persian naval base and a prison for Macedonian sympathisers, and a squadron of Persian ships lay in the harbour where Chabrias had died.

It did not last long. In 332 BC a Macedonian squadron under Hegelochus and Amphoterus retook the island. The pro-Persian leaders were arrested and shipped south to Alexander, who was then in Egypt. And the settlement he imposed on the island produced one of the most valuable documents to survive from the ancient world.