Henceforward Athens was a subordinate power. Sparta was, for a time,
supreme; a Spartan garrison held the Acropolis; Alcibiades, who might
have restored Athens, was assassinated in Persia through the influence
of Lysander; and though, after a brief period of rule by the Thirty
Tyrants, set up by Lysander, a counter-revolution restored, in part, the
constitution of Solon, the political greatness of Athens had departed.
Even the disastrous Peloponnesian War, which lasted twenty-seven years,
did not destroy the impulse given to the Greek intellect during the
preceding age, and literature, oratory, and philosophy flourished.