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He was a Spartan admiral who
commanded the Peloponnesian fleet in 411 and 410 BC, during the Peloponnesian
War. Mindarus first took command of the Spartan fleet at Miletus, where the
satrap, Tissaphernes,
had promised the Spartans they would be joined by the sizeable Phoenician fleet
under his command. After several months of waiting, Mindarus realized that no
such fleet would be forthcoming, and made the strategic decision to relocate
his fleet to the Hellespont, where the rival satrap,
Pharnabazus had
promised him greater support than he was receiving from Tissaphernes. Mindarus
set out from Miletus with 73 ships; a storm forced him ashore at Chios, but he
remained there only a few days. Sailing with haste to avoid an Athenian fleet
that had been brought up from Samos to oppose him, he succeeded in bringing his
fleet between Lesbos and the mainland and into the Hellespont, where he joined
the few allied ships in the region in the Spartan base at
Abydos. With this strategic
move, Mindarus had placed his fleet in position to cut off the Athenian grain
supply, and had forced the Athenian fleet to challenge him at a place of his
choosing. But then Mindarus' luck ran out. Five days after his arrival at
Abydos, the Athenians sailed into the narrow waters of the Hellespont to engage
his numerically superior force. In the resulting battle, Peloponnesian victory
appeared within grasp in the early going, as the Athenian left was cut off and
the centre driven ashore on the promontory of
Cynossema;
superior seamanship on the part of the Athenian captains and sailors, however,
turned the tide of the battle, and Mindarus' fleet fled back to Abydos with
losses. He summoned reinforcements to him at
Abydos, but
suffered a second defeat when a small group of ships sailing to join him there
was trapped by the Athenian fleet. Mindarus sailed out to rescue them, but,
after a hard fought battle, the arrival of
Alcibiades with Athenian
reinforcements turned the battle into a rout, with the Peloponnesians again
suffering losses in their flight back to Abydos. Over the next several months,
Mindarus, with financial support from Pharnabazus, rebuilt his fleet to 80
triremes by the spring of 410. Sailing eastward to
Cyzicus, he
besieged the city with the assistance of Pharnabazus' army and took it by
storm. The Athenians pursued him, and, in the waters off Cyzicus, enticed
Mindarus into a fatal trap. While
Thrasybulus and
Theramenes waited out of
sight with a number of triremes, Alcibiades took forty ships and showed himself
before Cyzicus. Mindarus took the bait, setting out with his entire fleet in
pursuit. When he was sufficiently far from shore, the hidden Athenian forces
emerged to cut off his line of retreat. Surrounded, Mindarus led his ships in a
desperate flight towards a beach south-west of the city, the one direction open
to him. Landing with Alcibiades' force hot on their heels, Mindarus' men, and
Pharnabazus' troops who had come up to support them, fought to prevent the
Athenians from towing their ships out to sea. Initially, the Athenians were
driven back, but Thrasybulus and Theramenes, bringing up their forces and the
Athenian land forces from the rear, were eventually able to drive the Persians
off. Undaunted, Mindarus divided his force to face the threat now pressing from
both sides, but when he fell in the fighting, Peloponnesian resistance
dissolved; all the fleet's ships were either destroyed or captured.
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