Their joy was tempered, however, by the aftermath of the battle, in which a storm prevented the ships assigned to rescue the survivors of the 25 disabled or sunken Athenian triremes from performing their duties, and a great number of sailors drowned.

At Sparta, meanwhile, traditionalists who had supported Callicratidas pressed for peace with Athens since they knew that a continuation of the war would lead to the reascendence of their opponent Lysander.

The Athenians, however, rejected the offer, and Lysander departed to the Aegean to take command of the fleet for the remainder of the war, which would be decided less than a year later by his total victory at the Battle of Aegospotami.

Besieged by land and sea, Conon was powerless to act against the vastly superior forces that surrounded him and only barely slipped a messenger ship out to Athens to carry the news of his plight.

When the messenger ship reached Athens with news of Conon's situation, the assembly wasted no time in approving extreme measures to build and man a relief force.

To ensure a sufficiently large and loyal group of crewmen, the Athenians possibly took the radical step of extending citizenship to thousands of slaves who rowed with the fleet.

In a highly unorthodox arrangement, the fleet was commanded collaboratively by eight generals: Aristocrates, Aristogenes, Diomedon, Erasinides, Lysias, Pericles, Protomachus and Thrasyllus.

After leaving Samos, the Athenian fleet sailed to the Arginusae islands, opposite Cape Malea on Lesbos, where they camped for an evening.

The superior Athenian numbers, combined with the tactics they had implemented, created a dangerous situation for the Spartans, and Callicratidas's helmsman advised him to retire without a fight, but the navarch insisted on pushing on.

[10] To address both of these concerns, the generals decided that all eight of them would sail with the majority of the fleet to Mytilene, where they would attempt to relieve Conon, and the trierarchs Thrasybulus and Theramenes would remain behind with a smaller detachment to rescue the survivors.

[11] At Athens, the public relief at this unexpected victory was quickly subsumed in a bitter rhetorical battle over who was responsible for the failure to rescue the sailors.

When the generals learned that the public was angry over the failed rescue, they assumed that Thrasybulus and Theramenes, who had already returned to the city, were responsible, and accordingly, they wrote letters to the assembly denouncing the two trierarchs and blaming them for the disaster.

On the first day of debate, the generals won the sympathy of the crowd by placing the blame for the tragedy entirely on the storm that had thwarted the rescue attempts.

In this context, the absence of those drowned at Arginusae was painfully evident, and when the assembly next met, the initiative passed to those who wished to treat the generals harshly.

The fleet, now stationed at Chios, was in poor condition, Spartans at home were discouraged and supporters of Callicratidas were displeased by the notion that his rival Lysander would rise to power again if the war were to continue (Sparta's allies in the Aegean were demanding his return).