Critias died on the slope. He had been the most aggressive of the Thirty Tyrants, the philosopher and second cousin of Plato's mother, and an architect of the regime that had executed perhaps fifteen hundred Athenians and exiled thousands more in the bitter year after Athens's surrender to Sparta. He had been part of the brilliant intellectual circle around Socrates, and had translated his ideas about elite rule into a government of summary executions and confiscations. On a spring day in 403 BC he led troops up a hillside above the port at Piraeus to crush a force of returning exiles. He was outnumbered five to one - and won easily - and he died anyway, killed in the chaos when the men he despised charged downhill at him.
The Thirty had been installed by Sparta after Athens's defeat in the Peloponnesian War, with a Spartan garrison on the Acropolis to back them up. Their rule was brief and savage. Among those who fled was Thrasybulus, an Athenian general and democrat, who in late 404 BC seized the border fort of Phyle with a small group of exiles and held it against an attack. As word spread, men trickled out of Athens to join him. By the time Thrasybulus marched his thousand-strong force down to Piraeus by night, the Thirty's grip was already loosening. The exiles took the prominent hill of Munychia, the steep crag above the port that gave its name to the harbor below.
The Thirty's army formed up in the marketplace below - the Spartan garrison on the right, the oligarchs' troops on the left, fifty ranks deep against the exiles' ten. They were the better part of five thousand men. The exiles were a thousand. Xenophon records the speech Thrasybulus gave to his men: their enemies on the right were the same Spartans they had routed near Phyle just days before; the men on the left had wrongly driven them from their country. He told them to fight not just for themselves but for the right to walk into Athens by the front gate. Then the Thirty's forces began to climb the road. Before they reached the top, the exiles charged downhill at them.
Numbers matter less when the slope is wrong. The downhill momentum and the disorder of the climbing column did the rest. The oligarchic line broke. The exiles drove their enemies down to the level ground, killing perhaps seventy. Among the dead were Critias, the head of the regime, and Charmides, another of the Thirty - a man Plato remembered fondly enough to name a dialogue after him, but who had served a government that murdered citizens. They had grown up in the same families as the men they fought, in some cases the same households. The bodies on the slope were Athenians on both sides.
The next day, in Athens, the Thirty were deposed. They fled to Eleusis, a nearby town they had previously massacred to secure as a refuge. A new oligarchy of ten men was installed, but the city was now divided: the men in Piraeus held the port, and a cycle of small fights went on until Sparta itself stepped in. King Pausanias led a Spartan force to Athens, fought a face-saving engagement at Piraeus, and then negotiated. The settlement he arranged restored Athenian democracy. Athens issued an amnesty - one of the first in recorded history - that forbade prosecution for acts committed during the period of the Thirty, with a few specific exceptions. It did not heal everything. Socrates, who had associations with members of the regime, would be tried and executed within four years. But the city, for a generation, did not return to civil war.
Munychia is now Kastella, the residential hill above Mikrolimano in Piraeus, with whitewashed houses climbing its slopes and a chapel on top. The view from the summit takes in the Saronic Gulf and on a clear day the islands of Aegina and Salamis. The ancient theater of Munychia, where part of the action probably ranged, has been excavated nearby. The exact slope where Critias died cannot be located precisely - the centuries have built apartments over the marketplace, run roads through the line of advance, and turned the harbor below into one of Greece's busiest ports. But the geography is intact: the hill, the sea, the line of sight that made it strategically valuable. It is one of the better places in Athens to think about how a city decides what kind of city it wants to be.
Battle site at the hill of Munychia (modern Kastella) at 37.94N, 23.66E, in Piraeus, the port of Athens. Athens International Airport (LGAV) is roughly 30 km east; the harbor of Piraeus is one of the most recognizable features on the Saronic Gulf coast, with concentric inner harbors visible from cruise. Best viewing 5,000-10,000 ft on a clear day; the hill itself is a low rounded rise just inland from Mikrolimano, with the Acropolis of Athens visible as a flat-topped rock about 7 km to the northeast.