Athens in 323 BC was no longer the city of Pericles — but it was still formidable. Its treasury was replenished, and it could put between 240 and perhaps 400 warships at sea. With Alexander gone and Macedon in the hands of his regent Antipater, the Greek city-states saw an opening. Athens led a coalition that included the Aetolian League and others who had never fully accepted Macedonian supremacy. The war began well for the Greeks. They defeated the pro-Macedonian Boeotians, won over the Thessalian cavalry, and forced Antipater to retreat inside the walls of Lamia — a city in central Greece where the allies besieged him.

Antipater called for help. Naval reinforcements began moving from Asia Minor toward Europe, and the Macedonian admiral Cleitus the White put to sea with a fleet of 240 warships. The Athenian admiral Euetion tried to stop them at the Hellespont, the narrow strait between Europe and Asia. He failed. The war at sea was now decisive.

The ancient historian Diodorus Siculus, writing centuries after the fact, gives us the terse record of what happened near the Echinades: Cleitus "defeated him in two naval battles and destroyed a large number of the ships of the enemy near the islands that are called the Echinades." That is almost all we have. The Parian Marble — a chronicle inscribed on stone in Paros — separately records a battle near Amorgos in the Aegean. Other inscriptions speak of fighting at Abydos on the Hellespont.

Scholars have argued for generations about how many separate engagements there were and in what order. The traditional view places a first Macedonian victory at the Hellespont, then a battle at Amorgos, and finally a third engagement at the Echinades. The historian A. B. Bosworth offered a different reconstruction: the Echinades battles happened in the spring of 322 BC in a separate western theatre, with the Macedonian fleet supporting Macedonian interests against the Aetolians who controlled Oiniades on the Acarnanian coast. Under this reading, the Athenians had sent ships to help the Aetolians and were defeated here twice before the fleet returned east to finish off the Athenian navy at Amorgos.

What all interpretations agree on is the result: the Athenian fleet was destroyed. Whether it happened here first and then at Amorgos, or here as a final blow after Amorgos, is a question that the brevity of the sources may never fully resolve.

The location of the battle raises its own puzzle. The Echinades islands lie in the Ionian Sea, off the coast of Acarnania in western Greece — geographically awkward for a war that was primarily fought in the Aegean and along Greece's eastern coast. This mismatch led scholars like T. Walek in 1924 to propose that the "Echinades" in the sources were actually the Lichades islets in the Malian Gulf near Lamia, while J. S. Morrison in 1987 suggested the area near Cape Echinus. The question remains open.

What is not in question is the weight of the defeat. The Athenians who survived the naval disasters came home to a city facing ruin. Their land forces had been beaten at the Battle of Crannon. The Macedonian army had crossed into Europe and was no longer penned inside Lamia. Athens had no good options left.

Athens sued for peace, and Antipater's terms were harsh. Twelve thousand of the city's poorest citizens — the thetes, men who rowed the warships and formed the backbone of classical Athenian democracy — were disenfranchised and expelled. The vote was restricted to those wealthy enough to meet a property threshold. Antipater then stationed a Macedonian garrison on the Munychia hill overlooking the harbor of Piraeus, ending Athens' ability to project naval power.

The war that had burned so brightly after Alexander's death thus closed with the extinguishing of the democratic system that had defined Athens for more than a century. The men who had rowed those fleets to Amorgos and the Echinades, whatever the precise sequence of battles, did not return to the same city. The men who died in the water off these small, rocky islands died in the last campaign fought in the name of Athenian liberty.