The strategy was sound and its execution deliberate. By occupying the heights before announcing themselves, Diakos and Bousgos denied the Ottoman forces any easy route of escape or reinforcement. The message sent down to the town's Greek leaders — reconcile with us and open the gates — gave the local population a way to align with the revolution without waiting to see which side would prevail. By the time the flag of freedom was raised on March 30, the political question in Livadeia had already been answered. The military question had not. The Ottoman residents of the town, seeing armed Greeks enter in force, retreated to the strongest buildings in the city and prepared to defend them.

The battle that began on March 31 lasted five days. At some point in the fighting, a man identified in the sources only as Roukis led a night escalade — a direct climb up the fortress walls — to try to take the stronghold by surprise. The Ottoman defenders noticed the assault and repelled it. But whatever advantage the garrison held inside those walls, time was working against them. Cut off from resupply, without fresh water and running out of food, the besieged eventually had no viable choice left. They laid down their arms. The fortress of Livadeia fell not by storm but by attrition — a five-day siege that cost the defenders whatever provisions they had entered with.

Athanasios Diakos was already a celebrated figure in the early revolution, a former monk turned military leader who had become a captain of armatoloi — local irregular fighters. After Livadeia fell, he gathered the spoils of the siege and handed them over to the town's prefects to be converted into food and ammunition for the army. He did not rest. Rumors were reaching him that Ottoman forces were assembling to the north and west, and he set out with 600 men toward Vodonitsa and Thermopylae. The name of that second place carried its own weight — a mountain pass where the idea of Greek resistance against overwhelming force had, twenty-three centuries earlier, become myth. Within days, Diakos would fight his last battle there. He was captured at the Battle of Alamana in late April 1821 and executed by the Ottomans, becoming one of the first martyrs of the independence struggle.

The seizure of Livadeia in late March 1821 was one of a cluster of uprisings that erupted across central Greece in the weeks after the Greek War of Independence formally began. The town sat at the foot of Mount Helicon, on the road through Boeotia that connected Athens to the passes of central Greece — strategically important as a waystation, even if its fortress was not large. Its fall, along with other early successes in the region, demonstrated that the revolution was not confined to the Peloponnese, where it had first taken hold, but was spreading rapidly through the mainland. The men who took Livadeia were armed with muskets, local knowledge, and the momentum of a movement whose outcome was still far from certain.