Results
Ultimately, Melos refused to surrender to the Athenians. The Athenians immediately besieged Melos, as threatened. Thucydides writes, "Our decision, Athenians, is just the same as it was at first. We are not prepared to give up in a short moment the liberty which our city has enjoyed from its foundation for 700 years." With this decision, the Athenians now had the excuse they needed to destroy Melos, even though the Melians offered them peace at the end of the Dialogue by saying, "‘We invite you to allow us to be friends of yours and enemies to neither side, to make a treaty which shall be agreeable to both you and us, and so to leave our country.'" Although the Melians held out for a time, the Athenians eventually won after some form of unspecified treachery within the city. They then proceeded to execute all the men they took captive and enslaved the women and children, and further, repopulated it as an Athenian colony.
Liebeschuetz notes an irony in the Melian Dialogue: "The Athenians look at the present and can see nothing will save Melos. They are right. The Melians look to the future. They are right too. Melos is destroyed. But the very next sentence in the history begins the story of the decline of Athens and the justification of the Melians." This is incredible because both groups, the Melians and Athenians, predicted outcomes that both came to pass at a later time. Athens correctly predicted that Sparta would not or could not prevent the Athenian army from destroying Melos. Yet the Melians were also correct in their belief in their kindred, the Spartans. After the fall of their city, the surviving Melians were resettled on the mainland by Sparta. Within a few years the Peloponnesian War broke out between Sparta and Athens, and the Melian community in exile raised funds to contribute to the Spartan war effort, which successfully destroyed the Athenian empire. The Spartan general Lysander then retook Melos and restored the Melians to their homeland. Overall, Melos was one of the few islands in the Cyclades that stood up for itself despite the negative repercussions.
Read more about this topic: Melian Dialogue
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