The Spartan who learned the sea
Lysander was the Spartan commander who finally won the Peloponnesian War — and the platform reads him as the man who beat Athens by becoming, in the one respect that mattered, more like Athens. Sparta was a land power with no naval tradition; Lysander built it a fleet, and he paid for it with Persian gold, cultivating the friendship of the prince Cyrus the Younger to fund the ships and crews that Sparta could not afford. The platform reads this as the decisive strategic insight of the war's end: to defeat a naval empire, Sparta had to contest the sea.
Aegospotami and the fall of Athens
The platform reads Lysander's victory at Aegospotami in 405 BCE as the blow that ended the war. Catching the Athenian fleet beached and unprepared on the Hellespont, he destroyed almost the whole of it in a single action, cutting the grain route on which Athens depended. Besieged and starving, Athens surrendered in 404 BCE; Lysander sailed into the Piraeus, oversaw the demolition of the Long Walls to the music of flute-girls, and installed the oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants. The platform reads the scene as the symbolic end of the Athenian century — the walls that Pericles had made the basis of his strategy thrown down by the Spartan who had learned to fight at sea.
Victory and its corruption
The platform reads Lysander's conduct in victory as a study in how power corrupts even the disciplined Spartan character. He governed the defeated Aegean cities through narrow juntas of his own partisans (the decarchies), accumulated personal honours unprecedented for a Spartan — cities raised altars to him as to a god — and pursued an ambition that alarmed his own government. The platform reads this under ambition and downfall: the Spartan order distrusted the over-mighty individual, and Lysander's reach for personal pre-eminence was checked at home even as it triumphed abroad. He was killed in 395 BCE in the war that Spartan overreach soon provoked.
Why the platform reads him
Lysander is the platform's case for the decisive commander whose victory both ends a war and sows the next one. He shows how Sparta won — by mastering the sea with Persian money — and how its victory corrupted it, turning the liberator of the Greeks into the imposer of narrow tyrannies. The platform reads him as the human hinge of why Athens lost and of the brief, arrogant Spartan hegemony that followed.