Chares
Chares commanded Athenian armies for forty years, mostly by hiring them out to whoever would pay. He belongs to a generation of professional Greek commanders who no longer led citizen levies: Athens voted campaigns it would not fund, so its generals took mercenary armies into foreign service and used the wages to keep the force together between Athenian wars. He took service with the rebel Persian satrap Artabazus in the 350s and won a battle that his troops called a second Marathon, which paid the fleet and produced a Persian protest that forced Athens to disown him. He was prosecuted more than once and acquitted, and Demosthenes both defended and attacked him depending on the year. He fought through the Social War against the seceding allies, and the long campaign in the north against Philip of Macedon, taking Athenian forces into the Chersonese and to Byzantium. At Chaeronea in 338 BC he shared the Athenian command against Philip and Alexander. The Athenian left broke the Macedonian line and pursued it into a feigned withdrawal, and the phalanx closed behind them; the Theban Sacred Band was destroyed to a man on the other wing. Greek independence effectively ended that afternoon. He ended his life in Persian service again, at Taenarum and then in Asia Minor, and died about 325 BC. Ancient opinion of him is poor and consistent: brave, popular with his soldiers, careless of discipline, and available. The judgement is fair and it is also convenient, because a city that would not pay for its own army found it useful to blame the men who raised one on credit.
- Lived: 400 BCE – 325 BCE
- Nationality: Athenian
- Roles: military
