Conon
Conon escaped the disaster that ended the Peloponnesian War and came back eleven years later with a Persian fleet to undo it. He was an Athenian of good family who held commands through the last phase of the war, and he was one of the generals at Aegospotami in 405 BC when the Athenian fleet was caught beached and unprepared and destroyed almost entirely. He got away with about nine ships and did not go home - a prosecution was certain - and took refuge with Evagoras of Salamis in Cyprus. Athens surrendered the following year, its walls were pulled down to flute music, and Sparta took the empire. What he did next is unusual: he entered Persian service. Artaxerxes gave him joint command of a fleet against the Spartans, whose high-handedness in Asia Minor had made them intolerable to their former paymaster. At Cnidus in 394 BC he destroyed the Spartan fleet and with it the naval supremacy Sparta had bought with Persian gold ten years earlier. He then sailed to the Piraeus with Persian money and rebuilt the Long Walls of Athens, which the Spartans had demolished as the condition of peace - so the man who was present at the ruin of the city paid for its refortification out of the treasury of the king who had financed the ruin. He was arrested on a later embassy to the satrap Tiribazus and died shortly afterwards, probably back in Cyprus. A statue of him stood in the agora, one of the first put up for a living Athenian.
- Lived: 444 BCE – 389 BCE
- Nationality: Athenian
- Roles: naval_commander
