Miltiades

Miltiades commanded the Athenians at Marathon and was prosecuted by them the following year. Born around 550 BC into the wealthy Philaid family, he inherited a personal principality in the Thracian Chersonese, where his uncle had established a tyranny, and ruled it as a vassal of Persia. He served on Darius's Scythian expedition around 513 BC, guarding a bridge over the Danube, and later claimed to have urged the other Greek commanders to destroy it and strand the Persian army — a claim that may have been invented to explain his subsequent flight. He joined the Ionian Revolt, took Lemnos and Imbros for Athens, and fled ahead of the Persian recovery in 493 BC, losing a son to a Phoenician squadron on the way. In Athens he was prosecuted for tyranny in the Chersonese and acquitted. He was elected one of the ten generals for 490 BC. When the Persian force landed at Marathon, the commanders were divided over whether to fight or wait; Herodotus has Miltiades persuade the polemarch Callimachus to cast the deciding vote for battle. The Athenians attacked across about a mile of open ground, with the centre deliberately thinned and the wings strengthened. The centre gave way, the wings held and turned inward, and the Persians were driven into the marshes and the sea. Herodotus gives 6,400 Persian dead against 192 Athenians. Miltiades then took a fleet to Paros on a private grievance, failed, and was badly injured. He was fined fifty talents and died of gangrene in 489 BC.

• Lived: 550 BCE – 489 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: general, strategist