Miltiades
Miltiades
Miltiades son of Cimon, of the aristocratic house of the Philaids — former tyrant of the Thracian Chersonese under Persian overlordship, who fled back to Athens in 493 after the fall of the Ionian Revolt and was elected strategos in time for the crisis of 490. At Marathon he convinced the polemarch Callimachus to vote for immediate battle, and when his day of the ten-strategoi rotation came round he deployed the Athenian line with thinned centre and strengthened wings — the tactical innovation that let the wings envelop the Persian flanks after the centre gave ground. After the victory his ambitious expedition against Paros the following year failed; he was fined fifty talents and died of gangrene from a thigh wound the same year. His son Cimon would lead the Athenian counter-offensive in the Aegean two decades later.