Cheirisophos

Cheirisophos ( Greek Χειρίσοφος; * around 435 BC; † 400 BC ) was a Spartan military leader who, after the end of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), defeated the Persian prince Cyrus , who was Sparta during the War had helped, was sent for military support.

Cheirisophos, who - after Diodorus - acted on the official behalf of Sparta, came across in 401 BC. At Issus , the easternmost port city in Cilicia , with 700 hoplites, who were commanded by him, to the army of Cyrus encamped there. This consisted of local contingents as well as Greek mercenaries (10,400 hoplites, 2,500 peltasts, ie lightly armed men). With this army Cyrus intended to fight his brother, the Persian great king Artaxerxes II , and to oust him from the throne. The leadership of the Greek mercenary army was given by Cyrus to the Spartan Klearchus .

In the same year Cyrus's troops clashed with the army of his brother Artaxerxes II at Kunaxa . Despite the military superiority of his army, the recklessly advancing Cyrus himself fell in battle. An attempt by Clearchus to proclaim the Persian noble Ariaios to replace Cyrus as the new Great King with the help of Cheirisophos and Menon, known from Plato's dialogues , failed. The victorious Greek army of over ten thousand soldiers was now in the middle of the hostile Persian Empire without any further specific assignment. During feigned negotiations with the great king Artaxerxes, the majority of the Greek generals were lured into a trap by the Persian satrap Tissaphernes and murdered.

After a phase of confusion, Cheirisophos and the Sparta-friendly Athenian intellectual, historian and Socrates student Xenophon , who had accompanied the procession at the invitation of his friend Proxenus , took over the leadership of the Greek mercenary army. The two unusual partners succeeded in fighting for the return from Persia to their homeland despite various obstacles, as Xenophon vividly described in his work Anabasis .

After reaching the Black Sea, Cheirisophos led the mercenary army along the coast to the west, but lost command in a mutiny in Herakleia Pontike . A little later he died in 400 BC. In the city of Kalpe in Bithynia of a fever.

swell

• Diodorus Siculus: Book XIV , chap. 19th
• Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War .
• Xenophon: Greek History ( Hellenica ).
• Xenophon: Cyrus anabasis. The train of ten thousand.

literature

• Franz Kiechle: Cheirisophos 1. In: The Little Pauly (KlP). Volume 1, Stuttgart 1964, column 1141 f.
• Benedikt Niese : Cheirisophos 1 . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume III, 2, Stuttgart 1899, Col. 2220 f.