Dessek

Go to the source! We know about him mainly through Thucydides (book 5, the beginning of book 6 and the end of book and Plutarch (Life of Alkibiades). The latter is where we get all the tall tales.

I find it very hard to give much credit to generals like Patton and Montgomery who achieved the feat of winning victory with an army superior in men, fuel, ammunition, replacements, tanks, guns, ships, and military intelligence, and with uncontested air supremacy to boot. By the time of the D-Day landings, the defeat of Nazi Germany was an absolute inevitability. Utterly idiotic plans like Monty's Operation Market Garden and the American bloodbath in the Hürtgenwald only served to make the war drag on longer. People ITT appear to be making a conscious effort to avoid the clichés. It's been noted that we're ignoring Zhukov, von Manstein and von Rundstedt. Also no Patton, Rommel, Wellington or Napoleon yet. It's hard to argue with the greatness of Alexander, though. Someone did mention Darius III, his enemy, who gets a bad rep due to his running away from battle more than once, but who actually was known at the time for being in exceptional physical shape and very brave; it's likely that he fled the field knowing that the vastness of his empire would allow him to raise more forces for another round provided he didn't die. That business about Alexander being the son of Amon/Zeus was mostly politics. He only had himself declared the son of God when he got to Egypt, which notably had a tradition of regarding their rightful king as a son of God, and another tradition of revolting against any king who was not regarded as rightful, and another tradition of being notoriously hard to conquer. Egypt was the only part of the Persian empire ever to succesfully break away for any length of time, and had only recently been reconquered by the Persians (proving, incidentally, that the Persian empire was not in decline). Alexander was smart enough to realise that he absolutely had to make sure they were indeed worshipping him as the son of God.

Although he did die from a rooftile to the head, which isn't high up there when it comes to glorious deaths

Was many, but Chirisophus was the general one. The chap who led them was Cheirisophos. The chap who did all the cool tactical stuff was Xenophon. It seems from the story that Cheirisophos was picked as the new leader because he was a Spartan, and the Spartans are the default leaders when things get sticky, but really Xenophon showed more initiative and ended up soon being the joint leader or the de facto leader of the Ten Thousand. On the other hand, we only know about this stuff because Xenophon wrote it down, so he may have overplayed his own part a little bit... It is said that the relative ease with which the Ten Thousand managed to escape the Persian Empire (some 60% survived, which is totally awesome I guess) encouraged later Greeks to believe that the Persians were weak, and that a united Greece could crush them. This is a bit ironic considering the fact that the Persians clearly made no concerted effort to destroy the Ten Thousand. They basically just chased them off into the mountains, to die of cold, hunger, and local tribes. From the Persian point of view this "someone else's problem" approach was extremely effective, because it removed the Greeks from Persian heartlands right away, and caused them to be whittled down by semi-autonomous mountain tribes who fought to protect their homeland and therefore didn't cost the Persians any money.

"Colourful" is probably the nicest word that can be applied to him. "Seven-layer bastard" is closer to the mark. More of a scheming politician than a general though, which is why I chose Demosthenes. Still, I agree, you can't help but admire a guy who was apparently so much of a genius that when he tried something for the first time and wasn't immediately the absolute best at it, people suspected him of failing on purpose.

I would also like to offer Demosthenes the Athenian (d. 413 BC; the general, not the orator). His career saw as many defeats as successes, but considering the circumstances he clearly did what he could and I think it's fair to judge him one of the greatest generals of Antiquity. His first campaign saw him marching unsupported into unknown territory and losing almost all of his men against light-armed enemies. Not a great start, of course, and he cleverly refused to go home after this, aware of the good Athenian democratic habit of executing generals who failed. However, he quickly learned from his mistakes. The following year he won the first real pitched battle of the Peloponnesian War (of Athens vs Sparta), destroying a numerically superior enemy force by anticipating their Spartan general's plan; he then promptly exploited the victory by rushing on and attacking the enemy's approaching reinforcements at night, slaughtering hundreds and effectively knocking one of Sparta's allies out of the war. His next major triumph was the battle on Sphakteria. Long story short, the Athenians had trapped some 400 Spartans on an island, but they didn't know how to proceed; a populist politician boasted he could resolve the issue within 20 days. This politician clearly didn't know a thing about warfare, but he was clever enough to bring Demosthenes along, who indeed resolved the issue in a good deal less than 20 days. Arming all his rowers as light troops, he landed some 8000 of them on the island, but simply refused to engage the Spartans hand-to-hand; he exhausted them with small task forces of missile troops swarming all around and constantly attacking them from behind. Eventually, worn out, thirsty and demoralised, the Spartans surrendered. This was of course unheard of - the Spartans carefully cultivated their myth of invincibility - and it showed all of Greece that even Spartans could be broken. More importantly, it gave the Athenians leverage in the form of nearly 200 irreplacable Spartans as hostages. The Spartans immediately began suing for peace. This established Demosthenes' reputation for getting stuff done, and getting it done in a hurry. While he failed a number of times in the following year, this was mostly due to his campaigns lacking support, or because his choice to retreat was sound in the circumstances. The Athenians did not forget about his abilities. Some years later, when they faced a terrible stalemate in Sicily, they promptly sent Demosthenes to go sort things out. Basically, the Athenians had been laying siege to the mighty city of Syracuse, and a series of pitched battles near the walls had failed to decide the issue. The soldiers were demoralised, the fleet was getting waterlogged and the situation was looking ever better for Syracuse. Demosthenes' arrival with fresh men was like a punch in the gut for the Syracusans. He decided that the only way to win would be a quick, unexpected strike against a key position - heights overlooking the city - which, true to form, he would carry out at night. Unfortunately his army wasn't experienced enough or familiar enough with the terrain to make this work. They were too many, too, and to top it off there were men among the enemy who spoke the same dialect as part of Demosthenes' army, which led to friend and foe getting horribly confused in the darkness. The attack failed miserably. To his credit, Demosthenes then advised that the Athenians should just give up and go home. His attack was a last hope, and with it crushed, there was no point staying. But the other generals didn't agree. The Athenians stayed, and eventually they lost everything - over 150 warships, tens of thousands of skilled rowers, thousands of infantry, everything. When Demosthenes was captured among the last straggling survivors, dying of hunger and thirst, he was immediately executed. The Syracusans knew not to let such a man fight another day.

Sup, gents. JFS told me about this thread and it's time to bring in some Greeks. After all, they invented military theory. (In the West. As far as we know.) So without further ado: Iphikrates of Athens (c.418-c.353 BC). Greek city-states rarely had the means to maintain armies on long campaigns abroad; they preferred to bring out their citizen armies briefly but in massive numbers and fight major battles. But at some point during the Corinthian War (395-386 BC), the Athenians realised that this business was a bit costly, because they kept getting massacred by the Spartans. So they decided instead to hire some light-armed mercenaries and fight a war of raids. Enter Iphikrates, the son of a shoemaker. Even though he had no military experience of any kind, he led said mercenaries with such consummate skill that his enemies learned to fear them like children feared the bogey-man, and basically refused to march out from the safety of their walls for fear of being caught in the open. The Spartans were the only ones who dared, until at one time Iphikrates struck a column of Spartans on the march and thoroughly ruined their ****, killing hundreds while losing - as far as we know - not a single man. With feats like these, Iphikrates turned the war from a near-certain Athenian defeat into a stalemate. He crushed the Spartans again at Abydos by ambushing them, forcing their commander to fight to the death while the rest of his army ran for their lives. The Athenians now realised what sort of man they had at their disposal, and in the ensuing decades, whenever things got really rough, they would send Iphikrates - and he invariably set things straight, while training his men to brutal efficiency and recouping the cost of his campaigns along the way. He was a master of stealth and surprise, a strict disciplinarian and an innovator, able to use few men at low cost and low risk to achieve disproportionate gain. When another Athenian mercenary general went to help Egypt revolt against Persia, the Persian king pointed out that this was a violation of the peace between Athens and Persia, and demanded official Athenian support against the revolt. The Athenians, of course, sent Iphikrates. At this point he complained that he could not be so effective in Egypt, because the Egyptians did not know who he was - meaning he had to do without his customary advantage that the mention of his name made men **** themselves. Even the Spartans at one point abandoned an entire operation when they heard that Iphikrates was coming to reinforce their opponents. It's a shame we don't have more details about his various campaigns, but all evidence suggests that few in the centuries to come could match his prodigious levels of badassery. Through his relations with Thracian royalty (his wife was a Thracian princess), he also for a time had custody over a captive little boy - none other than the future Philip II of Macedon, conquering genius and father of Alexander the Great.