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Callias
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Quick Facts
Flourished:
4th century bce
Flourished:
c.500 BCE - c.301 BCE
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Callias

Greek statesman [4th century BCE]
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History

Callias (flourished 4th century bce) was an Athenian who was ridiculed by the comic poets for his youthful extravagance; later in life, he was a successful military commander and diplomat. The grandson of the diplomat Callias, he was the butt of jokes in the plays of Aristophanes and other poets and was attacked by the orator Andocides in his speech “On the Mysteries.” But Callias was on friendly terms with the Athenian philosophers, and his home was the scene of Xenophon’s Symposium and Plato’s Protagoras. In 390, during the Corinthian War (Sparta versus Athens and her allies, 395–387), he commanded the heavy infantry that helped Iphicrates annihilate a Spartan regiment near Corinth. In 371, Callias headed an embassy to Sparta that was credited with devising a treaty to end a seven-year war between Sparta and Athens.

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