Alcibiades

Alcibiades was the last of the Alcmaeonidae, an Athenian general who entered the second half of the Peloponnesian War pushing for the Sicilian Expedition. When enemies in Athens charged him with sacrilege, he fled to Sparta and turned adviser, proposing the capture of Decelea and fomenting revolts that crippled Athens. Sparta made enemies of him too, so he defected to Persia and counseled the satrap Tissaphernes until Athenian allies engineered his recall. Back in Athens he commanded a string of victories that brought Sparta to the bargaining table, favoring treachery and negotiation over siege. But his talent for making powerful enemies outlasted his utility; exiled a second time, he took refuge in Persian territory and was assassinated, reportedly at Sparta's urging. Scholars argue the Sicilian disaster might have been averted under his command; by war's end, the man who helped rekindle it was a spent memory, remembered in later centuries as a student of Socrates.