In 476/5 BC, an Athenian force under Cimon sailed to Thrace to recapture the city of Eion held by the Persians. After a successful battle against the enemy, Cimon besieged the city and forced the Persian general Butes, who would not surrender, to set the whole city – including his family – on fire. In the aftermath of these events, the Athenians authorised Cimon to erect three inscribed monuments at Athens to commemorate the victory. The third of them, as Aeschines and later Plutarch relate (Aeschin. 3.185; Plut. Cim. 7.5), evoked the timeless Athenian superiority in the art of marshalling warriors as exemplified by Menestheus, the Homeric hero who led the Athenians at Troy:

In the inscription Menestheus, praised in the Iliad for his outstanding ability in ‘the arrangement in order of horses and shielded fighters’ (2.554), provided an archetype of the Athenian supremacy in generalship, thus justifying their leadership in the newly formed Delian League. Such evocations of the mythical heroes of the past were by no means unusual as the Homeric epics provided the classical Greeks with an inexhaustible source of wisdom and inspiration. In particular, any subjects related to war were almost inevitably set against the battle narratives of the Iliad, seen as an exemplar in all things military. Mentions of Homer featured prominently in discussions regarding troop arrangement, tactics, bravery, war ethics and even appropriate campaign diets, spread across a variety of classical authors and genres. From the Hellenistic period onward Homeric citations formed an important part of the advice collected in the military manuals on tactics and stratagems, confirming the unquestionable authority of the Iliad for the Greek thinking about war.

One area for which the Homeric epics supplied invaluable guidelines in the eyes of the ancient Greeks was the art of generalship.