Kimon was an Athenian general and statesman, a member of the distinguished Philaid family and the son of the great Miltiades, the victorious general at Marathon. Kimon first came to public notice when he tried to obtain his father’s corpse for burial. Militiades had convinced the Athens to put him in charge of a fleet which he used for his own private purposes. Returning to Athens, he was fined the enormous sum of fifty talents, which he could not pay, and so died in prison in 489.  According to Athenian law Kimon was required to take his father’s place in prison until the fifty talents were paid, which it eventually was by Kallias, a very rich Athenian who married Kimon's sister Elpinike.

        Kimon was a passionate opponent of the Persians and met them in battle many times as general in the 470’s and 460’s BC. In the years following the defeat of the Persians at Plataia in 479 he and Aristeides gained the support of the Aegean islanders for the new Delian league. Kimon was commander of the Athenian naval contingent, and thus (since the Athenians provided most of the ships) the commander of the allied Greek navy arrayed against the Persians in the Aegean Sea.  One of his earliest acts as commander was to seize the island of Skyros in 476 BC from the Dolopians, the native inhabitants (who were accused of piracy), and to settle Athenian colonists in their place.  It was at this time that Kimon claimed that he had found the bones of the legendary Athenian king Theseus, which were brought to Athens with great ceremony.

        Shortly after this Karystos on the island of Euboia was forced to joined the Delian League, and the island state of Naxos, which had seceded from the League, was put under siege and forced to return, the earliest actions which showed that the League was no longer a voluntary association.  Both actions were almost certainly carried out under the command of Kimon, who now had the most influential voice in Athenian foreign policy.

        Domestically, Kimon led the aristocratic opposition to Themistokles, the leader of the democratizing forces in Athens. The death of Aristeides (probably about 468) and the ostracism of Themistokles (in 470) left Kimon as Athens' most influential leader for several years.

        Kimon's greatest military success was the Eurymedon campaign in 467, when he destroyed the Persian fleet on the south coast of Asia Minor. Kimon’s next achievement was the expulsion of the Persians from the Chersonese in the northern Aegean, and its inclusion in the Delian League. The combination of these various victories put the Persians permanently on the defensive.  Kimon’s efforts against Persia were eventually crowned by the famous peace of Kallias (448), named for Kimon's brother-in-law and chief negotiator for the Athens.  This treaty imposed humiliating conditions on the Persians, that no Persian satrap would approach within three days' march of the coast and that no Persian ship would sail into the Aegean controlled by the Athenians.

        To backtrack a bit, Kimon had pursued a foreign policy which saw the Athenians dominant in the Aegean Sea and conceded dominance on land in mainland Greece to Sparta; domestically Kimon followed a conservative line which saw no need to further expand democracy within Athens.  This domestic policy in particular was opposed by Perikles and Ephialtes, who in 462 prosecuted Kimon on a charge of corruption, that he had taken a bribe from Alexander, king of Macedon, not to attack his kingdom.  The prosecution was unsuccessful but nonetheless weakened Kimon's position.  In a further embarrassment, Kimon led an Athenian expedition to help the Spartans in suppressing helot unrest, but the Spartans declined the Athenian help out of fear of the democratic tendencies of the troops, and sent the expedition back home.  Kimon's downfall was completed with his ostracism in 461, though the ostracism was overturned after only three years and he was allowed to return to Athens.  Meanwhile reforms proposed by Perikles and Ephialtes and enacted during Kimon's absence in Sparta carried through the democratization of Athenian government.

        After his return from exile Kimon was relatively inactive, but in 451/0 he arranged a five-year truce with Sparta, with whom Athens had been at war since 457.  When war broke out again between Athens and her allies and Persia in 449 Kimon was appoint the general in command of an expeditionary force of two hundred ships.  The force sailed to the Persian-controlled island of Kypros (Cyprus), where the Athenians laid siege to the town of Kition.  It was here that Kimon was wounded and eventually died.  With him died his pro-Spartan policy, and any hope of a joint Spartan-Athenian hegemony.  Instead repeated conflicts between Sparta and Athens would eventually climax in the Peloponnesian War.