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Aetos — Description

Name: Aetos
Born: June 11, 519 BC; Miletus, Achaemenid Empire
Died: August 20, 431 BC; Athens, Delian League (age 88)
Allegiance: Assassins

Bio: Aetos was an Ionian Greek born to a small farming family in the city of Miletus, then under the control of the Persians. He lived a normal life, helping out on the farm, getting married, having a daughter, and other good homely stuff. Things took a sour turn in the average life of Aetos in 499 BC, however. The tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras, led a revolt against the Persians after he had been snubbed by the government. Aetos found himself forced to fight and protect his family from the chaos, eventually getting them passage to Athens so that they could stay with his trusted family members there while he defended Ionia. It was during this revolt that Aetos discovered two organizations influencing the two sides: two groups known nowadays as the Assassins and Templars. The Templars were waist deep in the Persian government, with the Persian king Darius I and his son Xerxes being members. Aetos went to the Assassins, learned that they stood for the freedom and safety of all people from Templar tyranny, and he joined just as the Ionian Revolt was crushed in 494 BC after the Greek defeat at the Battle of Lade.

Soon after the revolt, the Persians led an invasion on the Greek city-states of Athens and Eretria in revenge for their support of the Ionians. Aetos rushed to defend the land, fighting at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC and soon after running to Athens with Phidippides to inform the city of their great victory. The Assassins later discovered that Darius was planning a full assault on Greece, and so Aetos killed the Persian king in 486 BC before he could. The Persians, now led by Xerxes I, continued to attack Greece, now a confederacy of allied city-states led by the legendary Spartans. Aetos followed the Greek armies to the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, and it proved a disastrous mission due to a Greek traitor and Templar agent named Ephialtes of Trachis, who told the Persians of the Greek lines’ weak points.

Aetos wanted to hunt down the traitor and make him pay for his crimes, but more pressing matters quickly took over his life. Shortly after the Persians retreated after the Battles of Plataea and Mycale, the Greeks began to lose faith in the Spartans, who refused to help liberate Ionia. Power was shifted to the Athenians, and an alliance known as the Delian League was formed. Aetos discovered that a Greek general named Pausanias was responsible for the Spartans’ inadequacy. The man was a Templar spy working for the Persians, and Aetos quickly shifted his efforts to bringing him down. His search led to the interrogation and killing of the traitor Ephialtes, who told Aetos that Pausanias had fled. Aetos tracked the general down and killed him in Sparta’s Temple of Athena in 470 BC.

The wars continued to rage on. The Greeks destroyed the Persian fleet at the Battle of Eurymedon in 469 BC, and the Assassins began the production of a new weapon: the hidden blade, the first of which was christened with the blood of Xerxes when the king was killed by a Persian Assassin named Darius in 465 BC. Aetos himself was growing tired of the conflict which so often forced him away from spending time with his family. The lands became more chaotic when the Spartans and Athenians went into civil war with one another when the Peloponnesian Wars began in 460 BC. The land in shambles, Aetos decided he was going to retire, moving to a farm in Athens with his family until the conflict came to an end. The Persians and Greeks didn't stop fighting until the two sides signed a peace treaty following the Battle of Salamis-in-Cyprus in 449 BC. Aetos passed the responsibility of protecting Greece to his friends in the Brotherhood, and while he mostly stayed out of affairs after that, he did help out there and then when it was absolutely necessary. Aetos passed away peacefully on his farm in 431 BC, just as the Second Peloponnesian War was about to erupt.

He is an ancestor of Ava Arlie.