[2] Skleros was born to a middle-class family of Trebizond in Ottoman Pontus, and took a typical education and cosmopolitan outlook for the city and its Greek quarter of that age, and in his younger years travelled to Odessa in Russia to work as a merchant.

The following year he got involved in the revolutionary movement, under the influence of Georgi Plekhanov,[3] taking up the pseudonym of "Skliros" ("Severe").

A series of problems with the Tsarist establishment drove him to Estonia and then to Jena in Germany.

There, as representative of Marxist theory he met with Dimitris Glinos in the "Filiki Prodevtiki Enosi" ("Friendly Progressive Unity"), a student society oriented in a socialist direction.

[4] Skleros, suffering from tuberculosis, then moved to and lived in Alexandria, where he died in 1919.