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Cleomenes

Agiad king of Sparta, about 520-490 BCE

In the game: Level 7: Sardis Burns

Cleomenes I was the Agiad king of Sparta from about 520 to about 490. He drove the tyrant Hippias out of Athens, crushed Argos at Sepeia and turned away Aristagoras of Miletus when the Ionians sought help against Persia, then forced out his fellow king Demaratus, who fled to Darius. Nearly everything known of him comes from Herodotus, whose portrait of him is largely hostile.

In the game: The game names Cleomenes only in its chronicle, as the Spartan king who refused Aristagoras once he learned how far inland Susa lay, following Herodotus 5.49-51.

A king of the Agiad house

Ancient account

Herodotus says Cleomenes was the son of Anaxandridas by a second wife, whom the ephors made the king take because his first marriage was childless. The first wife later bore Dorieus, Leonidas and Cleombrotus. Cleomenes succeeded as the elder son, probably about 520. Herodotus adds that the passed-over Dorieus left Sparta to found colonies abroad.

Herodotus 5.39-42

Aristagoras and the road to Susa

Ancient account

In about 499 Aristagoras came to Sparta with a bronze map of the world and urged an attack on the King. Herodotus says Cleomenes asked how far Susa lay from the coast. When told it was a three months' journey, he ordered the Milesian out of Sparta by sunset. Aristagoras then offered bribes of rising size, and Cleomenes' young daughter Gorgo warned her father that the stranger would corrupt him, so he left the room.

Herodotus 5.49-51

Interventions at Athens

Ancient account

In 510 Cleomenes led the Spartan force that expelled Hippias and his family from Athens. A few years later he returned to back Isagoras against Cleisthenes, but the Athenians besieged him on the Acropolis and he left under a truce. His larger invasion of Attica about 506 broke up at Eleusis when the Corinthians and his fellow king Demaratus withdrew.

Herodotus 5.64-76

Aegina, Demaratus and Persia

Ancient account

When Darius's heralds asked the Greeks for earth and water about 491, Aegina submitted, and Cleomenes went to arrest the men responsible, but Demaratus worked against him. Herodotus says Cleomenes then joined with Leotychides and, through a bribed go-between, had the Delphic oracle declare Demaratus illegitimate. The deposed king fled to Darius, received lands and cities in Asia, and later accompanied Xerxes in 480.

Herodotus 6.48-51, 6.61-70

Madness and death

Disputed

Herodotus reports that when the Delphi plot came out Cleomenes fled, was recalled, went mad and cut himself to death with a knife while in the stocks, probably about 490. Most Greeks blamed the bribed oracle, the Athenians his ravaging of the sacred precinct at Eleusis, and the Argives his killing of suppliants and burning of their grove after Sepeia. The Spartans blamed unmixed wine, a habit learned from Scythian envoys; some modern historians suspect murder.

Herodotus 6.74-84