While Sparta was very much a military unit, the kings of Sparta with their dual rulership had a unique influence over the people. In particular Sparta had some truly important kings in its time, which we will go into more detail with. King Leonidas of Sparta is of course well known as the leader in the battle of Thermopylae, where only Spartans led by the king would do battle with ten times more Persian warriors.
While Leonidas fell in battle many will not know that at the time he was reported to be around 60 years old, having shared the Kingship of Sparta for the last ten years. King Cleomenes was a Spartan king that ruled an overlapping time from the 6th to 5th century for what is thought to be around thirty years. During his time as king, Cleomenes was truly important to Sparta as a political and tactical genius. While during his time he set out to destroy the Greek municipality of Argos, he also was the mastermind behind the Peloponnesian League which helped and ensured the success of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.
Agis was a king of Sparta for only a short reign, for what was thought to be only four years and also at the rather young, early twenties age. Agis while not a famed warrior like Leonidas, or a tactician like Cleomenes I, was a true saviour of the traditional ways of ancient Sparta.
At the time of BC Sparta was in a state, the ancient ways had gone, and the wealth was unevenly distributed. Agis would offer to donate his lands between the Spartans and the Percoli in an attempt to more evenly distribute the wealth and reduce the materialist direction Sparta was heading. The kings were chief priests of the state and kept oracles from Delphi.
They were also known to be war leaders but only one would actually go to war whilst the other king stayed in Sparta and when this happened they would go to war first and come back last. They members of the Gerousia. They also had an active role in foreign affairs debates. Adoptions had to be held in the presence of them and they had limited political powers.
Like Like. The main roles of the spartan kings included military, judiciary and religious roles. The kings military duty was to command the spartan army, establish arrangements and conditions for ratifications by assembly, and sacrifice and decipher omens before war.
Spartan kings were also the chief priests of the state, which meant that they had various religious roles, which included sacrifices and the communication with the Delphian sanctuary. The kings also had judicial roles, which were to deal with cases of heirises, adoptions and public roads. The kings also had a role to play in military affairs. One of the kings had to go to war, while the other had to stay in Sparta and they could also declare war against anyone they please.
The two kings represented clans of Eurypontid and Agiad. Kingship was hereditary. The Spartan kings had military, judicial and religious roles. Military roles included commanding the army. They could make war against whatsoever land, place forward peace treaties to the Gerousia, and had the power of life and death over his troops on the battle field.
The kings are the voice in foreign affairs and are supervised by the Ephors. Religious roles the kings have are to make numerous sacrifices during war time, at festivals and funerals. The kings are the principal oracular between Sparta and the oracle at the temple a Delphi. My family spartichino are Italians that founded south Italy. The faraci side are from north italy and are related to julious ceaser. Herodotus noted the battle tactics the Spartans employed. Eventually, a Greek man showed Xerxes a pass that allowed part of the Persian force to outmaneuver the Greeks and attack them on both flanks.
Leonidas was doomed. Many of the troops who were with Leonidas withdrew possibly because the Spartan king ordered them to. According to Herodotus, the Thespians decided to stay with the Spartans by their own free will.
Leonidas then made his fateful stand and "fell fighting bravely, together with many other famous Spartans," Herodotus writes. Ultimately, the Persians killed almost all of the Spartan troops. The helots the Spartans brought with them were also killed. The Persian army proceeded south, sacking Athens and threatening to break into the Peloponnese. A Greek naval victory at the Battle of Salamis halted this approach, the Persian king Xerxes going home and leaving an army behind that would later be destroyed.
The Greeks led by the now dead Leonidas had prevailed. When the threat from the Persians receded, the Greeks resumed their inter-city rivalries. Two of the most powerful city states were Athens and Sparta, and tensions between the two escalated in the decades after their victory over Persia. The situation was serious enough that Sparta called on allied cities for aid in putting it down. When the Athenians arrived, however, the Spartans refused their help. This was taken as an insult in Athens and bolstered anti-Spartan views.
The Battle of Tanagra, fought in B. At times, Athens appeared to have the advantage, such as the battle of Sphacteria in B. It was the opinion that no force or famine could make the Lacedaemonians give up their arms, but that they would fight on as they could, and die with them in their hands," wrote Thucydides B. Translation by J. Dent via Perseus Digital Library. There were also periods when Athens was in trouble, such as in B.
There has been speculation that the plague was actually an ancient form of the Ebola virus. Ultimately, the conflict between Sparta and Athens resolved itself on the sea. While the Athenians had the naval advantage throughout much of the war, the situation changed when a man named Lysander was named commander of Sparta's navy. He sought out Persian financial support to help the Spartans build up their fleet. He convinced a Persian prince named Cyrus to provide him with money.
The prince "had brought with him, he said, five hundred talents; if this amount should prove insufficient, he would use his own money, which his father had given him; and if this too should prove inadequate, he would go so far as to break up the throne whereon he sat, which was of silver and gold," wrote Xenophon B. With Persian financial support, Lysander built up his navy and trained his sailors. In B. He managed to catch them by surprise, winning a decisive victory and cutting off Athens' supply of grain from the Crimea.
Athens was now forced to make peace on Sparta's terms. They had to tear down their walls, confine their activities to Attica and as Lysander latter ordered submit to rule by a man body later called the "thirty tyrants. The "Peloponnesians with great enthusiasm began to tear down the walls [of Athens] to the music of flute-girls, thinking that that day was the beginning of freedom for Greece," wrote Xenophon.
A series of events and missteps led Sparta from being the pre-eminent force in the Aegean to becoming a second rate power. Shortly after their victory, the Spartans turned against their Persian backers and launched an inconclusive campaign into Turkey. Then in the following decades, the Spartans were forced to campaign on several fronts. The "lower bricks became soaked and failed to support those above them, the wall began first to crack and then to give way," wrote Xenophon.
The city was forced to surrender against this unorthodox onslaught. More challenges affected Spartan hegemony. Ultimately, however Sparta's downfall came, not from Athens, but from a city named Thebes. Spurred on by Spartan king Agesilaus II, relations between the two cities had become increasingly hostile and in B.
Although an ally of Sparta during the long Peloponnesian War, Thebes had become the lodestar of resistance when victorious Sparta became an angry tyrant in her turn," writes Lendon. He notes that after a peace was agreed to with Athens in B. At Leuctra, "for reasons unclear the Spartans posted their cavalry in front of their phalanx. The Lacedaemonian cavalry was poor because good Spartan warriors still insisted on serving as hoplites [infantrymen]," he writes.
And that is apparently what happened. Lendon writes that "the Thebans pushed the Spartans back one fateful step and then the leaderless Spartans were in flight and their allies with them. Of the seven hundred full Spartan citizens at the battle, four hundred died The Thebans pressed south, gaining support from communities as they marched and liberating Messenia, depriving the Spartans of much of their helot labor.
Sparta never recovered from the losses in both Spartan lives and slave labor. As Kennell writes, the city was now a "second-rate power," and never again would regain its former strength. In the following centuries Sparta, in its reduced state, found itself under the sway of different powers including Macedonia eventually led by Alexander the Great , the Achaean League a confederation of Greek cities and, later on, Rome.
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