Agesilaus II of Sparta

Spartan king (r. 400-360 b.c.e.)

• Born: c. 444 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Sparta, Greece
• Died: c. 360 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Cyrene, Cyrenaica (now in Libya)

By common consent the most powerful and illustrious Greek leader of his day, Agesilaus took Sparta to its peak of influence. Unfortunately, his policies led to a devastating defeat at Leuctra in 371 b.c.e., and at his death he left an impoverished and weakened kingdom that would never again play a dominant role in Greek affairs.

Early Life

When Eupolia, the young second wife of the aging Spartan king Archidamus II, gave birth to Agesilaus (uh-jehs-uh-LAY-uhs) in 444 b.c.e., her son’s prospects must have seemed quite limited. Archidamus already had an heir apparent, Agis, by his first wife. Worse, Agesilaus was born lame, an egregious liability in militaristic, fitness-minded Sparta. Indeed, his very survival is remarkable, given the official inspection and possible infanticide to which the Spartan authorities subjected every infant. That he passed their scrutiny may be attributed to Sparta’s growing manpower shortage, a problem that would become acute in Agesilaus’s lifetime.

Because he was not considered an heir to the throne, from age seven to eighteen the boy underwent the normal Spartan training, the agoge. Royal heirs were normally spared this rigorous, competitive, and often violent regimen, designed to produce the bravest, most disciplined soldiers possible. Despite his lameness and small stature, Agesilaus excelled in the agoge. He was the first to jest at his deformity and deliberately sought out the most difficult tasks to prove that his weak leg was no real hindrance. If the young man displayed any weakness, it was excessive loyalty and favoritism to family and friends.

At some point in his youth, Agesilaus formed a relationship that would change the course of his life. It was customary that a Spartan youth cultivate a special friendship with a mature man who would guide him and advance his career. Agesilaus had the good fortune to become the special friend of Lysander, the honored and influential general who spearheaded Sparta’s victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Before his extreme ambition and egotism brought him discredit and demotion in 403, Lysander had initiated an aggressive style of Spartan imperialism, and he would remain a powerful advocate of Spartan expansion.

At his death in 400, after a reign of twenty-seven years, King Agis left a son and presumptive successor, Leotychides. Nevertheless, Agesilaus asserted his own claim to the throne. His participation in the agoge had given him a strong following among Spartan citizens. There was also some question as to the legitimacy of Leotychides, and Agesilaus made the most of it. When supporters of Leotychides recalled that an oracle had warned Spartans against the “lame kingship,” Agesilaus countered that the warning was against a king of nonroyal blood. Perhaps the decisive factor in this contest was the intervention of Lysander on behalf of Agesilaus. Unable to serve as king himself, Lysander championed the claim of his friend. Leotychides lost not only the kingship but also his inheritance, and Agesilaus assumed the throne in 400, when he was about forty-four years old.

Because Sparta had a curious double monarchy with two royal houses, a Spartan king had to share his royal authority with a colleague—and potential rival. During the forty-year reign of Agesilaus, exile and premature death from disease or combat brought him five comparatively short-reigned and weak colleagues in the kingship. As a result, despite some factional disputes at home, Agesilaus had an unusually free hand to lead Sparta as he saw fit.

Life’s Work

Agesilaus inherited a kingdom politically and militarily supreme in Greece, but that very fact of supremacy presented potentially dangerous temptations and challenges. Specifically, Agesilaus would have to decide whether to limit Sparta’s hegemony to its traditional area of dominance, southern Greece, or extend it to include central Greece or even regions beyond. He would also have to reckon with the ambitions of a former ally in central Greece, Thebes. The Thebans wanted to unify the district of Boeotia in a federal state headed by Thebes. Agesilaus could attempt to prevent this, or he could accept it and at the same time compensate by encouraging the traditional rivalry between Thebes and its neighbor Athens.

At home, Sparta had certain long-standing internal weaknesses that needed attention, most notably the decline in the number of Spartan citizens. The gradual concentration of slave-worked land in the hands of wealthy families meant that fewer Spartans could afford to pay the dues required of all citizens. Accelerated by casualties in war and natural disasters, this trend had reduced the Spartan community to no more than three thousand male citizens at the accession of Agesilaus. His performance as king must be judged by his responses to these challenges and problems.

In his first year on the throne, Agesilaus had to deal with the revolutionary conspiracy of Cinadon, a crisis that revealed the precarious position of the dwindling Spartan citizen body. Cinadon was an “inferior,” one of a sizable and growing body of Spartans who had lost their citizen status because of poverty. He based his revolutionary hopes on the fact that the Spartans were dangerously outnumbered by their subjects: the free perioikoi, who lived in semiautonomous villages around Sparta, and the servile Helots, who lived primarily in Messenia, west of Sparta. Cinadon boasted that his supporters—Helots, freed Helots, inferiors, and perioikoi—hated the Spartans so much that they would be glad to eat them raw. Because of an informant who betrayed the plot in its early stages, Agesilaus and the other Spartan authorities were able to suppress the conspiracy, but they took no steps to correct the conditions that had engendered it.

Instead, in 396, Agesilaus undertook his first military campaign to distant Asia Minor, where he challenged the power of Persia. Agesilaus may have presented this expedition as a Panhellenic crusade on behalf of the Asiatic Greeks, but others saw it as an attempt to extend Spartan hegemony. Both Athens and Thebes refused to take part, and the Thebans further offended Agesilaus by disrupting his parting sacrifices at Aulis in Boeotia. After several victories against the Persians, Agesilaus received joint command of both land and sea forces, an honor unprecedented in Spartan history. The Asian campaign won fame for Agesilaus and much treasure for Sparta, but his victories accomplished little in the military sense. Moreover, his poor choice of an incompetent brother-in-law, Peisandros, as admiral resulted in a disastrous naval defeat in 394 that seriously weakened Sparta’s position overseas. How Agesilaus might have responded to this setback is uncertain, because he had already been recalled home to help Sparta face a hostile alliance of major Greek states in the so-called Corinthian War (395-386 b.c.e.).

Primarily instigated by Thebes, this war challenged Sparta’s domination of central Greece and had already produced the death of the reckless Lysander and the banishment of King Pausanias, Agesilaus’s first comonarch. Victory in a major battle at Coronea secured Agesilaus’s safe passage through Boeotia to Sparta, but it failed to reestablish Spartan preeminence in central Greece. His vengeful frontal assault on the Theban force, moreover, needlessly risked his men and produced severe casualties, including several wounds to Agesilaus himself. In subsequent engagements, Agesilaus generally got the upper hand, although one of his companies was decimated by a tactically innovative, lightly armed force near Corinth in 390. As the war became a stalemate, Agesilaus formed an alliance with his erstwhile enemy, the Persian king. By the terms of the “King’s Peace” of 386, the Asiatic Greeks were abandoned to Persian domination. In return, the Persian king promised to make war on any Greek state that violated the accord and backed Sparta as overseer and arbiter of a general peace in Greece.

By a just and conciliatory administration of the King’s Peace, Agesilaus might have maintained Sparta’s security and hegemony indefinitely. Instead, he intervened in the affairs of other Greek states in order to install governments friendly to Sparta. Above all, he indulged his obsessive hatred of Thebes, and he condoned—if he did not instigate—the unlawful military occupation of Thebes in 382. This act, more than any other, outraged Greek opinion and helped the Thebans to establish an alliance with their natural rivals, the Athenians. After Thebes expelled the Spartan garrison, Agesilaus twice led invasions of Boeotia in vain attempts to recapture the city. Despite serious injuries in 377 that kept him out of military action until 370, Agesilaus continued to reject the claims of Thebes to represent all of Boeotia. He presided at a peace conference in 371, and, after a bitter exchange with the Theban leader Epaminondas, he excluded Thebes from the general peace.

Then, against the advice of other Spartans, Agesilaus urged an immediate invasion of Boeotia. A momentous battle duly ensued at Leuctra, where the Spartans suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the more tactically advanced Thebans. King Cleombrotus and four hundred of his fellow Spartans died in this conflict, the worst defeat in Spartan history.

Sparta never recovered from the setback at Leuctra. The battle itself inflicted heavy casualties on an already dangerously small Spartan citizen body and shattered the myth of Spartan invincibility. The ensuing Theban invasion of southern Greece permanently sundered Sparta’s regional alliance and prompted defections among the long subordinate perioikoi and Helots who surrounded Sparta. In the face of the Theban advance, many Spartans panicked, while others plotted revolution. Only the energetic emergency measures of Agesilaus, who was then in his early seventies, saved the city from destruction. Worst of all in the long run, the Thebans liberated Messenia and thereby deprived Sparta of its richest agricultural district with its large number of Helot slaves.

Agesilaus refused to accept the loss of Messenia, and in the last decade of his life he pursued its recovery with a stubbornness that equaled his earlier opposition to Thebes. Unfortunately, he now ruled a weakened and impoverished Sparta with a citizen population of only one thousand. In the end, he was forced to undertake foreign mercenary service in order to finance his efforts to regain Messenia. Such was the military reputation of the aging king that rebellious Persian governors in Asia Minor and Egypt paid handsomely for his skills. In 360, after completing his final campaign in Egypt, Agesilaus set sail for home but died en route in Libya at about age eighty-four.

Significance

For more than two decades, Agesilaus II was, in effect, king of Greece. Nevertheless, his reign must be seen as a failure. A general of unquestioned talent and bravery, Agesilaus shared in the Spartans’ failure to keep up with the military innovations of that time. The resulting tactical backwardness of the Spartan army helps explain the defeat at Leuctra. As a statesman, Agesilaus pursued unwise policies. The attempt to extend Sparta’s hegemony was unrealistic in the light of Sparta’s declining manpower, while his flagrantly aggressive administration of the King’s Peace needlessly alienated other Greek states and made allies for Thebes. Above all, his relentless hatred of Thebes caused a breakdown of the common peace and led directly to the disastrous confrontation at Leuctra.

Agesilaus cannot be held responsible for the structural ills of the Spartan system, but he seems to have been blind to its most glaring problem, the decline in Spartan manpower. During his reign, the number of Spartan male citizens dropped by two-thirds to a mere one thousand. He left his son a feeble kingdom that would never again play a major role in Greek affairs.

A Spartan’s Spartan, a product of the agoge, Agesilaus sadly exemplifies Aristotle’s famous critique of the Spartans: Because their whole system was directed to securing only a part of virtue, military prowess, they did well at war but failed at the higher art of peace.

Bibliography

Cartledge, Paul. Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. This exhaustive study from a Marxist perspective places Agesilaus in the context of fourth century b.c.e. Greek history and provides an introduction to the whole political and social system of Sparta. Includes a helpful chronological table.

David, Ephraim. Sparta Between Empire and Revolution, 404-243 B.C.: Internal Problems and Their Impact on Contemporary Greek Consciousness. New York: Arno Press, 1981. An excellent study of the internal problems of Sparta, this book deals with the period of Agesilaus’s rule in chapters 1 through 3.

Forrest, W. G. A History of Sparta, 950-192 B.C. 2d ed. London: Duckworth, 1980. A brief introduction to ancient Sparta. Two chapters cover the period of Agesilaus’s rule.

Hamilton, Charles D. Agesilaus and the Failure of Spartan Hegemony. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. A balanced assessment that argues that Agesilaus’s obsessive hatred of Thebes displaces his original genuine Panhellenic goals.

Hamilton, Charles D. Sparta’s Bitter Victories: Politics and Diplomacy in the Corinthian War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. An excellent, detailed study of Greek international affairs in the period 405-386 b.c.e., this book is especially good in presenting the policies of Agesilaus and Lysander in the context of Spartan factional politics.

Plutarch. Agesilaus and Pompey Pelopidas and Marcellus. In Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Beradotte Perrin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. This ancient source for the career of Agesilaus was written about five centuries after his death.

Xenophon. A History of My Times (Hellenica). Translated by George Cawkwell. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. In this work, the Athenian soldier-historian provides a contemporary narrative of the whole period of Agesilaus’s rule, the only such account to survive complete. A personal friend of Agesilaus, Xenophon participated in many of the events he describes and provides revealing details. Unfortunately, he is biased in favor of Agesilaus and omits several very important events.