Leonidas I

Leonidas and Gorgo had a son, Pleistarchus, who ruled Sparta after his father.

In 1955, a monument in honor of Leonidas and his soldiers was erected at Thermopylae by King Paul of Greece. On the other side from the monument, a stone lion marks the small mound where the Spartan dead were buried.

If ‘The Histories’ by Herodotus is to be believed, Leonidas, born in 540 BC, was the middle son of King Anaxandridas II of Sparta and his first wife, who was also his niece.

King Anaxandridas II and his first wife did not have any children for many years. Going against the counsel of the ‘ephors’, the council of five annually elected leaders of the Spartan constitution, to take a second wife and set aside the first, Anaxandridas asserted that his wife was blameless. He was eventually placated by being allowed to marry a second time without annulling the previous marriage.

Cleomenes was Anaxandridas’ first born son through his second wife. But a year later, his first wife too bore him a son, Dorieus, and would go on to give birth to two more, Leonidas and Cleombrotus.

Being third in the succession line, Leonidas had to go through the agoge to earn full citizenship (homoios). The Spartans were a militaristic society; they considered giving life for the state as a virtue and the duty of every individual. His training to become a hoplite warrior must have garnered respect of his fellow countrymen.

In 519 BC, Cleomenes was made king. Dorieus, believing himself to be more worthy, could not accept living under Cleomenes’ reign and went to North Africa to establish a colony there. It is unknown whether Leonidas’ supported either of his brothers’ claims or not.

After the violent and mysterious death of his half-brother, Leonidas ascended to the Agiad throne in 490 BC. Sparta historically was ruled by two families, the Agiads and Eurypontids, who believed they had descended from the twins Eurysthenes and Procles, respectively, the great-great-great grandsons of the mythical hero Heracles. During Leonidas’ reign, the Eurypontid king of Sparta was Leotychidas.

His reign did not go unquestioned. Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch wrote about one such incident. When told that he was not better than everyone else save from being the king, Leonidas had promptly replied, “But were I not better than you, I should not be king.” This answer was not a boisterous statement about his birthright but an assertion that, having endured the training of agoge, he was more than qualified to rule Sparta.

Leonidas’ Sparta, alongside Athens, was the largest and most powerful city-state in the classical Greece. While there were a lot of in-fighting among the city-states, they always managed to produce a united front to an invading force.

After Athens had provided support to the Ionian rebels in their fight against the Persian rule, Darius I, the emperor of Persia attacked Athens, but was turned back by a combined Greek force in 490 BC at the ‘Battle of Marathon’. This came to be known as the ‘First Persian War’. In spring 480 BC, Darius’ son, Xerxes launched the second invasion to subjugate entire Greece. Leonidas was chosen to lead the allied Greek resistance.

When the request to join the ‘Corinthian League’ arrived at Sparta, the Oracle at Delphi was consulted. The Oracle prophesied that either Sparta would fall, or the city would lose a king. According to Herodotus, Leonidas deduced that he would not survive the war against the ostensibly impossible odds, so he picked men with living sons to accompany him.

The Battle of Thermopylae, in which Leonidas I lost his life fighting for Sparta, is considered very significant from a historic point of view. The king and his soldiers are much revered to this day as symbols of patriotism for their valor and courage even in the face of inevitable defeat.