Leonidas

King of Sparta (r. 490-480 b. c.e.)

Born: c. 510 b. c.e.; Sparta, Greece

Died: August 20, 480 b. c.e.; Thermopylae, Thessaly, Greece Category: Government and politics

Life Leonidas (lee-AHN-id-uhs), king of Sparta, belonged to the senior of two royal families in Sparta and married Gorgo, the daughter of his tragic half brother Cleomenes I. Leonidas is best remembered for his selfsacrifice at the Battle of Thermopylae, 480 b. c.e., described by Greek historian Herodotus.

While Sparta and its allies celebrated Carneian and Olympic festivals,

Leonidas (left) meets with an ambassador of Xerxes. (Library of Congress

The Spartans sent Leonidas with three hundred men to rally central Greece against the Persians in Malis. Persian leader Xerxes I waited four days, then attacked for two as the Greeks fought off vastly superior numbers. On the second night, the Malian traitor Ephialtes told Xerxes of the Anopaea mountain track that led to Thermopylae and directed Hydarnes’s troops around the mountain, brushing aside the thousand Phocians Leonidas had posted there.

Warned of Hydarnes’s descent and remembering Delphi’s prophecy that either Sparta would fall to the Persians or a Heraclid king would die, Leonidas did not waver and, despite being surrounded, fought to the end with his own three hundred Spartans and volunteer Thespians as the Thebans surrendered.

Influence Leonidas’s valor was not fatalistic. He had been ordered to delay Xerxes and inspire the Greeks. However, he ran out of time because the Phocians ran away. He could not inspire the Greeks by retreating as the Phocians had or by surrendering as the Thebans had. Therefore, to fulfill his mission, he fought on until his death.

Further Reading

Burn, A. R. Persia and the Greeks: The Defense of the West, 546-478 B. C.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984.

Cartledge, Paul. The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, from Utopia to Crisis and Collapse. Woodstock, N. Y.: Overlook Press, 2003.

De Souza, Philip. The Greek and Persian Wars, 499-386B. C. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Green, Peter. The Greco-Persian Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Grundy, G. B. The Great Persian War. London: John Murray, 1901. Strauss, Barry. “Go Tell the Spartans.” MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History 17, no. 1 (Autumn, 2004): 16-25.

O. Kimball Armayor

See also: Cleomenes I; Delphic Oracle; Greco-Persian Wars; Herodotus; Thermopylae, Battle of; Xerxes I.