Archidamus III
Archidamus III inherited a Sparta that had already lost, and spent twenty-two years failing to get any of it back. He was the son of Agesilaus and had commanded before he reigned, winning a skirmish in 368 that Sparta called the tearless battle because it lost nobody - a description that says more about the state of Spartan confidence after Leuctra than about the engagement. He succeeded his father in 360, over a city that had lost half its territory, most of its helot labour and the military reputation on which its alliances had rested. The problem was arithmetic. Spartan citizenship required a man to contribute to a common mess from the produce of his allotted land, and the loss of Messenia disqualified thousands at once, on top of two centuries of concentration of estates into fewer hands. The figure usually given is that there had been eight thousand full citizens at the time of the Persian wars and perhaps a thousand by Archidamus's reign. A state organised entirely around a citizen phalanx could not replace it, and would not enfranchise the people who might have filled it. He spent his reign hiring out the army he had. Sparta took Phocian money during the Third Sacred War and Persian money afterwards, and Archidamus himself went to Italy as a mercenary commander for Taras and was killed there in 338 - on the day, by one tradition, that Philip of Macedon destroyed the combined armies of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea and ended the independence of the Greek cities. Sparta refused to join the league Philip then created and was left alone, which is how it kept a nominal freedom and lost every other kind.
- Lived: 400 BCE – 338 BCE
- Nationality: Spartan
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
