Cleomenes I
Cleomenes I was the Agiad king of Sparta for thirty years, the man who expelled the tyrants from Athens and then tried and failed to make it a Spartan client, who broke Argos in the worst defeat that city ever suffered, who was offered the wealth of the Persian empire by the Ionian Aristagoras and refused it, and who had the Aeginetans who submitted to Darius taken as hostages so that the island could not be used against Athens; then, having deposed his fellow king by bribing the Delphic oracle, he was found out, fled, raised Arcadia, was brought home, and in 490 was said to have cut himself to pieces in the stocks. Herodotus thought him half mad and used him for a set of stories. He was the son of Anaxandridas by a second wife the ephors had made the king take when the first had no children; the first wife then produced Dorieus, who thought the throne should be his, and Leonidas, who eventually had it. In 510 Cleomenes marched on Athens at Delphi's urging and drove out the tyrant Hippias, whose horses were disturbed by an ambush. Two years later he came back to help the oligarch Isagoras against the reformer Cleisthenes, seized the Acropolis with a small force, was besieged there for two days by the Athenian people and let go under truce. A third expedition, with the whole Peloponnesian league, broke up at Eleusis when the Corinthians went home and his fellow king Demaratus refused to go on, after which Sparta made a law that both kings should not lead an army together. Aristagoras came in 499 with a bronze map of the world and a promise of Susa, and Cleomenes dismissed him when he heard it was three months' march from the sea, his small daughter warning him that the stranger would corrupt him. About 494 he burned the sacred grove of Argos with six thousand Argives in it. Deposing Demaratus and driving him to Persia was the end. The reaction to his death was to leave the throne to the half-brother who would die at Thermopylae.
- Lived: 560 BCE – 490 BCE
- Nationality: Spartan
- Roles: king, monarch
