Pleistarchus
Pleistarchus was king of Sparta for twenty-one years and is remembered for a battle his regent won while he was a child. He was the son of Leonidas, and he inherited the Agiad throne in 480 when his father was killed at Thermopylae holding a pass for three days against an army that had come to conquer Greece. He was too young to rule, so his cousin governed as regent, and it was that regent who commanded the allied Greek army at Plataea the following year - the land battle that ended the Persian invasion, fought with something like eighty thousand Greeks under a Spartan general and won by the Spartan phalanx against the Persian centre. The regent's career afterwards is a Spartan lesson in what victory does to a commander. He took the war to Byzantium, adopted Persian dress and manners, corresponded with the Persian king about marrying his daughter, and was recalled twice to face charges. The third time he took sanctuary in a temple, and the ephors walled up the doors and let him starve, his own mother reportedly laying the first stone. Sparta thereafter kept its commanders on a short rope and its politics turned inward, which is why the leadership of the Greek alliance passed to Athens and became an empire. Pleistarchus reigned through that transfer of power and left no mark on it that survives. That is not unusual for a Spartan king: the office was hereditary, held simultaneously by two men from two houses, and hedged by five annually elected ephors who could and did prosecute kings, depose them and put them to death. A Spartan king commanded armies in the field and presided over sacrifices; he did not govern alone, and the corpus's own list of three kings from two dynasties across a century and a half should not be read as a line of succession.
- Lived: 500 BCE – 459 BCE
- Nationality: Spartan
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
