Pleistoanax
Pleistoanax was exiled for nineteen years for taking a bribe not to sack Athens, recalled, and spent the rest of his reign arguing for peace. He succeeded his brother on the Agiad throne as a boy and invaded Attica in 446 at the head of a Peloponnesian army with the city apparently at his mercy. He withdrew without fighting. Sparta concluded that the Athenian leader had bought him, fined him a sum he could not pay, and drove him into exile at a sanctuary on the Arcadian border, where he built a house half inside the sacred precinct so that he could not be seized. He stayed there nineteen years. The peace he had made lasted fourteen of them, and when it broke the Peloponnesian War went badly enough for Sparta that the oracle at Delphi was persuaded to instruct the Spartans to bring him home. His enemies said he had bribed the priestess; his supporters said the gods wanted him. He returned in 427 and was blamed for every misfortune of the following years by people who held that his restoration had been impious, which is a Spartan way of conducting a policy argument. The policy he argued for was ending the war, and in 421 he got it: the peace of that year was negotiated by him and by an Athenian of the same mind, and it was supposed to last fifty years. It lasted six, undermined by allies on both sides who had not been consulted and by an Athenian expedition to Sicily that broke it in spirit before anyone broke it in form. Pleistoanax reigned alongside a Eurypontid colleague throughout, which is the arrangement the corpus's single list of Spartan kings does not show: for almost all of his reign Sparta had two kings, and they frequently disagreed.
- Lived: 480 BCE – 409 BCE
- Nationality: Spartan
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
