Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 27, “The Bad Boy of Sparta: The Life of King Cleomenes.” I’m Scott Emmons.

In recent episodes, we’ve seen how the sixth century BCE brought major developments to both Athens and Sparta. In the later part of that century and on into the next, one man consistently held the center stage. At the height of his reign, the Spartan king Cleomenes was arguably the most powerful individual in the Greek world. His story can tell us a lot about the nature of Spartan kingship, internal conflicts within the state, and the kinds of extreme behavior that were remarkably common in a culture that considered moderation one of the highest virtues. So this episode will be a deep dive into the life of the brilliant, ruthless, and evidently somewhat disturbed king who put his indelible stamp on Spartan history. 

Just a couple of notes before I start… This topic messes with my timeline a little, because some events in the later part of Cleomenes’ life are part of the buildup to the first Persian War, and I don’t want to steal any thunder from upcoming episodes. So, as a biography, this will have a few gaps, but even so, I hope to provide a fairly complete portrait. More importantly, this episode will touch on mental illness and some of its worst outcomes, so if you’re emotionally triggered by that kind of thing, you might want to consider skipping this one. Some content will not be suitable for young children, so listener discretion is advised. 

With that caveat, on with the story… Cleomenes led a turbulent life, and that turbulence started even before he was born. His father, the king Anaxandridas, had married his niece, which wasn’t unusual for a Spartan king. But after they’d been married for some time, they still hadn’t produced any children. At this point, the ephors — those elected officials who wielded so much power in Sparta — started to get worried. One of their responsibilities was to make sure both royal houses had good succession plans. If a king died without an heir, it could lead to a constitutional crisis. So the ephors told Anaxandridas, “You need to divorce your wife and marry another woman who can give you a son.” Anaxandridas wasn’t going to be told what to do, and he flat-out refused.

So the ephors went and met with the Gerousia, the council of elders, and together they hammered out a new proposal. They told Anaxandridas, “Keep your current wife, if you’re that attached to her, but take another one at the same time, so your royal line can continue.” This is a great example of how limited a Spartan king’s power was. He couldn’t just make a decision and say that was the law. The ephors told him if he didn’t accept their deal, they’d have to explore other options that he wouldn’t like very much. So Anaxandridas married a second wife, which Herodotus points out was not at all according to Spartan custom. And it’s not just Sparta. Monogamy was the norm across the Greek world, so this arrangement was very unusual. 

Well, soon after the wedding, his new wife had a son, Cleomenes. Which must have been a great relief for all concerned. But as luck would have it, his first wife then started pumping out sons. She had a boy named Dorieus, and soon afterwards, she had two more: Leonidas and Cleombrotus. So right away, there were jealousies and suspicions between the two sides of this one royal family. As the boys grew up, Dorieus turned out to be a robust, capable young man in the Spartan mold, while Cleomenes seemed to be a bit unstable. Maybe. We have to be careful here, because our main authority, Herodotus, may be drawing on a source that’s hostile to Cleomenes. In fact, Herodotus’ portrayal of Cleomenes is inconsistent. At one point he calls him “the most just of men.” But in this passage and at least one other, he suggests that the young Cleomenes had a touch of mental illness. The term he uses means something like “mad around the edges.” For what it’s worth, I’m inclined to agree with him, for reasons that will soon become clear.

In any case, Dorieus thought he should be the heir to the throne because he was born to Anaxandridas’ first wife and because of his Spartan virtues. But Spartan custom dictated that the first-born son of a king was the heir, and so the kingship went to Cleomenes. Dorieus was naturally unhappy with the outcome, so he soon left Sparta and spent the rest of his life adventuring first in Libya and then in Italy, trying to found a Spartan settlement, until finally he was killed in a battle against the Carthaginians in Sicily. 

The next major events we know about in Cleomenes’ life are the ones I’ve covered in the last few episodes — his expeditions to depose the tyrant Hippias in Athens, then to support his friend Isagoras against the rising tide of democracy. We saw how his attempt to invade Attica and install Isagoras as tyrant imploded when the Corinthian allies defected and then his own co-king Demaratus backed out. As you can imagine, from that point on, there was no love lost between the two kings. 

That failed expedition to Attica was a huge embarrassment, but Cleomenes later scored a significant military victory against Argos. You may remember that Argos and Sparta had long been the two big rivals for power in the Peloponnese, and they continued to quarrel, especially over the region of Cynuria on the eastern coast. Well, in 494 BCE, Cleomenes had a pretext for a war of aggression. He’d received an oracle from Delphi saying he would conquer Argos. So he led his army to face off against the Argives at a place called Sepeia, just a few miles east of the city. And if we can believe Herodotus’ account, he won the battle by outsmarting the enemy. The Argives were worried about the Spartans outmaneuvering them, so they decided that they’d listen to whatever orders the Spartan herald shouted to the army, and they’d make a parallel move on their side. They were essentially mirroring the Spartan army so they’d have their defense in place wherever the Spartans tried to get an advantage. Well, Cleomenes soon caught on to what they were doing. So he sent word out that at dawn, when the herald gave the signal for the men to eat breakfast, that was when they should attack. The Argives fell for it. They broke for their morning meal, and the Spartans swooped in and massacred them. 

So far, it was a fairly ordinary military victory taking advantage of an opponent’s error. What came next was what we’d call a war crime. The Argive survivors ran off to seek safety in a sacred grove nearby. The Spartans surrounded the grove and stood guard to keep anyone from escaping. Cleomenes interrogated some Argive deserters and found out the names of some of the men who’d taken sanctuary. He started having those men called out one by one, saying their families had paid a ransom for them and they were free to go home. And as soon as a man came out, he’d be put to death. This went on for a while until the Argive survivors caught on, and they stopped going out when they heard their names called. At which point Cleomenes gave the order to burn the whole grove and everyone in it. So if you’re wondering why I agree that he probably had sociopathic tendencies, here’s exhibit A.

But after all that, Cleomenes didn’t follow up his victory by attacking Argos itself. Why not? His excuse was that he’d found out the name of the grove he’d just burned was Argos. So by destroying quote-unquote “Argos,” he’d fulfilled the oracle’s prediction. I suspect it mostly came down to a cost-benefit assessment. Sieges were very difficult. They took a lot of time, manpower, and money. And as dominant as the Spartan soldiers were in the field, siege craft was never their strong suit. There may have been other factors that we just don’t know about. In any case, he sent most of the army home, but he did make a gesture of conquest by taking a thousand elite troops to the most important religious sanctuary of Argos, the temple of Hera, and claiming the right to sacrifice there. The priest objected, saying it was sacrilege for an outsider to perform the rites. Cleomenes ordered the helots to take the priest away and flog him while he made the sacrifice. So much for religious scruples. 

Well, when he got back to Sparta, he found he was under suspicion for failing to take Argos after routing its army. Rumors floated around that he’d taken a bribe from the Argives to leave the city alone. This is a peculiar feature of Spartan culture. They made such a fuss about living simply and not caring about the trappings of wealth, but they had a reputation for being highly corruptible. Again and again, their prominent men were either caught taking bribes or were suspected of doing so. Well, Cleomenes was put on trial. And in court, he used the loophole I’ve already mentioned, that the oracle had said he’d take Argos, and that was literally what he’d done — he’d taken the grove called Argos. He also claimed to have received an omen when he sacrificed at the temple of Hera. He said that when he was performing the rites, the breast of the cult statue had burst into flames. As he interpreted the omen, it meant that he’d been right to stop at taking the grove of Argos, because if he’d been destined to take the city, it would have been the head that caught on fire. An absolutely airtight argument, wouldn’t you say? I don’t know how many people he convinced, but the corruption charge didn’t stick, and he was acquitted.  

Meanwhile, the feud between Cleomenes and his co-king Demaratus continued to escalate. It must have been an awkward position for Demaratus, having to fulfill his role as king in the shadow of such a forceful personality. It reminds me of a much later situation in Rome, when Julius Caesar was consul.  

His co-consul was a man named Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus who theoretically had the same powers. But Caesar bulldozed over him to the point where, instead of talking about the consulship of Caesar and Bibulus, people sarcastically called it the consulship of Julius and Caesar. That was the kind of thing Demaratus was up against. He seems to have had to work hard just to make sure his name was still out there. We hear that he was the only Spartan king to enter a winning team in the four-horse chariot race at Olympia. His need to stay relevant in Sparta may have been behind that and some of his moves to push back against Cleomenes.

In any case, the feud reached the boiling point in about 491. It was clear at this point that the Persian king Darius was soon going to be sending forces into Greece. In that situation, a lot of Greek states had to make a decision, whether they were going to submit or face the overwhelming power of the Persian empire. And a great many of them, especially the islands, had decided they had no choice, so they’d sent earth and water to the Great King as the token of submission. One of those was the large island of Aegina, which sits just about 17 miles or 27 kilometers off the coast of Attica. Today, the high-speed ferry will get you there in about half an hour. Now, Athens and Aegina had never gotten along very well. The later statesman Pericles famously called it the “eyesore of the Piraeus” — the Piraeus being the port town of Athens. And at this time, the Athenians were very uncomfortable having a powerful island that close to their city submitting to Persian authority. When they considered how to deal with the situation, they decided their best option was to ask for help from Sparta. 

This just goes to show how quickly political dynamics can shift. It had only been about fifteen years since the Athenians had driven Cleomenes and his army out of the city. But now, under the threat of a Persian invasion, they were forced to patch things up and work together. So Cleomenes sailed to Aegina — and I assume he must have taken a small force with him — to arrest those responsible for submitting to Persian authority. But a force of Aeginetans turned out to oppose him, led by a man named Krios. And this Krios told him, “You’re not arresting anybody.” He said he knew Cleomenes didn’t have Sparta’s full backing, otherwise they would have sent both kings. He made the standard accusation that the Athenians must have paid him off. Herodotus tells us that Krios was prepared for this confrontation because the other king, Demaratus, had sent him a letter to undermine Cleomenes’ operation.  

So Cleomenes had to back down, for the time being at least, and in Herodotus’ telling, he left with a tough-guy zinger. Krios in Greek means “ram,” and rams were very often used as sacrificial animals. It was standard practice to tip the ram’s horns with gold or bronze before the sacrifice. So on his way out, Cleomenes told him, “Krios, you’d better cover your horns in bronze, because you’re in for some serious trouble.” 

When Cleomenes got back to Sparta, he went after Demaratus with everything he had. He stirred up old rumors that Demaratus was not actually the legitimate son of the previous king Ariston. The story was that Ariston had married the former wife of a friend, and that she gave birth to Demaratus well before her due date. Supposedly there were witnesses that Ariston had been in a meeting with the ephors when one of his household slaves came in to announce that his wife had given birth. So Ariston started counting on his fingers… one, two, three, four, five, six, seven… and then blurted out, “He’s not my son!” Although later he came around and recognized Demaratus as his son and heir. 

So that was the narrative that Cleomenes was now pushing. And he started scheming with a man named Leotychidas, who was a member of Demaratus’s royal family. If Leotychidas would help get Demaratus deposed, Cleomenes would pull strings to help put him on the throne. So Leotychidas made a formal accusation that Demaratus was not the legitimate king and brought him to trial. It must have been the trial of the century at Sparta. It went on for some time, and the Spartans were having a hard time coming to a verdict, so Cleomenes made a suggestion. “Why don’t we ask the Delphic oracle?” He must have been very happy when the Spartans agreed, because, well… he knew a guy. He had an influential connection at Delphi who put pressure on the Pythia to answer the way Cleomenes wanted. So the oracle gave an answer, and for once there were no riddles, no complicated verses to decipher, just a straightforward pronouncement. Demaratus was not the son of Ariston. Cleomenes had won. Demaratus soon left Sparta and went over to Asia to seek protection from none other than the Persian king Darius. The king welcomed him warmly and gave him lands and cities to govern. He became an adviser to Darius on Greek affairs. And here we see a pattern that will play out repeatedly in later episodes. When Greek leaders fall from grace in their own cities, they often go on to become honored vassals of the Great King. 

As for Cleomenes, he now went back to Aegina — with the new king Leotychidas this time — to take care of unfinished business. They selected ten of the wealthiest men from the most prominent families and delivered them to the Athenians as hostages to make sure Aegina stayed in line. Of course, one of those ten was Krios, the man who’d put up such a fight the last time. 

That was a clear win for Cleomenes, but he couldn’t bask in the glory for very long. Soon after he got back to Sparta, news of his underhanded dealings at Delphi leaked out. Things must have gotten very hot for him, because he decided he had to sneak out of Sparta. He escaped to the region of Thessaly, and once he’d had time to figure out his next move, he returned to the Peloponnese, to the central region of Arcadia. And there he started to foment a rebellion of the cities there against his own city of Sparta. Now, it wasn’t too hard for Sparta to keep Arcadia in line as long as it was just a collection of small cities, but if they got together and presented a united front, that would be a serious threat. So that’s what Cleomenes now tried to achieve. He went around trying to get the leading men from all the Arcadian cities to swear an oath that they’d follow wherever he led them. The Spartans were naturally alarmed at the possibility of losing their hold on that key area, so they ultimately patched things up with him. We don’t have any details about how they worked that out. It must have involved a lot of debate and complex negotiations. But all we really know is that the Spartans agreed Cleomenes could come back and take his place as king again. Evidently his tampering with Delphi would be swept under the rug. 

But at this point, his behavior became too erratic to ignore. He started randomly going up to Spartan citizens and whacking them in the face with his staff. He’d clearly become a danger, if not to himself, at least to others. So his relatives — probably led by his half-brothers Leonidas and Cleombrotus — put him in some kind of wooden stocks that bound his feet but evidently left his hands free. At one point, when there was only one helot guarding him, Cleomenes ordered him to bring him a knife. Of course the guard tried to object, but Cleomenes reminded him that he was still the king, and he threatened him with all kinds of punishments if he disobeyed. So the guard gave in and brought him the knife. Which Cleomenes used to start cutting himself, starting with his shins, working his way up gradually to his thighs, and finally up to his abdomen, which he continued slicing up until he died.

So ended this larger-than-life king who’d been both a dominating and destabilizing force in Sparta for about 35 years. His violent suicide must have stunned the Greek world. Inevitably, there was a lot of speculation about what drove him to it. Herodotus reports several theories from different parts of Greece. Many people said it was divine punishment for tampering with the Delphic oracle. To the Argives, it was payback for burning all those suppliants in the sacred grove. The Athenians offered a similar story, that he’d burned a sacred precinct of Demeter when he’d mustered his forces at Eleusis.  

As for the Spartans, they chalked it up to advanced alcoholism. Their story was that Cleomenes had once met with a delegation of Scythians, who introduced him to the practice of drinking undiluted wine, and he made a habit of it. For Greeks, drinking full-strength wine was the worst kind of substance abuse. It was also outside the accepted social context for drinking. So if you were drinking unmixed wine, you were considered to be pretty far gone. Well, scholars will keep debating. But to put it in modern terms, I think it’s likely that Cleomenes struggled with mental illness all his life and self-medicated with alcohol. He certainly wouldn’t be the last maniacally ambitious leader in history to end up taking his own life.

And that concludes episode 27. If you have comments, questions, corrections, or anything you’d like to add, I’m here for it. You can email me at scott@epicgreekhistory.com, or you can always leave a comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. Music for this episode was composed and recorded by Matt Hobbs and Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork were created by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.