New Biography: King Agis IV—The Post-Alexander King Of Sparta Who Wanted To Bring Sparta Back To Its Glory Days

(Lycurgus of Sparta, painted by Jacques-Louis David  (1748–1825), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

When a civilization begins to decline, those witnessing the fall start to question what went wrong. Was it abandoning traditional government, apostatizing from the ancestral religion, or was it a general degradation of morality that brought about the end? And when once-great powers find themselves without strength, they look to the past in search of the specialness that they had lost by the time of their present.

King Agis IV felt these emotions strongly. He took power in 244 or 243 BCE, allegedly at the young age of nineteen. Agis was a member of the Eurypontid line of Spartan kings, one of two co-ruling monarchies in Sparta. His co-king from the Agiad line was Leonidas II, who had been in power since 251 BCE. The two kings had vastly different visions for Sparta and their personalities were bound to clash. It was a classic sociopolitical conflict—the ongoing struggle between the revolutionary and the defender of the status quo.

Continue reading about the dramatic struggle between Agis IV and Leonidas II, HERE.