ABSTRACT
The lives of Agis IV (Eurypontid, r. c.244-1) and Cleomenes III (Agiad, r. c. 235-222) are the stuff of novels, ancient as well as modern. After Lycurgus the lawgiver, Leonidas, and Agesilaus II, they are the most famous exemplars of Laconism, bulking largest in the tortuous annals of the ‘Spartan mirage’. Their achievements and significance, on the other hand, are the stuff of history. But these will always remain desperately elusive. For against the martyrology of the contemporary historian Phylarchus, prime source of Plutarch’s biographical ‘novels’, we have to pit only the Memoirs of Aratus, enemy of Cleomenes, as mediated by Plutarch’s life of the Achaean statesman and by Polybius, and of course the latter’s Histories, itself composed more than a generation later.
