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Eurotas River. According to myth, the first king of the region later to be called Laconia, but then called Lelegia was the eponymous King Lelex.He was followed, according to tradition, by a series of kings allegorizing several traits of later-to-be Sparta and Laconia, such as the Kings Myles, Eurotas, Lacedaemon and Amyclas of Sparta.
For most of its history, the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta in the Peloponnese was ruled by kings. Sparta was unusual among the Greek city-states in that it maintained its kingship past the Archaic age. It was even more unusual in that it had two kings simultaneously, who were called the archagetai, [1] [n 1] coming from two separate lines.
Given its military pre-eminence, Sparta was recognized as the leading force of the unified Greek military during the Greco-Persian Wars, in rivalry with the rising naval power of Athens. [3] Sparta was the principal enemy of Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), [4] from which it emerged victorious after the Battle of Aegospotami.
Sparta was later defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. A few decades later, the rivalry between Athens and Sparta ended when Macedonia became the most powerful entity in Greece and Philip II of Macedon unified all of the Greek world except Sparta, which was later subjugated by Philip's son Alexander in 331 BC. [32]
The ancient Greek tribes (Ancient Greek: Ἑλλήνων ἔθνη) were groups of Greek-speaking populations living in Greece, Cyprus, and the various Greek colonies.They were primarily divided by geographic, dialectal, political, and cultural criteria, as well as distinct traditions in mythology and religion.
By 362 BC, the question of whether to continue as an ally of Thebes had become so pressing as to divide the Arcadian League, with Mantinea siding with Sparta and Athens while Tegea and Megalopolis remained loyal to Thebes. Thus, the cities of the league fought on different sides at the Battle of Mantinea in that year.
There is a question as to whether he ever was actually in possession there. One tradition says that he was and was therefore the first king of Sparta. A second asserts that he died before taking possession and that the Dorians brought his infant twin sons to Sparta as kings under a regent. [5] Aristodemus was assassinated at Delphi by the Atreids.
The Athenians executed the men of fighting age [24] and sold the women and children into slavery. They then settled 500 of their own colonists on the island. [25]In 405 BC, by which time Athens was losing the war, the Spartan general Lysander expelled the Athenian colonists from Melos and restored the survivors of the siege to the island.