Accession of Agesilaus II as Spartan King

Succession in Sparta meant the passing of a mantle older than its kings. Around 400 BCE, Agesilaus II, an Agiad king with a reputation for austerity and speed, rose over rivals to claim the diadem and the duty to manage a Greece just reshaped by Spartan hands [17]. He entered office not as conqueror, but as caretaker of a victory that needed tending.

Agesilaus impressed contemporaries like Xenophon, who later wrote an encomium that made the king’s virtues luminous: endurance, frugality, decisiveness [6]. But beyond the annexes of praise lay the hard arithmetic of hegemony. Harmosts in places like Byzantium and Miletus sent reports; allies in Corinth and Thebes required calibration; Athens, humiliated, remained a factor. The sound he heard most often was not the clash of shields but the rustle of dispatches from ports and passes [1][17].

His early decision to cross into Asia Minor in 396 carried the scent of both piety and calculation. Sparta could export its most restless energies eastward under a king who spoke of freeing Greek cities from Persian rule; it could also remind the Great King that the hoplite phalanx might march beyond the Aegean. Agesilaus gathered men at Ephesus beneath the azure Aegean, trained relentlessly, and set his eyes on Sardis [1][17][6].

At home, the old Spartan equilibrium tilted. A land power now had to master sea lanes and diplomacy. The Peloponnesian League’s traditional anchors—Tegea, Corinth, Elis—pulled against newer obligations in Ionia. Agesilaus’s accession thus marked not just a change of monarch but a change of scale. His ambition would draw Sparta across the water; his defeats would draw enemies back to the Isthmus.

Xenophon’s admiration did not blind him to complexity. “To do a brilliant deed was far dearer to him than life,” he wrote of men like Phoebidas—an ethos Agesilaus shared when he defended utile illegality in Thebes years later [3][6]. The king’s moral compass, tuned to usefulness, would steer Sparta through treaties and coups. In 387/6, the King’s Peace, negotiated by the Spartan Antalcidas, would align Agesilaus’s Greece with Persian dictates. That tether would tighten.

Agesilaus’s crown came with low numbers that worried veterans: fewer full Spartiates to fill the ranks, thicker purses corroding old simplicity, more dependence on allied cavalry to cover Spartan flanks. The scarlet of the cloak remained bright, but Xenophon, in a separate treatise, would later describe the fading discipline beneath it [5][13][17].

The accession set the arc. From Ephesus to Sardis, from Corinth to Leuctra, Agesilaus’s name shadows each decision. King Cleombrotus would command at Leuctra in 371, but the policies that put a Spartan army on that field—enforcing autonomy against Thebes, excluding them from peace—bear Agesilaus’s imprint [18].