1. Cleomenes I, from c.520–c.490 BC king of Sparta of the Agiad line. He expelled the tyrant Hippias from Athens in 510. In 508 he supported the aristocratic faction in the city, led by Isagoras, against Cleisthenes, and by invoking the hereditary curse of the Alcmaeonidae, to which family Cleisthenes belonged, compelled him and his supporters to retire. When Cleomenes arrived in Athens and attempted to set up Isagoras and his friends in a narrow oligarchy, there was a popular uprising; after being besieged in the Acropolis both were obliged to withdraw, and Cleisthenes was able to return. Later Cleomenes failed in attempts to restore first Isagoras and then the tyrant Hippias, obstructed in both cases by his fellow king Demaratus. The latter also prevented him from punishing Aegina in 491, when that island was suspected of favouring Persia before the outbreak of the Persian War.
2. Cleomenes III, b. c.260 BC, king of Sparta from 235 to 219. Following the social ideals of his predecessor Agis IV, whose widow he married, he attempted to restore Spartan power by a series of idealistic reforms designed to rehabilitate the constitution of Lycurgus. This was in 226–225, when Cleomenes had already built up a strong position in the state by his successful wars against the Achaean League. The reforms were in part carried out, but in 222 Cleomenes was defeated at Sellasia by the Achaeans under Aratus of Sicyon and fled to his patron Ptolemy III Euergetes in Egypt; there he committed suicide in 219. He was a nationalist and an idealist whose ideals lived on after him, but in practical terms he made no lasting gains.
