Sparta by Philip Matyszak

Author:Philip Matyszak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2017-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Cleomenes I – Sparta’s ‘Mad’ King

Almost everything about the career of Cleomenes I of Sparta is exceptional, often to the point of being bizarre. This includes the circumstances surrounding his conception and birth.

The father of Cleomenes I was King Anaxandrias II (560-c.520 BC), a highly successful king of the Agiad line. To date we have avoided the complex family lives and succession struggles of the Spartan royal families, other than to note that once the historical record becomes more detailed, the regular reigns and father-son succession of king lists from earlier eras becomes considerably more complex. King Anaxandrias and his successors are a good example of this.

Sparta had a relaxed attitude to close-kin marriages, even allowing the marriage of uterine half-siblings (those with the same mother but different fathers – Philo On Special Laws 3.4.22). Therefore no-one found it particularly odd that Anaxandrias had chosen to marry his own niece. However, the fact that Anaxandrias was incapable of fathering children on his sister’s daughter caused considerable concern in the city.

Since at least the time of Chilon the Ephors had possessed the power to call their kings to account, and they did so on this occasion. Anaxandrias was summoned by the Ephors and told that he had to divorce his barren wife forthwith. The Ephors had a substitute wife lined up – by some accounts a granddaughter of Chilon himself. This also is none too surprising, because Spartan women – or at least their families – were aggressively hypergamous. That is, daughters tended to marry as high-ranking or powerful a man as possible, and given that Spartan women could and did inherit property, this meant that much of Sparta’s assets began to accumulate with a relatively small group of women. It was therefore logical that the family of Chilon should try immediately to leverage the great Ephor’s power and prestige into an advantageous marriage for his female descendants. The infertility of Anaxandrias’ current wife allowed them this opportunity. (Detailed discussion on Spartan hypergamy can be found in Powell, A. Classical Sparta Routledge 2014 edition, p92ff)

The problem was that Anaxandrias loved his niece and had no intention of divorcing her. He informed the Ephors that she had done nothing wrong, and threatened to force a constitutional crisis by defiantly remaining married. A hasty compromise was worked out. If Anaxandrias insisted on being married to his niece, the Ephors would permit this, but only on condition that Anaxandrias contracted a second, bigamous marriage to the woman they had selected from Chilon’s family.

The intention was to get the Agiad line breeding again, and in this the Ephors were certainly successful. Hardly had Anaxandrias conceived a child on his second wife than the first became pregnant. This sudden burst of fertility caused deep suspicion among the family of Chilon and their faction. The suspicion was that Anaxandrias’ wife was faking a pregnancy to invalidate the King’s second marriage. Therefore the unfortunate woman was watched day and night, and she even gave birth with a monitor present to carefully check that the child had come from her womb.

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