previous next
[5] Cleomenes had two sons, the elder being Acrotatus and the younger Cleonymus. Now Acrotatus died first; and when afterwards Cleomenes died, a claim to the throne was put forward by Areus son of Acrotatus, and Cleonymus took steps to induce Pyrrhus to enter the country. Before the battle of Leuctra1 the Lacedaemonians had suffered no disaster, so that they even refused to admit that they had yet been worsted in a land battle. For Leonidas, they said, had won the victory2, but his followers were insufficient for the entire destruction of the Persians; the achievement of Demosthenes and the Athenians on the island of Sphacteria3 was no victory, but only a trick in war.

1 371 B.C.

2 480 B.C.

3 425 B.C.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Sphacteria (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
480 BC (1)
425 BC (1)
371 BC (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: