Archidamus II

Eurypontid king of Sparta from c. 469, jointly with the Agiad royal house. The eponym of the Archidamian War (the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, 431–421) by virtue of having led the first three Spartan invasions of Attica in 431, 430, and 428. Thucydides 1.79–85 preserves his speech in the Spartan assembly of summer 432, the warning against the war his colleagues then voted: 'we have not the means of starving them out, nor by sea, where they are strongest, nor by land, where they have the resources of the empire to draw on.' His son Agis II, who succeeded him in 427, would in 413 take the Decelea recommendation of Alcibiades and fortify the Attic countryside. Archidamus's strategic premise — that Athens was unbeatable in a war Sparta would have to fight — was vindicated through the first ten years of the war his policy had failed to prevent. Buried in the Agora of the Damōnonidai at Sparta with the standard royal *agones* commemoration; the unusual fact that Spartan kings were buried inside the polis rather than outside the walls is the detail Hdt. 6.58 spends a chapter explaining.

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