page_title: Agis IV
section_title: Execution and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Agis IV / Execution and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: The Doom of Agis, king of Sparta, engraving by Walter Crane. From The Children's Plutarch: Tales of the Greeks by F. J. Gould, Harper &amp; Brothers Publishers, 1910.
context_page_description: Agis IV, the elder son of Eudamidas II, was the 25th king of the Eurypontid dynasty of Sparta. Posterity has reckoned him an idealistic but impractical monarch.
context_section_description: Cleombrotus was allowed to go into exile; he escaped death only because of the influence of his wife, Leonidas' daughter Chilonis. While Agis  was campaigning against the Aetolian Alliance, the oligarchs succeeded in restoring Leonidas to power and canceling the reforms that Agis  had implemented. In 241 Agis was betrayed by some friends and thrown into prison.  Leonidas immediately came with a band of mercenaries and secured the prison, while the ephors entered it and went through the mockery of a trial.  When asked if he did not repent of what he had attempted, Agis replied that he should never repent of so great a design, even in the face of death.  He was accused of seeking tyranny,  and quickly executed by strangulation, the ephors fearing a rescue, as a great crowd of people had assembled around the prison gates.
  Agis, observing that one of his executioners was moved to tears, said, "Weep not for me: suffering, as I do, unjustly, I am in a happier case than my murderers."  His mother Agesistrate and his grandmother Archidameia were strangled on his body.  Agis was the first king of Sparta to have been put to death by the ephors.  Pausanias, who, however, is undoubtedly wrong, says that he fell in battle.  His widow Agiatis was forcibly married by Leonidas to his son Cleomenes III, but nevertheless the two developed for each other a mutual affection and esteem.
  Considered by many writers too weak and good-natured to cope with the problems which confronted him, Agis was characterized by a sincerity of purpose and a blend of youthful modesty with royal dignity, which render him perhaps the most attractive figure in the whole of Spartan history.  His life and death caught the romantic imagination of several ancient writers.  He is the subject of a lost biography by Phylarchus, which was apparently very heavily relied upon by Plutarch when he wrote his own biography of the king.
  Agis was succeeded by his son Eudamidas III.
caption: The Doom of Agis, king of Sparta - early 20th-century engraving
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