Plutarch, a Greek writer living under the Roman Empire around the year 100, wrote Parallel Lives: paired biographies of Greeks and Romans that weigh character, virtue, and vice. This life is Agis, a young king of Sparta in the Peloponnese of southern Greece, written as a moral pair to the Roman land-reformer Tiberius Gracchus.

Agis tried to restore the old laws of Lycurgus, Sparta's legendary lawgiver: cancel the debts, redivide the land, and fill the common dining halls with true Spartiates, the full citizens, instead of a rich handful. The rich let him begin, then used the other king to stop him. He was dragged from sanctuary and strangled by the ephors, Sparta's annually elected overseers; his mother and grandmother died with him. He believed the old city could be made again.