Plutarch, a Greek writer living under Rome around AD 100, wrote Parallel Lives: paired biographies of Greeks and Romans that weigh character as well as deeds. This life is Cleomenes, a king of Sparta in the third century BC, in the Peloponnese of southern Greece. Plutarch sets him with Agis, another Spartan king, beside the two Gracchi at Rome: attempts, Greek and Roman, to reverse a drift of wealth, both ending in blood.

Cleomenes III finishes what Agis began. He kills the ephors, five officials who oversaw Sparta’s kings, restores land lots to citizens, takes Megalopolis, and makes Sparta feared again until a Macedonian army comes down to stop him. Defeat at Sellasia ruins him. He flees to Ptolemy’s Egypt, is kept like a curiosity, and when the court will not send him home he breaks out for a last street fight. He dies on his own sword.