Killing of the ephors
event · 2 works · 2 mentions · 4 anchored passages
killing of the ephors · coup against the ephors
in the texts
Agis and Cleomenes
Cleomenes' armed coup in which four of the five ephors are killed at their mess-table and their office abolished.
Cleomenes, when day came, published a list of eighty citizens who must go into exile, and removed all the ephoral chairs except one;
When the city was close at hand, he sent Eurycleidas to the mess-table of the ephors, ostensibly to carry some message of the king from the army;
The first of them, Agylaeus, on receiving the blow, fell and lay still as though dead;
Comparison of Agis and Cleomenes and the Gracchi
Cleomenes's unlawful slaying of the Spartan ephors in the course of seizing control of the constitution.
Cleomenes, on the contrary, undertook his change of the constitution with too much rashness and violence, killing the ephors in unlawful fashion, when it would have been easier to win them over to his views or remove them by superiority in arms, just as he removed many others from the city.
But Cleomenes, not to mention again his slaughter of the ephors, set free all the slaves, and was king by himself in point of fact, though nominally with another, after he had chosen his brother Eucleidas, a man from the same house, as his colleague;