Leonidas I (ca. 530 BC-480 BC) was a Spartan king immortalized in Greek literature and legend because of his heroic last stand against Persian invaders.

Leonidas is a legend without a biographer. Almost nothing is known of his life. The exact date of his birth is as unknown as the particulars of his childhood. Even the spectacular events surrounding his epic struggle in 480 B.C. are shrouded in mystery and open to controversy. The chief source is the famous Greek historian, Herodotus, but even here Leonidas is given relatively scant attention, and modern scholars have been forced to critically reexamine each of Herodotus's sentences to reconstruct more telling and at times more accurate detail.

Leonidas was born on Spartan territory in the Peloponnesian Peninsula in southern Greece probably between the years 530-500 B.C. He was the son of the Spartan king Anaxandrides and was descended from the Greek...