Pausanias the Regent

Pausanias
Bust of Pausanias, in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.
Regent of Sparta
Reign	479–478 BC
Predecessor	Cleombrotus
Successor	Pleistarchus
Died	477 BC Sparta
Issue	Pleistoanax Cleomenes Nasteria
Greek	Παυσανίας
House	Agiad
Father	Cleombrotus
Mother	Theano

Pausanias (Greek: Παυσανίας) was a Spartan regent and a general. In 479 BC, as a leader of the Hellenic League's combined land forces, he won a pivotal victory against the Achaemenid Empire in the Battle of Plataea. Despite his role in ending the Second Persian invasion of Greece, Pausanias subsequently fell under suspicion of conspiring with the Persian king Xerxes I. After an interval of repeated arrests and debates about his guilt, he was starved to death by his fellow Spartans in 477 BC. What is known of his life is largely according to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Diodorus' Bibliotheca historica and a handful of other classical sources.