Spartan Name Generator

Spartan names are Greek names with a Doric accent. Where an Athenian was Demosthenes or Aristodemos, a Spartan was Damonon or Aristodamos, because Doric kept the long a that Attic turned into e. That is why so many real Spartans end in -as rather than -es: Leonidas, Brasidas, Pausanias, Antalkidas, Kallikratidas. The rest of the toolkit is shared Greek: a name is two roots joined together, and Spartan families favoured roots about war and rule, such as Archi- and -archos (lead), Nik- (victory), Kleo- (fame), Agesi- (leader), Leo- (lion), Eury- (wide), Damo- (people) and -machos (fighter).

The name alone was rarely enough. Spartans were written as 'X son of Y' (Leonidas son of Anaxandridas), and the famous ones picked up an epithet: Aristodemos the Trembler, who survived Thermopylae in disgrace; Agesilaos the Lame King; Kleombrotos, who lost at Leuktra. Spartan women, unusually, were named in the sources too: Gorgo the queen, Kyniska the first woman to win at Olympia, Argileonis, who asked whether her dead son Brasidas had any equals.

This list mixes attested Spartans from the kings' lists, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plutarch with original names assembled from the same Doric roots, so a fictional hoplite, a wargame general or a sports team can sound like Lacedaemon without borrowing a king.