Argos has been lived in for 7,000 years and spent centuries fighting Sparta
People have lived at the foot of Aspida hill in Argos since a late Neolithic village about 7,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities anywhere. In classical times it was Sparta's great Peloponnesian rival, and Macedon's kings claimed the city as their ancestral home.
Argos sits on the fertile Argolic plain, 11 kilometres from Nafplio, which served as its old harbour, and is today the largest town in Argolis, nearly twice the size of the regional capital. Since 2011 it has formed part of the municipality of Argos-Mykines, and farming drives the local economy. The name may come from argos, meaning white or shining, perhaps for the look of the plain at harvest; legend credits a king called Argus with renaming a settlement once known as the Citadel of Phoroneus. Homer's bards used Argive loosely for all the Greeks who besieged Troy.
Alongside Mycenae and Tiryns it was a Mycenaean stronghold. Its high point came under King Pheidon in the 7th century BC, when Argive hoplites beat the Spartans at Hyssiae in 669–668 BC. The city then supported bronze and pottery schools, tanneries, clothmakers and a sanctuary of Hera.
Fortunes swung hard. A crushing defeat by Sparta at Sepeia in 494 BC killed so many citizens that a revolution admitted previously excluded outsiders and set up a democracy that lasted, with a brief oligarchic interruption, through most of the classical era. Its institutions included an assembly, a council, a mysterious body called the Eighty and magistrates serving six-month terms. Staying out of the Greek alliance against Persia in 480 BC left Argos isolated; a later partnership with Athens and Thessaly delivered only about 1,000 hoplites at Tanagra, and an anti-Spartan coalition it led collapsed after defeat at Mantinea in 418 BC.
Herodotus recorded the tradition that the Argead royal house of Philip II and Alexander the Great came from Argos, and that symbolism kept the city relevant. Argos sent no troops to Chaironeia in 338 BC, yet Philip rewarded it the next year with Spartan borderlands, stretching its territory to as much as 1,400 square kilometres. After Alexander died, Macedonian regents fought over the city, and when it broke free in 303 BC, Argive inscriptions thanked Apollo rather than the general Demetrius.
Source: Argos, Peloponnese
