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Leonidas was a king of Sparta, the seventeenth of the Agiad line. He succeeded, probably in 489 or 488 BC, his half-brother Cleomenes I, whose daughter Gorgo he married.
In 480 he was sent with about 7000 men to hold the pass of Thermopylae against the army of Xerxes (see Battle of Thermopylae). The smallness of the force was, according to a current story, due to the fact that he was deliberately going to his doom, an oracle having foretold that Sparta could be saved only by the death of one of its kings: in reality it seems rather that the ephors supported the scheme half-heartedly, their policy being to concentrate the Greek forces at the Isthmus.