Cynisca

Daughter of the Spartan king Archidamus, sister of Agesilaus, and the first woman to win at Olympia. Her four-horse team took the crown in 396 and again in 392 before the common era. Owners, not drivers, were proclaimed victors in the chariot events, which is what made the win possible for a woman at all.

Pausanias saw the monument. Beside the statue of Troilus at Olympia stood a stone base carrying a chariot and horses, a charioteer and a portrait of Cynisca by the sculptor Apelles, with inscriptions. The inscribed base survives and is catalogued as IG V.1 1564a; the epigram speaks in her own voice, naming her father and brothers as kings of Sparta and claiming to be the only woman in Greece to have taken the crown.

Xenophon, who knew Agesilaus personally, gives a colder account of the motive. He says Agesilaus put his sister into horse-breeding in order to demonstrate to the Spartans that a chariot victory was a mark of wealth and not of excellence. Both things can be true: the point Agesilaus wanted made, and the inscription she paid for.