Battle of Thermopylae

• 1. Introduction

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  Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. In William Roger Paton's translation, those lines speak for the dead of the Battle of Thermopylae. That battle was fought in 480 BC. On one side stood the Persian Empire under Xerxes. On the other stood a Greek alliance led by Sparta under Leonidas I.

  It lasted three days, and the Greeks lost. Even so, it became one of the most famous battles in European ancient history. Why does a defeat carry that kind of glory? Who chose to stay and die at the pass, and what made them stay? And how much of the famous story can be trusted, when one ancient historian supplies most of it?

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• 2. Earth And Water

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  The trouble began with the Ionian Revolt of 499-494 BC. The city-states of Athens and Eretria had aided the rebels against the Persian Empire of Darius I. That empire was still young and prone to revolt. Darius was a usurper who had spent years putting down rebellions against his own rule. He vowed to punish those involved, the Athenians above all, and he saw a chance to expand into the fractious world of Greece. A preliminary expedition under Mardonius in 492 BC secured the lands approaching Greece and re-conquered Thrace. It also forced Macedon to become a client kingdom of Persia.

  In 491 BC Darius sent emissaries to the Greek city-states to ask for a gift of earth and water as a token of submission. Most cities complied. In Athens the ambassadors were put on trial and then thrown into a pit. In Sparta they were thrown down a well. That left Sparta effectively at war with Persia. To soften the insult, two Spartans were voluntarily sent to Susa for execution, as atonement for the dead heralds.

  A force under Datis and Artaphernes sailed in 490 BC. It attacked Naxos, received the submission of the other Cycladic Islands, and then besieged and destroyed Eretria. Next it landed at the bay of Marathon, where a heavily outnumbered Athenian army won a remarkable victory. The Persians withdrew to Asia. Darius began raising a huge new army, but his Egyptian province revolted in 486 BC. He died while preparing to march on Egypt, and the throne passed to his son Xerxes.

  Xerxes crushed the Egyptian revolt and restarted the preparations. This was to be a full-scale invasion, backed by long-term planning, stockpiling and conscription. He ordered a bridge across the Hellespont and a canal across the isthmus of Mount Athos, where a Persian fleet had been destroyed in 492 BC. No other state of the time could have attempted either feat. By early 480 BC the army gathered at Sardis was crossing the Hellespont on two pontoon bridges. According to Herodotus, it was so large that the soldiers drank the Echeidorus River dry.

  Athens had been preparing since the mid-480s BC. In 482 BC, under the strategic guidance of the politician Themistocles, it decided to build a massive fleet of triremes. Even so, Athens lacked the manpower to fight on land and sea at once. In 481 BC Xerxes sent ambassadors to demand earth and water, but he deliberately skipped Athens and Sparta. Support began to gather around those two cities. A congress at Corinth in late autumn of 481 BC formed an alliance of Greek city-states. That was remarkable in a Greek world where many of the new allies were still technically at war with each other.

  When the congress met again in the spring of 480 BC, a Thessalian delegation proposed a stand in the narrow Vale of Tempe. A force of 10,000 hoplites went there. Alexander I of Macedon warned them that the vale could be bypassed through Sarantoporo Pass and that Xerxes's army was overwhelming. The Greeks retreated. Soon afterwards, news arrived that Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont.

  Themistocles then proposed another plan. Any army heading for southern Greece would have to squeeze through the very narrow pass of Thermopylae, while allied ships blocked the straits of Artemisium. Congress adopted the plan. The Peloponnesian cities also drew up a fall-back defence at the Isthmus of Corinth. If the line broke, the women and children of Athens were to be evacuated to Troezen.

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• 3. Festival And Prophecy

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  A Greek spy brought word of the Persian approach in August, and the timing could hardly have been worse. The Spartans, the alliance's de facto military leaders, were celebrating the festival of Carneia. Spartan law forbade military activity during it, and the same rule had made them late for Marathon. The Olympic Games and the Olympic truce also fell at this time. Marching out with the whole army would therefore have been doubly sacrilegious. The ephors judged the danger urgent enough to send an advance expedition under King Leonidas I. He took the 300 men of the royal bodyguard, the Hippeis. They were to collect other Greek soldiers on the way and wait for the main Spartan army.

  Herodotus describes a visit to the Oracle at Delphi, which gave the Spartans a prophecy about the coming conflict. According to him, Leonidas took it to mean he was marching to certain death, because his force could not win. So he chose only Spartans who had living sons.

  By the time it reached the pass, the Spartan column had been swelled by contingents from various cities. Leonidas chose to camp at the middle gate, the narrowest stretch of Thermopylae, where the Phocians had built a defensive wall some time before. Word came from the nearby city of Trachis that a mountain track could be used to outflank the pass. Leonidas stationed 1,000 Phocians on the heights to guard against it.

  In mid-August the Persian army was sighted across the Malian Gulf. At a council of war, some Peloponnesians urged falling back to block the Isthmus of Corinth. The Phocians and Locrians lived close by and were indignant. They wanted to hold Thermopylae and send for more help. Leonidas calmed the panic and agreed to defend the pass.

  Plutarch records that a soldier complained the enemy's arrows would hide the sun. Leonidas replied, "Won't it be nice, then, if we shall have shade in which to fight them?" Herodotus reports a similar remark but credits it to Dienekes.

  According to one report, the Persians sent a mounted scout to look over the Greek camp. The Greeks let him approach, watch and leave. He reported that the Spartans were doing callisthenics and combing their long hair, which Xerxes found laughable. Xerxes asked Demaratus, an exiled Spartan king in his retinue, what it meant. Demaratus said it was the Spartan custom to adorn their hair before risking their lives. He called them "the bravest men in Greece". He added that if Xerxes ever subdued the Spartans, no other nation anywhere would dare lift a hand in their defence.

  Xerxes then sent a Persian emissary to negotiate. The Greeks were offered their freedom, the title "Friends of the Persian People" and land better than their own. Leonidas refused. The emissary came back with a written message from Xerxes: "Hand over your arms". Leonidas answered "Molṑn labé", which literally means "having come, take them" and is usually rendered "come and take them". Xerxes waited four days, hoping the Greeks would scatter, before sending troops against them.

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• 4. Counting The Armies

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  Herodotus claimed that Xerxes led 2.6 million military personnel, accompanied by an equal number of support personnel. The poet Simonides, a contemporary, spoke of four million. Ctesias gave 800,000. Modern scholars reject such figures as miscalculation or the exaggeration of victors. Their own estimates run from 120,000 to 300,000, drawn from studies of Persian logistics, supply bases and manpower limits. How many of those men reached Thermopylae is just as uncertain. Xerxes may have left garrisons behind in Macedon and Thessaly.

  Herodotus counts 3,100 Peloponnesians at the pass before the battle. Elsewhere he quotes an inscription by Simonides that says 4,000. One way to close the gap of 900 is to suppose, without proof, that helots served as armed retainers, three per Spartan. Another is that the missing men were perioeci, which would match Diodorus Siculus and his 1,000 Lacedaemonians. Diodorus is unclear whether that 1,000 includes the 300 Spartans.

  Pausanias agrees with Herodotus but adds the Locrians, whom Herodotus declined to count. They lived directly in the Persian path, and Pausanias says they sent 6,000 men. That would lift Herodotus's 5,200 to 11,200. Many modern historians instead add the 1,000 Lacedaemonians and 900 helots to the 5,200. That gives about 7,000 men as a standard figure.

  Almost everything about the battle rests on Herodotus, whose account in Book VII of his Histories is the backbone of the story. Paul Cartledge wrote: "we either write a history of Thermopylae with Herodotus, or not at all". Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st century BC, seems to follow the earlier historian Ephorus. He adds a supposed night attack on the Persian camp, which modern scholars tend to doubt. The account of Ctesias survives only in a summary by the eighth-century Byzantine Photios. One verdict calls that summary "almost worse than useless", because it omits the betrayal by Ephialtes.

  Archaeology backs some of Herodotus's specifics, such as the Serpent Column, now in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. George B. Grundy was the first modern historian to survey the topography of Thermopylae thoroughly. His work led writers such as Liddell Hart to revise their views of the battle. Grundy also explored Plataea and wrote a treatise on that battle.

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• 5. The Hot Gates

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  A popular claim says the pass was a shoreline track so narrow that only one chariot could squeeze through. Core samples indicate it was only 100 m wide, probably more than the Greeks could have held against the Persian masses. The chariot detail comes from Herodotus, and it describes something else. The Phocians had channelled water from the hot springs to create a marsh. A causeway across that marsh was one chariot wide.

  Pausanias later described a Gaulish attempt to force the pass. Cavalry proved useless on ground that was narrow, smooth with rock and slippery with streams, and many of the attackers disappeared into the mud. To the north lay the Malian Gulf, where the land shelved gently. When the Gauls led by Brennus tried to force the pass, the shallow water kept the Greek fleet too far away to bombard them.

  Three constrictions, called gates or pylai, punctuated the path. At the middle one stood the wall the Phocians had raised in the previous century against Thessalian invasions. The name Hot Gates comes from the hot springs there. The surrounding land was harsher than the Persians expected. Torrential rain falls for four months of the year, and summer heat is scorching enough to crack the ground. Vegetation is scarce and consists of low thorny shrubs. Thick brush covers the hillsides, with some plants reaching 10 ft high.

  Leonidas had sound reasons to fight here. As long as the Greeks blocked any further advance, they had no need to seek a decisive battle. Supplying so large an army meant the Persians could not stay put for long, so they had to retreat or force the pass. A hoplite phalanx could seal the narrow ground with no risk of cavalry outflanking it. Lightly armed Persian infantry would struggle to break it. The weak point was the mountain track. Cavalry probably could not use it, but infantry, many of them versed in mountain warfare, could.

  Today the pass sits several kilometres from the sea, because sediment has filled the Malian Gulf. The old track appears at the foot of the hills, beside a modern road. As one account puts it, "Little do the visitors realize that the battle took place across the road from the monument." The ground still works as a natural defensive position. In 1941 forces of the British Empire made a stand there against the German invasion, mere metres from the original battlefield.

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• 6. The Traitor's Path

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  On the fifth day after the Persians arrived, Xerxes finally ordered the attack. First came 5,000 archers. Modern scholars say they shot from at least 100 yards away. The Greeks' wooden shields, sometimes thinly covered in bronze, and their bronze helmets turned the arrows aside.

  Next Xerxes sent 10,000 Medes and Cissians with orders to take the defenders prisoner and bring them to him. The Persians attacked head-on in waves of around 10,000 men. The Greeks fought in front of the Phocian wall, at the narrowest point, so they needed as few men as possible. Diodorus says the men stood shoulder to shoulder and were superior in valour and in the great size of their shields. That probably describes a standard phalanx, a wall of overlapping shields bristling with spear points. The Persians had weaker shields and shorter spears and swords, so they could not engage the hoplites effectively.

  Herodotus says each city's contingent stayed together and units rotated in and out to avoid fatigue. That implies the Greeks had more men than they needed to block the road. The Greeks killed so many Medes that Xerxes is said to have leapt from his viewing seat three times. According to Ctesias, the first wave was "cut to ribbons", while only two or three Spartans died.

  Herodotus and Diodorus both report that Xerxes then threw in his best troops, the Immortals, an elite corps of 10,000. They fared no better. The Spartans reportedly used a trick. They feigned retreat, then turned and killed the enemy troops who ran after them.

  On the second day Xerxes sent in the infantry again. He assumed his enemies, being so few, were "disabled by wounds" and could no longer resist. The result was the same. At last he called off the assault and withdrew to camp, "totally perplexed".

  Later that day, while Xerxes was still pondering, a Trachinian named Ephialtes offered him a windfall. He knew of a mountain path around Thermopylae and would guide the Persian army along it. His motive was the hope of a reward. The name Ephialtes came to mean "nightmare" in Greek and became shorthand for the archetypal traitor.

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• 7. The Last Morning

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  At daybreak on the third day, the Phocians guarding the path heard the rustle of oak leaves and realised a column was approaching. Herodotus says they leapt up, greatly amazed. Hydarnes was perhaps just as startled to see them scrambling for their weapons. He feared they were Spartans until Ephialtes assured him they were not. The Phocians retreated to a nearby hill to make a stand, assuming they were the target. The Persians, unwilling to be delayed, shot a volley at them and marched on.

  A runner told Leonidas that the Phocians had failed to hold the path, and at dawn he called a council of war. Diodorus adds that a Persian named Tyrrhastiadas, a Cymaean by birth, also warned the Greeks. Some argued for withdrawal. Leonidas resolved to stay at the pass with the Spartans, and he told his allies they were free to leave. Many took the offer, but around 2,000 soldiers stayed to fight and die. Herodotus admits doubt over whether some contingents left without orders or because Leonidas sent them away. The 700 Thespians, led by their general Demophilus, refused to go. The 400 Thebans were there too, and probably the helots who had come with the Spartans.

  Historians have long debated why Leonidas stayed. It is commonly said that Spartan law forbade retreat, and the episode may be why people believed Spartans never retreated. Some suggest that, remembering the Oracle's words, he committed himself to dying so that Sparta would be saved. A commonly accepted theory is that he formed a rearguard so the others could escape. If everyone had retreated across the open ground beyond the pass, Persian cavalry would have run them down. If everyone had stayed, they would have been encircled and killed. By covering the retreat, Leonidas could save more than 3,000 men to fight another day.

  Herodotus suggests the 400 Thebans were brought along as hostages to guarantee the good behavior of Thebes. Plutarch objected that hostages would have been sent away with the rest. More likely they were Theban loyalists who opposed Persian rule. They came of their own free will and could not go home if the Persians conquered Boeotia. The Thespians faced the destruction of their city, but the rest of Thespiae was successfully evacuated. So that cannot be the whole reason. Their contingent was every hoplite the city could muster. It seems they volunteered as a simple act of self-sacrifice. On at least two later occasions, a Thespian force committed itself to a fight to the death.

  Xerxes made libations at dawn and paused to give the Immortals time to descend the mountain. Then he advanced. A Persian force of 10,000 light infantry and cavalry charged the Greek front. This time the Greeks sallied out from the wall into the wider part of the pass, hoping to kill as many Persians as possible. They fought with spears until every spear shattered, then drew their short swords, called xiphe. Herodotus states that two of Xerxes's brothers, Abrocomes and Hyperanthes, fell in the struggle. Leonidas was shot down by Persian archers. The two sides fought over his body, and the Greeks took possession of it.

  As the Immortals approached, the Greeks withdrew to a hill behind the wall. The Thebans moved away from their companions and advanced toward the Persians with hands upraised. A few were killed before their surrender was accepted. Xerxes later had the Theban prisoners branded with the royal mark. Herodotus says the rest defended themselves to the last, using swords while they had them and hands and teeth when they did not. Xerxes had part of the wall torn down and the hill surrounded. The Persians rained arrows on the defenders until every last Greek was dead.

  In 1939 the archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos found large numbers of Persian bronze arrowheads on Kolonos Hill. That changed which hill was thought to be the site of the last stand, moving it from a smaller one nearer the wall. According to Herodotus, forcing the pass cost the Persians up to 20,000 dead. The Greek rearguard was annihilated, with a probable loss of 2,000 men, counting those killed on the first two days. Herodotus once puts the Greek dead at 4,000, but that figure is probably too high. With the pass now open, the naval blockade at Artemisium no longer served any purpose.

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• 8. Defeat And Legacy

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  The naval Battle of Artemisium, fought alongside Thermopylae, had ended in a tactical stalemate. The Greek fleet retreated in good order to the Saronic Gulf and helped ferry the remaining Athenians to the island of Salamis. Themistocles was in command of it when word of the lost pass arrived. The Persians overran Boeotia, burned Plataea and Thespiae, and captured the evacuated city of Athens. Themistocles then persuaded the Greeks to seek a decisive victory instead of a mere blockade. They lured the Persian navy into the Straits of Salamis and destroyed much of it in late 480 BC.

  Xerxes feared the Greeks might attack the bridges over the Hellespont and trap his army in Europe. He withdrew to Asia with much of his army, and nearly all of those men died of starvation and disease on the way. He left a hand-picked force under Mardonius to finish the conquest. The following year a Greek army won a decisive victory over Mardonius at Plataea. At the near-simultaneous naval Battle of Mycale, the Greeks destroyed much of the remaining Persian fleet.

  Modern historians call Thermopylae a Persian victory in strategic terms. George Cawkwell wrote: "he was successful on both land and sea, and the Great Invasion began with a brilliant success." Lazenby describes the Greek defeat as "disastrous". Two popular rescue stories do not survive scrutiny. The Pyrrhic victory idea ignores that the Persians went on to conquer most of Greece and were still fighting there a year later. The delaying-action idea fails because only about a month separated Thermopylae from Salamis, a negligible gain. Cawkwell suggests that gap came from Xerxes systematically reducing Greek opposition in Phocis and Boeotia.

  The fame of Thermopylae comes from the example it set, not from its effect on the war. The doomed rearguard stayed at the pass despite facing certain death. Contemporary Greeks also read a lesson into it. A small, free people had outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. Commentators have often used the battle to illustrate that contrast, though it is a sweeping overgeneralisation with many counter-examples. Leonidas's bones were returned to Sparta 40 years after the battle. He was buried again with full honours, and funeral games were held every year in his memory.

  Herodotus also supplies a story about Arcadian deserters, whom Xerxes had interrogated after the battle. They told him the other Greeks were taking part in the Olympic Games, where the prize was an olive-wreath. The Persian general Tigranes turned to Mardonius in dismay. In the Godley translation, he says: "It is not for riches that they contend but for honour!"

  The epitaph usually attributed to Simonides was engraved on a stone on the burial mound of the Spartans, the hill where the last of them died. That stone did not survive, and a new one carrying the epitaph was set up in 1955. The poem is an elegiac couplet and a model of Laconian brevity, which leaves room for varied readings. Cicero recorded a Latin variation in his Tusculan Disputations. The German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll took its first line as the title of a short story. A variant is inscribed at the Polish Cemetery at Monte Cassino. Frank Miller's 1998 rendering reads: "Go tell the Spartans, passerby: That here, by Spartan law, we lie."

  At the battlefield stands the Leonidas Monument by Vassos Falireas, a bronze statue of the Spartan king. A sign beneath it reads simply "Μολὼν λαβέ", the reply he gave to Xerxes. Two marble statues beside it represent the river Eurotas and Mount Taygetos, famous landmarks of Sparta. In 1997 the Greek government unveiled a second monument to the 700 Thespians. It is topped by a bronze Eros, the god the Thespians held in particular veneration. Its headless figure stands for anonymous sacrifice, and its broken wing for voluntary sacrifice and death.

  The earliest known appearance of the battle in culture is a series of epigrams by Simonides of Ceos. Interest in Europe revived in the 1700s, with Richard Glover's poem Leonidas in 1737 and Willem van Haren's Leonidas in 1742. Steven Pressfield's 1998 novel Gates of Fire is unusual in showing the battle as gruesome rather than glorious. Zack Snyder's 2006 film 300, based on a comic book series by Frank Miller, grossed US$456 million globally. Greece also announced two commemorative coins marking 2,500 years since the battle.

  In 330 BC, Alexander the Great met a mirror image of Thermopylae at the Battle of the Persian Gate. Ancient and modern authors call it the Persian Thermopylae. A Persian force under Ariobarzanes held a narrow pass near Persepolis for a month, until the enemy found a path to their rear. Some accounts say a local shepherd showed Alexander's forces the secret route, just as a local Greek had shown the Persians theirs at Thermopylae.

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