The Delphic Oracle had said that a Spartan King must fall in battle or Sparta would burn.
So when a Persian envoy came with the message, 'hand over your weapons', Leonidas had one response:
"Come and take them."
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The Persians advanced, 200 thousand strong.
Leonidas only had an advance force,
7000 Hellenic allies. Men from Thebes, Thespia, and 10 other cities led by a corps of nearly 300 Spartan Hoplites.
The main army would follow once the sacred festivals ended if the advanced force was still alive
That is though outnumbered the Greeks had chosen good ground the narrow pass meant that the Hellenic allies could fight in shifts
Resting their reserves while others stood on the front line shields locked into a wall bristling with spears
Perfect terrain for the phalanx
First, Persian archers probed the line, arrows glancing off helmets, and sticking in shields
But these Persian bows did little against heavy armored hoplites
Xerxes, watching from his seat on a nearby hill, pulled them back and sent in his Medes
2,000 light spearmen - veteran campaigners.
As they approached, they pulled their head wraps up over their mouths
It was August, and the approaching column raised a dust storm from the baking ground
The sides met in a moment of fury, spearhead striking and mauling
The lines separated then met again
Combat was too exhausting to sustain for more than a minute at a time
So, they fought in bursts
clash
retreat
clash
retreat
The Medes fell, their wickerwork shields
No match for the long Hoplite Spears
This Persian army,
which had subjugated and liberated its way through the Middle East,
was used to operating on plains and deserts
They practiced a light mobile form of warfare
That was no help in dislodging a heavily armored phalanx
The pass was just too narrow, the seashore too boggy for their cavalry
Persian bodies piled against the wall.
Flies, omnipresent in the Greeks summer, began to collect in a humming swarm
But their numbers began to tell
The Greek line retreated and the Medes,
roaring with triumph, followed breaking formation and raising their Spears to the Hoplites' unprotected backs
And that is when the Greeks wheeled - a feint.
The wall of shields hit the ragged Persian formation and tore into them
From his seat on the hill, Xerxes lept to his feet, horrified.
After several more hours,
he withdrew his Medes, frustrated and appalled
He sent in another column, the elite Royal Guard that the Greeks called The Immortals
Immortal in name, perhaps but not in body, that much was clear by dusk.
Though The Immortals did manage to pressure the hoplite line even harder than the Medes,
The Greeks still held their ground
Leonidas had reason to be pleased that night.
The line was holding
They were in a good position where they couldn't be outflanked
Except, in one spot.
On their arrival, locals had told them of a narrow mountain trail that circumvented the pass
To take it, the Persians would have to climb a thousand metres and travel single-file, but it was possible
Leonidas had dispatched a thousand phocaeans to hold this flank,
but had failed to send a Spartan officer with him. He needed every man on the frontline
Meanwhile, Xerxes tallied his losses
The first day had been expensive
There were more battles to fight after this, and he couldn't drain his elite units just to break these Greeks
He sent messengers to gather the bravest men of each nation in his army and amalgamate them into a single unit
That way, the unit would be an elite one, but the impact would be distributed if it were wiped out
But this was not a question of bravery
The Greeks were just too heavily armored, and in too good of a position
By dusk the next day, the best of the Persian Empire
were lying dead, with the tactical balance unchanged
And that is when a traitor arrived in the Persian camp,
speaking of another way
Night comes
The phocaeans holding the mountain pass have been sitting guard duty for two days
Without a Spartan officer to keep them in formation,
They've broken up into an ad-hoc camp, and they've posted no centuries
Their only warning is the crunch of dead leaves, and then the mortals are on them
Persians have marched by night,
noiselessly scaling the mountain, soft-footed and quick
This is their version of war
The phocaeans run.
By dawn, Immortals are exiting the pass and forming up behind the Greeks.
"So that's it then, " thinks, Leonidas
He asks his diviner to sacrifice a ram
The beasts entrails are filthy black - an omen of certain death
Leonidas makes his decision: the rest of his army will withdraw to join the Allies
The Spartans, and their enslaved helot attendants, will fight a rearguard action to let them escape
But they wouldn't fight alone
Overcome by emotion,
700 thespians decide to stay, as do 400 loyalists from Thebes
It is perhaps the bravest decision of the whole day
Unlike Spartans, trained from birth to expect death in battle, these men are
civilians giving up lives and family
The Greeks form up, vault the wall to engage the Persians directly, and advance
With survival impossible, the Greeks lose all fear
They stab until their spears break then draw their short swords
Shields splinter, men scream
Leonidas falls early, his body sprawling amidst the Persians
The Greeks line surges forward with new savagery,
recapturing his body before it's mutilated
And when their swords are blunted or lost, these Greeks -
Spartans, Thebans, Helots, Thespians fight with bare hands and teeth
But Xerxes has a long war to fight, and there is no sense throwing good men away just so these Greeks can have a noble death
He pulls his infantry back, and calls up his archers
The victory costs Xerxes dearly
He had lost thousands of soldiers and two half brothers, but he was through
He swept into Greece, sacking the cities that had refused to submit
He entered Athens and fulfilled his father's promise to burn the Acropolis - a punishment for the Ionian revolt
But he found the city empty
The Athenian Navy had forced a stalemate at Artemisium as Thermopylae raged and then
withdrawn and evacuated the city under Themistocles' orders
And a month later, that same Athenian fleet
baited the Persian Navy into a battle at Salamis and delivered a decisive blow
Fearing that the Athenians would target his bridge across the Hellespont and strand him in Europe,
Xerxes handed commands to a subordinate and went home
He was not present a year later,
when a Spartan led coalition force defeated the Persian army at Plataea, ending the war
Two great victories
Which demands we ask,
Why do we remember Thermopylae?
Though the Hellenic Allies fought bravely,
they failed to stop Xerxes or even hold him long enough to make a strategic difference.
He still burned Athens
Why does everyone know the Greek defeat at Thermopylae but , victories like Salamis and Plataea remain obscure?
It's because Thermopylae helped to define Greek and thus "Western culture," and that is thanks to one man,
Herodotus
Decades after the Greco-Persian war, Herodotus wrote a pioneering book about it
A book that would be one of the first to treat writing history as an investigation rather than myth making
And his rousing account of Thermopylae is the story we all know today
But it's important to remember that Herodotus had an ulterior motive
In his histories, he was arguing for a pan - Greek identity
an idea that all of these competing city-states shared a culture, religion, language,
and values that existed above their petty squabbles, and as part of this, he constantly
contrasted the Greek West, which he portrayed as noble and free, humble, and equitable,
with the Persian East, which he considered
emotional, despotic, decadent, and obsessed with subservience and slavery
As we saw last episode,
that doesn't really reflect the reality of ancient Greece and Persia because, well, nothing's ever as simple as that
But it did prove an attractive story, and that problematic frame the idea of a global East and West with opposing,
incompatible values, persisted in Europe and the areas it settled, and throughout history,
the story of Thermopylae would be told and retold as a story of clashing civilizations
In the 1960's, that story became about the Cold War,
while the graphic novel 300 reframed it as a story about terrorism
Early Americans fetishized Sparta so much that Alexander Hamilton made fun of it
During World War two,
Spartan culture found admirers in both axis and allied nations
Some of our etellings even suggests that the Spartans fought to preserve democracy,
thereby saving the modern world from being snuffed out
which is almost comical, since within a generation of Thermopylae,
Sparta actually partnered with Persia to crush Athens and it's democracy
The truth is always more complex
This contact between Asia and Europe didn't save what we sometimes refer to as Western civilization,
But the melding of its cultures and preservation and history books did help to create it
The open society of Athens survived long enough for later governments to imitate it
Sparta gave many European nations their concepts of service to the state, military
professionalism and mandatory public education
And when Alexander the Great eventually conquered Persia,
he was so enamored with its administration and policies, that he copied them, spreading Cyrus
the Great's ideas of professional bureaucracy and multicultural tolerant society
No matter where you are, you live in the aftermath of Thermopylae
But it's important to remember: neither of those two sides, Greece or Persia, represent any one of us
We are all the inheritors of both
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