In June or July, the Greeks sent an army of ten thousand men to hold the mountain pass known as the Vale of Tempe, which runs between Macedonia and Thessaly. But their leaders discovered two other passes nearby. Since it would be impossible to close all three passes to Persia, they withdrew southward. Tempe had been a failure of intelligence, a sign of how little the Greeks knew about their own country and how much darkness ancient strategists often worked in.
But Thermopylae was a better choice. Leonidas reasoned that in its confines a small number of men could hold off the Persians.
Besides, Thermopylae was close enough to the harbor at Artemisium to allow a coordinated land-sea strategy. The Greek fleet at Artemisium would keep Persian reinforcements from arriving by sea and cutting off the Greek army holding the pass at Thermopylae. Although they had not planned matters quite so precisely, the land and sea battles there turned out to be fought on precisely the same three days in late August b.
But having established that, modern historians run up against a series of mysteries. Numbers, first. The Greeks sent only a small force to Thermopylae, fewer in fact than at Tempe a month or two before. A closer look only compounds the puzzle. The approximately seventy-one hundred Greeks at Thermopylae were made up of about four thousand Peloponnesians from nearly a dozen different states as well as about thirty-one hundred soldiers from central Greece.
Some of the more noteworthy contributions, besides the three hundred Spartans, were four hundred men each from the great states of Thebes and Corinth. Yet they were each easily outstripped by the seven hundred men from the tiny city-state of Thespiae.
Sparta promised to send more men soon, yet, even so, the discrepancy in numbers is striking. Corinth and Sparta both lie in the Peloponnese, a peninsula located several hundred miles south of Thermopylae, and which is protected by the natural barrier of the narrow and mountainous Isthmus of Corinth. No Peloponnesian state wanted to risk sending a large force off to central Greece without first dispatching a smaller force to test the waters. They were particularly concerned about Thebes, the largest and strongest central Greek state, and an uncertain ally, since strong rumors circulated of its impending defection to Persia.
Thespiae, a neighbor and rival of Thebes, was determined to stop Persia. Hence, Thespiae made an all-out effort at Thermopylae. The dual monarchy was an unusual but established part of Spartan government. There were good reasons, both positive and negative. On the plus side, Thermopylae was too strong a position to give up and a successful forward defense might have kept war away from the Peloponnesian homeland.
The dispatch of a king symbolized Spartan resolve, even if he had only few men with him. By his presence, Leonidas might stiffen the spines of wavering Greek states. Besides, the three hundred Spartans were all full citizens, that is, elite soldiers, and therefore a scarce resource. And they could leverage success simply by bloodying Persia and slowing it down.
On the minus side, Sparta and other Greek cities faced a big religious prohibition. The cities therefore imposed strict limits on the dispatch of men to war. And that, said the Greeks, is why they could send only an advance force to Thermopylae.
They promised that the main army would follow, after the festivals. It is tempting to consider this a mere excuse, but it might just be true. The fact is that war tends to make people more, not less, religious. But what of the idea, first attested in ancient times, that Thermopylae was planned as a suicide mission?
This is probably a legend. Suicide missions were downright un-Spartan. Pragmatism and realism were the national character traits; every Spartan soldier was an elite warrior; no Spartan would voluntarily sacrifice three hundred such soldiers.
A different picture emerges from the historian Herodotus, our best source on Thermopylae, who wrote approximately two generations after the battle.
In Sparta, men generally married around the age of thirty, so soldiers with sons were probably in their thirties or forties. Because the Olympic Games, and perhaps the Carnea too, especially involved youth, men with sons might possibly have been exempted from attending religious observances — which makes them the logical option for the mission.
But the choice of men with sons for the Thermopylae operation might also reflect military psychology, a matter on which the Spartans set great store. Leonidas in particular made a point of using a shrewd eye to select soldiers. His selection of an all-fathers unit of Spartans might similarly have served a psychological purpose, in this case, unit motivation. The Greeks believed that men with sons were especially mature and reliable, hence they would make highly motivated soldiers.
There is no reason to think, as some scholars do, that Leonidas chose an all-fathers unit because he wanted to make sure that each soldier had an heir at home — or that he did so knowing that Thermopylae would be a suicide mission. In fact, Leonidas wanted to avoid unnecessary risk. Herodotus reported that when the Greeks reached Thermopylae and realized the huge size of the enemy army, they had second thoughts about the operation. Indeed it was only the anger of the Phocians and Locrians that kept Leonidas from supporting a proposed withdrawal to the Isthmus of Corinth.
He agreed to stay at Thermopylae, but he sent messengers southward to hurry the reinforcements. And so a Greek army sat at Thermopylae and a Greek navy sat at Artemisium, and they each waited for the barbarians.
But the barbarians — as the Greeks sometimes called the Persians — were waiting in turn. For four days, Xerxes made no move against the enemy. No doubt he was hoping that the Greeks would retreat in fear. He had also discovered reasons to think twice before sending his men in to fight Spartans. A few months earlier, Demaratus, the exiled king of Sparta, had warned Xerxes about his former countrymen.
They must have made an odd pair, the king of kings in his purple robes and gold jewelry and the austere Spartan, raised in a country whose citizens slept on straw pallets and allowed their sons only one cloak a year. Although these many city-states vied with one another for control of land and resources, they also banded together to defend themselves from foreign invasion. Twice at the beginning of the fifth century B. In B. Under Xerxes I, the Persian army moved south through Greece on the eastern coast, accompanied by the Persian navy moving parallel to the shore.
In the late summer of B. Leonidas established his army at Thermopylae, expecting that the narrow pass would funnel the Persian army toward his own force. For two days, the Greeks withstood the determined attacks of their far more numerous enemy. A local Greek told Xerxes about this other route and led the Persian army across it, enabling them to surround the Greeks. Much of the Greek force retreated rather than face the Persian army. An army of Spartans, Thespians and Thebans remained to fight the Persians.
Leonidas and the Spartans with him were all killed, along with most of their remaining allies. In September B. Leonidas achieved lasting fame for his personal sacrifice. Hero cults were an established custom in ancient Greece from the eighth century B.
Dead heroes were worshipped, usually near their burial site, as intermediaries to the gods. On the sixth night, the second of the battle , the Immortals followed this path, brushed aside the small guard and prepared to catch the Greeks in a pincer. King Leonidas , undisputed head of the Greek defenders, was made aware of this pincer by a runner. Unwilling to sacrifice the entire army, but determined to keep the Spartan promise to defend Thermopylae, or perhaps just act as a rearguard, he ordered everyone but his Spartans and their Helots to retreat.
Many did, but the Thebans and Thespians stayed the former possibly because Leonidas insisted they stay as hostages. When battle commenced the next day, there were Greeks left, including Spartans two having been sent on missions. Caught between the main Persian army and 10, men to their rear, all were involved in fighting and wiped out. Only Thebans who surrendered remained.
It is entirely possible the above account contains other myths. Historians have suggested the full force of Greeks may have been as high as 8, to begin with or that the 1, only stayed put on the third day after being trapped by the Immortals. The truth of the defense of Thermopylae is no less fascinating than the myth and should undercut the transformation of the Spartans into idealized supermen.
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Select basic ads. Moreover, the Greek hoplite was better equipped, with his long thrusting spear, heavy hoplite shield, and body armour; the Persian had a shorter javelin-type spear, a wicker shield which did indeed provide superior mobility in the open field but was much less useful than bronze at close quarters, and thick-woven linen corselets.
For two days the Spartans held off lesser elements of the imperial army: Medes and Cissians were succeeded by the crack troops, the Immortals, to little avail. Then the tide turned when a local man, a Malian named Ephialtes, offered to show the Persians a way around the back of the defending force, a way to get past the "Middle Gate" and turn the Greek position.
Xerxes agreed, sending what was left of his 10, "Immortals" off at dusk. The precise route taken by the Persian troops that night is disputed. The standard view used to be that the path corresponded to the gorge of the Asopos river so e.
Leake, Grundy, Hignett , but this has two problems. First, the Asopos river gorge is too rocky to be negotiated at night without numerous broken ankles; second, Herodotus says that the path began from the Asopos river "which flows through the gorge" and not, as the standard view insists, "where it flows through the gorge" 7.
Two other main candidates have been put forward: the Vardates route favored by Myres, Burn, and Wallace ; and the Chalkomata spring route, favored by Pritchett. Whichever of these two it was may never be known for certain, but both would bring the Persians to the peak of Sastano Kallidromos near ancient Drakospilia by dawn. From there the paths converge. Now, according to Herodotus Leonidas had been aware from the beginning of the existence of the Anopaia path.
He stationed Phokians there to stop any encircling movement. The Phokians, according to Herodotus, were taken by surprise and put up little resistance. But word got through to Leonidas that the position had been outflanked, and there seems to have been time to abandon the position and withdraw to the south before the Immortals under Hydarnes arrived. Why did Leonidas refuse? There have been various answers to this question. Herodotus represents it as an act of deliberate self-sacrifice carried out in accordance with an oracle, which had said that the death of a Spartan king would save Sparta from destruction.
One may observe that the pronouncements of the oracle in the late 's have a distinctly pro-Persian cast; it seems likely that the priests, whose job after all was to predict the future, simply believed that the victory of the Persian army, whose immense size was known well in advance of its arrival, was inevitable.
It may be that this oracle, if genuine, actually meant that the recommended course of action was for the Spartans to depose one of the sitting kings and take back Demaratus as the vassal of the Persians. Alternatively it is possible that the oracle is a post-eventum falsehood, put out by the oracle and its partisans to make it appear that Apollo had successfully predicted the outcome.
There is also available the so-called "military" solution to the question, as formulated by Dascalakis. He argues that Leonidas remained in order to give the allied contingents, whom he dismissed with the exception of the Thebans and the Thespians , time to get away.
There is an interesting sidelight here which sheds light on the interstate politics of the Persian Wars.
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