The Battle of Thermopylae: Professor Paul Cartledge (480 BCE)
The 'Graeco-Persian Wars' (490 BCE, 480-479 BCE) were a major crunch-point in the history of western civilisation and culture.
The mighty Persian empire - based in Iran, founded by Cyrus II in the mid-6th century BCE - expanded rapidly to encompass all Middle Eastern Asia, from Kashmir and Afghanistan in the east to the Aegean shore of today's Turkey in the west, and extended into Europe beyond the Hellespont/Dardanelles in northern Greece, and into north Africa by way of Egypt and eastern Libya.
In about 500 BCE, Persia's Greek subjects along the Aegean shoreline together with Greeks and non-Greeks on Cyprus rose up in armed rebellion for half a dozen years, aided by two non-subject Greek cities: Eretria on the island of Euboea and Athens.
The revolt was crushed, but Eretria and Athens had to be punished. In 490 a Persian naval expedition put paid to Eretria, but Athens - unexpectedly - won the battle of Marathon. Even more reason, then, for Athens to be properly punished later - hence the massive amphibious expedition launched in spring 480 by Persian King-Emperor Xerxes - only this time it wasn't only the punishment of Athens but the conquest of all mainland Greece that he had in mind.
This meant that all the many Greek cities of the mainland had to make a choice: cave in without a fight, try to stay neutral, or ... resist. The latter was the choice of some 30-plus cities, led by Sparta and King Leonidas.
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Show notes
Scene One: Sparta - King Leonidas chooses 'the 300' for Thermopylae
Scene Two: Thermopylae - a 1-kilometre long E-W pass in northern Greece, where Thessaly (a region whose rulers were already on the Persian side) gives way to (resisting, loyalist) Phocis.
Scene Three: The morning of the final day of the Battle
Memento: A bronze Persian arrowhead
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About Professor Paul Cartledge
Professor Paul Cartledge is the A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and the emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture (2008-2014) in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.
He is an Honorary Citizen of (modern) Sparta, and holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour awarded by the President of the Hellenic Republic. He is President of the UK Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (SPHS). He is a a member of the Honorary Committee ‘Thermopylae-Salamis 2020’. He spoke@GreeceInUK about this initiative, and the relevance of the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis nowadays.
Images
Leonidas at Thermopylae, Jacques-Louis David (1814)
More about the scenes
Scene One: An alliance is sworn, in the name of the gods, and the alliance decided that its first point of resistance should be the chokepoint of the pass of Thermopylae (below).
Sparta's initial military contribution was a crack force of 300 heavy-armed infantrymen, specially chosen by Leonidas himself - our historian, Herodotus, tells us - on two grounds: that they would be magnificent fighters, of course, but also that they already were married and had sired a son. To some of us, that latter condition implies that Leonidas - who himself had a son and heir - was not expecting many, if any, of his 300 to return home to Sparta.
Scene Two: Thermopylae - The topography has radically changed for geomorphological reasons since August 480BCE: the pass then ran very close to the sea, whereas it's now more than two miles away.
But it's still as narrow as it then was, and a visit to the modern memorial monuments still gives a good flavour of the narrowness of space in which the rival armies - Xerxes with his maybe over 100,000 land troops, Leonidas with his 6-7,000 - had to operate, a distinct advantage to the defenders.
Leonidas occupied the pass first, reinforced its central section known as the Middle Gate (Thermopylae means 'Hot Gates', so called because of its natural sulphur springs) and posted a picket of several hundred local Phocians to guard what he knew was a back path in the mountains behind and to the south.
As they waited, one of the Spartan select 300, Dienekes, was told that the Persians had so many archers that their arrows would blot out the sun - to which he responded, laconically, with a classic Spartan apophthegm, 'great, we'll fight 'em in the shade...'. At least, that was the story as told to and preserved by Herodotus. Many of us suspect it was ben trovato. But still it captures the essential point: the Spartan spirit of never-surrender and do-and-die.
Scene Three: For three days Xerxes waited at the western end of the pass, expecting Leonidas to surrender. Instead, when he received Xerxes's peremptory demand to down and surrender arms, Leonidas replied - or so mythology has it - with a two-word note of his own: molon labe - 'come and get 'em yourself!'
Fighting lasted three days. The first two days went, if anything, in the defenders' favour. Certainly, Xerxes lost a lot of men, perhaps as many as 20,000 in all. But on the night of the second day, the Phocian picket proved monumentally incompetent. A local Greek called Ephialtes - from nearby Malis - had turned traitor and informed Xerxes of the existence of the back mountain path by means of which the Thermopylae pass could be turned and Leonidas's remaining force of Spartans and others could be pincered and kettled.
An elite Persian taskforce had simply walked past the Greek picket during a moonlit night. Leonidas and co. were cornered, but Leonidas was prepared for this. Gee-ing up his remaining troops for what would be their last, do-and-die day, he told them: 'Eat a hearty breakfast, comrades - for tonight we'll be dining in Hades' (the underworld, where actually there wasn't a great deal of food and drink on offer for the shades of the dead).
All or almost all fought magnificently to the end, to their deaths, which came - via a storm of Persian arrows - on a small mound that can still be seen today and is adorned with a contemporary poetic inscription 'Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by/That here obedient to their laws we lie'. There too lies the basis of the Spartan legend.
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