The Battle of Thermopylae

The story

Ten years later

In 490 BC the Athenians had driven back the Persians at Marathon, but the war was not over. The Persian king Darius died and his son, Xerxes I, decided to complete the task: not only to punish Athens, but to conquer Greece. This was the second Persian invasion. For years the empire prepared an enormous army and fleet, and in 480 BC it set them in motion. The Greek cities faced a hard choice: surrender or unite. A group of poleis chose to resist together, and command was given to Sparta, the city with the strongest land army.

A narrow pass between mountain and sea

The Greeks decided to stop the Persians at the point where the road from the north into central Greece became narrowest. It was called Thermopylae, between Thessaly and central Greece, between Mount Oeta and the Malian Gulf. There the passage was a strip of land between the mountain and the sea, so narrow that a very large army could not deploy in full. At the same time the Greek fleet was blocking the Persian fleet at Cape Artemisium, not far away, to stop it from outflanking the position by sea.

At Thermopylae the king of Sparta, Leonidas I, was in command. How many men did he have? Herodotus speaks of about 5,200 allies, other ancient authors of more; modern historians think of about 7,000 men in all. Among them were three hundred chosen Spartiates, that is, Leonidas' own soldiers. According to the sources, the Persians were far more numerous. Herodotus gives a fantastic number, over two million soldiers; modern historians estimate between 120,000 and 300,000 men (some even fewer), which is still a great many.

Three days of battle

The battle lasted three days, in mid-August or early September of 480 BC (there are two possible dates, 19–21 August or 8–10 September). On the first two days the Greeks drove back the Persian attacks, including those of the famous “Immortals”, Xerxes' elite troops. In the narrow pass numbers did not count: the Greek soldiers, protected by their shields and long spears, held their position.

But there was a mountain path that went round the pass, called the Anopaea. According to Herodotus a local man named Ephialtes revealed it to the Persians hoping for a reward. His name has become in Greece a synonym for “traitor”. That path was guarded by a thousand soldiers from Phocis, but the Persians took them by surprise and arrived behind the Greeks.

The last day

When Leonidas learned that they were about to be outflanked, he sent most of the army away. He stayed to fight with his three hundred Spartiates, about seven hundred soldiers from the city of Thespiae and a group of Thebans, whose behaviour is unclear. On the third day the Greek rearguard was wiped out. According to Herodotus, very many Persians died in the battle, about twenty thousand, but this number is uncertain too. The victory went to Xerxes, although some historians call it a “costly” victory.

An inscription was later carved at the site, a short epigram composed by the poet Simonides. It asked the traveller to tell the Spartans that their men had fallen obeying the laws of the city. According to one tradition, when the Persian envoy asked Leonidas to hand over his weapons, he answered with the phrase “Molon labe”, “come and take them”. We do not know whether he really said it.

After Thermopylae

The time gained helped the Greeks. After Cape Artemisium the fleet withdrew to the waters of Salamis, in front of Athens, where, towards the end of 480 BC, it defeated the Persian fleet. Xerxes went back to Asia, leaving the general Mardonius in Greece. The following year, 479 BC, the Greeks won the decisive battle at Plataea and Mardonius died. The second invasion was over.

A great memory remained of Thermopylae. A stone lion was set up in honour of Leonidas; forty years later his bones were brought back to Sparta. In 1950 a monument with a bronze statue was put up, and in 1997 another dedicated to the Thespians, who are often forgotten but numbered seven hundred.