Battle of Thermopylae: Leonidas the Hero

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Stripped of its helmet, Leonidas’ head is framed by his long hair. The lean skin of the warrior’s face, its color gone, stands out all the more against a short and pointed beard. The dirt of battle is probably still upon Leonidas, and there is a dark purple bruise on his chin from the pooling of what little blood is left. Ragged bits of tissue and bone hang from his severed neck, and flies and beetles have landed on his skin. If the dead Spartan king’s eyes could see, they might look 140 miles to the south — all the way to Athens, the road to which now lies open for Persia.

The time is August 480 b.c.; the place, Thermopylae, Greece; the occasion, the aftermath of a great battle. A vast army of Persians was on the march to conquer Greece. A small force of Greeks had been all that stood in their way. And yet, in a pass that narrows to a space smaller than a baseball diamond, the impossible almost happened. For three days, just over seventy-one hundred Greeks, spearheaded by an elite unit of three hundred Spartans, gave a savage beating to a Persian army that outnumbered them by perhaps 20-to-1. About 150,000 men willing to die for the glory of Xerxes, the Persian Great King, came up against the most efficient killing machine in history.

Leonidas son of Anaxandrides, commander in chief of the Greek resistance to Persia at Thermopylae, died in a heroic last stand. After the battle, as Xerxes son of Darius toured the battlefield, he came upon Leonidas’ body and ordered the beheading of the corpse and the impalement of the severed head on a pole. One of those who no doubt saw Leonidas’ severed head was the former king of Sparta, Demaratus son of Ariston, a refugee who was now allied with the Persians.

In the slaughtering pen at Thermopylae — as the narrow killing fields might be called — a king died and a legend was born. Led by Leonidas, the three hundred Spartans stood and fell and took the pride of the Persian Empire down with them. Sparta the steadfast and self-sacrificing, Greece unflagging in its fight for freedom, Xerxes the flummoxed, Demaratus the traitorous: These are the images left in the summer heat. Thermopylae is the prototype of many a last stand, from Roncesvalles to the Alamo to Isandlhwana to Bastogne.

The gantlet at Thermopylae had punished the Persians. Xerxes had learned how high the price of victory would be, if he could pay it at all. How hard to think that so few men could devastate so many. Yet Thermopylae is no ordinary place — or rather, was no ordinary place. The silting-up of the land over the millennia leaves the ancient scenery hard to recognize today. Yet what a landscape it was.

It was a gateway region, a pass — actually, three passes — containing the main road between northern and central Greece. Its name, ‘Thermopylae,’ means ‘hot gates’: ‘hot’ because of the sulfur springs there and ‘gates’ rather than ‘gate’ because of the three separate places where the land narrows. Thermopylae consists of a tapered plain that stretches for about 3 1/2 miles, from east to west. Mountains lie to the south, and to the north is the sea, here known as the Gulf of Malis.

Thermopylae is narrowest at its two ends, the so-called East and West Gates, while the mountains are sharpest in the center of the pass, at the so-called Middle Gate (all modern appellations). It was here, at the Middle Gate, that the Greeks defended the pass. Taking advantage of a dilapidated old wall, which they rebuilt, they took their stand between the sheer cliffs and the sea. The land was less than twenty yards wide here in 480 b.c. As far as the Greek defenders knew, the mountains were impassable.

Glory and revenge brought Xerxes to Thermopylae. Greeks and Persians had been at war for more than a generation. Xerxes’ father, Darius I, had crushed a Greek revolt in western Anatolia, but his armies had been bruised by Greeks at Sardis in 498 and suffered a demeaning defeat in 490 at Marathon, where a seaborne Persian army was stopped after landing less than twenty-five miles from the city of Athens. Now the Persians sought to settle the score.

Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Historical Conflicts

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