Battle of Thermopylae: Leonidas the Hero

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On the minus side, Sparta and other Greek cities faced a big religious prohibition. Two major festivals — Sparta’s Carnea (dedicated to Apollo) and the all-Greek Olympic Games (in ancient times, a celebration of the gods) — took place the same time as the mustering of the Greek army. 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. He reported that Leonidas handpicked his Spartans for the Thermopylae mission; they were ‘the 300 men assigned him by law and whose lot it was to have sons.’ Three hundred was the standard number of Spartans used for hazardous assignments, but just what ‘whose lot it was to have sons’ means is, frankly, unclear. 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. He insisted on choosing each of the four hundred men in Thebes’ contingent at Thermopylae, and he picked men of suspect loyalty, in order to test them. 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. Demaratus said that no matter how greatly they were outnumbered, the Spartans would fight. And the Spartans, he pointed out, were great warriors. They would obey the command of their law and fight to the death.

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Tags: Ancient-Medieval, Historical Conflicts