The Spartans
A nation of fighters - A Transcript of today's episode of The Spartans
When we think of ancient Greece, we almost invariably think of Athens. This is where the blueprint for Western civilisation received its first draft. Philosophy and science, art and architecture, democracy itself – all these have their roots there. But there's more to the story of ancient Greece than Athens.
Unlike Athens, Sparta can't boast of its philosophers and politicians and artists. It became famous for two things: its frugality – which is where we get our word 'spartan' from – and its fighters. In everyday Sparta, these two were intimately linked.
The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of extreme discipline and self-sacrifice. Their aim was to create the perfect state protected by the perfect. Although Spartan hard-line ideals don't have the charisma of Athenian culture, they have meant as much to Western civilisation as the ideals represented by the Parthenon. Down the centuries, the Spartans have inspired a diverse range of people. Anyone with a plan for a utopia has cherry-picked their ideas – Plato, Sir Thomas More, the French revolutionaries, American pioneers, Adolf Hitler, even the founders of the English public school system. They all turned directly to the Spartans for ideas and inspiration.
So the story of the Spartans is also, in a way, the story of ourselves. It's the story of how many of the values that we hold dear were first found in a warrior state on the mainland of Greece 2,500 years ago.
The Spartans' history is highly dramatic – and it has a setting to match: the Peloponnese, a huge peninsula crowned by rugged mountains and scored by deep gorges, which forms the southern-most part of the Greek mainland.
The ancient Greeks thought of it as an island – and seen from the northern side of the Gulf of Corinth, it does have a brooding, closed-in feel, cold-shouldering the outside world.
Long before the Spartans of our story arrived on the scene, this part of the world was making history. Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War more than 3,000 years ago came from here. King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, came from Mycenae, in the eastern Peloponnese. And to the south, in the city-state of Sparta in the region known as Lakonia, was the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen – for Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused the Trojan War, had once been Helen of Sparta.
The heroes of the Trojan War, their lavish palaces and possessions, the beauty of Helen – all offered a standard against which the later Spartans would measure their own actions and aspirations.
At some point in about 1200 BC, all this disappeared.
No one knows for sure what happened – earthquakes, tidal waves, slave revolts have all been blamed. But all over the eastern Mediterranean, the world of Helen of Troy disappeared in a cataclysm of fire and destruction. A remnant clung on for a few hundred years, but finally the Dark Ages came to Greece and the thread of history snapped.
At some point in those centuries of darkness, new people came out of the north, seeking more hospitable lands. They were called the Dorians, and they brought with them a new Greek dialect, their sheep and goats and a few simple possessions. They settled all over the Peloponnese, and some found their way to Lakonia and the lands that had once belonged to King Menelaus.
It had been a journey worth making. The people who came to Lakonia must have thought they had found a Shangri-la. The plain of the Eurotas river was, north to south, 50 miles of precious, flat, fertile farmland. And the river ran through it all year round. In land-hungry Greece, where 70% of the land couldn't be farmed and what was left was squeezed between the mountains and the sea, that was a lot of elbow room.
To the west were the spectacular Taygetos mountains, rising to more than 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) in places. Patches of snow still lingered while down on the plain spring was turning into summer. The slopes once teemed with game – deer, hare and wild boar, rich pickings for the new arrivals.
But statistics don't convey the most striking quality of this place: the sense of security. Everywhere you look, you're bounded by hills. The feeling is one of enclosure – not claustrophobia, but safety. You feel that everything you could possibly want is here – if you can just lay claim to it and keep the rest of the world at bay.
And so the herdsmen traded in their sheep for olive trees, and settled down. A new Sparta came into being, and the new Spartans built a temple, the Menelaion, to honour the legendary king and his wayward wife.
In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages, new city-states like Sparta appeared all over Greece. They varied in size and power, but had one thing in common: they were all communities governed according to a set of mutually agreed laws and customs. The rules by which people agreed to live varied, but their aim was broadly the same: to create good order and justice and to protect against chaos and lawlessness.
In Sparta today, archaeologists are still piecing together the story of the people who first came here some 3,000 years ago and created an ideal city – a utopia. It's not an easy task because they left relatively few clues behind.
Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans were famous for not building, not making things and, in particular, not writing about themselves. Nearly every account we have of the Spartan way of life was written by an outsider.
Some of these writers resented Sparta's power, some were in awe of its traditions and achievements, and some were given to exaggeration – and there was much about Sparta that lent itself to exaggeration. So of all the cities and civilisations in the ancient world, the Spartans remain the most intriguing and the most mysterious.
Take, for example, Sparta's kings. Since time immemorial, Sparta had been ruled by not one but two kings – two royal houses, two royal lines, twice the potential for the rows and wrangles to which all monarchies are prone. The Spartans explained this unique arrangement by claiming that their kings were direct descendants of the great-great grandsons of Heracles (Hercules), the strongman of Greek myth. According to the legend, it was this pair of twins who wrested control of the Peloponnese from the descendants of King Agamemnon.
The stories that people tell about themselves are always revealing. This tale of a land-grab by a pair of aggressive usurpers, themselves descended from the most macho man in mythology, sent out a worrying message to Sparta's neighbours.
And it wasn't long before the Spartans started throwing their weight around, seizing control of the whole of the Eurotas valley, enslaving non-Spartan inhabitants or categorising them as perioikoi – 'those who live around' or 'neighbours'. In the rigid apartheid-like system that came into being there, the perioikoi would become a disenfranchised caste of craftsmen and traders, the economic muscle of the Spartan utopia.
But sorting out their immediate neighbours was just the first phase of Sparta's aggressive expansionism. Despite the generous acres of the Eurotas valley, Sparta, like the rest of Greece, always suffered from land hunger. Other city-states dealt with the problem by establishing colonies throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. This Greek diaspora would eventually spread as far west as the Strait of Gibraltar, and as far east as the Crimea in the Black Sea.
Sparta came up with its own take on colonisation: it looked west and began to wonder what opportunities lay on the other side of the Taygetos mountains. It was there that they would go to satisfy their hunger for land. It was there that their Shangri-la would reveal its dark underside. For it was there that a slave-nation would be created to serve the Spartan master-race.
The journey through the gorges of the Taygetos mountains is as spectacular now as it must have been some 2,800 years ago when the armies of Sparta headed west in search of conquest.
Several days' hard march would have brought them to the territory of the Messenians on the other side of the mountains. The Spartans weren't coming just to take their land – they wanted to take away their freedom, too. They intended to turn all the Messenians into helots. This word translates as 'captives', but it came to mean, more bluntly, 'slaves'.
Slavery in ancient Greece was an accepted fact of life. But slaves were supposed to be foreigners – barbarians who spoke no Greek and so were obviously suited by nature to be slaves. The enslavement of fellow Greeks and on a massive scale was something else. The crushing of Messenia set Sparta apart from the rest of Greece.
It also shaped the kind of place Sparta became – wary of unrest, paranoid about revolt.
Enslaving the Messenians was no easy task. It took two full-scale wars, each lasting 20 years or more. We know something about the second one because we have an eye-witness to the events – one of the first identifiable eye-witnesses known to history. He was called Tyrtaeus:
It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks while fighting for his homeland.
Let us fight with spirit for this land and let us die for our children, no longer sparing our lives.
Make the spirit in your heart strong and valiant, and do not be in love with life when you are a fighting man.
Tyrtaeus was a Spartan soldier and a war poet. His poems were battle cries, delivered with the directness of a sergeant major putting some backbone into shirkers and faint-hearts.
The kind of fighter that Tyrtaeus addresses in his poems was the hoplite – an infantryman armed with an 8ft (2.4m) spear and a round shield. By the end of the 7th century, practically all Greek cities had their own contingents of hoplites. They were not full-time professional soldiers. They were generally farmers, who swapped ploughs and spades for spears and shields in defence of their communities. By standing side by side with their neighbours and taking part in the fight, these militia-men demonstrated not just their courage but their status as citizens.
Like the Minutemen of the American Revolutionary War who forged a republic on the ends of their rifles, hoplites were more than just fighters: they were agents of profound social change.
Olympia was home of the famous games. It was also the unofficial shrine of the hoplite fighter – for this was where he would come to dedicate his arms to the gods in thanks for a victory. The 'House of Bronze' must have been thick with the stuff, judging from the number of shields, helmets and breastplates found here, and now on display in the museum.
The round shield – hoplon – was the cardinal item of equipment, and it was from this that the hoplite probably derived his name. He held it by thrusting his left arm through the central armband – the porpax – and gripping the antilabe, a leather thong attached to the rim, in his fist. It was made mainly of wood, and weighed around 20lb (9 kilograms), which was quite a weight to carry through a day's fighting. But to let your shield drop or fall in battle was the ultimate disgrace.
Hoplite fighting was a team effort: half your shield was for you, the other half for the man to your left. The hoplites would form into densely packed ranks, collectively called a phalanx, seven or eight deep and perhaps 50 shields across. Co-ordination and discipline were important, but most important of all was trust: if your neighbour broke and ran, you would be left exposed to the spear- points of the enemy.
When two phalanxes met, there was a natural tendency for each line to edge to the right as the men tucked themselves behind their neighbours' shields. It was at moments like this that the discipline of the phalanx threatened to collapse. To be effective, you had to hold your ground.
Tyrtaeus had some helpful advice for Sparta's nerve-wracked hoplites:
Those who dare to stand fast at one another's side and to advance towards the front ranks in hand-to-hand conflict, they die in smaller numbers and they keep the troops behind safe.
There wasn't much in the way of tactics once the shield walls came together. The battlefield all but disappeared in a dust cloud as the two opposing masses of bronze and muscle heaved against each other. The rear ranks provided the traction, pushing forward like rugby players in a scrum.
It was in the front three ranks, within range of the enemy's spear points, that things got deadly. It was there that a hoplite would come face to face with the snake-haired gorgon, emblazoned on the shield of the enemy just inches away. The goddess's stare was said to have the power to petrify people, and in the stabbing frenzy of battle, many must have felt as if their limbs were turning to stone.
Crude it may have been, but hoplite fighting had far-reaching consequences. In the heaving sweaty, noisy mêlée, neighbours chose to stand together in support of the common good. It was an act of citizenship, and to take part in it was as much a privilege as an obligation.
To fight as a hoplite, you had to have the kit, and while few could manage a magnificent outfit, the basic panoply – shield, spear and helmet – was within reach of around a third of the city-state's able-bodied male population. Being able to afford to fight was terribly important. Aristotle said: 'Those who do the fighting wield absolute power.' In other words, if you didn't fight for your community, you couldn't expect to have a stake in it.
So, on the day of battle, while well-to-do land-owners paraded in the front rank in their bespoke armour, a dirt farmer's eldest boy, taking his place somewhere in the back with his grandfather's dented helmet and his uncle's battered shield, would be determined at all costs to maintain his family's standing as citizens.
The Spartans finally defeated and enslaved the Messenians in about 650 BC. For the next 300 years, the latter would be forced to slave in the fields of their Spartan masters 'like asses, worn out by heavy burdens', according to Tyrtaeus.
But now that Messenia had been won, the critical question for the Spartans became, then and for centuries to come: how would they keep it?
Elsewhere in Greece, city-states were being torn apart by civil war between rich and poor. With the spoils of Messene up for grabs, the chances of that happening in Sparta were greatly increased.
To keep their paradise safe, the Spartans chose to act in a totally radical way. From now on, they would dedicate themselves to the creation of a perfect society, and it would be modelled on the hoplite phalanx – disciplined, collective and unselfish. There was going to be a revolution in Shangri-la.
Every revolution needs a great leader. Sparta's was Lycurgus – the 'wolf worker'. He may or may not have existed. In fact, so vague are his outlines that most historians now dismiss him as a myth. But for the ancient Spartans, he was very real. He was a miracle worker who created a unique social system on the advice of the gods themselves, a blueprint that would turn Spartan society into one of the most extreme civilisations of the ancient world.
To keep the Messenian helots subdued and, just as importantly, to stop themselves from falling out over the spoils of war, the Spartans decided to dedicate themselves to becoming the most formidable, disciplined and professional warriors that Greece had ever seen. The whole of Spartan society became, in effect, a military training camp.
Spartan men would neither farm nor fish, manufacture nor trade. They would simply fight. And when they weren't fighting, they would train. And when they weren't training, they would socialise with their fellow fighters rather than with their own families, to bolster the solidarity and cohesion of the phalanx.
The single-mindedness and thoroughness with which they pursued this programme was extreme, radical and typically Spartan. Being born Spartan was not enough. All male Spartans had to earn their citizenship through long years of competitive struggle, and through surviving one of the most gruelling training systems ever invented.
The first test came early. A ravine a few miles outside the centre of Sparta was known as the Apothetae – the 'Deposits'. It was also called the 'place of rejection', because newly born Spartan boys were thrown into the ravine if they were judged unfit to live.
Infanticide was common throughout ancient Greece. Unwanted babies – usually girls – were left on hillsides. Sometimes they would be placed in a basket or protective pot so that there was at least a chance of someone coming along and taking the child in.
In Sparta, things were, as ever, different. Boys rather than girls were the likeliest candidates for infanticide. The decision about whether the child lived or died was not left to the parents but was taken by the city elders. And there was no possibility of a kindly shepherd rescuing a newborn child after it had been 'placed' down here. The decision of the city elders was final, terminal and absolute.
Such state-sponsored eugenics has won Sparta many admirers over the years. Here's what one 20th-century leader had to say on the subject:
The abandonment of sick, puny and misshapen children by the Spartans was more humanitarian and, in reality, a thousand times more humane than the pitiful madness of our present time where the most sickly subjects are preserved at any price only to be followed by the breeding of a race from degenerates burdened with disease.
No prizes for guessing that these are the words of Adolf Hitler.
Surviving the Apothetae was just the start for the boys. At the age of seven, they were removed from their families and placed in a training system called the agoge, which means, literally, 'rearing'. The children were treated little better than animals.
For Spartan boys, one of the classrooms of the agoge was the wild foothills of the Taygetos mountains. They were organised into 'herds' under the command of an older 'boy herd', who was responsible for discipline and punishment. Denied adequate clothing, they slept rough throughout the year – and, in winter, temperatures could drop below freezing. Kept on short rations, they were expected to steal to supplement their food. Anyone caught stealing was flogged – not for the theft itself, but for being an unskilful thief.
It was more of a trial by ordeal than an education.
One of the more famous Spartan legends concerns a young boy who allows his intestines to be gnawed away by a fox that he has stolen and concealed, rather than cry out or let the animal go. In the retelling, the story usually becomes a straightforward tale of endurance and moral toughness. Restored to its original context, however, it sounds more like a half-starved, brutalised boy dying from an excess of bone-headed obedience.
The Taygetos also provided the backdrop for one of Sparta's most controversial and disputed institutions: the krypteia or 'secret service brigade'. Membership of this was reserved for boys who had shown particular promise. Hard cases would be sent out into the wilds with basic rations and a knife. By day, they would lie low and, at night, would infiltrate the valley below, murdering any helot they caught.
For some historians, this vision of adolescent lynch mobs roaming the countryside is simply too lurid to accept. But a reign of terror – random, vicious and unprovoked – is precisely the kind of tactic that might keep a large slave population quiet.
Although Sparta encouraged the collective spirit, it placed a higher value on individual achievement. The boys were tested constantly – against each other and against their own limitations.
The competitive nature of the Spartan system found its most extreme expression at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. If a boy survived his first five years in the agoge, he would go there at the age of 12 for a brutal rite of passage.
On the altar, cheeses were placed – the sort of homely nourishing foodstuff that young boys on short rations would have found irresistible. The challenge was simple: to steal as many cheeses as possible. But in front of the altar was a phalanx of ephebes – boys in their 20s – carrying whips. Their instructions were to protect the altar, showing neither mercy nor restraint.
Indoctrinated with the tenets of endurance and perseverance, and determined to excel in this public display, the 12-year-olds would brave the gauntlet again and again. Meeting the whips face on, they would have suffered the most horrific injuries. The weakest never left alive.
The sheer brutality of a system seems alien. But it's not just modern audiences who find the Spartans shocking. The philosopher Aristotle argued that they turned their children into animals, while other contemporary Greeks pictured them as bees swarming round a hive, stripped of their individuality.
It's been a popular conception of Sparta through the centuries, but one that misses an important point.
Taking part in any mass activity can be fantastically unifying. We all recognise that feeling if we're part of a Mexican wave in a football crowd, singing in a choir or joining a protest march. As individuals, we are not diminished by the crowd. We become stronger; our reach is greater; our sense of self is magnified.
That was the underlying appeal of the Spartan system as a whole: the possibility of transcending your limitations as an individual and becoming part of something bigger and better.
From the age of 12, the boys' training became, if possible, even more exacting. Reading and writing were taught 'no more than was necessary', but music and dancing were regarded as essential.
The battlefields on which hoplites clashed were once memorably described as the 'dancing floors of war'. A phalanx that was able to move together in a coordinated way made for a formidable dancing partner.
So the Spartans spent many hours perfecting what was known as 'war music', a kind of rhythmic drill in which changes in direction and pace were communicated musically. The Spartans earned the reputation for being 'the most musical and the most war-like of people'.
At the age of 20, with their training nearing completion, Spartan males faced their most crucial test: election to one of the common messes – dining clubs – where they would be expected to spend most of their time when they weren't training or fighting.
But even if you had survived the brutal apprenticeship of the agoge, entry to these exclusive gentlemen's clubs was not guaranteed. Election to a mess was by the vote of existing members. You could be blackballed if it was felt that you didn't measure up – and that would be that. You would become a failed Spartan, consigned to a living hell of exclusion and public humiliation.
If, on the other hand, you were elected, you would receive from the state a share of land and a quota of helots. You were now one of the homoioi – one of the peers, the warrior élite at the top of Sparta's hierarchy.
The common messes, which lay a mile or so from the centre of Sparta, were an essential part of the city's social engineering, intended to keep discord and civil strife at bay. Old and young mixed here, easing generational conflicts – a constant source of friction elsewhere in Greece. More importantly, rich and poor met on an equal footing, the differences between them hidden by a rigorously enforced code of 'conspicuous non-consumption'.
In egalitarian Sparta, the rule was: even if you've got it, don't flaunt it. This was applied to everything from houses to clothes, even to food. In the common messes, the dish of the day, every day, was a concoction made of boiled pigs' blood and vinegar, known as melas zomos, 'black soup'.
The joke goes that, on being told the recipe for black soup, a man from Sybaris – a city in southern Italy infamous for its luxury and gluttony – said he now understood why the Spartans were so willing to die.
Spartan frugality may have shocked their contemporaries, but to a modern audience, their diet – leaving aside the black soup – sounds nutritious and healthy. Their land was very fertile, producing figs and quinces among other fruits. It was also a rich hunting ground. Compared to the diets of their neighbours – and enemies – the Spartans' comprised a much higher proportion of meat.
Free from the need to make a living (thanks to their helots), free from the anxieties of ill-health (thanks to their healthy diet and rigorous keep-fit regime), free from the pressure to 'keep up with the Joneses' (thanks to their egalitarian code), the Spartans could be said to be a people who knew the 'good life'.
More importantly, they were entirely new kinds of human beings: citizens. The Spartan system was one of the first in Western history to define what citizenship meant.
Sparta was the first society to offer a social contract based on duties and rights, and it was introduced there 100 years or more before Athens – the so-called 'cradle of democracy' – had even started thinking along similar lines.
The myth of Lycurgus ends on a prophetic note. Having persuaded his fellow citizens to adopt his radical rule book, he made them swear not to meddle with anything until he returned from a consultation with the gods at the religious site at Delphi.
The oath was given, Lycurgus departed ... and never came back, sealing with his own, voluntary death the Spartans' oath.
As explanations go, this is on a par with the rest of Lycurgus's mythical life, but at least it attempts to explain one of the most puzzling facts about Sparta: that, having embarked on a radical social experiment, this revolutionary city-state would soon become the most hide-bound and conservative in the whole of ancient Greece.
Change was coming – but it was originating beyond Sparta's borders. In 480 BC, disturbing news reached the Spartans: the Persian empire was on the move. A huge invasion force was heading west by land and sea, bent on subduing the troublesome Greeks. The time had come to see whether Sparta's celebrated warriors would live up to their fearsome reputation – and save the Greek world from the threat from the east.
Archaeology came relatively late to Sparta. It wasn't until 1906 that a British team began the first systematic excavations. In 1925, they made a major discovery: a striking life-sized bust of a Spartan warrior dating from the 5th century BC. When it was discovered, one of the Greek workmen said unhesitatingly, 'This is Leonidas.'
Leonidas was Sparta's super-hero – the king who, with 300 warriors, made a doomed last stand against the might of Persia in the pass at Thermopylae.
These days, the warrior presides magisterially over the museum in Sparta – they still call him 'Leonidas', though the name is safely within quote marks. The enigmatic smile is a convention of sculpture from this period, but it definitely gives him a Mona Lisa-type quality. The eyes are blank, but would probably have been inlaid with precious stone. The posture is puzzling – he seems to lunging forward so much that he looks like he might topple over.
But, all in all, he conforms to the heroic Spartan ideal, right down to his facial hair – for one of Lycurgus's more pernickety rules was that the upper lip should be clean-shaven and the beard long.
We know very little about the real Leonidas. He was a member of the Agidai, one of the two aristocratic families that supplied Sparta with her kings. He had been on the throne for 10 years when the Persian juggernaut began to roll west.
Persia was the regional superpower of the eastern Mediterranean – a vast empire stretching from present-day Afghanistan to the Aegean. The Greeks were an insignificant but increasingly troublesome presence on the western limits of the empire, inciting rebellion among the king's Greek subjects in Asia Minor.
In 499 BC, a major rebellion ended in the destruction of the royal city of Sardis. This was too much for the Persians. They demanded oaths of loyalty from all the Greek city-states. Some caved in, but others followed the defiant examples set by Sparta and Athens. When Persian heralds went there demanding water and earth as tokens of submission, they were executed – an act of sacrilege and a declaration of war.
King Darius made the first move. In 490 BC, he landed a punitive force on the Greek mainland at Marathon, only to see it sent packing by Athens and her allies. When Darius died, it was left to his son Xerxes to avenge the insult. Around the year 485, he began assembling a massive invasion force to sort out the Greek problem once and for all.
The Persians set out, by land and sea, early in 480 BC. The land army was so vast that, according to the Greek historian Herodotus (who lived during this time), it drank whole rivers dry. Herodotus also reckoned that the combined Persian forces numbered more than 1.5 million men. A more sober estimate would put the ceiling at 300,000 – far more than enough to crush the minnow-like city-states of Greece.
When the Spartans learned that a Persian invasion was imminent, they asked the oracle at Delphi for advice. The oracle was a kind of messaging service for the gods, delivered through the mouth of a possessed priestess.
The Spartans were unswervingly pious, so what they were told now must have worried them greatly:
Hear your fate, O dwellers in Sparta of the wide spaces.
Either your famed great town must be sacked by Perseus' sons [the Persians] – Or the whole land of Lacedaemon
Shall mourn the death of a king of the house of Heracles.
Beneath the flowery language, the advice was straightforward: capitulate.
But despite the dire warning, Sparta decided to put itself at the head of the resistance to the invasion. As the Persian army swung south towards the Greek heartland, a Greek force, under the command of King Leonidas, headed north to stop their advance at Thermopylae – the 'gates of fire'.
In 480 BC, Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck. The road south squeezed past the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. Today, the mountains are still there, but the sea has retreated a few miles. To this place came a force of 7,000-8,000 Greek hoplites from half-a-dozen city-states. They rebuilt a wall that ran across the narrowest part of the pass, and hunkered down behind it, aiming to halt the Persian advance in its tracks.
Geography favoured the Greeks. Despite the overwhelming odds, the position was not hopeless. If the Persian advance could be slowed here, it would give the Greeks a chance to organise more formidable defences, on land and sea.
But for Leonidas in overall command, and for the 300 Spartan warriors who had accompanied him, Thermopylae was more than a strategic strong point. It was the place where they intended to show the world what it meant to be a Spartan.
For the first three days of the battle, the Greeks held off the Persian advance, sheltering behind their wall and then counter-attacking in hoplite formation. Three times, the Persians attacked; three times, they were beaten back.
Xerxes had almost given up hope when he was told of a secret path that crossed the mountains and came out behind the Greek defences. When Leonidas discovered that the Persians were on their way, he knew the game was up and, before long, the Greeks would be surrounded. While there was still time for them to escape, Leonidas dismissed his allies, setting the stage for one of history's most celebrated last stands.
In reality, the Spartans weren't entirely alone. Leonidas kept with him 400 troops from Thebes, a city thought to be dangerously pro-Persian. There were also 700 fighters from Thespiae, as determined as the Spartans to go down fighting. Finally, there were the Spartans' own helots, who had no choice but to stay by their masters' sides. But this was Sparta's show, and the parts played by others, willingly or unwillingly, were bound to be overshadowed.
On the final morning, the Spartans followed their usual pre-battle rituals. They stripped naked and exercised. They oiled their bodies and combed out each other's long hair. They wrote their names on small sticks and tied them to their arms – an ancient form of 'dog-tags' that would allow their bodies to be identified later. Persian spies, observing these strange pre-battle rites, reported back to Xerxes, who thought them laughable.
In the morning, the Persian king poured a libation to the rising sun and then ordered the advance. The Greeks under Leonidas, knowing that the fight would be their last, pressed forward into the widest part of the pass. They fought with reckless desperation – with swords if they had them and, if not, with their hands and teeth – until the Persians, coming in from the front and closing in from behind, overwhelmed them.
Militarily, Thermopylae was insignificant. The Persian advance, delayed for less than a week, was soon rolling south again. A far more important battle took place shortly afterwards in the bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet, led by Athens, destroyed the Persian armada. It was a scrappy, hit-and-miss affair, but Salamis marked the beginning of the end for the Persians' invasion, and the following year, they were finally driven out of Greece.
But in the aftermath of victory, it was the doomed heroism of Thermopylae that captured the imagination.
The 300 were buried at Thermopylae and honoured with an inscription that still echoes down the centuries:
Go tell the Spartans,
Stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Thermopylae was a stage on which the Spartans performed the role for which they had spent their lives training and preparing. They had shown the world the kind of place that Sparta was and the kind of men it produced. They had fulfilled the ideals of their city and justified the claims of their utopia.
And by doing that, according to Herodotus, they had 'laid up for the Spartans a treasure of fame in which no other city could share'.
Leonidas's stage management certainly paid off. Today, in the Louvre in Paris, you can see the Spartan king and the 300 at Thermopylae captured in all their nobility by the French revolutionary painter David.
The Spartans certainly impressed Hitler. In February 1945, he told Martin Bormann:
And if, in spite of everything, the Fates have decreed that we should once more in the course of our history be crushed by forces superior to our own, then let us go down with our heads high and secure in the knowledge that the honour of the German people remains without blemish. A desperate fight remains for all time a shining example. Let us remember Leonidas and his 300 Spartans! In any case, we are not of the stuff that goes tamely to the slaughter like sheep. They may well exterminate us. But they will never lead us to the slaughter house!
