Thermopylae: Killing a Sacred Cow

The Battle of Thermopylae hardly needs any introduction. It is one of the most famous and inspiring battles in European history. The last stand of three hundred Spartans against an overwhelming force of Persians, facing certain death, yet willing to remain free to the last breath… alright, let’s cut that crap.

The battle wasn’t all that great. It has been romanticised on end, and I know everybody who is reading this will first think of the film 300 that was all the rage and led everybody who has never known the first thing about ancient Greece to scream “This is SPARTAAA!!!!111 LOLZORZ!!!” And along came the amateur historians, who have read parts of the historical background section in the Age of Empires Help file and have it all worked out now. You can read their comments on Youtube, and random internet forums that have a History section.

I liked the film, even though I had turned in a term paper named Sparta in the Persian Wars the same day I saw the movie, and am now doing Iranian Studies. I liked it, and I thought it was pretty cool, but that is because I can separate history from fantasy. The film took a historical subject that wasn’t really all that cool, but had already been distorted in collective memory anyway (it’s not like 300 popularised the battle, it merely brought its popularity to the 21^st century), twisted it some more, added a queer Persian King and a giant with scissors for hands (I suppose Johnny Depp wasn’t available that day?) and cashed in on the success.

When it came to the story itself, the film, and I suppose the comic it was based on, is surprisingly close to what has been written about the battle. You can read the accounts of the battle in the Histories of Herodotus and the work of Diodorus Siculus. Even some of the one-liners are there, including “Tonight, we dine in Hell!” Believe it or not.

So, why wasn’t the battle all that great? I am not going to recount the entire story, which you can read up on thousands of pages on the net. But I am going to point out some of the things that are sometimes a bit disregarded. First of all, the Persian army did not consist of millions, as some of the more dramatic accounts like to say. Modern historians have well-reasoned estimations of perhaps 200,000 men under Xerxes’ command. Mind you, that is still an amazingly big number, even by today’s standards. Then, the Greek army that stood at Thermopylae wasn’t that small. Yes, there were 300 Spartans, and they were the ones in command. But for some reason, people always forget the several thousands of other Greek soldiers that were there. While it is true that many had left or died by the final day, and that the 300 Spartans all died, there were still up to 1,500 Greeks left then. I don’t even know why people keep forgetting them, even Herodotus mentions them.

So if we go by the numbers of 200,000 vs 5,000 to 11,000 according to various Greek accounts, it doesn’t look that spectacular anymore. The spectacle fails especially when you consider that it was not an open battlefield, but a narrow pass that was deemed impossible to surround. Battles like this happened every once in a while in history, because passes are so amazingly easy to defend. They held up Alexander the Great, Hannibal and the entire British Empire. Mountain passes have always been the ideal defence position, and numerical superiority loses much of its effect here. In fact, at Thermopylae, it became completely irrelevant, until the Persians managed to surround the pass.

More importantly, the motivation that the Greeks would stand there to their death and take as many Persians with them as possible is plain wrong. The strategy behind Thermopylae was very pragmatic, and in fact, by today’s standards would be considered pretty ruthless. The idea was that the Greeks hold up the Persians at Thermopylae for several days so the city of Athens could be evacuated. Then they would retreat to the Isthmus of Corinth, which was an even better defence position, especially when considering that the entire Peloponnesian Peninsula with enough back-up troops was at their back, so the Greeks could simply drive the Persians to the sea if they had enough. The destruction of Athens was, well, taken into account.

In romantic distortion, Thermopylae is a nice and inspiring story. In historical fact, it is still pretty impressive, but not all that great indeed.