Titans of History

LEONIDAS

d. 480 BC

In the course of that fight Leonidas fell, having fought like a man indeed. Many distinguished Spartans were killed at his side—their names, like the names of all the three hundred … deserve to be remembered.

Herodotus, The Histories, Book VII

The last stand of Leonidas and his 300 against the might of Persia spread the legend of Spartan bravery across the world. A peerless fighter, Leonidas sacrificed himself for Greek freedom. His intrepid defense at Thermopylae gave the Greeks the time and the inspiration to defeat the massively superior Persian force that sought to overwhelm them.

For over a decade the Greeks had been fighting the Persians, who were determined to absorb them into their empire. Faced with Greek intransigence, the Persian Great King Xerxes assembled the greatest army the ancient world had ever seen. In 480 BC it crossed the Dardanelles on a bridge of boats, then swarmed along the coast toward the Greek heartlands. Xerxes’ progress seemed inexorable, Greece’s subjugation inevitable.

Ten years or so earlier, Leonidas had succeeded to the throne of Sparta, a city-state in the area of the southeastern Peloponnese known as Lacedaemonia. The latter name gives us the word “laconic,” for the Spartans were renowned for their terseness of speech—as exemplified by the Spartan discipline, toughness and endurance that Leonidas and his fellows were to display.

There was only one career for a male Spartan: as a fighting machine. In an education system as ruthless as it was effective, Sparta raised men who belonged, as the Roman historian Plutarch said, “entirely to their country and not to themselves.”

Sparta was frozen into an ancient constitution laid down in the 7th century BC by the semi-legendary King Lycurgus. Innovation was a mortal offense, individualism mercilessly eradicated. Foreigners were discouraged, money was replaced by iron bars, meals were taken in common. Nothing was allowed to divide the brotherhood of Sparta.

Sparta began selecting its warriors at birth. Inspecting all male infants, the council of elders weeded out the sickly and malformed, abandoning them on the mountainside to die. The sturdy, destined to protect rather than burden the state, were sent back to their fathers to be reared by nurses.

At the age of seven boys were taken into the care of the state, which set about transforming them into some of the toughest warriors the world has ever seen. The balletic grace of Sparta’s soldiers was honed by years of gymnastics and athletics, all undertaken in the nude. So endlessly did Spartans indulge in such exercises that the Athenians gave them the nickname phaenomerides, the “displayers of thighs.”

Boys were taught only the skills needed in war. Literacy was of no importance, and music only valued insofar as it encouraged heroic thoughts. Cunning, endurance, stamina and boldness were all prized. The boys slept on pallets made of rushes they gathered themselves. They were kept hungry to encourage them to take the initiative and steal food and were only punished if they were caught.

Flogging competitions tested their mental and physical stamina. Some boys died, but as long as they had betrayed no flicker of emotion they were commemorated with a statue. Pitched into battles against each other, the boys went at it with unremitting savagery. They spent long periods fending for themselves in the wild. As the twenty-year-old soldier-citizens approached the end of their training, the elite were sent out to live a guerrilla existence, using helots (slaves) as target practice.

All young men had to live in barracks until they were thirty. They were encouraged to marry, but they could only visit their wives by stealth. “Some of them,” reports Plutarch, “became fathers before they looked upon their own wives by daylight.” It mattered little: their education had produced an unbreakable bond. “They neither would nor could live alone,” Plutarch continues, “but were in manner as men incorporated one with another.”

“A city will be well fortified which is surrounded by brave men and not by bricks,” declared Lycurgus. Sparta’s citizens did not work—that was for the helots, who outnumbered them twenty-five to one. They were rather born and bred to fight, so in this respect the heroism of the 300 at Thermopylae should not surprise us.

It was said that the Delphic Oracle had prophesied to Leonidas that only the sacrifice of a king descended from Hercules could save his city from destruction. Leonidas, the seventeenth king of the Agiad dynasty, knew that his family claimed descent from Hercules and thus from Zeus. When representatives of the terrified Greek city-states met to confer at Corinth to discuss Xerxes’ advance, Leonidas volunteered to lead his men to head off the Persians at the only choke-point left: the narrow pass of Thermopylae.

It seemed an unwinnable battle from the start. With the Athenians setting sail to fight the Persians at sea and the other city-states apparently resigned to their fate and focusing instead on securing victory at the Olympics, Leonidas was given a force of no more than 7000 Greeks to combat the vast Persian army. Even Sparta—occupied by its own ceremonial games and wanting to reserve the mass of its troops to defend the Isthmus of Corinth, the gateway to the Peloponnese—allowed its king just 300 soldiers. Leonidas, who chose only men with sons old enough to assume their fathers’ role, seemed in no doubt that he was going to his death, telling his wife: “Marry a good man and have good children.”

The laconic wit of the Lacedaemonians spread the legend of Spartan intrepidity across the world. Asked by Xerxes’ envoy to order his army to lay down its arms, Leonidas replied, “Come and get them.” His men were no less defiant. When the Persians threatened to let loose so many arrows that the light of the sun would be blotted out, one Spartan commented, “So much the better. We will fight in the shade.”

Xerxes was confident of victory after his scout reported that the Spartans appeared to be preparing for battle by performing stretching exercises and combing their long hair. But as wave upon wave of Persians tried to force their way through the pass the next day, they were cut down in their thousands. The oncoming Persians were forced to scale a wall of their fallen comrades, and then they found themselves in a death trap. After three days of hurling tens of thousands of men at the small band of Greeks, Xerxes withdrew to rethink.

Had it not been for the actions of one man, the Delphic Oracle might have been proved false. But when a Greek traitor called Ephialtes showed the Persians a hidden path that led behind Greek lines, the fate of Leonidas was sealed. Leonidas sent away the bulk of his army. With 700 Thespians who chose to stay, and 400 Thebans who deserted almost immediately, Leonidas and his 300 Spartans set themselves up as a rearguard to delay the Persian advance and protect the retreating Greeks. They knew they would die fighting.

They fought with spears. When their spears shattered they fought with swords. Once those were broken, they fought with teeth and hands until they fell. The historian Herodotus estimated that this tiny band inflicted losses of 20,000 on the Persians. When Leonidas’ body was recovered, Xerxes, raging impotently at his ignominious victory, ordered that the dead king be decapitated and his body crucified. Forty years later Leonidas’ remains were finally returned to the Spartans, to be buried with the honor they were due.

Leonidas’ last stand inspired the Greeks to rally and fight for their freedom. Their subsequent victories over the Persians at sea (Salamis) and on land (Plataea) ensured that Xerxes was the first, and last, Persian sovereign to set foot on Greek soil. The suicidal bravery of the Spartans, so gloriously victorious in defeat, is commemorated in a famous epitaph inscribed on a stone marking the place where they fell at Thermopylae:

Go tell it in Sparta, stranger passing by,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.