The Ancients - Battle of Thermopylae

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

2,499 years ago the Persian 'Great King' Xerxes launched history's largest amphibious invasion of Europe before D-Day. Accompanied by a huge army and navy he crossed the Hellespont (modern day Dardanelles), intent on punishing the city-state of Athens and any other Hellenic powers that dared to resist. It was during this campaign that one of history's most famous battles was fought, at the Pass of Thermopylae in central Greece. King Leonidas, his 300 (or so) Spartans and their Hellenic allies fought off against King Xerxes' mighty Persian army for three days. To talk through this fascinating battle I'm chatting with Paul Cartledge, a professor from the University of Cambridge and one of the World's leading experts on ancient Sparta. In this fascinating chat, Paul sorts the fact from the fiction about the doomed Thermopylae defence. He starts by explaining the conflict's background, before moving on to the battle itself. We finish off by discussing how this famous battle ultimately created what we now know as 'the Spartan mirage'.This episode will be the first in a small series dedicated to talking about the 480 BC clashes of the Second Persian War, for the 2,499th anniversaries of these battles. Paul is the author of 'Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World.'

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. 2,499 years ago, one of the most famous battles in antiquity, indeed, one of the most famous battles in history, was fought at the Pass of Thermopylae in central Greece. King Leonidas, his 300 Spartans, or 300 thereabout, and their Hellenic allies fought off against King Xerxes' mighty Persian army

for three days. To talk through this fascinating battle, I'm chatting with Paul Kartlitsch. He is a professor from the University of Cambridge, and he is one of the world's leading authorities on ancient Sparta. Enjoy. Paul, it's an honour to have you on the podcast. Well that's very sweet of you to say that but I have done one previous history hit with Dan directly in his little studio in London that was gosh I'm trying that was on democracy. Well this time we're talking about something a little different. Thermopylae, one of, if not the most iconic battle in ancient history. It is. And the oddity of it, of course, is that it was a defeat. The word means hot gates,

and that's because of the sulphur springs in this very, very narrow pass in north central Greece where the battle was fought. But, for example, Montaigne in the 16th century, he said, though it was a defeat, it's one of those defeats that's going to be remembered much more than quite often victories, precisely because of the nature of the defeat. So we'll come back to that, of course, in detail later. We absolutely will. But to start off with, let's talk about the background to the clash at Thermopylae. Now, at the start of the 5th century BC, there is one power that dominates the eastern

Mediterranean and the Near East, isn't there? There is, and it rose, as we say, in the middle of the 6th century BC, BCE. And its founder was a man called Cyrus. And that's the Latin version of his original Persian name, which is something like Khorash. And he formed this amazing, well, we say empire. And it started out roughly 550 BC and his first task was to reverse the relationship between his people, which was the Persians in southern Iran, and the Medes in northern Iran where Tehran is where the Median Empire started. They had a bit of an empire themselves.

So Cyrus first of all has to reverse the relationship between the two peoples. Then he has to unite the whole of Iran. And then he sets off, interestingly, not, you might have thought he would have gone east to start with, but actually, no, he goes west. And the Greeks, who had been living along the western coast of what's today Turkey, since, well, hundreds of years, they suddenly found themselves confronted, having been to some extent dominated by a local Lydian ruler called Croesus, they suddenly found themselves confronted with this huge, what turns out to be actually the fastest growing

oriental empire ever to that date. This is before the unification of China. And so Cyrus finds himself and his forces reaching to the Aegean in the east as early as about 546, 545. At any rate, the background to our battle is, of course, when the Persian empire decides that it wants to be very secure in its boundaries and this is I think a very common Imperial phenomenon they worry about the next people along beyond where they've already got so what particularly upset the Persian Empire this is now many years after Cyrus. Cyrus died in about 530. His son then added Egypt. So that by the time of roughly 500 BC, the Persian Empire extends in the west to Egypt and to actually northern Greece.

In the east, as far as Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kashmir today, Sindh, that part of northwest India. And by 500 BC, he has these Greeks, the Persian Empire has these Greeks along the western seaboard of what's today Turkey. Well, they decide to rise up. They don't like being in the Persian Empire. they don't like being in the Persian Empire. And I think one reason that they got particularly exercised about that time is that their kinsmen, the Greeks across the Aegean in mainland Greece, had been making rather amazing developments on the political front. And one particular development is, of course, part of another story that I've been involved with for some years, which is democracy. And the thought that being Greek should have meant being not just free, that is free from any external, especially foreign power, but also free to run your government as you wish, not to be dictated to internally. Well, the Persian Empire, and this is a very normal phenomenon, liked to rule its subjects either directly,

force, military, lockdown, or indirectly through local rulers. This is the way we ruled India, for example, a lot of India under the Raj, you get tame local emirs or whatever, who will do your dirty business for you, keep down the locals, pay your taxes and all that. So about 500 BC, a number of Greeks in Western Asia on the seaboard of the Aegean, modern Turkey, decided to rise up and they were joined by some non-Greeks on the island of Cyprus. And this was a major, major revolt because it lasted some five to six years. If you can imagine an imperial power having to cope with or not being able to crush a rebellion for six years, six campaigning seasons, about five years.

In the middle of that, the further bit of the Aegean, that is the other side of the Aegean, decided to get involved in Asia. The revolting Greeks appealed to their cousins, as it were, in Athens and a city called Eretria on the island of Euboea. Please help us, send troops and send forces to help us revolt from the Persians so that we can get our freedom and our political self-determination. Well, it went rather well. The first two years, the revolt was incredibly successful to such an extent that one of the Persians' provincial capitals was actually torched by not just the

local Greeks rebelling, but also by the Athenians. So we have here a future, a seed of what is going to be 20 years on and off of direct Persian desire to both stretch their empire beyond Asia into mainland Greece, but also to punish those Greeks who had the temerity to intervene, to interfere in what the Persians considered to be their domain. And so that's the seeds of, after the rebellion is put down, there is then a reprisal expedition sent, a naval one, in 490. And so we get to the famous Battle of Marathon. And so the Battle of Marathon is the background

to the two years of conflict that we're principally interested in, which is 480-479, the battles of Thermopylae and the succeeding battles as the Persians tried to conquer, it seems, all mainland Greece. But the background to that is the defeat at Marathon, the Persian reprisal expedition punishing the Athenians for daring to involve themselves in a rebellion against the Persian Empire. That battle was a victory for the Athenians, unpredictable, but that's the source, the sort of the irritation that the Persians have, which ultimately generates the huge invasion, vast invasion, the biggest invasion, Armada, before D-Day. If you can imagine this,

the largest amphibious attack on Europe before 1944. So as you've just mentioned there, so when Xerxes, the king of kings, he crosses the Hellespont with this unprecedented army and navy, one of the main motives behind it is a revenge motive. It is, and it's twofold in a way, because in between Marathon and Xerxes' great armada of 480, his dad, Darius, Darius I, Darius the Great, the, in a way, second founder of the Persian Empire, had died. And so there was a sense in which Darius had failed to tame, to punish the Athenians. The Battle of Marathon was on his dad's watch. So he's avenging his father's failure or his memory as well. But secondly, because interestingly, he wasn't the crown prince,

he was actually Darius's third or fourth son. So Darius had taken a particular shine to him. And I think one reason was that his mother was actually a daughter of Cyrus the Great. So if you think going way back, Xerxes' mum was daughter of Cyrus the Great. So Darius had married a daughter. He had several wives, by the way. He'd married among them a daughter of Cyrus. So there's a lot at stake in the prestige both of himself as a young man and of his family and of the empire as a whole. So it's going to be a big deal. And what he wanted to do, I think, why did he get together such a big armada? People differ on how many they think, but let's say

it's of the order of maybe 100,000 land troops, maybe of the order of up to 1,000 warships and transport ships. Thousands of men. I mean, the Greeks tended to exaggerate the numbers because it made their victory look better. But Herodotus, for example, thought the Persians had brought 5 million people. Well, we tend to, as I say, reduce that to something of the order of 200,000, maybe maximum 100,000 to 200,000 maximum. So, as you rightly say, he crosses himself personally on foot, interestingly, going across the Hellespont, which is the modern Dardanelles, for which he has to build a massive pontoon

bridge. It takes a very long time. The current in the Hellespont, the Dardanelles, they're really unpredictable and they're very savage and actually the first bridge was destroyed and our mains by by the weather by the currents and the water and the winds and our main source for all this I should preface anything I say really by saying this is a near contemporary he was born in the Persian empire he was born on that western Asiatic seaboard, I mentioned, a place called Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum, and his name is Herodotus, and he is the first western historian. to explain first why the Persians had wanted to invade and the conflict of what we call the Persian Wars, the Greco-Persian Wars. But secondly, why the Greeks, that is the few, very few Greeks who were courageous enough to resist, why they'd won. It was quite an unpredictable, extraordinarily unpredictable outcome. So he wanted to do two

types of explanation, origins and explanation of the actual outcome. So anyway, Xerxes, with his land forces, marches across the Hellespont, while the navy, which is of course gathered much, much further south initially, that is in what's today Lebanon and Egypt, the Phoenicians and the Egyptians are his principal non-Greek sailors. and it's often forgotten this, but lots and lots of Greeks willy-nilly were fighting in ships on his side against their fellow Greeks. So it's a sort of complicated civil war as well as being an imperial conflict. So he marches across and he has a rally to, as it were, review his troops. Quite a long way west, as you're coming across the Hellespont, you come into the Gallipoli Peninsula. Gallipolis in ancient Greek comes Gallipoli in modern Turkish. And he then marches across and rendezvous the army with the fleet in the north-central Aegean. And that's what Herodotus uses as the kind of way of setting out the terms on which the ensuing conflict is going to happen.

Well, while this has been going on, it takes a very long time to get together such a huge force from most of the empire. He doesn't just use Western Asiatic forces, but he gathers his troops from as far east as what's today, as I say, Pakistan and the Punjab. And he conducts a review, and this is where Herodotus is able to describe in huge detail, not just the ethnic composition of Xerxes' army and navy, but also what they wore, what weapons they used, what defensive and offensive equipment they had. And his main point is to, on the one hand, emphasize the size and diversity of the Greeks' enemies, and on the other hand, how different the Greeks' type of armament was, not just how

many fewer they were, but that they fought with different equipment in a different manner. And this is all leading up to, Herodotus is divided for purposes of convenience into eight books, nine books, excuse me, not eight, nine. And so the conflict that we're interested in, you and me today, comes in book seven. So he's explained how the Persian Empire came into being, he's explained its expansion, he's explained the cause of Belai, why Xerxes is leading this particular force. And so we get to, it's about August, shall we say, July-August 480 BC, and this is the preliminary to the first of the major conflicts, which is the Battle of Thermopylae in roughly August 480 BC or BCE. You mentioned there briefly how the logistics of the whole Persian operation,

how it had taken years to gather all these troops from, you know, Batrion, Pakistan, all the way to Western Asia Minor. And also the fact, of course, there were a very good point that actually were Greeks in the Persian army. But the size of this invasion, how long it takes logistics wise, if we look at the other side of the conflict, at the Greek city-states that were going to be opposing this force, what have they been doing in the meantime to prepare for Xerxes' great expedition against them? From Marathon on, they would have known that sometime, I mean, some people think quite soon after 492, some of them were already starting their preparations. But I'm of the view that they weren't quite that foresighted and that it wasn't until probably after the death of Darius

who had other priorities than the Greeks, though there is a story that he was always told by his slaves to remember the Athenians, in other words, avenge the Battle of Marathon. That, to me, sounds like a bit of Greek propaganda, especially Athenian propaganda. So Greece, we use the word Greece loosely. The ancients called it Hellas, and it meant the Greek world. There was no one overarching, unified political state, Greece. It's very important to remember we're dealing with a bunch of independent and often very independent, mainly what we call city-states or citizen-states. Only typically a few thousand citizens in all, typically adult males,

and of these, the largest, the most important, and this has been the case for quite some time by 480, were Sparta on the one hand, Athens on the other. And as things turned out by 480, but only very, very recently, Athens had emerged after Marathon, not as a land power only, but principally, in fact, in terms of the most amount of money that they're spending, their principal effort on the military front, they'd become a naval power. And I think this is due partly to foresight on the part of a few Athenians who realized that when the invasion would come it would come by sea as well as by land it would not be enough just to resist them by land. On the other, it's not the other but it's in the deep south

as it were of Greece, Athens is on the eastern side of mainland Greece, but in the southern Peloponnese lay Sparta. And Sparta famously had evolved as a local important force beginning in the 7th century BC, so a couple of hundred years before our time. It had emerged as not just a massive, by Greek standards, state in terms of its territorial extent, but also a very strange one insofar as it seems to have privileged military preparation, i.e. being military seems to have been the overriding concern of the entire state, partly because they have chosen to conquer a larger number than they of locals. In other words, instead of just developing within their own particular region of Southeast Peloponnese, they've extended their control across actually quite a formidable mountain chain to the west to conquer Mycenae, as well as what we call, using a Latin name, Laconia, so that they occupied roughly two-fifths of the entire Peloponnese as their own territory, with many hundreds, indeed thousands, of unfree, some people call them serfs, called helots. So anyway, the Spartans developed

first a massive city-state of their own based on the control of large numbers of Greeks who are unfree, called helots. They then extend their control, their domination, their influence through an organization which we call for short the Peloponnesian League. It's an alliance, not of all the cities of the Peloponnese by any means, but of many of them. And the Spartans are, as it were, the leader. So already, long before Thermopylae, So already long before Thermopylae, long before Xerxes, there is an organization, ready-made, an alliance, which is a military alliance, but it's entirely land-based. One or two of their allies have navies, but the Spartans famously are very much non-naval. They are very much a land power. very much non-naval, they are very much a land power. So in order to resist Xerxes in the late 480s, Greeks if they're going to resist at all need a two-pronged resistance by land by sea. The Spartans provide the land-based resistance, the

leadership, the Athenians the naval naval-based resistance. And it's only very, very recently that the Athenians become able, they're in a position to resist by sea because they have on their territory, this is a bit of a fluke, supplies of silver. With that silver, they're able to purchase, to spend the money on buying, constructing up to 200 of the very latest type of warship. This is absolutely crucial for one particular battle, the one that comes immediately after Thermopylae, namely Salamis, in September of 480 BC. ADBC. So the Spartans and the Athenians agree, they disagree on lots of things, but they agree that they're going to resist together the Persian invasion under Xerxes. And in a way, this is quite interesting, because it's not the Spartans who provoked the Persian attack, it's the Athenians. So the Spartans, in agreeing to ally with, to form an alliance of a military kind with Athens to resist, are in a way doing the Athenians a favour,

though at the same time they're putting themselves forward as champions, as it were, of the Greeks. And it's very interesting that the Athenians agree to concede priority to the Spartans. So the leader, the formal general or admiral in charge of every campaign is always a Spartan. Even if it's a naval battle that's being fought, it's still a Spartan who technically is the overall, as it were, the Nelson of the fleet. And that, I think, is because the majority of the Greeks who agree to resist are allies of Sparta in the Peloponnesian League. So Athens, as of then, does not have an alliance, it's itself. Sparta has something like 15 or 16 allies, and that constitutes about half of, I mean, it's extraordinary if I say it to you, 32 or 33

out of the 700 or so Greek cities in mainland Greece and in the Aegean, only 32 or 33 agree to resist the Persians. And so the Spartans are the leaders of half of those anyway, and they then become overall leaders. So it's a question, as Xerxes now is poised up in North Greece, which line of defence do they choose? And it's got to be one which links, it's linkable by land and sea, because Greek type of warships and so on, they don't have the capacity to spend lots of time on the water. They need a base. And then you've got to have a connection with the army because Xerxes' forces is going to come down by land and by sea. So they first of all think, well, let's defend a pass right at the north of Thessaly, which is on the borders with Macedonia, Macedonia then being in the Persian Empire.

So they send a force to the Vale of Tempe, and then they realize, and it's actually a sign of amateurism, both ignorance of southern Greeks of the north. I mean, where have we heard that before? And they send a force, as it were, is thermopoly by land. And the northern tip of the island of Evia, where there is a temple of Artemis, and that's why the shrine, that area is called the Artemision, in Latin Artemisium. And they're easily connectable, they're easily linkable by a boat. You can communicate very quickly. So from what you're saying there, it's Sparta's decision to ally with Athens which really puts them in the crosshairs of Xerxes's invasion. Exactly right, because Xerxes did not have Sparta as a particular enemy. There had been relations of various kinds between the two.

There's a famous story in Herodotus that the Spartans say, leave my fellow Greeks alone. The Spartans send him a message and he says, who are the Spartans? Which is just a joke, but it's a very important way of saying that there is no direct connection. Then one of the leaders of the revolt I mentioned earlier that took place about 500, he goes to Sparta to try to get them to help. And they say, sorry, mate, I mean, it's absolutely out of the question. Persia's miles away, and we can't possibly help you. And that's when the Athenians decided to help. So it wasn't predictable that the Spartans would be quite such determined opponents of the Persians as they actually turned out to be in 480 BC.

So they've decided Thermopylae to be the base of their defence. But the army that marches north, the famous army, it's relatively small, isn't it? It is indeed. And there are a number of thoughts about this. In other words, did the Greeks, United Greeks, the few United Greeks, think, well, we're never going to defeat the Persians at Thermopylae. The best we can do is hold them up. And since the pass, it's about a kilometre long. It's very narrow. You could just about get two chariots passing in some points, and it's right on the sea, the topography's changed. So if you've, for example, seen the movie The 300 Spa, sea, so it looks much broader than it actually was then.

It was right on the sea. So they're not going to need, if you like, quite as many as you might have thought. You've got Xerxes with his, what, 100 plus thousand? And the Greeks, the resisting loyalist Greeks, managed to get together something of the order of six thousand for the other reason why there were fewer and this is in the sources I mean it said well possibly this was just a an advance card it was a just a temporary and they were going to wait hold up the Xerxes forces and then be joined by many many more of their mates when things changed. And the reason I put it that way is that there were two major religious festivals going on

at this time. And you could argue that it was a very clever move. Think about the, for example, Yom Kippur War in 1973. Xerxes knows that the Olympic Games are about to happen. He knows that it's the sacred month for all Dorian Greeks, the Karnia month, in which a nine-day festival, which takes precedence over everything else, a religious festival. This is the time to hit them, boys. Well, it might be that, or it might be it just coincidentally. It took Xerxes that long to get to where he'd got. And so by that time, these two things were happening.

At any rate, it's certainly the case the Olympic Games were happening in August 480, and it's certainly the case that the Spartan Carnia Festival was happening in about August 480. Whatever, whatever. The Spartans decide to send one of their two kings. This is quite normal. You would never send both your kings. So Sparta was odd in having kings. And this is one of the many ways in which Sparta is very different from Athens, which had by this time become a kind of democracy. from Athens, which had by this time become a kind of democracy, they send Leonidas, who is actually quite elderly. He's probably in his late 50s by this time. And he chooses a special force, a task force. And we hear of the figure 300 as being the normal size of the royal bodyguard in Sparta. So on a regular basis, day-to-day basis, there were 300 young Spartans who were, as it were, the elite, the marines,

if you like, of the Spartan army. And if there were to be a battle, they would fight with the king in their midst, bang in the center of a Spartan army. But this particular task force of 300, and it's something that's quite often overlooked, was not that normal royal 300 back in Sparta. It was especially picked up force because every member of it had to have been already not only married but the father of a son and I think this is something which is somewhat in my way of looking at things absolutely crucial they expected I think to die I don't think they thought that many of those 300 would survive. As a matter of fact, two of them did, which is another interesting little detail that's quite often overlooked. But at any rate, Leonidas

had a son who was going to succeed him, as it was to turn out. But I believe that Leonidas had sent in regular way to Delphi, which was a kind of information bureau as well as being a validation of anything that a Greek city wished to do. You get Apollo's advice or support. And an oracle had come back saying that if a king of Sparta died, then there was a chance that Sparta would survive this terrific, unprecedented invasion. If not, Sparta would be destroyed. Xerxes, at this point, probably wouldn't have thought yet beyond Athens. Athens was his target. But the Spartans, if they're committing a king, they've got to have a very good reason for wanting to do so. And that seems to be a very powerful incentive. This is, in other words, in part, not a pragmatic decision of the Spartans. It's a symbolic

decision to send a particular kind of force so that when they die, and they're going to have to die well, they can set an example, not only in Sparta, not only to the allies of the Spartans, but to the whole of the Greek world, at a time when most Greeks either were neutral at best, either were neutral at best or actually positively on the Persian side. One has to remember that all of Greece down to Thermopylae had gone over to the Persians. And south of Thermopylae, the Thebans in Boeotia, which is quite close to Athens, they had gone over to the Persians. So it was a very, very risky thing to do to resist at all. I think one has to be very insistent on this. So who supported him? Who

followed him? Well, one city which didn't like Thebes in Boeotia called Thespiae, they sent all their men of fighting age who were able to equip themselves as heavy armed infantrymen, all of them, whereas the Spartans sent 300 out of their, well, perhaps as many as 6,000 or 7,000 troops. There's a figure of 8,000 which is mentioned, and it may mean that there were as many as 7,000, 8,000 Spartans under arms, aged over 20 and under 60, because those were the fighting years, 20 to 60. In addition to them, there were a handful of their allies from the Peloponnese, plus some from central Greece, plus 400 from Thebes. Now, this is interesting because the Theban regime was pro-Persian, I mean, quite actively pro-Persian, not just not anti-Persian, but pro-Persian. After the wars, when the Greeks had won,

the resisting loyalist Greeks, Thebes obviously was in very bad odor and they had to be punished and they were punished to some extent. At any rate, lots of propaganda was put out as to why Thebes had gone over to the Persians and actually things weren't going so well. So there was a force of 400 Thebans, which the negative tradition, those who disliked the Thebans, believed were hostages, that Leonidas had somehow managed to compel 400 of them to come and fight in order to be a sort of check on any positive action that Thebes might take in support of the Persians. In other words, an attack on the people of Thermopylae, for example, from the rear. The alternative view is that Thebes was divided.

There were a number of Thebans who were actually anti-Persian, and they wanted to fight with Leonidas, and they did. And so they, as it were, defied their own regime. They signed up as volunteers. So anyway, there were 400 Thebans. If you add all the people together that we can put figures on, the numbers at Leonidas' disposal were of the order of 6,000 to 7, thousand. So we've got these six thousand troops of Thermopylae and how long, it's not too long before Xerxes and his huge Persian army descend on Thermopylae from the north isn't it? This is correct that they pitch up, they find that the pass is already fortified, it has gates as they call it in the middle so you hear the expression

middle gates so the pass is east west and it's about a kilometer long and in the middle it's already fortified that's its narrowest part and so they refurbish that first of all and then they as you rightly say they don't have to wait too long But once Xerxes has arrived at the western end and pitched his camp and watered his troops and rest them, he waits one, two, three, four days. And we have Herodotus only as our source. was that this would cause the Greeks to, you know, run away, basically, so that he could then march unopposed through this narrow pass, which is the main route of entry from North Greece into Central Greece and eventually towards Athens. It didn't work.

Leonidas and his men were absolutely determined not to flee. And so on the fifth day, fourth or fifth at any rate, the battle commenced. And it was a three-day affair, three-day battle. First day, Xerxes sends in not his absolutely tip-top troops, but pretty good Iranian troops. And they get really rather mauled by the defenders especially of course by the Spartans who are more heavily equipped they've got

better defensive armor they're fighting for their homeland they have that morale factor whereas the enemy is as it were a a pickup bunch, multi-ethnic. They're not particularly committed to conquering Greece. This doesn't particularly engage them. And so the first day is really, Herodotus even speaks of, you know, five-digit figure losses on the Persian side, 10,000 plus. on the Persian side, 10,000 plus. And the second day, he says, pretty much the same. So Xerxes is a little bit frustrated, but it's on the second day when there is a difference in Herodotus' theory. He mentions that more than one name is mentioned as, if you like,

the guilty party. But the Spartans and most people believe that the man who was the traitor, he came from a nearby region from Marlis, and Thermopylae is along the Marleac Gulf, so it's the region of Marlis, and next door to that is Trachis. It's all generically in Thessaly. It's all generically in Thessaly. Ephialtes, his name, says, look, I know a way round the back. You go over the mountain, you come down, and then you've got them. You enter the pass from the east, and they're in the middle, and you are on the west. They're pincered.

You've got them. Well, Leonidas knew that there was a way over the mountain round the back because he had posted a guard, quite a large one actually, of people from the area of the resisting Greeks because their principal enemy was the Thessalian Greeks, and the Thessalian Greeks were on the Persian side. So my enemy's enemy is my friend, or my friend's enemy is my friend. And the Phocians, therefore, were a suitable people to choose a defense force to guard this pass. But Herodotus tells it very, very negatively. The Phocians were pathetic, to be frank. They didn't realize that the Persians were sending a force to pass them, and they had already passed them before they realized that there was something coming that they should resist and the phokians prepared for a battle and the persians who were going past through the pass over the back just ignored them and did the phokians chase after them they did not

because i think they were outnumbered and they thought they probably knew, so they actually performed pathetically. At any rate, this meant that the Persians who had been sent, and these included the crack regiment of Xerxes' military infantry forces, known as the Immortals by the Greeks, the Persians seem to call them the Apple Bearers. Anyway, the equivalent of the Spartans' Royal Bodyguard, 300. But these are, because Persia is so much bigger, 10,000. Well, they didn't send all 10,000, obviously, over the mountain. But at any rate, crack force led by a very senior commander,

the captain of the Immortal Guard, who had been a provincial governor in Asia beforehand. And, well, it all worked out, as the Persians hoped. So on the third day, the lookouts, who had seen this disastrous performance by the Phocians, the Greeks, ran down to tell Leonidas, look, mate, the game is up. The Persians are coming around. You're about to be pincered. Opinions now differ, and probably they differed at the time. Did the non-Spartans and all other Greeks except the Thespians and the Thebans simply flee,

Thespians and the Thebans simply flee, realizing they were going to be killed if they didn't? Or did Leonidas say, you go, I'm dismissing you, so you're not fleeing dishonorably, I am discharging you because I and my Spartans and then the volunteers from Thespiae. And this is the dispute of Thebans. Did they volunteer to stay or were they volunteered to stay because Leonidas wanted certain Thebans killed? We don't know. At any rate, that's the scenario on day three, which is the decisive, the final, the climax of the battle of Thermopylae.

And that decision for the Spartans to stay, you mentioned earlier about death and the Spartans and their culture and how they were prepared, basically, to give their life in this forward defence, it seems. There's an interesting comparison making your book with the Bushido Code of Japan in the Second World War. Is there striking similarities between those two cultures in their warrior belief, as it were? I do believe that the Spartan elite shared a similar samurai mentality and the Bushido ethic. Not all my colleagues agree with me on that in the general principle.

And one might argue that this is a unique situation and therefore you can't generalise from it to how the Spartans looked upon themselves and their way of life in general. But there are certain features of the way in which they defended Thermopylae, the way in which it was talked about later, that suggest to me that Dendrite, by this point, this was indeed, I even use the word kamikaze, but that's a little bit excessive perhaps,

word kamikaze, but that's a little bit excessive perhaps. But they were, I think, a task force doomed to, but determined to, die and set an example in the way they died that would resonate immediately, but also has in fact resonated right down the reason why we're having this discussion today. And there is a little bit of a clue in one particular feature which is dwelt upon by Herodotus, who knew Sparta. He'd been there. Not many Greeks who were not Spartans actually visited Sparta. And this is a detail about their hair, the way in which the Spartans managed, if they could. I mean, of course, some Spartans managed if they could I mean of course some Spartans presumably were bald I don't know one assumes that might be the case anyway whereas most Greek men grew a beard they cut their hair so they when

they became another they would have a beard but their hair would be reasonably short. Spartans, yes, grew a beard, but they shaved off the moustache so that they had a clean-shaven upper lip. And that's, if you fact, a saying that when the chief officials of the Spartan state, they were elected annually, five of them, the overseers, the ethos. When they came into office in the autumn, they made two declarations. One was to declare war on behalf of the Spartans on the helots. Quite an extraordinary thing to declare war on your workforce, which means it's okay to kill them if you have to. You're not committing murder because they're an enemy. The second declaration of the air force was shave your lip, your upper lip, and obey the laws. And it is the case that the famous statue which is attributed to

Leonidas, it isn't actually of him, at any rate it is of a Spartan of the right sort of period, very famous in the Sparta Museum, has its shaven upper lip. You know it's just a very distinctive Spartan thing. Well the other thing about their hair was normally adult males, 20 and over, in other Greek cities kept their hair fairly short. Spartans grew their hair to such an extent that it was such a feature that non-Spartans commented on it. And in the case of the Thermopylae campaign, of the Thermopylae campaign, when Xerxes sends a scout on horseback in advance, his troops are lumbering along on the roads, sends a horseman to spy out the land. What are the Spartans up to? One thing that strikes him most, and of course this could be Herodotus rather than the reality, could be Herodotus rather than the reality. These guys, the Spartans, they exercise naked.

Well, that's shocking to an Oriental, to take all your clothes off in public. But they are combing after having bathed their long hair. So Herodotus wants to make a thing of this. And what he has, he has a series of conversations. They're staged, of course, by Herodotus wants to make a thing of this. And what he has, he has a series of conversations. They're staged, of course, by Herodotus. Between Xerxes and one of his inner circle of Greek advisors, who happens to be an ex-Spartan king, a man called Damaratus or Demaratus. So Xerxes, this is Herodotus, asks Demaratus, explain to me what the scout has just told me, that they're exercising naked and they're combing their long hair.

And Demaratus says, when Spartans are preparing to fight, they assume that they might die. They do exactly what these guys are doing. They take exercise and they comb their long hair. These are both signals and symbols that they are resolved to die. Well, I think that given the circumstances of Thermopylae, given the Spartans took only 300, there was never any talk of them actually sending reinforcements, really. This was, I think, a task force determined to die. Now, whether all Spartans, in the way that Darmaratus is made to say say always predicted or were willing to contemplate their death. I don't know, but other Greeks did think this was a peculiarly Spartan thing.

It's a famous story, man from Sybaris. It's an invented anecdote. Sybaris gives us Sybarite. It's a city of Greeks in southern Italy. They live high on the hog. And when the Sybarite gets to Sparta, he's fed the usual local food, some dreadful kind of soup and not much else. When he gets back, he tells his fellow Sybarites, now I can see why the Spartans are so willing to die because their life is, you know, so it's a joke.

But it all goes together. It's partly a myth, partly a mystique, but it's partly also, I think, a unique feature of Spartan culture, at least at this particular moment. And ultimately, that leads to Leonidas, his Spartans, the Thespians and the Thebans, dying almost completely to a man at Thermopylae. That's right. There are two Spartan survivors. One had been sent on a diplomatic mission to neighbouring Greeks, you know, come and send us some help. And the other one who doesn't die has terrific, very bad eye infection and can't see, he's blind.

And well, it's a question, isn't it? Why nevertheless, when there was one other Spartan in exactly the same situation, who had his helot servant lead him into the battle and he died. Why did this other one, Aristodamos is his name, not do that? But anyway, the fact of the matter is that he gets back to Sparta, as does the man who'd been sent away on a diplomatic mission, who then is away from the battle on the final day. Well, that other guy commits suicide as soon as he gets back to Sparta, which reinforces the notion that they were all expected to die. The other one, Aristodamos, instead of dying by his own hand, he dies at the hands of the Persians in the next major land battle that the Spartans are engaged in, the actually decisive land battle

of Plataea the following year. So Thermopylae ends with Leonidas having been killed actually before the very end. The last handful of Spartans and others on a hill, which is very clearly visible still today and it's on that hill that a famous poem an epigram has been inscribed as a plaque and it says something like go tell the Spartans stranger passing by that here obedient to there that is the Spartans' laws, we lie, we Spartans, but also we are the Greeks who died rather than give in or flee. So it's a terrifically kind of symbolic, it's like the Alamo in American folklore, Texan folklore, a heroic resistance doomed really from the start. But such was the morale, the spirit in which these people agreed to die, that it set an example that others would try to live up to. And in that regard, in the immediate aftermath, the morale impact of Thermopylae, although it's defeat, does it still alter, would you say, does it alter the course of the Persian war? Well, it has two functions. One is it holds up the Persian army, therefore gives the Greeks

further to the south even more time to prepare. On the other hand, because of its linkage with Artemisium, that is this amphibious nature of the resistance, the Greeks at Artemisium do rather well. One probably would call the result a draw, but at any rate, large numbers of Persian ships, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Greek, are damaged or put out of action. And so the combination of a heroic land resistance, which holds up admittedly for only a week, but nevertheless does have that effect, with the naval really a bit of an infliction of damage on the Persians. So the Persian amphibious force that marches or sails south is less gung-ho, shall we say, than it might otherwise have been. Xerxes' leadership is to that extent somewhat diminished, somewhat damaged, and Thermopylae therefore does have some practical immediate function in its own context in the long term then we're talking about it today and of course it's been become immortalized in

hollywood movies even in games day of assassin's creed and that like in the long term the battle Long term, the Battle of Thermopylae, is it insignificant skirmish or very important battle in history? Yes, that's a tough one, isn't it? In its own terms, skirmish it wasn't really. Possibly, as I say, as many as 20,000 on the Persian side might have been killed, which is not insubstantial. On the other hand, it wasn't decisive because the Persians win, they get through a little slower, and perhaps to some extent a little more angry than they might have been otherwise. They're also a little bit less cock-a-hoop, less cocky, less gung-ho.

And it doesn't stop them doing what they really wanted to do, which in the first instance primarily was to destroy, to make a significant damage to Athens. And they do indeed conquer, they take over Athens, they destroy much of the center of Athens, and they destroy buildings on the top of the Acropolis, and so on. So to that extent, the outcome of Thermopylae is pretty much negative in immediate practical military terms. But nevertheless, the Spartans can hold their head up high. And when it comes to the next major battle

which is going to be fought on sea the Spartan admiral who is the overall commander-in-chief though the Spartans contribute only a tiny number of ships nevertheless has the respect that comes from the commitment of significant numbers of important citizens of Sparta to the cause, the Hellenic, the Pan-Hellenic, the all-Greek anti-Persian cause. They don't actually contribute very much to the victory at Salamis, which follows in the following month, but nevertheless they can hold their head up high and they're in good shape when it comes to the actually decisive land battle, which is to be fought the following summer in central Greece at Plataea, not far from Thebes, not far from Athens. And final question regarding this. The Bastard Thermopylae is sometimes regarded as the foundation of what scholars have called the Spartan mirage, with the mythologising, the romanticising of Sparta, although it's not exactly, well, it's fictional. Would you agree with this, that this is the foundation, as it were, of the Spartan mirage in history?

Yes, the word was coined by a French scholar in the 30s, and his point was that most of the evidence about Sparta is by non-Spartans. And it falls into two groups. It's a bit like thinking about the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s. You either hate it or you love it. It's very difficult to be balanced, partly because it's very difficult to find out actually what the real truth is. So as a result of Thermopylae, it was Thermopylae which creates this aspect of the mirage, which is Spartans never surrender. They fight for whatever they believe in to the death. They are utterly committed. They're total in their outlook and totalizing. And this is actually, I think, an accurate reflection of the way in which they organized their society internally. They were the only Greek state that had a communal, centralized, obligatory education system.

No other Greek city as such organized the education of its young men, typically. And the Spartans educated not only their young men, but their young women as well. This is quite extraordinary. There's a whole aspect of Sparta which doesn't actually emerge much in connection with Thermopylae. But if we were to talk about other aspects of Sparta, then the role of women in Sparta was quite exceptional. At any rate, the mirage in its written form doesn't get started until the late 5th century. So it's an Athenian, very right-wing Athenian, reactionary, oligarchic Athenian called Critias, and he writes about the Spartans. And so that's the beginning of the mirage in terms of projecting a Sparta that is idealized. But Thermopylae is a key element

in one dimension of that imaginary, partly mythical, partly factual tradition. Perfect. Paul, thanks very much. Your book on Thermopylae is still one of the best books out there covering this clash. Once again, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Very kind indeed. Lovely to meet you, Tristan.

I hope I'll actually meet you physically one day. Oh, when this is over, we'll go out for a pint, I'm sure. That'd be great. Take care. Have a great day. Bye.