The Ancients - Leonidas: King of Sparta, Hero of Thermopylae

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

In 480 BC, at the narrow pass of Thermopylae, a vastly outnumbered Greek force prepares to face the advancing army of the Persian king Xerxes. At its head stands Leonidas, king of Sparta, ready to make a final stand that will become one of the most famous moments in ancient history.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Andrew Bayliss to peel back the myth and uncover the real story of Leonidas. Tracing Leonidas's origins amid the turbulent politics of Sparta’s Agiad dynasty to his denouement at the hot gates of Thermopylae, they explore Leonidas's journey to power, his dogged defiance against the Persians and what his story reveals about Spartan society, kingship and warfare at the height of the Greco-Persian Wars.Watch this episode on our YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastMORE:Xerxes the Great: Listen on AppleListen on Spotify The Spartan Warrior:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Late summer, 480 BC, and a massive Persian army, more than 100,000 strong, approaches the gates of Thermopylae, a narrow pass with mountains to its south and a gulf of water to its north. Get through this pass and the road to great cities like Athens lies open for the Persian King Xerxes and his mighty host. But in their way stands an army, tiny in comparison, but determined to be. block the pass, commanded by a figure who would become steeped in legend. Leonidas, king of Sparta, hero of Thermopylae. Thanks to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, Frank Miller's 300 comic series, and two Hollywood

films, today most of us carry a ready-made image of Leonidas as a fearless warrior king hurling himself against endless ranks of Persian soldiers. But who was the real Leonidas, before all of the glory, all of the legend, how much actually survives about him? In today's episode, we peel back these layers of legend to explore the complicated world which shaped him, and the twisted and tragic politics in his family, Sparta's royal Aegean dynasty. We'll look at the reign of his half-brother, Cleomenes, the scandals, the alleged madness, and the political rupture that ultimately opened the way for Leonidas to rule. And then, of course, we march to Thermopylae, Leonidas's finest hour during the

climax of the Greco-Persian Wars. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of Leonidas. Our guest is Dr. Andrew Bayliss, Associate Professor in Greek History at the University of Birmingham, and the author of Sparta, the rise and fall of an ancient superpower. Andrew What a pleasure it is to have you back on the podcast. It has been too long. Thank you. It's brilliant to be here again. To talk about, he is the most famous, the legendary Spartan king, Leonidas, and he has become something of an icon today, purely because of the Bas of Thermopylai. Absolutely. If you think of Sparta, you think of Thermopyla, you think of Leonidas.

They all go together as one package. But, as we're going to be covering his whole story today, there is so much more to his tale than just Themopoli. Yes, and no. As in, because is this a figure shrouding quite a bit of mystery? I would say for sure, in terms of lack of sources. Most of the sources we have are talking entirely about the Battle of Thermopyla. So it's almost like the Onidas appears out of nowhere, but you sort of have to dig around and find the backstory

in the earlier stories about the Spartans. Is it understanding more about Sparta as a state and how Sparta acted as a people to kind of learn more about what Leonidas's earlier years would have looked like. Absolutely. And picking through the narratives about his family story because he's one of four brothers. So there's a lot to unpick there.

And can you tell us what are our main sources for learning about Leonidas and the world in which he lived? So the late 6th and early 5th centuries BC? Yeah. So our number one source and our earliest surviving source is erodotus. And so that's why it's, all about Thomoply, because Herodotus doesn't even mention Leonidas until he actually gets to Thamoply, so he really does appear out of nowhere. We've got later sources like Diodorus,

but he only introduces Leonidas at Thomoply as well, and we've got sayings attributed to him by Plutarch, but most of those are actually relating to Thomoply as well. So we're quite limited in source material. And how much can we trust, let's say we focus on Herodotus first and foremost, how much can we trust his version of Leonidas that he puts forward? And I guess his overall opinion towards Spartan kings. That's a tricky one. It's always a tricky one. How much can we trust anything with Sparta?

So Herodotus traveled to Sparta. He spoke to Spartans. It has been suggested by many experts that he spoke to Golgo, Leonidas's wife. So he would be getting an official version of Leonidas, but maybe somewhat partial version of Leonidas. and he's writing 50 years after the events. So there's a lot of rebalancing, I think, of what really happened coming through. So he's getting the official Spartan version of what Thermopyla was rather than what we might think Thomopoli actually was. He's already become a cult hero by that time in Sparta, which I'm sure we'll explore as time goes on.

Absolutely. I think cult hero is perfect. And I think all the 300 who fought and died with Leonidas were cult heroes in Sparta. So Herodotus says he travelled to Sparta and he said, I learned all their names. And so he bothered to find them out and sort of commit them to memory, even though he didn't write them all down. And he doesn't say, I read the names off the list that was set up afterwards. So he probably didn't actually see the later memorial to the men who fought and died at Thermopylae as well. You're a proper keen being if you learn all 300 or so of those names of the figures. I think so.

Herodotus liked to show how clever he was. He liked to show his maths. He often got that wrong. But he was trying, and I think he really did commit a lot of facts to memory. Okay, good effort, good effort. And can we also say that, I mean, do we have any archaeological evidence for Leonidas at the same time? My mind will immediately go if we're talking about an ancient ruler to something like coinage or inscriptions, but do we have anything of that sort for him?

No. So we have no classical period Spartan coinage at all. Really? So it's only in the Hellenistic period that we actually get proper Spartan coinage. No inscriptions bear Leonidas's name. there's just those literary accounts, that's it. And is that classic Spartan statue is in there, or depiction of a Spartan, and people sometimes say, that's Leonidas, but is that true?

That's not Leonidas. When the excavators dug him up, they nicknamed him Leonidas, because he was a big heroic-looking man, and it kind of made sense, but no. So there's nothing like, I might also think of Miletides, isn't he, the Bats of Marathon, and there's the helmet, and it has Miletides on it? Yeah, the Miletides helmet from Marathon. Yeah, I'd love taking him, taking my... students to Olympia and showing this is the Meltyides helmet, maybe. It's the right time period.

It's got the right name on. It's no, there's nothing like that for Leonidas at all. The closest you get is the commemorative inscription that was set up in modern times at Thamopoli, which is said to be a representation of the real monument that was set up afterwards. I'm getting a clear feeling here. Maybe our ecological evidence for Leonidas is pretty slight. But let's explore his story as much as we can by taking into account what we know about the Spartan world and the world of Spartan elites and kings at the time that he would have been living. So first and foremost, let's start at the beginning. Do we know much about when he's born and who his parents were? We actually know a surprisingly large amount.

So we finally have something to play with there. So Herodotus gives us a lot of details. He clearly talked to the right people and he tells us about the pretty odd coincidental. is going on with the two Spartan royal houses at the time. And you have Leonidas's father, Alexandradas, and his co-king, Arrestone, both were having trouble having children. And they reached different ways of solving their problem. So when it came to Alexandradas, he was failing to have a child, and the Spartan officials,

the Ephors, visited him. And they basically told him he needed to sort it out and make sure that he didn't allow the royal line to die out. And they said, ditch your current wife, take a new one. get her pregnant and everything will be good. And Alexandra Das said no. He said, my wife's blameless, you're giving me bad advice. And they threatened him and said, well, we could find some way of solving this if you don't do what we're telling you to do, but here's a compromise. Take another wife as well and have children by her. And that's what he did. And so by the new wife,

he had his first son, Cleomenes. But almost as soon as she fell pregnant, the original wife fell pregnant as well. And she gave birth to a son not long after named Doreas and then sometime afterwards two sons, Leonidas and Cleombrotus, who were so close together that there was a story that they might have been twins. And those are all from the first wife from Alexandria, apart from Cleomenes? Yeah, Cleomenes is with the second wife and then the other three are with the original wife. Okay, so Cleomenes is the only half-brother of Leonidas? That's right, yeah. And also, you mentioned their Spartan kings at that time. Can you explain to us this unique concept? And I always hesitate saying the word unique in these cases, but I think it is with the

story of Spartan kings, how the Spartan royalty ruled, because there is not just one royal line. Yeah, that Sparta is not a monarchy, it's a diarchy. A diarchy. What a word. It is a wonderful word, and I often say to people, all right, name another diarchy. And there is a Wikipedia page explaining diarchy out there, but there are very few real situations where you have two genuinely equal royal houses. So Herodotus tells us that the Aghiad royal house, which was the Onodas's one, was the more senior. But a hundred years later, the Europontid royal house actually seemed more senior. So it was probably a force of personality as much as anything else. So two kings, supposedly equal, both command armies,

both sit on the council of elders, and they could nominally be in charge at various points in time. And do they both feel the same functions? It's not like one king is more senior than the other than when they're ruling at the same time? Not really, no. So they both priests of Zeus, they both command armies, they both sit on the council, so they have very equal roles in that way. Herodotus tells us one story where Cleomenes, Leonidas's half-brother, led out an army and his co-commander was Demerantis, the Euripontid king. And along the way, DeMarantus decided he didn't want to be involved in it and went home. And when he left, all the Allies went, oh, well, the Spartans aren't on equal footing on this, so we better bail out as well. So the whole campaign led to

nothing. And then afterwards, the Spartans, according to Rodot, to set up a new rule where only one king would command an army to avoid that kind of thing happening again. So there's always a king in Sparta that kind of idea, is it? Yeah, yeah. So there'll be one at home to oversee what's happening there and one and commanding the army and then no chance of them interfering with each other. And in regards to marriage and wives of these kings, did they ever intermarried? Do they ever mix the two lines?

Not that we know of, no. So it's only in the Hellenistic period that there's sort of some sort of change with that. no, there's no sense in, I'm trying to think of a concrete example and I can't. So they intermarry within their own family. So Anacandradas's first wife was his niece. But I'm struggling to think of any moment where the two royal houses mingle. But that's even more interesting. So let's focus that.

So close-kin marriage and incest are parts of Spartan royal life then? Yeah. So there's several examples of uncles marrying nieces in the ancient world. That wasn't as abnormal as it is today, but that is something that Spartans seem to have done enough for people to notice. And it's probably all about the fact that Spartan women inherit land. So you can keep the wealth in the family by making sure that they don't marry out into another family. Right, there you go.

With the Spartan kings, are they also expected primarily to be charismatic and capable warlords, especially when they're leading the army out? Are they expected to be fighting at the front with them? They do fight very much at the front, and they're guarded by the elite unit of the Spartan army, the 300 hippays, which literally means knights, but they don't fight on horseback. And so the best of the best are with the king.

Olympic champions have a special right to fight near the king as well. So the king should be at the front, and quite a few Spartan kings do die in combat. And are they expected to be athletic? Do they compete in the Olympic Games as well? We do have examples of Spartan kings competing in the Olympic Games. De Moratis, Leonidas, no, he's never quite Leonidas as Co-King, adjacent to Leonidas.

He won at the Four Horse Chariot Race at the Olympics, but we don't have any examples of boxing or running or anything like that for the Kings, but they do do sport. So he's made you to have that kind of very, like his virulent character to them, that charismatic character when they're, as part of their leadership. So let's talk about the next stage in Leonidas' story, which is the death of his father, Alexandridaeus. So what happens when Alexandridae dies? Well, as far as I see it, what happens when Alexandradas dies, the natural things happens.

His eldest son, Cleomenes, becomes king. But that seems to have been a surprise to his second son, Dorias, who thought that he should be king. And Herodotus said he thought he should be king because he was manifestly the best of his generation. And the obvious assumption from that is that he must have gone through the Spartan upbringing, that it must be in operation by now, because how else would he be able to prove that he was the best of his generation if it wasn't something that people had been assessing and monitoring? And what was this Spartan upbringing? This feels a good time to talk about that as well, because I guess we can also ask whether Leonidas would have done similar.

Yeah, so the Spartan upbringing is a mandatory step to full Spartan citizenship for ordinary Spartans. So you have to start at age seven, goes through to 20 or 30, depending on how you want to assess the final stage of sort of processing a citizen through intersful citizenship. It's quite brutal. There's a lot of sport. The official who oversees it has the title Piedinomos, which means boy herder. The boys are just grouped into batches that some of the primary sources call herds. Xenophon describes them as sort of squadrons. The Pieda Anomos is assisted by young men known as the whip bearers, and there is a lot of evidence for brutal corporal punishment for indiscretions by boys going through the upbringing.

And every single Spartan citizen has to go through this with a couple of exceptions, and that is the direct heirs to the two royal houses. So Plutarch tells us probably incorrectly that the fourth century Euripontid king, Ageselaus, was the only Spartan king to have gone through the upbringing. He probably hadn't remembered that Leonidas must have done before him. So that sort of makes it exceptional for these kings who have gone through the upbringing because they're kind of one of the boys, but they're not because they then become one of these charismatic kings. So the thought process that a lot of modern scholars have is that they exempted the heir to the throne from the upbringing

because you couldn't really risk them failing. So they might look a bit rubbish if they'd done badly. So in regards to Leonidas' family, then it seems that Cleomenes would not have gone through this, but both Doreas and Leonidas would have gone through this fully Spartan training. Yeah, and the other brother Cleombrotus as well. So there would have been this obvious distinction between those three full brothers and their half-brother. So it won't necessarily just be, yeah, we kind of think we're better than him because we're from the original legitimate wife.

there may well have been a sense that, well, we've gone through the state upbringing, so we're manifestly better men than him, he who hasn't done it. And can you also explain what happens if, let's say Leonidas completes that training, as he almost certainly did, how does that distinguish him from the rest of Spartan society and not just full-blooded Spartans? Well, I think when it comes to full-blooded Spartans, it distinguishes him not at all. It actually makes him part of what you could think of as the in-group of, of Spartan citizens, they call themselves the homoyoi, which means the equals.

They dine together in communal mess groups every night. They spend their time exercising, hunting, being gentlemen of leisure. So he would have been one of them, whereas Cleomenes wouldn't have been. He would have been separate from that. The kings have their own common mess where they dine with their chosen companions. They get a double portion so they can entertain guests. So Leonidas would have been one of the guys. but then he would have been, like all Spartan citizens,

very distinct from the sub-citizen groups in Sparta, the Perioichoi, and then the Helots who did the work for them. And so who are the Perioicoe? They're free men who live in communities around the Spartans. They share the label Lacedaemonians with the Spartans, because Spartans aren't really Spartans. The primary sources all call them the Lackademonians. And so they do the work that the Spartans are supposed to be not doing,

because they're gentlemen of leisure who aren't supposedly aren't allowed to work. So they do the trading, they do the manufacturing, that kind of thing. And then beneath them, you have the slave population of Helots who work the land for the Spartans, allowing them all, including Leonidas, to be gentlemen of leisure. And perioichos, that literally means those living around? Yeah, that's literally it. So do you think it's fair to say that Leonidas, when he's growing up, when he's going through this education, that even he himself would not have

expected to one day become king? I think, well, you could probably ask many princes now how they feel about what their chances are of becoming king, but I think as the third brother, he would have thought very little chance of becoming a king. And so what do we know then by the time that Cleomones does succeed his father as king? Do we have any idea roughly how old Doreas and Leonidas would have been at that time as well? Well, Doreus is basically practically the same age as Cleomenes. We're not sure well, the gap is between Leonidas and Cleomones, but the assumption is he's kind of pushing 60 by the Battle of Thermopy. So when their father dies, he should be near enough to an adult. Near enough to an adult, because he dies in about 524? Something like that. Something like that.

And that's when Cleomones comes to the four. And what is Cleomenes' reign? What is it defined by? How does he change or, I guess, improve Sparta? I think what he does is continue his father's policies, which was ousting Tyrone. from other parts of the Greek world and trying to set up puppet regimes that will be loyal to Sparta and secure Sparta's security from outside threats.

So he does that, but in his own way and occasionally pushes things too far. And where are these threats at this time? How powerful is Sparta? Is it the dominant force in the Peloponnese or is it still trying to kind of expand its authority there? I think it's still trying to expand its authority.

It is becoming the dominant force. So by the time Herodotus introduces us to the Spartans, which is 540 or thereabouts. He said Sparta is the dominant force in the Peloponnese, but it kind of isn't yet because the original dominant force, Argos, is still strong and still powerful. So a lot of Cleomenes' activities are directed against Argos. Is this around the time you get the famous Battle of the Champions as well?

Yeah, so it's just the Battle of the Champions is around 575 or thereabouts. So that's the moment that Sparta really starts to dominate Argos. but Argos is still powerful, so there needs to be a few more confrontations for Argos to finally accept that the Spartans are really in charge. Well, are there any big notable campaigns by Cleomones in the Peloponnese, or perhaps even beyond that, that occurs during his reign that we should mention? I think you can't not talk about his involvement with Athens. Okay.

So the Athenians have their official story, which was Harmonius and Aristogaitan, the tyrannicides, got rid of the tyrants because they killed Hipparchus. The hystritids, right? except he was the brother, the younger brother of Hippias, who was the actual tyrant of Athens. So the Athenian official story is kind of hiding the fact that really it was the Spartans who ousted Hippias, because they got messages from the Oracle at Delphi to liberate Athens from the tyranny. So they did. And so they had several failed attempts militarily to oust hippias,

and then Cleomone's led a campaign himself and actually ended up besieging the Piscerited family on the Athenian necropolis. and managed to force them out. Can we presume, I mean, is it likely then, that Leonidas would have been one of the Spartan hoplites, one of the Spartan warriors serving in that army? It's entirely plausible that Leonidas will have been involved in some of his brother's campaigns, although you might wonder whether what role he would have, is he going to be an officer, would the king want his younger half-brother to be in any sort of official role, or would he considered that to be a problem. Popular novels covering this often sort of turn Leonidas

into a senior officer and someone who's learning to sort of find his own way while his brother is king. But there's nothing in the sources. That's the really frustrating thing. There are probably a few hypothetical questions I'm going to ask. I mean, one of them, another theoretical one, is if Leonidas did go through that Spartan training system, which seems almost certain that he did, I can't ever wonder whether that would have really increased his popularity with the Spartans that he was growing up alongside and almost becoming the equivalent of his companions. And whether is there any potential there that the likes of Cleomenes would have looked upon his younger brothers, his half-brothers, and seen them as potential to threats because they

might have had a lot of popularity with Spartans of similar age? I would think so, yes. And the direct analogy is, I guess, on Aes, the 4th century, Euripontid king, who went through the upbringing, who seems to have been. been particularly respected by his men because he had gone through that system with them. So some of the other kings sort of seemed to be, well, who do they think they are? What's their right to command us? They don't know what they're doing, whereas, I guess, Alias obviously knew what he was doing

because he'd gone through the system and had been recognized as excellent. So the same thing might have happened with the Onidas. The other guys might have thought, yeah, he's one of us. So that would be potentially a threat to a king, particularly a king who had a reputation for not always following the rules, which is what Cleomone's had. So how does he not follow the rules? Over time, he develops a reputation for being, I think, not actually accepting bribes, but vulnerable to bribery and outright acts of impiety. Religious atrocities would be a not unkind way of putting it. I think we're teeing up the end of Cleomneys very soon, aren't we, with that?

But before we get to that, I must also ask about the middle brother, about Doreas. Do we know what happened to him? Because it sounds like he wasn't that happy. Yeah, Dorius is very angry when Cleomones becomes king. And as Rottitus puts it, he refused to be ruled by his brother. So he asked to be able to set up a colony somewhere else. So he asked the Spartan authorities and said, can I have some men to found a colony? And despite his reputation for being excellent, he did not ask the Oracle at Delphi

where he should set up his colony. he just decided to do it and he ended up going to North Africa and his colony failed. They were driven out by the Carthaginians and the locals, came back to Sparta, tried to start again, asked the Oracle at Delphi whether he would be successful if he set up a colony in southern Italy and did, and then got involved in a local war and ended up getting himself killed. This is the first of those kind of Greek adventures, dare I say, to southern Italy that would become so popular over the next few centuries or so. do you think, well, it's another kind of theoretical question, isn't it, hypothetical, whether Leonidas could have been tempted with doing something similar? There's nothing in the sources that suggest he was. Maybe he was smart enough to realize that if he lurked around in Sparta, he might get somewhere with this.

I'm not sure, but I think my reading of Heserodotus is that he paints Dorias as someone who really ought to have just stuck around because he kind of contradicts himself about Cleomones. He said he didn't reign for very long, which is not true. He's got his maths wrong there, but I think he might be trying to make that point to say, look, if Dorias had just waited around, waited until Cleomenes died, he could have been the king, and then he could have been the one who was leading the Spartans at Thermopyla. Do Spartan kings regularly look outside the Peloponnese or look to the sea and the waters and places beyond,

like, the seas nearby? Is that quite unusual? Spartan foreign policy is always cast by our primary sources as cautious. So I think actually trying to go too far away is a bit dangerous. And when Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, asks the Spartans to intervene to help them rebel against the Persians, he seems quite interested until he finds out how far away it is. When Aristagoras has this amazing bronze map, which is like super new technology. He points out all the parts of the Persian kingdom and says, oh, look at all, look how big it is and how wonderful it is and how much gold and silver they have. You'll eat them easily. And then Cleomone says, okay, how far is it from here to the Persian heartland?

And he's told three months. And his response is, get out of Sparta. But just go. Really? Get out. Yeah. Wow. Okay.

Well, how does it all end for Cleomones? Hinted it earlier. It doesn't end well, does it? I think that's an understatement. It ends spectacularly badly for Cleomenes. So there's a series of scandals. He has a falling out with his co-king Demeratus. it involves him then trying to get Demeratus deposed to make that happen.

He bribes the priests at Delphi to get the priestess at Delphi to declare Demeratus illegitimate. Demeratus is deposed and ends up running away to Persia. Afterwards, it turns out, the story gets out that he has bribed the Oracle at Delphi, not the done thing. There's a campaign against the Argyves where he is victorious. but he doesn't capture the city of Argos, and on his way home, he flogs the priest at the Argyve Horayan. Well, his helots flog the priest at the Argyve Horion. He burns a sacred grove in which some runaway Argyves have hidden, so religious atrocities are plenty. The Argyve Huron says that's a secret place to the goddess hero.

Yeah, and when he tries to make a sacrifice there, the priest says you can't because you're not Argyve, and he just has his helots drag him away and flog him and does the sacrifice anyway. getting the impression of a man who doesn't necessarily follow the rules. He doesn't care anymore, it sounds like. Not really, I think, well, that's the message we're getting about him. He ends up going into somewhat voluntary exile, and then one is in exile, he starts stirring up trouble and tries to get various Spartan allies to swear allegiance to him,

at which point the authorities panic and bring him back, and he ends up under house arrest, under the care of his relatives, and then he's found one day, covered in blood, knife hacked himself to pieces, allegedly. Hacked himself, is he started cutting his skin on his legs and just into strips and then just got higher and higher and higher. And then when he got to his belly, he just bled to death.

And the source of information was the helot who was left guarding him, who he bullied into giving him the knife. He said, give me the knife. The helot said, no. And he said, well, think what I'm going to do to you if I ever get out of here. so the Helllot gave him the knife. That's the official story. That's not a nice end for Cleomenes. Who succeeds him? Well, his half-brother Leonidas married to his daughter, Gorggo.

And so when you think about his relatives who've had him under house arrest, some modern scholars have suggested, well, maybe there was something not quite legit about this story about how Cleomones died. I think Leonidas could have orchestrated it and potentially also Gorggo too, so his own daughter. potentially. Wow. And so Cleomenes has no male sons, does he? So that's why it goes to his half-brother Leonidas. And Doreas is out of the picture by now.

Yeah, Doreas is dead by now. Cleombrotus is clearly younger than Leonidas. Or if they were twins, he's clearly the Leonardo's clearly the older twin. So Leonidas is now king. And he's married, Gorgh, so Cleononis's daughter. Do we know much behind the marriage there? No. And so there's going to be an obvious age gap between the two.

So either Leonidas had had a previous wife who died, or they waited long enough for him to marry his niece so that they would keep that wealth in the family. And so do we know much then about, I first off, Leonidas is inheriting quite an unusual position, dare I say, the fact that one of the previous kings has fled to Persia and the other one has may well have been killed by Leonidas's command. So it is quite an interesting situation that he's thrown himself into compared to, let's say, that of his father, Anxandradas? Yeah, I'd love to know more. That's the problem we have with the Herodotus's narrative, as he doesn't say when he describes the death of Cleomenes, oh, and he was succeeded by Leonidas, he kind of just moves on. So it's only when you get to the narrative about Thermopy that you actually get the stories of Leonidas then. So there is a void in our sources. So we don't really know exactly what's going on in this period of time.

But maybe because of the massive change that you've described, there's been two quite strong kings in both royal houses, and they've both been replaced by people you would never have expected to be king. So maybe there is just a bit of a power vacuum. So who is the other person who's become king at this time? So DeMiratus was replaced by his cousin, Leotokides, who had no great distinguishing features whatsoever. So he probably went through the upbringing.

as well, but not in a demonstrably excellent kind of way. There's a wonderful story when DeMoratus had not yet gone into exile. He'd been elected to hold an official post. And at the Spartan religious festival, the Jim Napidiye, Leone Dekides decided to sort of poke him a bit and send a servant and said, how does it feel to hold an elected office after you've served as king like I am now? And Deeratis responds, I think quite a good one. He says, well, you wouldn't know because you would never distinguish enough to hold an elected role.

But that's the event that prompts him to go into exile. So he loses his temper and then runs off to the Persians. Runs off to the Persians. But that's also interesting to highlight that link between Sparta and Persia at that time. It sounds like at least with the royal family, with the kings, the Persians and the Spartans, they did have contact. They did. And so Cleomeney's policy seems to have been prepare Sparta to resist the Persia. The fact that he was often being stymied by Demeratus and then Dein Maratas ending up in Pers,

you suggest that maybe DeMiratus had other ideas. And also, so what date is it that Cleomenes dies and Leonidas officially becomes the next king? It's sometime around the Battle of Marathon. Around the Battle of Marathon. But it's murky exactly when it happened. So we don't think that Leonidas is leading the Spartan force that goes to Marathon after the battle is fought to look at the corpses of the Persians? It would be nice to think that he was.

But we don't know. So they sent 2,000 men in a hurry. So it's entirely possible that they were under a more junior officer just with orders of get there fast. And maybe a larger Spartan army was meant to come later. There we go. So it's a decade after that that we get to the Battle of Thermopylai and Leonidas's claim to fame, as it were. Do we know anything? Can we presume anything about Leonidas's rule in that decade before we get Xerxes,

King of Kings and the great second Persian invasion of Greece? I'd love to say yes, but no. And we even potentially have indications that he's not that significant, as in the initial Greek Allied forces that are sent north to try and stop Xerxes are not under his command. They attempt to hold off, well, they think they can hold off Xerxes at the Valley of Tempe in Thessaly and send 10,000 men a large fleet. and there's a random Spartan

who's not a member of the royal house in charge of that. 10,000 Greek hoplites. So not all full Spartans, it's a combination of Greeks. Yeah, combination of Greeks, yeah. Yeah, they'll probably be Marines off the warships because there was nowhere where they could actually try and fight against the Persians at sea there

because of the strategy was trying to block them up in narrow spaces so they could nullify their numbers and there's no really obvious at all at sea where it would have been narrow there. So it seems they probably just beached their ships and then decamped and ended up getting off the ships and then being ready to fight on land. So there's a large force

and there's no sign of Leonidas in charge of us. Well, Andrew, talk us then through how we get to Leonidas camping with his men at the Hot Gates, at Thermopylae. And feel free, please do, to include some of the quotes that are attributed to him at this time as well. Right, okay. So the quotes that attributed to Leonidas are in the late sources. And the fact that Herodotus, who knows a very good one-liner,

when he hears one, doesn't use any of those, suggests to me that they are part of the later legend about Leonidas. But we can come to that later on. Yes, yes. So I mentioned Tempe, it's a complete failure. They get there, and they're warned by Alexander, the King of Macedon, that they have no chance of holding up. Not Alexander in the Great, just to come.

Yeah, definitely not Alexander the Great. That one drives my students insane. Yeah, Alexander the first, not Alexander the third. And they're told that basically they'll be too easily surrounded, so they withdraw. And then they go back and down south and come up with a plan B. And the plan B is Thermopyla because it's on the major route for sort of wheeled vehicles from northern to southern Greece, and at its narrowest, it's sort of 15 metres wide. So it makes sense.

And it's actually adjacent to some strength. narrow straits where the fleet would be able to block up the Persians as well. So it makes sense. So the story that Herodotus tells us is this coincides with the Olympic Games when there is a truce for all the Greeks to compete in the Olympics. It also coincides with the month of the Kanea when all of the Dorian Greeks maintain a strict truce. So that explains why only 300 Spartans and a comparatively small number of allies are sent

to Thermopylae. And the Dorian Greeks are these, the Greek, like includes Sparitan. sparta and other Peloponnesian cities. Yeah, most of the other Peloponnesians and then islands like Egina and roads and costs and places like that. So it's one of the major ethnic groups of the Greeks. And that is why you see such a small number of soldiers then combining together after that. Is that the reason? That's a logical explanation. That's what Herodotus tells us, but the numbers kind of don't work in terms of the calendar. It's like by the time you actually get to the Battle of Thermopy, the Kanea should be over by now.

So there's maybe this is part of the official Spartan version of what actually happened later on after to sort of cover up what was maybe a complete sort of mess up in that way. So are the 300 Spartans who are sent with Leonidas? Are they a suicide squad? Are they an advanced guard? Did Leonidas just not actually managed to hold the past long enough for reinforcements to arrive? These are questions that we don't know the answer to, but we can speculate. Was it a logistics cock up that they were? There wasn't more men to go to the past to defend there.

That has been argued, and you could see that. So as a Thermopylae can be cast as this great moral victory, even though they lost, or it could just be cast as a complete failure. They held up Xerxes for a couple of days, and it was all over. Is it decided, though, that Leonidas, he is going to be the commander-in-chief of that army force. There's no kind of Athenian general who's right there and who's also of Inquil-Rank or something like that. No. So the Athenians are actually in the fleet at Artemisium, which is taking place at the

same time as Themopoli, but there's no sense that any of the allies are equal. Spartans are in command of the Allied Greek forces against the Persians. That was agreed. The Peloponnesians made it clear they wouldn't accept anyone else, and the Athenians just kind of had to swallow it. They agreed to it. And also, there's a Spartan naval commander as well. I mean, you think themistically, but there's Eurobides? Yeah, Euribides is in charge of the fleet. And Herodotus almost implies that He's senior to Leonidas as well, which is interesting, shall we say. And when Leonidas does leave Sparta to go to the Hotgates Thermopyla at that time, talk us through, first of all, the famous saying he supposedly gives to Gorga and his family.

Oh, yes. So it's not in Herodotus, but it is in the diodorus version of things, is that Leonidas, this various wonderful saying. So one of them is the aphors tell him he's not taking enough men. and he says, for my purpose, I'm taking enough. And they say, seriously, do you understand what you're doing? And he says, yes, to die, there's enough. So he makes it clear that it's a suicide mission. That's a suicide mission. The story is that he told Gorgh, when she asked,

what should I do? His response to her was marry well and have more children. So he would know that he was going off to die. Herodotus makes it clear that Leonidas and all of the men with him had living sons. So that might imply that they knew it was a great risk that they might die, whether it was definitely a suicide squad is another matter. And is there the Gorgos saying, come back with your shield or on it? Well, she doesn't say that. So it's not one of her attributed sayings, but that that is in the sayings of Spartan women. There's one where a mother says to a son, come back with your shield or on it.

But it's such a good line that popular culture has to give it to Gorgone. They're in the original 300, didn't they say? Yeah. Yeah. Frank Miller's graphic novel has it and then it makes its way into the film, yeah. But do we know whether did Leonidas have children by that time? Oh yes, of course. You said everyone has a child. Yeah, including him. So his son, Pleistarchus, is alive and does succeed him as king afterwards.

And he is very much, like Leominis would have done, was previously, he wouldn't have gone through the Spartan system because he was the heir apparent. That's our understanding, yes. So they get to Thermopylae. Talk us through what we know about Leonidas and his role during the Greek defense. fence of Thermopyla over. It's a two or three days, isn't it? Well, there's four or five days waiting, and then two and a half days of actual fighting. So Leonidas is in command of all of the Greek forces. Herodotus says he was the most respected man in the Greek army, which he has

given us no evidence to explain why. So when you're speculating early, was he involved in that campaign that not mentioned, was he involved in that campaign? Maybe he was. Maybe that's why he was so respected, or maybe it's just because Herodotus wants to big him up in that way. He gives him a genealogy going all the way back to Heracles and then therefore Zeus. So he goes through the full thing and casts him like a Homeric hero. And there's a lot of Homer, Homozyliad, sort of imagery in his account of the Battle of Thermopy as well. So you can see he's definitely turning it into an epic story.

And how would he have fought at the Basil of Thermopyla? Well, would have fought at the front with everyone else. So he would have fought as a hop light. He would have had his big bronze-faced wooden shield. He would have had bronze armour, bronze helmet. So he would have gone into combat, dressed in red like the Spartans did. So he would have been one of the front-line troops. There's only 300 of them, so they're all in the front line.

And it's brazen. Is that bronze kind of shining light, bright armour colour at that time? That's what Xenophon says about later Spartan army. So he says that they wore red because it was the manliest colour. and they had bronze shields because you could polish them easily, and they would tarnish slowly. And isn't there also that story? We'll include the stories, but as you've already mentioned,

we've got to take them with a large barrel full of salt. But is there another one about the Persian scouts who see the Spartans, and then they notice the Persian scouts, but they say, yeah, let them watch us. We're prepared for this. We're ready to die if need be. Herodotus says that the Persian spy is sent to watch the Greeks and see what they can see,

and just by sheer coincidence, it's the Spartans turn to guard the pass and there's a wall there that they've rebuilt to sort of shore up the defences. And the Spartans are there. They're exercising naked, which is Spartan military practice. They continue their exercises

even while on campaign, and some of them just sitting around combing their hair. And it's a brilliant story. And when the spy goes back and reports this to Xerxes, he has no idea what this means. So he has to summon Demeratis. to ask him, because D'Amortis has accompanied him on his campaign. You can see where D'amaranthus is going with this.

He clearly is imagining himself becoming King of Greece at Xerxes behest, and D'amarathus has to explain the Spartans to Xerxes. And that's where he has, sort of gives the best description of them. He describes them as the best fighting men on earth and says that they won't run away because Normos is their master. Spartan custom or law is their master and he says they fear Spartan law more than Xerxes men fear him

and Spartan custom dictates that they will fight where they have been ordered to fight and they will not run away and he explains the combing of their hair he says this is what Spartans do when they're preparing to risk their lives they make themselves look handsome and Leonidas even though he's a king

he wouldn't have been above the law in Sparta would he so he would have been very much as at risk as any other Spartan serving there if he, you know, if he returned home but was seen to be a coward. Yeah, absolutely. When Spartans become a citizen and join the Spartan army, they swear an oath to cement that new arrangement. And while we have very limited source material for it, the one surviving reference to this oath says that they swore to not break the ranks. So you could interpret that as they swore to fight where they were ordered to fight and not run away. And Leonidas at this time, is he quite old? Yeah, he's probably late 50s, early 60s.

Right. Because part of my thinking was also like, imagine if it was also the people that he'd grown up alongside, you know, in the spars and training, that now were the people with them as the 300. But it seems like that's unlikely if he's, you know, in his late 50s by that time. Yeah, I'd think it'd be more likely men in their prime. Herodotus says it was the usual 300, which might imply that were the hippace, but the hippays are the men. in age 20 to 30, and Spartans don't seem to normally married until 30, so that doesn't kind of work. So it's been suggested maybe they were people who'd once been the best of the best, so former

hippays, but they must have been mature men to all have living sons. Another big, great, controversial is probably the wrong word, but a question full of debate, how greatly outnumbered were the Spartans and their allies at Thermopylae? Well, I would never trust Herodotus's numbers. I said earlier that Herodotus likes doing his maths, and his description of the number of Persian forces is a fantastic example of him doing maths. So he has to calculate how many infantry men there are, how many cavalry men there are, how many marines there must be, adds them all together, gets 2,700,000 and so on,

and then says, but every single one of them would have owned a slave as well, and then adds that in as well and gets this figure of 5 million, which is obviously absurd. So that would have been like half the population of the planet at the time. A swarm of locusts going down through Macedonian into northern Greece. Yeah, and that's how Herodotus paints it. So they come through, they drown, they drain lakes and rivers with their pack animals, just drinking up all the water.

He does sort of paint them like locusts. So they would have been outnumbered, but nothing like the numbers that Herodotus is suggesting. Molon Labbe, talk us through this. Okay, so Plutarch says that Xerxes wrote to Leonidas and ordered him to surrender his arms, and he then wrote back just two words, Molan Labé, which translates says, come and get them. But Herodotus does not mention this. He says that Xerxes assumed that they would run away, and when they didn't, he got angry and eventually ordered an attack. So he doesn't, there's moments in Herodotus's narrative where if he under his under his

understood that Leonidas had said Muldon Mabe, he would have said it. So I'd say no. But that saying has taken on a life of its own. Are there any other particular sayings by Leonidas that we've missed at Thermopyla or beforehand? I can think of that, then we will fight in the shade, but I don't think that's Leonidas himself. That's not Leonidas himself, according to Herodotus. He gives that to Deonis and says that he had a reputation for great wit. Here's a good line. Plutarch gives it to Leonidas, and he has some other ones. And Plutarch wrote a work called the malice of Herodotus, and he criticised Herodotus and for being a lover of Persians and all sorts of things. And he says, and he didn't give Leonidas his best one-liners. But that's clearly because

the tradition of his best one-liners was invented after the facts. It ends up being said by Michael Fasbender doesn't it as well? It does. Yeah. Let's wrap up the story of Thermopylae. How does it all come tumbling down? And what do we know about Leonidas during those final hours of the stand at Thermopyla. Well, it all comes unraveled because there is a way of surrounding the Greeks at Thermopyla that they know is there. And they've thought they've fixed, but ultimately they haven't. So Leonidas ordered the local Fokians to guard this secondary route around where they're

occupying the pass, thinking that the locals would know what to do. Much ink has been spent saying, why didn't Leonidas order a spark? officer to oversee the Fokians. Why didn't he do it himself, all of that kind of thing? But it's an allied army. Their officers are in charge of their own allied contingents. So you could argue that it would have been insulting for Leonidas to do that. A local Greek named Effialtis tells Xerxes about this for one in cash and is rewarded, and he's able to lead Haidani's and the best of Xerxes troops, the immortals, around. to surround the Greeks, but according to Herodotus, they find out either by deserters or by the

seers interpreting the signs, and they find out early enough that Leonidas can give orders for most of the troops to go home. So he's able to leave himself and his men and the men from the city of Thespi and Thebes to fight on, to basically hold the Persians off, to buy enough time for the rest of the soldiers to escape. And Herodotus says there's all sorts of explanations of why this happened, but he thinks that Leonidas deliberately did this because he wanted to achieve Klaos. Great renown for glory, exactly. The kind of type of glory that Achilles are striving for in the Iliad.

So by fighting and dying, he'll get this great reputation and be able to sort of live on in the way that he actually has done. So whether that's true or not as another matter, but that's what Herodotus said that he thought was the right explanation. And he would have grown up Leonidasia. He would have heard about and read the classics like the homers, the Iliad in the Odyssey, wouldn't he? So he would have known all about these great heroes and wanting to emulate them. Yeah, all ancient Greeks knew the stories of the great heroes. They all knew the Trojan War cycle.

They all knew Achilles. They all knew what they were meant to do. And so people like, well, heroes like Achilles were a paradigm of men. masculine behavior, and Sparta was particularly obsessed with genealogies of the gods and the stories of the mythical past. So Menelaus, king of Sparta, the co-commander against the Trojans, they would have understood that this was the kind of behavior they were meant to follow. I wonder if Leonidast wore himself as a bit of a Menelaus. It's interesting to think, isn't it, the legacy of that figure as well in the Spartan royal mindset. Yeah, and that comes through in Herodotus's story, because when Leonidas is

killed, there's a massive fight over his body. And Herodotus says that four times the Spartans were able to force the Persians back and reclaim Leonidas's body. And that's obviously riffing on Homer's Iliad where there's a great struggle over Achilles' friend Patroclus' body, which is led by Menelaus, King of Sparta. And three times they're able to force the Trojans back to reclaim in Patricluss's bodies. So the Spartans at Thermopyla are even better. They do it four times. And so we hear then, so in that last stand of the 300 and the Thespians in the past at Thomopoli, Leonidas is not the last man standing of them all. He falls at the height of the fighting to see. Yeah, absolutely. So on the final day, the Spartans lead out the Thespians and the

the thibians beyond the wall to sort of go into a more dangerous position to try and really take the fight to the Persians and at some point in the morning Leonidas goes down and there's this great fight over his body. The Thebans end up surrendering. They clearly lose contact with the rest. Xerxes has them branded as slaves. What's going on there is a big question. But the the Thespians and the remaining Spartans end up withdrawing to a small bluff where they make a final stand. And Herodotus says by that stage most of them lost their spears. Some of them even lost They're swords. They're just fighting with hands and teeth.

So Leonidas' body, does it end up in Persian hands? It does. Yes. Yes. So Xerxes, after the battle, cuts off his head and puts it on a spike. On a pike. Yeah. Yeah.

So Xerxes gets his revenge on the Spartans who've embarrassed him over the two days of fighting at Thermopy. So when you think about, I've said, oh, it's an embarrassing fiasco. They've only held up the Persians for a couple of days. The portrayal of Xerxes anger suggests that this has not been something that he's just been weathering, that this has been a humiliation that all of his vast hordes have been delayed by just such a small number of Greek troops. And do we then know what happens to Leonidas's body after that? His head has been severed from his body, but do the Persians keep hold of it or is it finally acquired by the Spartans? What do we know?

It is eventually reacquired by the Spartans. And it's one of those gray areas where the sources are a bit weird and they don't make sense. But Pausanius, the travel writer, says that sometime afterwards, another Pausanius, probably the Pozzanius who commanded the Greeks at the Battle of Patea, the following summer, traveled north, reclaimed Leonidas's remains and brought them back to Sparta. Head and body. Yeah. Well, presumably, yes. There is also that Omen story, isn't it, that a Spartan king has. a Spartan king had to die so that the Persian invasion failed?

Yes, so the prophecy from Delphi, well, all of the Greeks asked what they should do, and they all got pretty grim answers. So when the Athenians asked Delphi, should they fight against the Persians, they got the answer run away. And the delegates in Delphi were looking so despondent that one of the locals said to them, why don't you ask again, see if you get a better answer? And they got a slightly less terrible answer the second time around that said that there would be great deaths, but blessed Salamis and the wooden wall would prevail. And Themistically, it was a leading Athenian statesman who was able to convince the Athenians.

All this means our fleet, the wooden walls, our fleet, we'll be able to win that if we fight near Salamis, this will be fine. The Spartans got an equally doom-laden message, which was Sparta will fall or a Spartan king will die. So if the oracle from Delphi is true, and Leonidas had this before he set off, this may have explained what his thought process was, that he was intending to die to preserve Sparta's security. Or it could be the kind of thing that was invented afterwards to explain what happened. It could be hindsoaken. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of these oracles from Delphia are deliberately ambiguous, a bit vague, and genuinely quite obviously made up.

up. Okay, so how quickly do we get after the Spartans eventually retrieve Leonidas' body, and the Persian invasion has been repelled? Zerxes out to the picture. How long is it before there is a full, a very clear cult of Leonidas back in Sparta? Not sure. So by the time Herodotus travels there sometime in the 450s to 420s, it's obvious that there is an official version of what happened, and that is that Leonidas was a great hero and definitely intended to die. The cult for Leonidas depends on when this event of bringing his remains back actually happened because Porzania says King Pozanius did it. The Pozanias who commanded the Greeks at Plataea wasn't a king.

And he says it was only four years after, but what Posanius was doing there at four years after is a little bit tricky. So it's not entirely certain exactly when. But by the time you get to the fourth century, it's quite obvious that there is a great cult of Leonidas, and the victory over the Persians is part of the official Spartan story. And do we know much about the structure of this cult or how Leonidas was worshipped in Sparta over those following centuries? Not much at all, really. So there's a building in modern Sparty, like a classical period structure where the foundation stones are there, and that is known as the shrine of Leonidas. but there is nothing that will actually concretely link that to Leonidas. No, it's just we know from Pausania saying there was cult to Leonidas,

but we don't really know much beyond that. And was Leonidas remembered outside of Sparta as well in other Greek cities, and indeed later, with the rise of Macedon and the Hellenistic kingdoms? Does his name become well-known far and wide? Yes and no. The Spartans at Thermopylae get remembered, and they are very much remembered as the good guys who were almost won. Leonidas does get remembered and often in an odd kind of way.

So in the middle ages, Leonidas is the king of Athens, who defeated Xerxes at Thermopylae, and Xerxes runs away and ends up getting killed by his own men. So there's even manuscripts showing Xerxes running away and drinking is getting so thirsty that he drinks from the rivers filled with the blood of his men. And so this whole thing just gets completely mangled. Wow. But like from Roman times when the Romans take over Sparta, so going back into ancient history, I read in my notes there's something called the Leonidae or something that's also there at the time.

Yeah, so the Leonidas games is clearly something that takes place in Sparta and it's something that kind of got revived when the Romans ended up going to war against the Parthians. So as they're about to go and fight against the dreaded foreigners in the East, they sort of revive this Spartan festival. celebrating their great victory against the foreigners from the East. So that's where we also get Leonidas' name in Roman times, but probably not much else apart from that. No, not really, no. Gosh. But is there anything else we can mention about the legacy of Leonidas before modern times

that people really picked up on us, the Spartan king who loses life at Thermopylai, leading these 300 Spartans and the Thespians and so on? I think a really brilliant source and one that we, I never make my students read is there's an epic poem written by Richard Glover in the late 18th century, which is an absolutely massive epic poem all about Leonidas. And so celebrating his life and his achievements. And it was a massive success in England, and it was a massive success in continental Europe, translated into German like nine times, that sort of thing. So Leonidas has been remembered

and then discussed and debated and then in more modern times. at the Battle of Stalingrad, both the Soviets and the Germans were casting themselves as like Leonidas and the 300 Spartans, which is awed. When you think about it, that way that both sides could identify with him, the defenders and the attackers could both cast themselves as Spartan-like. That's so interesting. Do you think there's also a sense that, I mean, Sir Plutarch and his parallel lives, his lives of eminent Greeks and Romans, he doesn't include one of Leonidas, does he? He said he did. So in that work on the malice of Herodotus, he rips into Herodotus for all of the things he gets wrong in his narrative,

and he has this whole section on Thermopyla. And he says that Herodotus left out the good one-liners from the Onodas and his fellow soldiers, because there's one where someone said, an old man who he's tried to send home with a message, and he said, I came to fight, not be a postman, and decided to fight and die on the final day. And Herodotus has none of those.

And he said, And I'll redress this when I write my life of Leonidas, but no life of Leonidas survived. Who he would have paired with as a Roman would be a really interesting question as well. Exactly. Who would it be Odysseus or someone like that who tries to also throw themselves in in a battle? But I think that I was going to go with that question was that, of course, there's no Shakespeare play of Leonidas either. So I was thinking, like, would Leonidas' name have been even better remembered down through history before the 20th? of the century, if he'd have had, you know, a widespread life in Plutarch that survived and a play from William Shakespeare, as we have like Anthony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar in the life.

I would think so, and I think if there had been a Plutarch life, you could imagine Shakespeare thinking the tragedy of Leonidas would have been, would have been perfect in that way. Absolutely. This has been a fascinating insight into the story of Leonidas, and of course, last but not least, we should mention his legacy nearer the present day. whether it's TV or film or comic books and the like, he's had even more of a resurgence over the past few decades. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think many people of my age saw repeats of the 300 Spartans from the 1960s on television. And that was a sword and sound old epic from the 1960s, wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of money was spent on that, and it was done in collaboration with the Greek government and all of the extras, like all of the Persians, and most of the Greeks were played by Greek citizens doing military service.

So it's a huge production, and Leonidas is this wonderful, charismatic commander with really short hair, because the Spartans didn't have long hair in the 1960s. I love that thinking. So there was that, and that was directly, there's a direct link between the 300 Spartans and Frank Miller's graphic novel 300, because Frank Miller's in interviews has pointed out that He watched that when he was a kid. He watched it with his dad. And there was a moment towards the end of the film where he said,

Dad, the good guys are going to lose, aren't they? And so he could see where this was coming. And so really had an impact on him. So having made his name as a superhero comic writer, he decided to do something historical and really put it out there and came up with 300. And then that became the film 300 as well. Stephen Pressville's novel, The Gates of Fire, it was about Thermopyla. Leonidas has a huge role in that.

Deioniske's the will fight in the shade guy is in many ways the real hero of Presfield's story but Leonidas is a central figure in that novel as well How do you think Neonadas's legacy will go on from the present day I guess the good and the bad potentially?

I think whenever people see the Spartans at Thermopylae as the good guys he will be painted as the leader of the good guys the great hero who sacrificed himself the more we start to unpick what the Spartans were like, play with the significance or lack thereof of defeating the Persians.

His legacy will appear differently, I think. Andrew, this has been such a great chat. Last but certainly not least, you cover the story of Leonidas and the wider story of ancient Sparta in your new book, which is called... Sparta, the rise and fall of an ancient superpower. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show today. Thank you for having me. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Andrew Bayliss talking all the things the life of Leonidas. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. Last few things from me, you know what I'm going to say. Please make sure to follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That does really help us, and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you've been enjoying the show and we'll be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours.

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