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The Battle of Thermopylae took place in 480 BC between an alliance of Greek city-states and the Persians. Though wildly outnumbered, the Greeks held back the Persian advance until a defector informed the Persians of an alternate route, leading to the defeat of the Greek army and the sacking of Athens.

Background

Xerxes I, king of Persia, had been preparing for years to continue the war against the Greeks started by his father Darius. In 484 BC Xerxes' army and navy arrived in Asia Minor, building a bridge of ships across the Hellespont at Abydos to march his troops across. According to Herodotus Xerxes had over five million men, while the poet Simonides estimated three million; Herodotus also wrote that the army drank entire rivers and ate the food supplies of entire cities. These are of course exaggerations, but it is clear that the Greeks were vastly outnumbered. The major Greek city-states formed an alliance, led by Sparta under king Leonidas, and prepared to block the Persian advance at the narrow pass of Thermopylae in northern Greece. Originally engaging the enemy in August of 480 BC with a force of some 7000 men, Leonidas aimed to hold the pass as long as possible so that the rest of Greece could rally their troops and navy.

Battle

Xerxes did not believe such a small force would oppose him, and gave the Greeks five days to retreat. When they did not, he sent his troops into the pass, but each successive wave was eventually defeated. The Persians, with arrows and short spears, could not break through the long spears of the Greek hoplites phalanx. Herodotus wrote that when Dienekes a Spartan soldier was informed that Persian arrows blotted out the sun, he remarked "Good, then we shall fight in the shade." The 6000 Greeks defending the pass defeated the Persians in a similar manner on the second day of battle.

After the second day a Greek named Ephialtes defected to the Persians and informed Xerxes of a separate path through Thermopylae. The pass was defended by the other 1000 Greeks, from Phocis, who had been placed there when the Greeks learned of the alternate route just before the battle, but they were not expecting to engage the Persians. The Phocians offered a brief resistance before fleeing, and the Persians advanced unopposed.

Leonidas then realized that further fighting would be futile. On August 11 he dismissed all but 300 Spartans. A contingent of Thespians, led by Demophilus, stayed as well in a suicidal effort to delay the advance. Leonidas also had a force of Thebans, but after some fighting they defected to the Persians. Although the Greeks killed many Persians, including two of Xerxes' brothers, Leonidas was killed, along with all 300 of his men. The last Spartans were killed trying to recover their king's body, after having been driven back into the narrowest part of the pass, onto a small hill in the pass.

There is an epitaph on a monument at site of the battle with Simonides's epigram, which can be found in Herodotus's work The Histories (7.228), to the Spartans:

ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
(O xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti täde/
κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.
(keimetha tois keinon rhämasi peithomenoi.)

Which to keep the poetic context can be translated as:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
that here, obedient to their laws we lie

or more literally as:

Traveler, carry this word to the men of Lacedaemon:
we who lie here did what they told us to do.

Aftermath

The simultaneous naval Battle of Artemisium was a draw, and the Greek navy retreated. The Persians had control of the Aegean Sea and all of Greece as far south as Attica; the Spartans prepared to defend the Isthmus of Corinth and the Peloponnese, while Xerxes sacked Athens, whose inhabitants had fled to Salamis Island. In September the Greeks and the Persians met at the naval Battle of Salamis.

Inspiration

This battle, along with Sogdian Rock and similar actions, is used in military academies around the world to show how a small group of well-trained and well-led soldiers can have an impact out of all proportion to their numbers.

External links

• Herodotus' Histories about the battle
• Map of the battle

• Battles of the Greco-Persian Wars