Thermopylae

THERMOPYLAE

THE BATTLE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

PAUL CARTLEDGE

THE OVERLOOK PRESS             2006

The inside cover

In 480 BC, a huge Persian army, led by the fabled King Xerxes, entered the mountain pass of Thermopylae as they marched on Greece, intending to conquer the land with little difficulty. But the Greeks – led by King Leonidas and a small army of Spartans – took the battle to the Persians at Thermopylae, and halted their advance – almost.

It is one of history’s most celebrated battles, one of civilization’s greatest last stands. And in Thermopylae, renowned classical historian Paul Cartledge newly examines this history-altering moment and, most impressively, shows how its repercussions have a bearing on us even today. The invasion of Europe by Xerxes and his army redefined culture, a kingdom, and class. The valiant efforts of a few thousand Greek warriors, facing a huge onrushing Persian army at the narrow pass at Thermopylae, changed the way generations would think about combat, courage and death.

The battle of Thermopylae was at its broadest a clash of civilizations, one that momentously helped to shape the identity of classical Greece and hence the nature of our own cultural heritage.

Preface

This is the setting forth of the research of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, done so that the achievements of men may not be lost to memory over time, and that the great and wondrous deeds of both Greeks and barbarians (non-Greeks) may not lack their due glory; and especially to show what was the cause why the two peoples fought against one another.

Heroditus Histories 1.1

Shortly after finishing my last book – on Alexander III ‘the Great’ King of Macedon (and a great deal more besides) between 336 and 323 BC(E) – I paid a visit to Thermopylae in preparation for writing this one. From plotting the world-changing course of Alexander the Great over most of the known world to charting the history-changing defence of a narrow pass by a Few. The task was similar in many ways – the weighing of evidence, the estimation of consequence and implication, the judgement of value – but here the subject, though comparably massive, is concerned in one act carried out in a little space: a suicidally defining stand for ‘freedom’.

The ‘Hot Gates’ – that is what ‘Thermopylae’ means in ancient Greek – are a narrow pass in north-central mainland Greece. The ‘gates’ bit referred to the fact that this was the natural and obvious route for any invading army coming from the north to defeat the forces of central or southern Greece. They were called ‘hot’ because of the presence nearby of natural healing sulphur springs still there today. Here it was that in August 480 BCE an ancient Greek ‘Few’, representing a small and wavering grouping of Greek cities, made their heroic stand against the oncoming might of a massive Persian invasionary force. They were headed by an elite force from Sparta, the single most powerful Greek polis, or citizen-state.

• The modern memorials to Leonidas and the other Greeks killed here in desperate battle in 480 BCE were first erected beside the National Road in the mid-1950s by he Greek government with the aid of American money. This was not all that long after a devastating civil war (1946-9) had left at least half a million Greeks dead.
• This intestine conflict in its turn had followed on a period of deeply unpleasant foreign occupation by the Axis powers of first Italy and then Nazi Germany (1941-4), notwithstanding the heroic Greek resistance in late 1940 that prompted comparison precisely with their ancestors’ derring-do of 480 BCE.
• If you cross to the other side of the National Road, the rewards for the student of 480 BCE are even greater. Close by is what has been identified – almost certainly correctly – as the low hill on which the Spartan King Leonidas and his few Spartans mounted their heroic ‘last stand’ against Great King Xerxes’s Persians.
• If you search among the scrub that overlies the site, you will come upon another modern memorial. This reads, in its most usual English translation:

Go tell the Spartans, passerby,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

• Obedience and freedom, self-sacrificing suicide … Thermopylae is a place of witness, redolent of the Spartan’s paradoxical cultural values that need explaining now as much as at the time, when Persian Great King Xerxes uncomprehendingly wondered at the report of these fearsome warriors combing their hair in preparation (though he did not know it) for a beautiful death.
• This clash between the Spartans and other Greeks, on one side, and the Persian horde (including Greeks), on the other, was a clash between Freedom and Slavery. In fact, the conflict has been plausibly described as the very axis of world history.
• ‘The interest of the whole world’s history hung trembling in the balance’, Hegel powerfully put it.
• At stake were nothing less than early forms of monotheism, the notion of a global state, democracy and totalitarianism.
• The Battle of Thermopylae, in short, was a turning-point not only in the history of Classical Greece, but in all the world’s history, eastern as well as western.
• So we are dealing here with the earlier of the two gigantic clashes of cultures and civilizations that helped to define both the identity of Classical Greece and, as a consequence, the nature of our own cultural heritage.
• We professional historians are all agreed that Greece – Classical Greece – is one of the major taproots of our own Western civilization in the sense that there has been a series of conscious choices made – in the Byzantine era, in the mainly Italian Renaissance, in the age of Enlightenment and in the 19^th century age of imperialism – to adopt the Classical Greeks as our ‘ancestors’ in key cultural respects.
• This book will concentrate most extensively on the decisive contributions made by the Spartans, on whose extraordinary society and civilization there has recently been a quite remarkable focus of academic and popular interest.
• What can there possibly be still to talk about that merits focusing all this media and other attention on ancient Sparta? This book will seek to provide a resounding answer or set of answers to this question, paying attention not least to the theme of Sparta’s promotion (or otherwise) of freedom, both at home and abroad.
• There is all to play for – and a great deal at stake – in any history of ‘Thermopylae’.
• The events of ‘9/11’ in New York City and now ‘7/7’ in London have given this project a renewed urgency and importance within the wider framework of East-West cultural encounter.

 

Timeline

All dates are BCE unless otherwise stated. (shortened version)

700            Homer; settlement of New Tro (illium)

550      Cyrus II the Great founds Achaemenid Persian Empire

508            Democracy instituted at Athens

493            Birth of Pericles

490            Battle of Marathon; accession of Leonidas

484            Birth of Herodotus

480            Invasion of Xerxes

469            Birth of Socrates

460-445 First Peloponnesian War

460            Birth of Thucydides

447-432 Building of the Parthenon

425            Publication of Herodotus’s Histories

359            Philip II becomes de facto King of Macedon

      336  Philip assassinated, succeeded by son (by Greek wife Olympias)              Alexander, Alexander III, later ‘the Great”

323              Death of Alexander at Babylon

Prologue – Setting the Awful Scene

Edward Gibbon described the process he chronicled in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) as an ‘awful revolution’. He meant by that a radical process that changed the course of human history in such a way and to so great a degree as to inspire awe. The Graeco-Persian Wars of 480-479 BCE, preceded by the Battle of Marathon in 490, occupied a much shorter timespan. Yet with the historian’s inestimable benefit of hindsight they can be seen to constitute precisely such a shock- and awe-inspiring juncture in the affairs of mankind.

The Battle of Thermopylae was a cardinal component of those Graeco-Persian wars. In late August 480 BCE a smallish Greek force of some 7,000 or so commanded by King Leonidas of Sparta and headed by an elite force of specially picked Spartan champions stood up to a vast imperial Persian army of invasion under the supreme and personal command of Xerxes, Great King of Persia. The manner of the Greeks’ and especially the Spartans’ (de)feat was absolutely crucial at the time, in that it provided the relatively very few ‘loyalist’ Greeks (as I shall call them) with the will and the example to continue to resist, and to go on, eventually, to throw the invaders back and out of Greece and the Aegean islands. Since then, Thermopylae has been a key ingredient in the Spartan myth, or legend. It has resonated indeed throughout the entire Western cultural tradition as a deed emblematic of the peculiar Greek and Spartan qualities of reasoned devotion to, and self-sacrifice in the name of, a higher collective cause, Freedom – or rather, a variety of definitions of Freedom.

• War was and is the ultimately awful negative experience, humans killing other humans, often for the least altruistically admirable reasons and with the most atrocious brutality.
• The Greeks practiced it with single-mindedness and gusto, to such an extent that it became the defining quality of their culture as a whole.
• On the other hand, war also is or can be uniquely ennobling – giving expression to patriotic and comradely solidarity, including selfless self-sacrifice in such obviously ‘good’ causes as freedom, democracy and other lofty ideals.
• The Greeks were second to none in embracing that contradictory combination of the ghastly and the ennobling, which takes us straight back to the fount and origin of Western culture and ‘civilization’ – to Homer’s Iliad, the first masterpiece of all Western literature; to Aeschylus’s Persians, the first surviving masterpiece of Western drama; to the coruscating war epigrams of Simonides and, last but most relevantly of all, to Herodotus’s Histories, the first masterpiece of Western historiography.
• One of the most appalling of human creations, war has given rise to some of humanity’s most sublime and influential literary creations and soaring visual monuments.
• Go to Delphi today and you will gain enough of an idea of the once astonishing superabundance of war memorial building and sculptures.
• Truly, as Sophocles’s Chorus put it in his tragic drama Antigone, ‘awesome are the works of man’ – for both good and evil. Or as Pindar sagely put it, ‘War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.’

We in the Western world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the centuries of total war, of the Flanders killing fields, of Stalingrad and Hiroshima, are surely well placed to appreciate this cardinal feature of ancient Greek culture, and in particular of fifth-century Spartan culture. Yet in another sense most of us are not in fact well placed at all. The summer of 2005, as I write, marks the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, but that intervening period of three score years is one characterized by the total absence of a major international military conflict in either Europe or North America. Of course, there have been any number of serious wars: the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Gulf War, the Iraq war, and the vicious civil wars in Bosnia and in Chechnya and in Rwanda, not to mention paramilitary terrorist atrocities in New York, Madrid, London, Omagh and elsewhere. But Americans and Western Europeans born in the years immediately after the Second World War have never – thank heavens – actually had to take up arms against a sea of foreign enemies and kill a fellow human being in the name of some patriotic or ideological cause. The President of the USA is also Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces, but William Jefferson Clinton, notoriously, had not even undergone national service, let alone fought in the front line. It is said that during the US ‘peacekeeping’ operation in Somalia he was particularly shocked by the sight of the corpse of a US Ranger sergeant being dragged through the streets by a chanting mob. Listeners to Homer’s Iliad in fifth-century BCE Sparta or Athens would presumably have felt quite differently, inured as they were to (all too) many similar sights, in ways that we just cannot begin to imagine, let alone empathize with.

• The Greeks in some sense valued and earnestly desired peace. Yet, despite these utopian yearnings, the harsh reality was that war was absolutely central to the Greeks’ lifestyle and world view.
• The sacred ‘Olympic truce’, which was declared every four years, was technically an ‘armistice’, in other words a severely practical necessity in order to enable competitors and spectators to attend the Olympic Games in safety.

The other major background factor is the mighty Achaemenid Persian Empire, the fastest-growing oriental empire before Genghis Khan’s Mongol juggernaut. In the space of a generation, from its foundation about 550 BCE by Cyrus II the Great, it spread out from its Iranian heartland as far west as the Aegean and east Mediterranean seaboard (including Egypt, conquered by Cyrus’s son, Cambyses) and as far east as Afghanistan, Pakistan and part of central Asia (where Cyrus himself died, still campaigning, in 529). A rash of revolts occurred on the death of Cambyses (522-521), but these were quelled by a distant relative who ascended the throne as Darius I. Darius had to cope with a further bout of revolt (499-494), this time actually led by his Greek subjects in western Asia, but he eventually effected a smooth repression. However, his attempt at reprisal and reparation on the other side of the Aegean came to grief at the Battle of Marathon in the territory of Athens in 490. This stinging defeat set the stage far an attempted conquest on a far grander scale undertaken, in the event of Darius’s death (486), by his son and successor Xerxes (480-479).

• In Thessalian territory lay the first conceivable line of anti-Persian defence, the Vale of Tempe between Mt Ossa and Mt Olympus. Once that had been abandoned by the coalition, the next and only feasible line of defence for the Greek loyalists was the pass of Thermopylae.
• After Thermopylae (a defeat) and its linked naval battle at Artemisium (a draw) the next major encounter was the naval Battle of Salamis in late September 480, in which the Greek loyalists, led – brilliantly – by the maverick Athenian politician and general Themistocles – won a smashing victory.
• Some modern as well as ancient critics, including Heroditus, have judged this to be the decisive battle of the Wars.
• That, then, is the background of war and empire against which I am going to look again in detail at the role in 480 BCE of the Spartans, as acknowledged leaders of the ‘the Greeks’ in resistance to the Persian invasion under Xerxes.
• There is no question but that had the Persians won, Greek civilization of the ensuing Classical era would have been immeasurably different from what did in fact evolve in the fifth and fourth centuries under the impulse of self-liberation against seemingly overwhelmingly military odds.

 

Chapter One – The Ancient World in 500 BCE: From India to the Aegean.

Chapter Two: The Dynamics of Empire: Persia of the Achaemenids, 485.

Chapter Three: Hellas: The Hellenic World in 485.

Chapter Four: Sparta 485: A Unique Culture and Society.

Chapter Five: Thermopylae I: Mobilization.

Chapter Six: Thermopylae II: Preparations for Battle.

Chapter Seven: Thermopylae III: The Battle.

Chapter Eight: The Thermopylae Legend I: Antiquity.

Chapter Nine: The Thermopylae Legend II: From Antiquity to Modernity.

Epilogue: Thermopylae: Turning-Point in World History.

Appendix 1. The Invention of History: Herodotus and Other Ancient Sources. Appendix 2. Herodotus’ Persian Muster-Lists: A Translation.

Appendix 3. Heroditus – Antidote to Fundamentalism.

Glossary. Bibliography. References. Index.