Battle of Thermopylae

Based on Wikipedia: Battle of Thermopylae

Three hundred Spartans walked into a narrow mountain pass knowing they would never walk out. That's the story everyone remembers. But the real Battle of Thermopylae, fought in 480 BCE, was stranger, more complex, and more consequential than the legend suggests.

It wasn't just three hundred men. It wasn't a suicide mission from the start. And the reason it still matters—the reason white nationalists in particular have latched onto this ancient battle—has everything to do with how we choose to tell stories about who gets to claim civilization itself.

An Empire Comes Calling

To understand Thermopylae, you first need to understand what the Persian Empire was in the fifth century BCE. This was the largest empire the world had ever seen. Stretching from modern-day Libya to Pakistan, from the shores of the Black Sea to the deserts of Egypt, it encompassed dozens of languages, religions, and peoples. The Persians called their king the "King of Kings"—and this wasn't mere boasting.

The Greeks, by contrast, weren't even a country. They were a collection of fiercely independent city-states who spent most of their time fighting each other. Athens and Sparta, the two most powerful, had fundamentally different societies. Athens was experimenting with democracy—a radical notion that ordinary citizens could govern themselves. Sparta was a military oligarchy built on the labor of enslaved people called helots, who outnumbered their Spartan masters roughly seven to one.

These city-states agreed on almost nothing. But they agreed on this: they didn't want to be ruled by Persia.

The Grudge Match

The Persian invasion of 480 BCE was, in essence, a revenge mission.

A decade earlier, some Greek cities had helped foment a rebellion in Persian territory—the Ionian Revolt. The Persians crushed it, but King Darius I didn't forget who had stirred the pot. He sent an expeditionary force to punish Athens and Eretria, the chief meddlers.

That force landed at Marathon in 490 BCE. Against all odds, the Athenians routed them. It was one of the most shocking military upsets in ancient history—a small Greek army defeating the mighty Persian war machine on an open beach.

Darius began planning a much larger invasion. He died before he could launch it. His son Xerxes inherited both the throne and the grudge.

Xerxes spent years preparing. He conscripted soldiers from across his vast empire. He ordered engineers to bridge the Hellespont—the narrow strait separating Asia from Europe—by lashing hundreds of ships together. He had workers dig a canal through a peninsula to avoid a stretch of coast where a previous Persian fleet had been destroyed by storms. These were engineering projects of almost unimaginable ambition for the ancient world.

When Xerxes finally marched, the ancient sources claim his army drank rivers dry as it passed. That's exaggeration, but the point stands: this was a force designed to be overwhelming, to convince the Greeks that resistance was not just futile but absurd.

The Diplomacy of Pits and Wells

Before the invasion, Xerxes sent ambassadors to Greek cities demanding "earth and water"—symbolic tokens of submission. Most cities complied. What else could they do against such power?

Athens and Sparta gave different answers.

The Athenians put the Persian ambassadors on trial and executed them by throwing them into a pit. The Spartans were more direct: they simply threw theirs down a well. According to the historian Herodotus, the Spartans told the ambassadors that if they wanted earth and water, they could find plenty at the bottom.

This was more than bravado. It was a point of no return. In the ancient world, harming ambassadors was a grave violation of sacred law. Athens and Sparta had now committed themselves to a fight to the death.

Interestingly, the Spartans later felt guilty about this. They sent two volunteers to the Persian capital at Susa, offering themselves for execution as atonement. Xerxes, reportedly impressed by their courage, sent them home unharmed. The gesture tells us something about Persian civilization that the simplified "freedom versus tyranny" narrative often omits.

A Plan Takes Shape

With the Persian army on the move, the Greek city-states did something remarkable: they stopped fighting each other long enough to form an alliance. Representatives met at Corinth to coordinate strategy. This was the ancient equivalent of herding cats—bitter rivals suddenly had to trust each other with their survival.

The Athenian politician Themistocles proposed a two-pronged defense. The Persian army would have to march south through mainland Greece, and the terrain offered a natural chokepoint: the pass of Thermopylae. Here, the coastal mountains squeezed down to a narrow track—in places, barely wide enough for a single wagon. A small force could hold that pass against vastly superior numbers.

But there was a catch. The Persians could bypass Thermopylae by landing troops from the sea. So the Greek fleet would simultaneously block the straits of Artemisium, preventing any naval end-run.

It was a clever strategy. Hold the pass, hold the straits, and the massive Persian advantage in numbers would mean nothing.

The Wrong Time for a War

Here's where the story gets complicated—and very human.

When scouts reported the Persian army approaching in August of 480 BCE, Sparta faced a problem. It was the festival of Carneia, a sacred religious celebration during which Spartan law forbade military action. The Olympic Games were also underway, which meant an Olympic truce was in effect.

This wasn't mere superstition. Sparta's entire society was built on rigid adherence to law and custom. Their power came from discipline, from the absolute predictability of Spartan behavior. Breaking religious law would undermine the very foundation of what made Sparta formidable.

But the Persians weren't going to wait for the festival to end.

The Spartan leadership found a compromise. They would send a small advance force to hold Thermopylae until the main army could follow. King Leonidas would lead this force personally, taking with him three hundred warriors from the Hippeis—the royal bodyguard.

Three hundred was a token force. Symbolic. It said to the Greeks: Sparta is committed. It said to the Persians: we are not afraid. And it gave the religious authorities cover—this wasn't really the army marching to war, just the king's personal retinue on an advance scouting mission.

Herodotus tells us Leonidas chose only men who had living sons. If the story is true, he knew what he was asking of them.

Seven Thousand Greeks

As Leonidas marched north, other Greek cities contributed troops. By the time the force reached Thermopylae, it numbered around seven thousand men. There were soldiers from Thespiae, Thebes, Corinth, Tegea, and a dozen other cities. The Phocians alone contributed a thousand warriors.

This wasn't a suicide squad. It was a real defensive force, meant to hold until reinforcements arrived.

Leonidas positioned his troops at the narrowest point of the pass—what the Greeks called the "middle gate." Here, an old defensive wall had been built years earlier by the Phocians. The Greeks repaired it and prepared to make their stand.

There was, however, a worry. Local informants told Leonidas about a mountain path called the Anopaea, which could be used to outflank the pass. He stationed the thousand Phocians on the heights to guard this route.

Everything was in place. Now they waited.

The Psychology of Waiting

Xerxes arrived at Thermopylae and made camp within sight of the Greek position. He waited four days before attacking.

Why? Probably he expected the Greeks to realize the hopelessness of their situation and disperse. His scouts had reported the size of the Greek force. It must have seemed laughable—a few thousand men against his hundreds of thousands.

The scouts also reported something curious. They had observed the Spartans exercising naked and combing their long hair. Xerxes supposedly found this amusing. A Greek exile in his court, the former Spartan king Demaratus, explained: these men were preparing to die, and Spartans always groomed themselves carefully before risking their lives in battle.

Xerxes sent an emissary to negotiate. He offered the Greeks their freedom and the title "Friends of the Persian People." He offered them better land than they currently possessed. All they had to do was submit.

Leonidas refused.

The emissary delivered Xerxes' final demand: surrender your weapons.

Leonidas' reply has echoed through twenty-five centuries: "Molṑn labé." Come and take them.

The Killing Ground

On the fifth day, Xerxes sent his first assault.

The narrow pass negated Persian numbers completely. The Greeks fought in rotation, each city's contingent taking turns at the front line while others rested. The Persian infantry, many of whom were lightly armed conscripts from subject peoples, crashed against the wall of Greek shields and spears again and again.

The Spartans were particularly devastating. They had trained for war since childhood—it was the only profession their society permitted for male citizens. They fought in the phalanx formation, overlapping shields creating an almost impenetrable wall while spears stabbed over the top. When their spears broke, they drew swords. When swords failed, they fought with hands and teeth.

They also employed a tactic that baffled the Persians: the feigned retreat. The Spartans would appear to flee in disorder, and when the Persians pursued, breaking their own formation in excitement, the Spartans would wheel around in perfect unison and slaughter them.

That first day was a catastrophe for Persia. Assault after assault broke against the Greek line.

Xerxes sent in the Immortals—his elite guard of ten thousand professional soldiers, so named because their ranks were immediately refilled whenever one fell. The Immortals fared no better. The pass was simply too narrow for numbers to matter.

The second day brought more of the same. Persian bodies piled in the pass. Greek casualties were minimal.

Xerxes, according to Herodotus, leapt from his throne three times in frustration as he watched his finest troops cut down.

The Betrayal

What Xerxes couldn't achieve through force, he achieved through treachery.

A local Greek named Ephialtes came to the Persian camp. His motivations aren't entirely clear—Herodotus says he expected a reward. Whatever his reasons, he told Xerxes about the mountain path that could bypass the Greek position.

That night, Xerxes sent the Immortals up the Anopaea path under cover of darkness.

The thousand Phocians stationed to guard the path heard them coming at dawn. The sound of men marching through fallen oak leaves gave the Immortals away. The Phocians grabbed their weapons—but rather than fight in the path itself, they retreated to higher ground to make a stand.

The Immortals ignored them. They had no interest in the Phocians. They continued down the path toward the Greek rear.

Runners reached Leonidas with the news around dawn. The Greeks held a council. Leonidas announced he would stay to cover the retreat of the main force.

Most of the Greek army withdrew. The Spartans stayed. So did seven hundred men from Thespiae, a small city that would be directly in the Persian path of march. They had no home left to retreat to.

The Thebans stayed too—though Herodotus suggests Leonidas kept them as hostages because he distrusted their loyalty. Most would eventually surrender.

There were also helots—enslaved people who served as attendants to the Spartan warriors. Ancient sources mention up to nine hundred of them remained. History has largely forgotten their presence in the final stand.

The Last Morning

Knowing the end was coming, the remaining Greeks moved forward from the narrow gate into a wider part of the pass. This seems counterintuitive—why abandon the defensive advantage? But they were no longer trying to hold. They were trying to kill as many Persians as possible before the Immortals arrived from behind.

They fought with a fury that shocked even the Persians. When their spears shattered, they used swords. When their swords broke, they used their hands. They were buying time for the rest of the Greek army to escape.

Leonidas fell in this fighting. A desperate struggle erupted over his body—the Greeks drove back the Persians four times before finally recovering their king's corpse.

Then the Immortals arrived.

The Greeks retreated to a small hill behind the wall, where they made their final stand. The Persians, unwilling to lose more men in close combat, surrounded them and finished them with arrows.

Xerxes was so angry at the casualties Leonidas had inflicted that he ordered the Spartan king's body beheaded and crucified—a shocking violation of Greek custom regarding the war dead.

The Aftermath

Thermopylae was a Persian victory. The pass was taken. The road to southern Greece lay open.

The Persians marched south. They overran Boeotia. They captured Athens itself—the Athenians had evacuated their population to the island of Salamis.

But the Greek fleet remained intact. And a month after Thermopylae, at the Battle of Salamis, the Greeks destroyed the Persian navy in the narrow straits. Xerxes, suddenly worried about being trapped in Europe with no way to supply his army, retreated to Asia with most of his forces.

He left behind a general named Mardonius with a substantial army to continue the campaign. The following year, at Plataea, a united Greek army annihilated this force. The Persian invasion was over.

Thermopylae hadn't stopped the Persians. But it had bought time. It had kept the Greek alliance together when it might have fractured. And it had demonstrated that the Persians could bleed—that they weren't invincible.

The Legend Takes Shape

Almost immediately, Thermopylae became a symbol.

The poet Simonides composed an epitaph for the Spartan dead, words that still appear on the modern monument at the pass:

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

The phrasing is significant. Not "obedient to their king" or "defending their homeland" but "obedient to their laws." The Spartans died because Spartan law required them to die rather than retreat. This was the highest Spartan virtue: perfect discipline, perfect obedience, the subordination of individual survival to collective duty.

For the Greeks, Thermopylae became proof that free men fighting for their homeland could stand against the massed forces of an empire. This interpretation was always somewhat tendentious—the Spartans weren't fighting for freedom in any modern sense, and their society depended on the enslavement of the helots. But the story was too powerful to complicate with nuance.

The Romans later adopted the tale. So did every European culture that followed. Thermopylae became the ur-narrative of the West defending civilization against Eastern barbarism, of quality versus quantity, of the few against the many.

What the Legend Leaves Out

The simplified version of Thermopylae—three hundred Spartans versus a million Persians—distorts the actual event in revealing ways.

First, the numbers. Modern historians estimate the Persian force at 120,000 to 300,000, not millions. This was still an overwhelming advantage, but not the cartoonish disparity ancient sources claimed.

Second, the Greeks. It wasn't three hundred men. It was seven thousand, from cities across Greece. The Thespians who died alongside the Spartans are usually forgotten, even though they made the same choice to stay. The helots who died as slaves in a battle for "freedom" are mentioned in passing at best.

Third, the Persians. Xerxes' empire was not a horde of barbarians. It was a sophisticated multicultural state with advanced infrastructure, religious tolerance, and a legal code. The Persians built roads, established postal systems, and generally allowed subject peoples to maintain their customs and religions. Many Greeks—including several city-states during the invasion—preferred Persian rule to the chaos of Greek inter-city warfare.

Fourth, the tactics. The Greeks didn't win through superior courage or love of freedom. They won through superior equipment (heavier armor, longer spears), superior training, and a terrain advantage that completely negated Persian numbers. It was a tactical triumph, not a spiritual one.

Why It Still Matters

The Battle of Thermopylae endures because it tells us something we want to believe: that sometimes standing firm matters even when you lose. That discipline and training can overcome raw numbers. That there are things worth dying for.

These are not ignoble sentiments. But the story has also been used for darker purposes.

White nationalists have adopted Thermopylae as a founding myth. In their telling, it becomes a story of white Europeans defending Western civilization against Asian hordes—a racial conflict dressed in ancient robes. The Spartans become proto-fascists, their militarism and eugenics admirable rather than disturbing. The "come and take them" slogan appears on merchandise and manifestos.

This reading requires ignoring almost everything about the actual history. The Greeks didn't think of themselves as "white" or "European" in any modern sense. The Persians weren't a different race. The Spartans' social system, built on slavery and the systematic abuse of children, would horrify any modern observer regardless of political orientation.

But that's the thing about legends. They become screens onto which later generations project their own anxieties and desires. The battle at the Hot Gates twenty-five hundred years ago was a real event with real causes and real consequences. The Battle of Thermopylae that lives in our cultural imagination is something else entirely—a story we keep telling ourselves, and the meaning changes with each telling.

The Ground Itself

If you visit Thermopylae today, you'll have trouble finding the pass. Centuries of sediment deposited by the nearby river have pushed the coastline several miles out to sea. What was once a narrow track between mountains and water is now a broad coastal plain.

A modern statue of Leonidas stands at the site, erected in 1955. Nearby is the monument with Simonides' epitaph. Tourists stop to take photographs. The hot springs that gave the place its name—Thermopylae means "Hot Gates"—still bubble up from the earth.

The actual location of the fighting has been identified through archaeology, but there's nothing dramatic about it now. Just a road, some hills, a few markers. The landscape that once made this place a perfect chokepoint has been erased by geology.

What remains is the story. And like all stories, it belongs to whoever tells it.