Against All Odds: Leonidas, the 300 Spartans, and the Battle of Thermopylae

The Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) was fought between the Persian Empire under King Xerxes I and the Greek forces led by Sparta under King Leonidas. Archive Photos/Getty Images

King Leonidas looked out upon the glinting mass of Persians winding up the valley toward him like the enameled back of a snake. He could hear the distant rumble of clanging armor and shouting men as the Persians advanced like the thundering sea that shimmered nearby. The restrictions of terrain prevented the enemy from casting its full weight and immense force against Leonidas and his Greek hoplites. Instead, the Persians squeezed their force into the mountain pass where they were confronted by Leonidas’ smaller army, which stood like an immovable wall. Despite the advantageous terrain, Leonidas knew how tenuous their position was. To his gaze, the enemy force appeared endless.

The Legend of Leonidas

Textile of “Leonidas at Thermopylae,” circa 1815, after the painting by Jacques-Louis David. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Public Domain

The story of Leonidas and his band of Spartans holding off the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. tops almost every list of the most heroic last stands in history. The Spartans’ deeds in that battle have assumed legendary status, fascinating generation after generation for 2,500 years, and, in our own day, generating comic books, movies, and games.

Although a layer of fabrication and exaggeration has come between us and the actual events of that day, it remains true that what Leonidas and his men did was genuinely heroic—worthy of tales and poems—and very likely helped to secure the future of Greece.

How did the fate of Greece come to rest with King Leonidas and a handful of Spartan warriors? By the 5th century B.C., Darius I’s Persian Empire was expanding into Europe. With Macedonia already under his control, Darius’s eye alighted next on Greece, particularly Athens. These troublesome little city-states on the peripheries of his vast empire had already stirred up revolts. It may be that Darius wanted to put an end to these backwater people once and for all.

But instead of uncivilized and undisciplined rebels, easily crushed by the might of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persians encountered something quite different. They met a society of capable, fierce warriors whose culture would become ascendant over the Mediterranean and—along with Roman culture—form the bedrock of Western civilization. The Persian Wars proved that Greece was no backwater. Persia, despite its vastly superior manpower and wealth, found itself locked in a grueling struggle against the Greek city-states. The future of the Mediterranean hung in the balance.

In 491 B.C., Darius demanded that the Greeks submit to his rule. The Greek response was to kill the messengers Darius had sent, and Athens and Sparta formed a defensive alliance. When the Persians invaded in 490 B.C., the Greeks beat them decisively in a surprise victory at Marathon.

Bas-relief of King Xerxes I, the fourth King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, from the ruined site of Persepolis, in present-day Iran. Hironaka/Shutterstock

Darius was succeeded by Xerxes I, who prepared another major invading army—composed of probably between 80,000 to  300,000 men, depending on the source. The Greeks learned of the oncoming force, and it must have appeared to them impossibly huge. This may account for Greek Historian Herodotus’s outlandish estimate of the Persian force at 5 million men. After some squabbling, the Greeks fielded a joint force of just 6,000 to 7,000 men, including Arcadians, Lokrians, Thebans, Phokians, and Spartans.

Under the Spartan Leonidas, the Greek force chose to make its defensive stand at the pass of Thermopylae,  about 93 miles from Athens. Because of the area’s mountainous topography, the approaching Persians could use only a narrow strip of land along the coast. Most of their large army was funneled toward the Greeks, making battle-line small enough for the outnumbered Greeks to handle.

The Persians approached, halted, and waited for the Greeks to come whimpering to them with terms of surrender. Xerxes expected his opponents to be so overawed by his force that they would simply lay down their weapons. When Xerxes demanded that the Greeks do just this, Leonidas replied: “come and take them.”

“The Defense of Thermopylae” From “The Story of the Greatest Nations, From the Dawn of History to the Twentieth Century,” 1900, by Edward Sylvester Ellis, and Charles Francis Horne. Internet Archive. Public Domain

Because of their resolute wills and strong defensive position, the Greek force held out against the battering onslaught of the Persian tide, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy and suffering only light casualties themselves. For two days, the battle wore on and the Persians made little progress. The barrages of arrows fired by the Persians didn’t  penetrate the heavy armor of the Greek hoplites well.

According to one famous legend, the Spartan Dieneces was told that the Persian arrows were so numerous, they would block out the sun, to which he replied, undaunted: “Then we will have the pleasure of fighting in the shade.” The Greek phalanx’s solid positional warfare was better suited to the terrain and held firm against the more lightly armed Persians. Even the more heavily-equipped, elite unit of Persian “Immortals” couldn’t break the Greek line.

Helmet of the Corinthian type and pair of greaves (shin guards) from the 5th century B.C. The complete armor would have typically included a spear, a shield, and a sword. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain

But on the third day, things changed. A local Greek betrayed Leonidas’s army by telling Xerxes about a hidden mountain pass that would take the Persians around behind the Greek line. Xerxes’s commander Hydarnes led a contingent through the mountain pass, and threatened to surround the Greeks.

With their strong defensive position flanked, Leonidas knew it was over. He dismissed most of his force, probably in order to spare their lives, while he, his 300 Spartans, and a few others formed a rear-guard to hold off the Persians and give the rest of the Greek army more time to get to safety. Alone as dawn shattered the sky on the third morning of the battle, Leonidas and his handful of men faced impossible odds. Historian Warren Carroll puts them at 600 to 1. There was no hope of victory, but there was hope of dying with honor, committed to duty, and with the goal of providing their comrades time to escape.

A Selfless Death

The 300 Spartans did just that. As Caroll related in “The Founding of Christendom,” “Every single Spartan died at his post, fighting in the end with fists and teeth when all weapons were gone; they held the whole horde of Asia from dawn to mid-afternoon, so that the rest of the army lived to fight again and help win later at Plataea.” Leonidas died with his men. The Persians decapitated his body and displayed it on a cross.

The Greek soldiers in the rearguard at Thermopylae laid down their lives for their comrades, and their sacrifice helped to preserve the much-needed Greek army. The war was far from over, and there were many battles yet to come.

The Spartans’ unflagging commitment to their duty was memorialized in an epitaph attributed to Simonides: “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by / That here, obeying their commands, we lie.”

The epitaph pays tribute to the Spartans and their Thespian allies who died on Kolonos Hill in Thermopylae. Elzbieta Krzysztof/Shutterstock

The legacy of the Spartans lives on through the ages. As we read in Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History, “The holding operation at Thermopylae not only bought time but went down in history as an extraordinary act of heroism. The defense of the Alamo in 1856 was commemorated as offering a modern parallel; German recruits in World War II were encouraged to emulate Leonidas’ Spartans; and in the ‘seventies the challenges of the futile war in Vietnam were captured in the film ‘Go Tell the Spartans.’”

The heroism of these men teaches us that fulfilling one’s duty is never futile. It may well be that Leonidas and his Spartans gave the rest of the Greek world just enough time to prepare for the next battle. Although Xerxes pushed forward after Thermopylae into mainland Greece, the Greeks defeated the Persians at the critical battle of Salamis, saving Greek civilization. Though Leonidas and the Spartans lost the battle of Thermopylae, their efforts played an important role in the larger conflict.

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