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The Miracle of Freedom - Chapter 2
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Pages 55-102
How the Greeks Saved the West
55 - And dying, died not.
Simonides, the Greek poet, in his epitaph to the Greek warriors who died in the battles against the Persians.
55 - The world is a warring place.
It is a jarring, unforgiving, and violent place, with power and riches going mainly to the strong.
In its long history, there have been thousands of battles fought.
Millions of soldiers and civilians have died.
Tyrants have been defeated. Heroes have been made.
55 - But none of these battles affected the future of the human race more, or created greater heroes, than did the two battles fought between the Greeks and the unconquerable Persians at Thermopylae and Salamis, in the nation of the Greeks.
Western Persia Kingdom
March, 480 BC
55 - He was a king. He was a Spartan. He was a warrior and a leader of the most advanced civilization on the earth.
55 - Or at least he used to be.
56 - Now he was something else.
56 - He was a traitor. A collaborator. A man whose lust for power was greater than even his love for kin.
For a chance to reclaim his old crown -- or for even a few cities, it would seem -- he would betray his own people.
56 - Demaratus, the Spartan, lifted his head bravely to the Persian king, daring to look upon his face.
Xerxes was incredibly intimidating -- dark and tall and strong.
 57 - The dethroned king, loser of a bitter power struggle in his old home of Sparta, lifted his head.
"Spartans do not fight for a king or empire, my lord.
They do not fight for riches or captured booty.
They will not fight under the sting of the whip or the threat of blood.
They do not fight for greed or lust or power.
They fight for something very different."
He stopped and took a breath.
When he continued, his voice was as soft as the night breeze that moved outside the thick tent walls.
"They fight for each other. For their families. For the idea that men should live free."
57 - Xerxes scoffed. Freedom! Liberty! Greek words, foreign to him.
There was nothing in his language that came close to explaining what the Spartan even meant.
57 - "One against one, they are as good as anyone in the world.
But when they fight in a body, they are the best of all.
For though they are free men, they are not entirely free.
They accept law as their master.
And they respect this master more than your subjects respect you."
The Spartan paused. "Whatever the law commands, they do.
And that command never changes: It forbids them to flee in battle, whatever the number of their foes.
It requires them to stand firm -- to conquer or die."
57 - But the Spartan soldiers are not like anything you (58) have ever faced before.
58 - They believe they are the master race.
Six hundred years of unpolluted Spartan lineage must be proven before a man-child is brought into the circle of Spartan warriors.
Once selected, a child is taken from his mother and trained to be nothing but a master of war.
They dedicate their lives, steeling themselves to die in battle if that is their cause.
They grow their hair long, work their bodies into muscle, keep their spirits lean, their stomachs hungry.
They are fearless when committed.
And they will be committed now."
58 - Xerxes was unimpressed. "All men are committed when faced with certain death," he said.
"The sword of Persia brings out commintment.
Believe me, Demaratus, I have defeated many committed men before."
58 - "You haven't fought against free men," Demaratus answered simply.
58 - The great one moved forward on his throne.
"What is the difference?" he sneered.
"Rule of law? Rule of an emperor? Show me a single place or time in history when the rule of law meant anything to anyone!"
58 - "Will they really fight against us?" King Xerxes asked for the final time.
58 - Demaratus didn't hesitate. "I can't speak for the Athenians, but this much I know: Sparta will never accept your terms.
They will die a thousand times before they accept earth and water, for to do so would (59) reduce them all to slavery, a thing they could never do.
59 - Even if all of Greece were to lie down before your army, the Spartans would stand and fight.
It matters not how many or how few.
If only a thousand should take the battle before your army of a million, they will stand and fight."
• • • • • • •
59 - Two hundred miles across the Aegean Sea, the Spartan king, Leonidas, watched the sun crest the mountains to the east...
59 - Leonidas was the epitome of everything a Spartan warrior was supposed to be.
Strong as oak. Quick with a sword. Fearless. Intelligent. Beyond the reach of pain.
60 - Hardened by a lifetime of preparation to fight and kill and die in war.
60 - He thought again of the words the oracle of Apollo had told them: The fate of Sparta was to see their great city destroyed, or to see the death of a great king.
60 - Which of the two it was to be, he did not know. No one did. But of this much he was certain: War was coming.
The messengers from Xerxes had made that very clear.
Which meant they had to stand against an army so large that it was said that when they stopped to drink, they would drain the rivers dry!
60 - His people were not ready. And that frightened him to the core.
The Seed of a Republic
60 - A little less than a century after the brutal Assyrians faced the city walls at Juersalem and walked away without victory (as noted in the previous chapter), the Assyrians met their demise at the hands of the Babylonians.
In 612 BC, those lands that had once been controlled by the Assyrians were divided between the Median Empire to the north and the Babylonians to the south.
In 540 BC, the center of power suddenly shifted once again when Babylon fell under the rising Persian power.
King Cyrus and his Persian army conquered not only Babylon but all of Asia Minor.
60 - Cyrus who had no bone to pick with the small and relatively unimportant kingdom of Judah, had allowed the Jews to return to their homeland, something that happened only a few decades after they had been taken captive into Babylon.
(Throughout his reign, Cyrus the Great was known for his tolerance of the religions of the people, his treatment of the Jews being only one example.)
61 - During all this upheaval, primarily because of their relatively protected location away from the warring empires, the Greek city-states had progressed beyond any other culture or society in the ancient world.
By any standard, their achievements were remarkable, and few if any societies can claim such a long-standing and positive influence on cultures or nations yet to come.
In so many critical human endeavors, the Greeks stood alone.
United by a common language, religion, and alphabet, and with the rise of the Roman Empire still a few centures in the future, the Greeks
61 - ... created a literature which is still living, still read: laid the basis, through Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes and others, of nearly 2000 years of geometry:
commenced, with Herodotus and Thucydides, history as we both know and practice it:
created diverse schools of philosophy which still exercise the minds of men: invented political science:
laid the foundations of biology: created geography and extended cosmology: developed medicine far beyond anything previously known to the ancient world.
And these were but a few of their achievements which can be rivalled in this period of human history by none.
61 - Yet none of these great achievements could occur if the Greeks were to be defeated by the mighty Persian army, for most of them wouldn't be achieved until after the battles at Thermopylae and Salamis were fought.
Who Were the Greeks?
61 - Though the emergence of their culture can be traced back to the eighth century BC, the Greeks exerted their greatest and longest-lasting influence on the world during their Classical and Hellenistic periods, (62) dating roughly from 500 BC until shortly after they were overcome by the Roman Empire in 146 BC.
62 - For all their achievements in so many noble fields of human endeavor, the greatest contribution of the ancient Greeks was their experimentation and success in establishing the concepts of the rights of the individual, personal liberty, and self-government or democracy.
62 - One of the primary reasons for the phenomenal progress of the Greeks, not just in democratic thinking but in so many other areas, was their early adoption of the city-state form of government.
The Greeks organized themselves around their local cities.
Adjoining areas were considered part of the city-state; for example, the city-state of Athens included the entire Attica peninsula, roughly a thousand square miles.
62 - On occasion, the city-states would unite together in leagues, primarily for mutual protection through military alliances, but also to enrich themselves through trade.
But these leagues were always limited in scope and subject to shifting membership.
Indeed, they were so fleeting that they could often not be relied upon, for the fiercely independent Greeks were determined not to become just another small part of someone else's greater kingdom or empire.
62 - Although their resistance to uniting made them vulnerable to more powerful forces, the Greeks' city-state form of government had many significant advantages.
Each city-state was small, locally governed, and in vibrant competition with its fellow Greek city-states.
Each set its own priorites and its own agenda.
This fascilitated innovation and creative genius.
One scholar declared them to be examples of "extreme chauvinism ... highly individualistic and autonomous ... all that had allowed the creation and growth of a free landowning citizenry like none other."
62 - Other scholars have noted:
62 - From the close of the Greek Middle Age (ca. 750 BC) Greek civilization developed with remarkable rapidity.
No other Indo-European or Oriental people has achieved results comparable to those of the next centuries.
63 - The one institution more responsible for this extraordinary achievement than any other was the city-state (polis)...
63 - ...[T]he city-state made possible boundless versatility in the fields of literature, art, and philosophy.
Perhaps its most precious contribution to civilization is republican government, which the Greeks devised in endless variety and which assured to the citizens a varying degree of liberty and self-government.
63 - Although not alone, the city-state most active in experimenting with self-government was Athens.
Over decades its government evolved from a kingship, to a king with a council made up of aristocrats, to rule by a broad collection of aristocrats, to a representative government of all citizens.
This evolution was not without its failures and the occasional tyrant or two, but for the quarter century before 480 BC, the city-state of Athens had tested the limits of democracy and found it acceptable.
After 480, it continued to experiment and achieved an even higher degree of self-government.
63 - Of the Athenians it was said, "They bow to no man and are no man's slaves.
63 - Noted historian Victor Davis Hanson has commented on how unusual the Greek experimentation truly was by pointing out what was at stake when Persia invaded Greece in 480 BC:
63 - First, we should remember that the decade-long Persian Wars ... offered the East the last real chance to check Western culture in its embryonic state, before the Greeks' radically dynamic menu of constitutional government, private property, broad-based militias, civilian control of military forces, free scientific inquiry, rationalism, and separation between political and religious authority would spread to Italy, and thus via the Roman Empire to most of northern Europe and the western Mediterranean.
Indeed, the words freedom and citizen did not exist in the vocabulary of any (64) other Mediterranean culture, which were either tribal monarchies, or theocracies.
64 - With its culture that valued freedom, individual liberty, and self-government, the Greek city-state was critical to the future development of the Western world.
And although it is impossible to know how the history of Europe would have unfolded, this much is surely true: had the Greeks been defeated at Salamis -- had their people been conquered by a power for whom the concepts of freedom and citizen did not even exist -- history would have unfolded much differently.
Who Were the Persians?
64 - Much of the early history of the Persian Empire remains obscured by the fog of time.
Still, from a murky genesis sprang one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known.
Encompassing almost three million square miles, the Persian Empire stretched across three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe.
It included an extremely diverse group of peoples: Persians, Medes, Egyptians, Greeks, Scythians, Babylonians, Bactrians, and Indians, among others.
At its zenith, the Persian Empire controlled territories that spanned from northern India across Central Asia and Asia Minor, stretching as far north as what is now known as Uzbekistan and the Black Sea coastal areas to the Mediterranean Sea in the west and as far south as Egypt and Libya in northern Africa.
And all of these people paid tribute to the Persian king, making the empire enormously wealthy.
64 - Cyrus founded the empire by conquering the Median kingdom, bringing together the Medes and the Persians, then building twin capital cities at Pasargadae and Persepolis.
(As conquerors of the Medes, the Persians are sometimes referred to by historians as the Medes. We will refer to them as Persians here.)
Cyrus continued conquering new territory thoughout his reign, the most important conquest being the defeat of Babylon, a victory that brought all of the former Babylonian Empire under his control, pushing his western border to the Mediterranean Sea.
65 - After the death of Cyrus in 530 BC, his son Cambyses made significant gains in Egypt.
His reign was short-lived, however, and only eight years after the death of Cyrus, Darius (whom many consider the greatest of the Persian kings, although his claim on the royal line was tenuous) fought his way to power.
65 - Darius started a series of brilliant military, engineering, and governmental campaigns.
He initiated the construction of a canal between the Nile River and the Red Sea (the forerunner of the Suez Canal), and construction of the Royal Road, a great highway stretching for more than a thousand miles between Mesopotamia and the Aegean Sea.
Among his other achievements, he made acceptable the use of coinage, spread the Old Perisan language, and greatly increased government and military efficiency.
65 - His immediate successor, Xerxes, ruled from 486 to 465 BC.
Cunning and incredibly ambitious, Xerxes was intent on expanding his empire west, determined to bring all of Europe under his domain.
He dreamed of an empire that stretched from the hills and swamps of India to the rocky Atlantic shores.
Looking across the Aegean Sea, he saw the magnificence of the Greek culture, knowing he would have to conquer the territories of Greece before he could venture any farther west.
The First Invasion of Greece
65 - Xerxes was not the first of the Persian rulers to lust after Greece.
His predecessor on the throne, Darius, had also looked longingly at the city-states of Greece.
Convinced that they were weak and ready to be plundered because of their continual inter-city conflict and unwillingness to agree upon mutual defense, Darius considered them easy targets for invasion.
65 - The Persian Empire was predatory and seemed to set no limit to its growth, and there was now no reason why it should not spread across the Aegean to the Balkan peninsula.
Booty, tribute, and the hope of excelling his predecessor (66) in the glory of triumphant war no doubt attracted Darius.
66 - ... What should Darius' policy be toward those Greeks not within his empire? Absorption was a likely answer.
66 - The Greeks were not unaware of Darius's intentions.
Quite the opposite -- they knew that he had already made one conquest in Europe when Thrace, a sometime ally to the north of Greece, fell under the Persian hand.
As the Greeks watched Darius reach into the Western world, they realized that he would surely come for them.
66 - Among all the city-states of Greece, the people of Athens were particularly perceptive of Darius's intentions.
In 492 BC, they elected a man named Themistocles to become their leader.
This was a decision that would prove to be one of the most significant in the long history of Athens.
66 - In preparing for the coming battle, Themistocles came to a critical conclusion: Hellespont was the key.
66 - Located in modern-day Turkey, Hellespont, or what is now called the Dardanelles, is the narrow strait of water that connects the Aegean and the Black Seas.
Long recognized as the boundary line between Asia and Europe, it is, at its most narrow point, less than one mile wide.
The Persians would have to move their massive army across Hellespont before they could begin to track west and then south toward the rugged mountains that made up most of Greece.
66 - Themistocles realized that once the Persians had crossed at Hellespont, their army could be resupplied only by sea.
Understanding this, he made a strategic -- but very risky -- decision, convincing his fellow Athenians to shift their resources to building a navy to counter the Persian fleet.
66 - When Darius had positioned his army and was ready to attack, he sent his emissaries to the Greek city-states, demanding "earth and water" -- the Persian term for unconditional surrender.
Many of the Greek city-states in the Aegean Islands surrendered. The situation looked bleak.
The Greeks' tradition of independence, which had proven to be one of their great strengths, now appeared to be their potential undoing.
67 - Standing alone as independent city-states, the Greeks could not hope to withstand the might of the Persian army.
67 - Many of the city-states in Greece were ready to capitulate.
Most were unsure of the best course of action.
But the Athenians, under the inspired leadership of Themistocles, ramped up their preparations for war.
67 - The first confrontation of what would become known as the Greco-Persian Wars occurred in 490 BC at Marathon.
A Persian army under the command of Darius's nephew sailed across the Aegean with the intent of subduing two city-states, Athens and Eretria.
Eretria fell quickly and was sacked, its people taken captive.
67 - Within Athens, the debate raged on: surrender of fight against impossible odds?
Their warrior neighbors were called on for help, but in a great irony of history, the devout Spartans were unable to come to the assistance of the Athenians due to the Carneia Festival.
During this sacred holiday, for fear of offending their gods, all Spartan male citizens had to be purified.
More important, the Spartan army was forbidden to leave the territory or fight in any kind of military campaign.
67 - Amid the chaos, and without the help of the Spartans, Athens was barely able to muster ten thousand men.
The Persians had an army at least three times that number.
67 - On the plains of Marathon, the Athenians faced their mortal enemy.
Terribly outnumbered, inexperienced in combat, and uncertain even of the sanity of their decision, they didn't wait for the mighty Persian army to march forward.
Instead, the brave Athenians initiated the attack.
Running in fury toward their enemy over a distance of almost one mile, they engaged the Persians.
Relying on such courage, as well as a variety of brilliant military tactics, the Athenians routed the Persians.
Much of the invading army was destroyed and the survivors sent scurrying across the Aegean in utter shame.
67 - Just as the battle was winding down, with their religious rites finally complete, the Spartans eagerly marched onto the scene, arriving just in time to inspect the dead Persians scattered across the plains of Marathon.
68 - Although only the first skirmish in what was to prove to be a brutal and protracted war, the battle of Marathon was significant for two reasons.
First, it proved to the Athenians that they were better warriors than any had believed, giving them a jolt of confidence.
It also proved that the Persians could be defeated.
They were not indomitable.
Soon, the story of the Athenian victory in the battle at Marathon was whispered throughout the Persian Empire.
The shocking revelation that the Persians were not invincible led to revolts in Babylon and Egypt, the people rising up against their Persian masters.
68 - From the Persian perspective, the defeat at Marathon led to a hardening of their resolve, altering the dynamic within the royal court.
No longer was the conquest of Greece seen as just a military option.
To the rulers of Persia, it had become vital to maintaining a firm grip upon their expansive empire.
Prelude to Invasion
68 - Although the victory at Marathon had been a land battle, the Athenians continued to concentrate on building their navy, for two facts had become even more apparent: first, the Persians would attack them again, and this time nothing would be held back;
and second, in order to defeat the Persians, the outnumbered Greeks had to defeat the Persian navy so as to sever their army's source of supply.
68 - On the other side of the Aegean sea, Darius spent several years amassing men, equipment, sailors, and ships for a second and decisive attack upon the Greeks.
But he died in 486 before he could fulfill his great ambition.
68 - His oldest son, Xerxes, set out to finish the task.
After crushing the various rebellions within his kingdom, he turned his attention back to the upcoming invasion of Greece.
His plan was to defeat the tiresome Greeks and then continue marching west until he had conquered all of Europe.
It was a monumental task, and he knew it.
He spent years in preparation, amassing an incomparable army to guarantee that the invasion would be unstoppable.
69 - The Hellespont was conquered by the construction of a bridge consisting of 674 boats.
69 - Once he had crossed onto the European continent, Xerxes commanded the digging of a massive canal across the entire peninsula at the base of Mount Athos.
69 - It took an untold number of men, standing on ladders while lifting bucket after bucket of rock and dirt, to build this canal.
Part military necessity, part a statement of pride and power, Xerxes spent nearly three years in this effort.
It would have been a massive undertaking in any age, but for the era of the Persians and Greeks, it was a wonder -- especially considering that its only purpose was to avoid a dangerous and stormy area of the Aegean Sea where his father's navy had suffered severe losses ten years before.
69 - This mighty effort spoke clearly of the simple truth that Xerxes knew that his invasion would succeed or fail based upon the ability of his navy to supply his immense army.
69 - Vast stores of supplies were then laid up along the route that Xerxes' army was to follow.
His army was immense. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed that it had five million soldiers and more than 1,200 ships.
This was certainly an exaggeration. Modern historians estimate the army to have been between 150,000 and 500,000 soldiers -- some say as high as 800,000 - with a navy of 700 to 1,200 warships.
69 - Regardless of the actual number, this is clear: It was the largest combined invasion force Europe was to witness until the D-Day invasion of World War II.
The Armies and Navies Compared
69 - Greece is a mountainous region, its land extremely unconducive to warring (as was rediscovered during World War II).
Not only are the mountain steep and rugged, with sharp and pointed rocks, but the undergrowth is very thorny.
In many locations, the hills and mountains are covered with high, thick bushes.
It is almost impossible to traverse them except over established trails, making it infeasible to (70) fight anywhere in Greece except for on its plains, which make up only about one-fifth of the country.
This physical characteristic dictated the makeup of the army.
70 - The core of the Greek army consisted of the hoplites -- heavily armored citizen-soldiers.
They wore bronze helmets, the rest of their upper bodies covered with bronze and leather.
They carried round shields, about thee feet across, made of wood, with a bronze covering, called hoplons, from which the hoplites received their name.
Their primary weapon was the spear, about six feet long, with a wood shaft and iron tip.
A short sword completed their personal arsenal. Bows and arrows were rarely used.
70 - Neither the Spartans nor the Athenians were ever able to muster armies of more than a few thousand soldiers -- in the case of Sparta, never more than eight thousand.
Being greatly outnumbered, the Greeks were forced to rely on disciplined mass to overcome their enemies.
They fought shoulder to shoulder, with shields touching, spears held out in front to rip the Persians apart.
Once their spears were hacked to pieces, the soldiers would fight to the death with their swords.
Standing brother to brother, the entire unit depended upon the courage and resolve of each and every soldier.
As one historian has noted, the hoplites would be expected to be "standing foot to foot, shield pressed on shield, crest to crest and helmet to helmet, chest to chest engage your man."
70 - For the Persians, bows and arrows were weapons of first choice.
For close-in combat, they used daggers and short javelins that could be thrown, unlike the Greek spears that would be wielded.
Only the personal bodyguards of Xerxes, the "Immortals," wore armor approaching the quality of that worn by the Greeks.
The rest of the Persians were lightly armored, their shields made of wicker, not bronze.
70 - But what the Persians lacked in armaments, they more than made up for in the vast number of soldiers that they could throw into the battle.
70 - Both the Persian and Greek naval vessels were called triemes.
Captained by a master, each trireme was fairly large, the Greek versions (71) being about 130 feet long and 30 feet wide with the oars extended.
71 - They had three levels, or banks, of oarsmen. The top level had 31 oars on each side. The two lower levels each had 27.
With one oarsman per oar, there were a total of 170 men pulling on each boat.
In addition to the oarsmen, there were fifteen deckhands and a contingent of marines, some of whom were archers.
71 - Each trieme had one small mast and sail that could propel the ship, but only under perfect conditions.
Generally the trieme was dependent upon the toil of the oarsmen to drive it forward.
In battle, the oarsmen were the only means of propulsion.
Manning an oar was harsh and backbreaking work, the opportunity to rest very rare.
71 - Once in the open water, the combat tactics used by both sides were simple: either ram an enemy ship with the ram positioned below the waterline to sink it, or run alongside of the enemy ship to break off the oars and kill the oarsmen, and then either capture or sink the boat at your leisure.
Both maneuvers required speed and mobility, a fact that was to prove fateful to the Greeks.
The Only Hope for a Greek Defense
71 - Before the command to invade Greece was given, Xerxes sent heralds to the various city-states, demanding they surrender.
Then, in a show of supreme confidence, he allowed Greek spies to observe the mustering and maneuvers of his military forces, knowing fear would play a significant role in the Greek decision as to whether it was worth the cost to stand and fight.
71 - There was precious little unity among the Greeks.
Seeing the massive invasion force, some of the city-states surrendered "earth and water."
Others, out of lingering anger for past defeats and injuries, refused to align with certain neighbors within the emerging defense league.
Still, the impeding threat was so obvious, the fear of utter destructioon so great, that it spurred a greater unity and sense of "being Greek" than had ever existed among the city-states before.
71 - Sparta had historically been the strongest of the Greek city-states (72) and was again looked to for leadership.
72 - In a meeting held in 481 BC, the city-states that had decided to fight agreed to Sparta's overall command and to the adoption of a comprehensive strategy.
72 - As Themistocles had so persuasively argued, the navy was the key.
Athens and its allies now had a fleet of almost three hundred ships.
If it could defeat or at least inflict major damage on the navy of Xerxes, his army would be left without the means of adequate resupply
Without the ability to supply his massive army, Xerxes would be forced to withdraw.
72 - But before the Greeks could engage the Persian navy, the Persian army had to be slowed on its long march south.
The Greeks hoped not only to give the citizens of Athens time to evacuate their city but also to limit the inevitable death and destruction that would shadow the approach of Xerxes' masses.
72 - But where to engage the massive Persian army that was approaching from the north?
72 - The defenders had to find a strategic spot where whatever small army they could muster could have some hope of blocking Xerxes' immense horde.
72 - Battlegrounds to the far north were out of the question.
Too many of the city-states in Macedonia, Thrace, and Thessaly had already surrendered.
72 - Another consideration was the fact that the farther south Xerxes marched, the more stretched his supply lines would become, making him more dependent upon his navy for resupply.
72 - The critical decision as to where the tiny nation of Greece could engage the mighty Persians was not an insignificant one, for not only was the freedom of the Greeks at risk, but the future of the entire Western world hung in the balance.
• • • • • • •
72 - Xerxes' plan depended on close coordination between his army and his navy.
As the army marched south, the navy sailed with it, hugging (73) the coast, slipping through the canal at Athos, always keeping abreast of the main thrust of Persian forces.
73 - The Greek leaders, watching and studying the advancing enemy, realized that their initial assumptions regarding the critical interdependence between the Persian army and the navy were holding true.
After days of debate, it was finally decided to confront both of them simultaneously.
Themistocles always believed this first sea battle would be a holding action.
He chose to meet the Persian navy at the narrow strait at Artemisium, hoping to inflict enough damage to weaken it and also to gain intelligence about Persia's naval capabilities before the main sea battle would be fought farther to the south, at Salamis.
73 - As for the land battle, the choice of where to engage the Persians was of much greater importance.
The Greeks were terribly outmanned.
In the end, they sent an army of seven thousand to meet Xerxes' horde of no fewer than twenty times that number, and perhaps thirty times or even more.
73 - Where could the Greeks stand to fight?
73 - Thermopylae was the only choice.
73 - Some hundred miles northwest of Athens, Thermopylae was a critical choke point through which the entire Persian army would have to pass.
Edged by steep mountains and the sea, the narrow passage was only about twenty yards wide.
There was also an ancient wall that could be rebuilt quickly.
With the sea protecting the Greeks' flank to the right and the steep, sheer base of Mount Kallidromos protecting their left, the advantage of the innumerable Persians would be mitigated at the pass.
73 - So it was that, at this narrow neck of land tucked between the mountain and the sea, King Leonidas, three hundred of his Spartans, and a few thousand other Greek hoplites would make their last stand.
The Movie: "300" - Released in 2006
King Leonidas of Sparta and a force of 300 men
fight the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.
The Spartan Warriors
73 - Unlike Athens and most other Greek city-states, Sparta did not rely on citizen-soldiers.
In the Spartan social structure, only descendants (74) of those who were part of the original group that had conquered the southern tip of Greece some six hundred years before could be full citizens.
74 - For the last two hundred years, the rulers of the Spartan "master race" had developed a set of very strict rules regarding its military class: weak or defective newborns were killed; at age eight, selected males were to be separated from other citizens in camps called messes; no ownership of gold or silver was allowed by those selected, nor were trading, farming, arts, or a profession; these men-children were immersed in military training, focusing entirly on becoming skilled and physically strong warriors.
Everyone ate the same food at the messes, and it was a "Spartan meal" insufficient to satisfy hunger, so thievery was encouraged.
But one should never the caught, so cleverness and cunning were developed.
To further distinguish the warriors, they were encouraged to grow their hair long.
Women were revered, good manners and order in families were demanded, stong marriages were admired.
74 - Sparta sustained this warrior class through the efforts of the other citizens who engaged in all those fields forbidden to the warriors.
Its form of governance was not like that of any other Greek city-state, for it was a strange mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.
74 - The Spartan life required the strictest adherence to religious formality, which explained why the Spartans had showed up late for the battle at Marathon.
(Odd though it seems, such restraint was a sign of the discipline and strength of the Spartan warrior.)
Yet once again, during the summer of 480, the approach of the Persian army coincided with a sacred holiday.
But the enemy forces that approached this year could not be ignored.
Despite the religious prohibition aganst doing so, three hundred warriors were assembled.
Under the command of King Leonidas, the tiny army was dispatched to Thermopylae.
74 - As the Spartans started marching toward the narrow pass, the Greek fleet (consisting primarily of Athenian ships) also sailed north.
The collision of East and West was drawing near.
The War Begins
75 - If history shows us anything, it shows that Xerxes, the man who presided over one of the largest kingdoms in world history, was not a weak or foolish man.
75 - In May of 480 BC, his giant army, with soldiers from at least forty-six nations, crossed the Hellespont.
75 - It took a week for the throng of men and animals (seventy-five thousand horses, mules, and camels) to cross over the bridge of boats.
Building a road before them, these so-called barbarians (a title attached by the Greeks to anyone not of Greek blood) proved to be quite marvelous in planning for, and skilled in the unfolding of, an invasion.
Creating the bridge across the Hellespont, building the Athos Canal to avoid the dangerous seas around Mount Athos, managing a supply of water for such a huge number of men and animals, supplying the men and animals with sufficient food in an area that barely sustained its own population, buying or frightening off the local population to avoid unnecessary fighting on the march south -- all of these showed the genius, preparation, and skills of King Xerxes and his royal court.
75 - Xerxes possessed a confidence born of planning, preparation, and an unparalleled history of military success.
He fully expected to easily sweep through all of Greece just as he had just swept through the north of that country.
75 - But, unknown to the Persian leader, King Leonidas and his tiny band of long-haired, scarlet-cloaked warriors were marching north to meet them.
75 - As soon as their most holy of festivals was over, the rest of the Spartan army would follow.
But all knew that it would be too late.
The marching Spartan soldiers were on a suicide mission.
Knowing this, Leonidas selected for his army only those Spartans who had living sons who could carry on their family names once their fathers had been killed.
76 - While the Spartans marched, the Greek navy struggled toward Artemisium, their ships fighting the prevailing currents and wind.
76 - Xerxes was taking his time moving south, enjoying the beginnings of his European conquest.
His navy was able to sail faster than his army could march.
That created a problem for his naval captains, who knew that the longer they lingered, the higher was the risk of encountering dangerous storms in this temperamental area of the Aegean sea.
The fact that Darius's navy had been wiped out ten years before, not far from where they now toiled under the summer sun, was not forgotten by Xerxes' naval commanders.
Their fears proved justified, for, while waiting for the army, the navy was hit by a three-day storm, and a large number of ships were lost off the coast of Euboea.
76 - As the Spartans marched north toward Thermopylae, they gathered additional soldiers: seven hundred from Thespia, four hundred from Thebes, a few hundred here and a few hundred more there, from cities large and townships small.
By the time they reached Thermopylae, Leonidas had perhaps seven thousand hoplites.
76 - One must wonder at the willingness of these men who joined this doomed army.
All of the soldiers knew what type of terror was descending from the north.
Many of their fellow Greeks had already surrendered in fear.
Others had betrayed their homeland for Persian coin.
But whatever the reason, there was something different about these men.
Willingly, they left their homes, their families, their peaceful lives, and joined in the valiant but hopeless effort to defend Greece.
76 - Leonidas must have considered the last words he is reported to have said to his wife, the queen, upon his leaving.
Looking at him for the last time, she had pleaded, "Leonidas, Leonidas, what am I to do?"
76 - He had answered her simply. "Marry a good man and bear good children."
76 - Such willingness to sacrifice on behalf of all Greece would prove to be the key to the battles that lay ahead.
Thermopylae Pass
Ninety-Eight Miles Northwest of Athens
77 - King Leonidas stood upon the rock and looked out on the narrow valley that lay on the other side of the pass.
Sand. Broken shale. Mountains on his left; steep rock, thick with trees and thorny brush.
To his right, the deep waters of the Gulf of Malis, the shoreline abrupt and craggy.
77 - Four days now. Four days and four nights. That was how long he had been watching as the Persian army flowed into the narrow gorge between the mountain and the sea.
Four full days just to amass and organize the army.
The crowd of men and horses was so vast it created a thunder throughout the ground and there was a nearly constant glint of flashing swords in the setting sun, the clouds aginst the mountain bathing the scene in filtered light.
Columns of men. Thousands of tents. It seemed a million horses. Looking at them, he had to force himself to breathe.
Amid the army, a massive portable building -- was it really just a tent? -- rose out of the flatness of the plain.
The mobile palace of the mighty Xerxes. Leonidas forced himself to breathe again.
77 - His tiny army waited on the south side of the wall. He turned to look down upon them.
77 - How does one wait to die? he wondered as he stared down at his men.
77 - He was standing where the man-made wall met a natural out-cropping of stone.
His Spartans were the closest to him, closest to the enemy, just where they should be.
Most of them were bare above the waist, exercising, eating, sharpening their short swords, washing their long hair.
Behind them, the hoplites stood in disorganized ranks, milling here and there.
They were good men all, and he didn't doubt their hearts, but none of them were warriors, and their ability to carry out the work of war was an unanswered question in his mind.
Yes, they would fight, but would their fighting be effective?
And would any of them live?
77 - His lieutenants stood on the wall beside him, watching his eyes.
78 - Behind them, the sounds of the mighty Persian army seemed to fill the air, the mass of so many men and animals concentrated so close together creating a constant commotion in their ears.
Dust drifted up from the roads that followed along the beach.
Still more soldiers coming in.
78 - The Spartan warriors turned to the their king. One of them spoke, his voice uncertain.
"I wonder, lord ... how can so few hope to stand against so many?"
78 - Leonidas lifted his chin. "If numbers are what matters, then all of Greece cannot match even a small part of this army," he said.
"But if courage is what counts, then our number is sufficient."
78 - The Spartan warrior thought, then nodded.
78 - Leonidas nodded gently to the hoplites and his Spartan brothers.
"I have plenty of men," he seemed to whisper to himself, "since they are all to be slain."
78 - The other Spartans watched, heavy with the burden of the coming battle, but thrilled to be there all the same.
The king frowned, then looked across the wall.
78 - A party of horsemen were riding toward them, their horses kicking up the sand.
They were dressed in long black robes and jeweled headdresses -- their coats flowing behind them, reaching almost to their horses' knees, created the impression of dark ghosts floating in the wind.
The riders rode quickly, pulling up their horses at the wall.
Only their eyes could be seen above the black veils across their faces.
Dark pupils. Powerful expressions. No fear of doubt or concern wer evident in either their eyes of body language.
78 - The lead horseman reached up to pull aside his veil.
"We come in the name of our lord, King Xerxes," he shouted, his voice harsh and arrogant.
78 - Leonidas stepped up a few paces, taking a position higher on the outcropping of rock against the wall.
78 - The horseman waited for an answer, then shouted once again, "We come in the name of Xerxes!"
78 - Leonidas pointed at the land of Greece behind him. "You are not welcome here," he said.
79 - The horseman seemed to freeze upon his saddle, then cracked a thin smile. "We go where we go, Spartan!"
79 - Leonidas motioned to the magnificent tent of Xerxes, the banners, the trumpets, the slaves, unnumbered wagons filled with food, the mounts and herds of animals, the majesty of the greatest army in the world.
Persians must be greedy," he said. "Look at all you have. Yet you come to take our barley cakes."
79 - The emissary studied him a long moment.
"We go where we go, Spartan," he repeated. "And we take what we take."
79 - Jerking on the leather reins, he pulled his horse around, the animal snorting in pain against the bit.
Then he nodded to his escorts, who seemed to gather nearer.
"Our lord demands that you surrender your arms!" he sneered.
79 - Leonidas watched him, his eyes narrowing in disgust.
A Spartan moved his hand toward his spear, but Leonidas held him back with a lift of his finger.
79 - A puff of hot wind blew, lifting dust into the air. None of the Spartans answered.
79 - The messenger waited, his face dark, his jaw growing tight.
My lord will spare you and your men," he shouted. "You may go in peace.
And you will go much richer. My master is a kind and generous man.
You will live a life of luxury. Or you can die here on this day.
Those are your choices, Spartan. Surrender this fight, and live to see another day!
Or die against the pitiful wall that you have built here. There is no other way!"
79 - Still Leonidas didn't answer. The burn in his eyes said everything.
79 - The emissary stretched against his stirrups and lifted up his sword. "Surrender now your weapons!" he screamed into the wind.
79 - "Come and take them!" Leonidas shouted back, his voice dripping with disdain.
79 - The emissary sat back into his saddle, his horse pawing at the ground.
He stared at the Spartan king in disbelief. Heat lifted off the brown earth and a salty breeze blew in.
Turning in rage, he pointed to his right.
Ten thousand blue and gray tents were positioned on the high ground against Mount Kallidromos, up where the hills rose out of the plains but before the scag trees grew.
"Do you see that?" he (80) screamed in anger.
80 - "Do you see that, king of Sparta? Thousands of the best archers in the world stand there with their weapons, waiting for the command from Xerxes to bring your world to an end.
They alone can do it; we won't even need our army.
Do you understand that, king of Sparta? Our archers will darken the sky with our arrows!"
80 - Leonidas smiled. "So much the better. We shall fight in the shade."
80 - The Persian shook his head. Never had he seen such insolence!
Such pride! Shifting in his saddle, he spat on the ground, pulled on his reins, and cut his spurs into his horse's side.
The animal lifted to its rear legs and pawed the air, a trickle of dark blood running down its flank.
80 - The emissary spat again toward Leonidas, then turned and rode away.
Day One
80 - Herodotus recounts that, while his army was assembling for combat, Xerxes sent one of his horsemen forward to try to determine how many Greeks they faced.
The narrowness of the pass, plus the wall that had been rebuilt, made it impossible for this scout to see much, but he returned with an unusual report:
Some of the vaunted Spartan warriors were stripped and exercising. Others were combing their long hair.
Xerxes was apparently amused to hear this report, though his Greek spies, including the former Spartan king, Demaratus, surely could have warned him not to be misled by the lackadaisical approach of the Spartans to the impending combat.
80 - While Xerxes was doing his spying, Leonidas was gathering intelligence as well.
During this time he became aware of a potentially fatal Achilles heel of his location.
80 - A deadly trap lay to his west. Something that could change the outcome of the battle.
80 - Did Xerxes also know of the deadly possibility on the mountain?
80 - Only time would tell
• • • • • • •
81 - On August 18, Xerxes decided he could not wait any longer.
His navy had not yet crushed the Greek navy, and his chain of resupply was unsure.
Because of this, he needed the provisions that awaited him in the cities and countryside on the other side of the small group of hoplites and the wall.
81 - The assault on the Greeks began.
81 - As promised, the Persian archers filled the air with arrows.
Then Xerxes ordered his army forward.
Lightly armored with their wicker shields, short javelins, and daggers, they moved through the impossibly narrow pass toward the Greek wall of spears and bronze shields and helmets.
81 - As the Persians charged,their ranks were torn apart by the long spears of the Greeks.
They fell by the hundreds, only to be replaced by other soldiers.
The slaughter was immense. The Persians were forced to withdraw.
81 - Frustrated, Xerxes ordered the men from Susa forward.
Forced to clamber over or around the mass of broken bodies, they struggled toward the enemy, only to be met by the bronze-protected Greeks and their long and deadly spears.
81 - The discipline of the Greeks was frightening.
If a Greek soldier fell in the stalwart line, another would rush forward to fill his place.
Despite their overwhelming numbers, the men of Susa began to fail.
Facing annihilation, they were forced to retreat.
81 - Xerxes was furious. Enough of this humiliation at the hand of the tiny band of Greeks!
In a rage, he called for the Immortals, his personal bodygurads, ten thousand men strong.
Xerxes watched the battle carefully, expecting the Greeks to be quickly and unmercifully swept aside by the extensively trained and heavily armed elite troops.
81 - And a slaughter did unfold. But to Xerxes' horror, it was the Immortals who fell, their bodies added to the pile of dead Persian and Susa soldiers.
81 - A humiliating retreat was sounded, and the Persians fell back to lick their wounds.
82 - The first day had gone to the Greeks. Some had died. Many had been wounded.
82 - But they had not given any ground.
War at Sea
82 - While the mighty Persian army was beginning to realize that the Greeks might be something more than a bump in the road on their inevitable conquest of Europe -- on that same day, in fact -- to the east, in the Gulf of Mailis, the Greeks instigated their first assault on the powerful Persian navy.
82 - The Persians had suffered significant losses during the three-day storm off the coast of Euboea, so much so that they had been forced to disperse their large fleet along the long and rugged coastline.
Themistocles tried to convince the hesitant members of his navy to take advantage of the disorder.
The Greeks were outnumbered more than two to one, however, and most of them were terrified of engaging the Persians in open battle.
Themistocles persisted and finally convinced them it was time to attack.
82 - Late in the afternoon they struck, sinking several Persian ships and capturing thirty more.
Despite their overwhelming numbers (plus the fact that Xerxes had promised a great reward to any crew that sank a Greek vessel), the Persians were unable to capture a single enemy ship.
As darkness approached, the two navies retreated to the protection of their respective shorelines.
82 - The Greek attack was not intended to confront the enemy in full force -- its main purpose was to measure the strengths and weaknesses of each side.
During the brief engagement, the Greeks learned several important lessons.
First, the superior number of Persian ships was a disadvantage that the Greeks would not surmount easily, especially because their own ships were slower than the Persian vessels.
In battle on the open sea, the Persians could envelop and decimate the Greeks.
But the Greeks also learned that, if they acted with cunning and courage, they could be formidable foes in ship-to-ship warfare.
83 - That night the Persians made a secret effort to surround the small Greek navy and destory it.
After they had moved away from the safety of the coast, however, another horrible gale struck.
Two hundred Persian vessels were caught at sea. Most of them were lost.
83 - The gods of war were not smiling on the Persian forces.
The first day of battle had been a humiliating defeat on the land and sea.
83 - The night would have been a hard one for the soldiers and the sailors.
The gale raged for hours. The wind and rain would have made sleep nearly impossible, and a day of blood and killing cannot be followed by peaceful dreams, especially when it is known that the next day will be the same.
Thermopylae Pass
Ninety-Eight Miles Northwest of Athens
83 - The Greek (Demaratus) was not loyal to the king of Sparta, or Athens, or any other city-state.
He was not motivated by love of country or freedom or any other abstract concept.
83 - The things that motivated him were far more tangible. Life. Money. Power.
The favor of the king of Persia, a man who could give him the things that he most desired.
Xerxes would certainly win this battle. The Greek had to gain his favor now.
83 - He crept along the outskirts of the massive army, searching, prodding, looking for the right location, trying to find the best place to make his move.
He had to do it right or they would surely kill him.
After making contact, he would have to say the right things.
Grovel at the right time and stand proud at the next.
He would get only one chance and he had to get it right.
83 - Finally, just as the moon was dipping toward the eastern sky and Mars was falling behind a low back of clouds hanging over the cold waters of the sea, he found what he was looking for: a small band of Persians standing around the dying embers of a fire.
Golden headbands and oval shields. Immortals standing guard.
83 - The traitor took a deep breath. This was it! It was death or riches.
83 - Moving from the shadows, he disarmed himself, dropping his (84) father's small dagger, the only weapon he had.
84 - Then he called out to the Immortals who stood around the dying fire, their spears sticking in the sand.
"Persians," he hissed through the darkness. "My brothers, I come in peace."
84 - The Persian soldiers sprang to life. Grabbing their swords and spears, they moved toward the sound of the man's voice.
84 - The dim moon cast enough light to show his shadow upon the ground.
He knelt, his hands atop his head, his face staring at the dirt.
"I come in the name of your leader, even the Great King Xerxes," he cried in a desperate voice.
"I must speak to him... he must hear me. There is something he must know."
84 - The leader of the Persian soldiers raced toward the cowering Greek.
Standing over him, he raised his sword.
The Greek pushed himself even lower, pressing his face into the sand.
He closed his eyes and kept on talking, praying to his gods that the Persian would listen to him before he sliced off his head.
"There is a mountain pass. A goat trail!" he cried.
84 - The Persian seemed to hold his weapon in midair.
84 - "High up on the mountain! I know it! I could show it! I have walked it many times.
It will take your soldiers around the Greek wall, behind the Spartans. You could surround them in a short time!"
84 - The Immortal held his sword in a strike position a long moment, then slowly lowered it and nodded to one of his men.
The second soldier grabbed the intruder by his neck and jerked him off the ground. "Say what you will!" he demanded.
84 - "This battle could be over," the Greek stammered.
"I can show you the way. But my lord ..." here he seemed to straighten, "I do not work for free."
84 - What the Greek traitor said was true.
There was a goat trail that began a few miles in front of Leonidas's position.
Sheer and treacherous, the trail worked its way across Mount Kallidromos before ending up a mile to the rear of the Greeks.
And though it was small and isolated, it was still potentially deadly.
84 - The Persians could use it to pass around the Greek army.
84 - Leonidas would be surrounded.
84 - All the Greeks would fall.
85 - Upon learning of the great danger the mountain trail represented to his men, Leonidas had sent a thousand soldiers from a local city-state to stand guard on the trail.
85 - Foolishly, as he would learn, he failed to send even a single Spartan to assure that the pass would be properly defended.
The Second Day
85 - The second day of the battle at Thermopylae unfolded like the first.
85 - Thinking the Greeks would be exhausted, Xerxes sent in fresh troops.
But it did not matter -- the slaughter of his forces proceeded much as it had the day before.
Worse, resentment and rebellion started growing in his ranks.
Having watched the previous day's carnage, his troops had no desire to be sent to the front line.
So terrified were they of the Spartan soldiers, Persian commanders had to use whips to drive some of them forward.
85 - The day ended as had the day before.
85 - At sea, Themistocles and his navy attacked the Persian fleet in another late afternoon hit-and-run effort.
The Persians, having been battered by the storm the night before, were slow to respond, and heavy losses were once again inflicted.
85 - Xerxes must have been frustrated as he reflected on the fortitude of the Greeks.
His army had fought mightily, but had nothing to show for it. Not a yard of progress.
Nothing but bodies scattered across the ground. Thousands of his men had died, maybe tens of thousands.
Equally exasperating, his navy, so essential to the entire effort, was being decimated by storms and Greek maneuvers.
85 - At this moment of frustration, the mighty Xerxes was finally brought good news.
A Greek was brought before his throne. He told the king his secret.
There was a pass through Mount Kallidromos. He was willing to guide the Persians.
He could take them on a secret march that would bring them to the rear of Leonidas's Greeks.
85 - Xerxes commanded his Immortals to follow the traitor.
The Immortals, who had suffered such a severe blow to their pride the day (86) before, were thrilled at the prospect.
86 - Not only was their commander giving them the opportunity to have their pride restored, but they had the prospect of sweet revenge upon the Greeks.
86 - The Immortals waited until dark to begin their ascent to the pass, not wanting to give away their intentions.
They did not know whether the pass was guarded, but they were prepared to fight their way through whatever force they encountered.
86 - Foolishly, without the leadership of a single Spartan, the one thousand local soldiers sent by Leonidas to guard the pass were completely unprepared.
Discovered asleep, unarmed, without even guards at watch, they were taken by surprise.
With the Immortals approaching up the trail, they dashed to a nearby hillside.
Whether they were seeking higher ground as the best spot to defend or were simply cowards, it is not known.
Either way, it did not matter. The Immortals simply passed them by and continued their march through the night.
The Final Day at Thermopylae
86 - Leonidas was alerted by a runner of the Immortals' approach.
Knowing he was about to be surrounded, he gathered his commanders in a desperate council.
86 - Some of the Greeks argued that the cause was now lost and a quick retreat was the only course.
Others refused to give up the fight, committed to defending the pass.
86 - In the end, most of the Greeks fled.
Some, it seems, may have been commanded by the king to go in order that they might live to fight another day.
One Spartan, upon being told to go back to tell their story, answered simply, "I came with the army, not to carry messages, but to fight."
Another answered, "I should be a better man if I stayed here."
In the end, only Leonidas and what remained of his three hundred Spartans stayed, along with a few others who were committed to defending Greece to the bitter end -- perhaps two thousand men.
86 - Knowing that the end was near, Leonidas ordered his soldiers away from the wall and out to a broader area of the pass, leaving themselves (87) completely unprotected.
87 - If they were doomed, he wanted his forces to have access to as many Persians as was possible.
87 - What must the Persians have thought as they watched the hopelessly outnumbered Greeks, in utter disregard for their own safety, position themselves to inflict the greatest kill?
87 - Even knowing that the Immortals would soon be attacking from the rear of the Greeks, the Persians did not go forth to battle with any eagerness.
Indeed, Herodotus records that the Persian soldiers had to be driven again under the sting of their commanders' whips.
In addition, "Many of them were pushed into the sea and drowned; far more were trampled alive by each other, with no regard for who perished."
87 - With the Immortals still somewhere on the mountain pass, the Persian slaughter commenced as it had during the two previous mornings.
87 - At some point during the bloody melee, Leonidas was killed.
A fierce battle ensued over possession of his body.
The Persians wanted it as a trophy.
But the Greeks were not going to easily give up the dead body of their noble king.
Four times the Persians fought their way toward the body.
Four times the fearless Greeks pushed them back.
How many died in the fight for the remains of the fallen warrior-king is unknown, but it was many.
In the end, the Greeks retained possession of their king's body.
87 - As the battle raged, the Immortals finally appeared, having ended their hurried march along the mountain pass.
A handful of soldiers from Thebes separated themselves from the battle and surrendered.
All of the others fought on.
The Immortals surged forward, fighting from the rear.
Surrounded, the Greeks made a courageous last stand.
Most of their spears had now been hacked to pieces.
They fought on with sword and shield.
In the end, they were finally overcome by an onslaught of arrows -- the Persians unwilling to finish the task in hand-to-hand combat.
87 - The slaughter lasted but a few hours. Virtually all of the Greeks were killed.
87 - As King Leonidas and his men were being slain in their courageous (88) stand, the Persian navy was again attacking the Greek fleet.
88 - Their hope -- and expectation -- was to claim an identical decisive victory at sea.
Yet, despite the fact that the Greeks were so outnumbered, the battle was a draw.
88 - Upon learning of the massacre of Leonidas and his hoplites, the Greek leader Themistocles was forced to withdraw his navy from Artemisium.
He sent them south to Salamis, a tiny island in the Saronic Gulf, just west of Athens.
88 - The narrow pass of Thermopylae was finally open.
Not only that, but the Persian navy was now free of Greek resistance.
Xerxes had reason to rejoice.
The lands and resources to the south were within easy marching distance.
But looking at the carnage around him, did Xerxes feel any joy?
Or did he have to wonder how many bloody fights like this one lay ahead?
For What Purpose
88 - Other than the slaughter of three hundred Spartans, several thousand other brave Greeks, and maybe twenty thousand Persian soldiers, what had the three fateful days at Thermopylae accomplished?
88 - The significance -- and, despite the disheartening outcome, the battle was significant -- was twofold:
88 - First, the presence of Leonidas's army at Thermopylae permitted the navy of Themistocles to operate at Artemisium.
During those several days of storms and brief but fierce battles, the Persians lost hundreds of their ships.
The success that the Greeks had in fighting the Persians confirmed that, were it not for the overwhelming advantage in Persian numbers, their ships and sailors were capable of defeating them.
That advantage of numbers was at least somehwat narrowed after the debacle at Artemisium.
88 - After witnessing the bravery and skill of the Spartan warriors, Xerxes was greatly sobered.
And how could he not be? A handful of Greeks had humiliated his mighty army, striking such fear as to force (89) him to drive his soldiers forward or into the sea under the crack of Persian whips.
89 - Mulling the gloomy outcome of his victory, he asked his Spartan turncoat, Demaratus, how he could possibly defeat a large army of such courageous men.
Demaratus told him that he had to divide his fleet and send three hundred ships around Greece to attack the Peloponnesian Peninsula where the city-state of Sparta was located.
If those ships could roam freely around the peninsula, bringing terror, the Spartans would be forced to defend their homeland.
Without the Spartans, the rest of the Greeks could easily be conquered.
Once Sparta stood alone, they could then be defeated.
89 - And the traitor was certainly right. But it did not matter any longer.
After the devastating losses on the seas around Artemisium, Xerxes did not possess the naval forces for such a strategy to succeed.
His fleet had been diminished to the point that dividing it was no longer possible.
89 - Second, the battle at Thermopylae was by proper measure not a defeat; rather, it was a clear-cut case of sacrifice for a greater good.
To that end, it was successful:
89 - The death of Leonidas and of the three hundred chosen men from Lacedaemon was seen at the time for what it was: a torch, not to light a funeral pyre, but to light the hitherto divided and irresolute Greek people ...
Without Thermopylae, there would hardly have been that extraordinary surge of pride throughout Greece which produced the spirit that was to lead to Salamis and Plataea.
For the first time in their history a distinct sense of "Greekness" far overriding the almost eternal (and fratricidal) squabbles of their city-states served to unite this brilliant people.
89 - With the fire of Thermopylae burning in their hearts, and knowing that Greeks from throughout the entire peninsula had died in defense of all of Greece, the Persian War of 480 took on an entirely new dimension.
Word spread quickly that the Greek army had been wiped out, the (90) great Spartan king killed in a heroic battle at Thermopylae.
90 - With the sense that all of Greece was now in real jeopardy, a unity emerged that had never been seen before.
United around the memory of those men who had died in defense of all of Greece, former bitter enemies put aside their differences.
Some opened their gates to welcome Athenian refugees. Others volunteered their services to Themistocles.
90 - Maybe for the first time in history, something that approached a national movement of free men stood together, voluntarily unifying to fight against an empire that sought to take their free will from them.
The Battle Turns upon the Sea
90 - Xerxes and his army passed through Thermopylae, his navy following him along the coast.
Determined to make an example for the rest of the Greeks to mull upon, Xerxes' soldiers engaged in wholesale slaughter, rape, and destruction of everything in the little province of Phocis that lay south of Thermopylae.
Many city-states, unwilling to endure the fate of Phocis, joined with Xerxes.
90 - Weeks before, Themistocles had told the citizens of Athens to evacuate.
Many had followed his advice.
As the Persian army approached, panic spread among those that remained, most of them fleeing the city.
Three months after crossing the Hellespont, Xerxes came to within sight of Athens, his navy covering his eastern flank.
The city was mostly deserted, though a few stalwarts had stayed to defend the Acropolis, the high rock edifice that rises above the rest of the city, home of the gods of Greece.
By the first week in September, those brave men had been slaughtered, the sacred site destroyed, the flames illuminating the city like a torch upon the hill.
90 - One must wonder what Xerxes was then thinking, with Athens, deemed to be the capital of the Mediterranean West, smoldering in ruin.
It was clear from the beginning of his invasion that his goal was to conquer not only Greece but the entire Mediterranean world.
(Xerxes had already negotiated with Carthage, another great Mediterranean power, to support his invasion.
As requested, Carthage (91) was simultaneously attacking Greek cities on Sicily to accomplish that joint objective.)
91 - As Xerxes watched the Acropolis glow in fire, he must have surrendered to his pride and wondered if all of the Mediterranean, and even all of Europe, would soon be in his grasp.
Spain, Italy, southern France, northern Africa? What glory would be his!
91 - As for the Greeks, the great question was, "What next?"
91 - The Greek fleet had taken up a defensive position at Salamis, just across a narrow strait from Athens, close enough that Themistocles and his sailors could have watched Athens burn.
91 - With most of the Greek leaders having evacuated to Salamis, a great debate ensued, one that lasted several weeks.
Finally, Themistocles convinced his fellow countrymen to fight, convincing them that the only hope they had was to defeat the Persians there and then.
91 - Like a Thermopylae at sea, Salamis was to be their last stand.
91 - By this point in mid-September, Xerxes also faced a crucial decision.
His army had quite effectively destroyed the crops of the Grecians as they marauded through the countryside, leaving him totally dependent on his ships for resupply.
The Greeks at Salamis were fully capable of harassing or destroying his resupply vessels.
Worse, the weather in the Mediterranean was chancy even in the summer; now that it was September, it would only get worse.
91 - His current situation was simply not tenable.
91 - He too decided to stand and fight -- and not only to fight, but to engage the Greek navy in a decisive battle that would rid him of the threat for good.
Athens, Greece
91 - Themistocles knew he and King Leonidas had been betrayed at least twice and maybe many times more.
Someone -- it had to be a Greek -- had told the Persians about the goat trail at Thermopylae.
And the former Spartan king, Demaratus, had been seen among the Persians.
Who knew what treachery he had committed with Xerxes, what information he had told him of the peninsula; the Spartan soldiers and (92) their training, the local populace, the roads, the water sources and terrain.
92 - Too many Greeks had proven willing to sell their countrymen or lay down their arms.
Entire cities had joined with Xerxes, driven by greed or fear.
Surely the mighty Xerxes had come to think poorly of his countrymen, expecting a traitor at every turn.
92 - Which was an expectation that Themistocles now planned to take advantage of.
• • • • • • •
92 - The Greek stood proudly before the king.
He wore the battle dress of a soldier, and he stood tall and firm.
He claimed to be a valued servant to Themistocles, even a close friend, and Xerxes watched him carefully, looking down from his mighty throne.
Behind him, the ruins of the Acropolis still smoldered.
They had been smoldering for days.
The Greek held his ground, his eyes bright and unblinking, as if he had no fear.
92 - "Say it again!" Xerxes commanded.
92 - "The men of Themistocles are in disarray," the Greek repeated.
Though it ground against his soul to say it, he found the words came surprisingly easy, for most of what he said was true.
"Many don't want to fight you, at least not right here and not right now.
They have seen your mighty army.
Your splendid navy. Their small victories at sea have not brought them comfort.
They know what is in store.
Some have attempted to escape from Salamis, and many others plan to escape soon.
Even Themistocles has threatened to take the two hundred ships of Athens and leave.
He talks of sailing away and starting a new colony far from the reach of the mighty Xerxes and your fearful army."
The Greek's voice fell almost to a whisper.
"Some of the men at Salamis ... maybe even many ... would join you, Lord Xerxes, if they saw an appropriate reward."
92 - The men of the court of Xerxes listened. Most of his commanders smiled.
92 - Xerxes looked around, seeing the eagerness on their faces.
It was what they had expected, what they had been waiting to hear.
93 - The Greeks were worn and weary.
They had sent their best men, given their best battle, and but a few of them had lived.
The hordes of Persians had run throughout Greece, taking Athens by storm, burning their holy mountain, cradle of their gods.
The Greeks must have watched the fires, smelled the smoke, seen their abandoned city filled with Persian warriors.
Though they had won a battle or two at sea, they must have known that they had no real hope of defeating the Persians, not as hopelessly outnumbered as they were.
93 - The shah of Persia raised a hand, motioning for a servant.
The man drew near, listened to the master, nodded, and turned around.
Moving almost at a run, he went to an ivory-inlaid box, extracted a large map, and laid it at the master's feet.
Xerxes pointed at it with a golden scepter, looking at his naval commander.
"Salamis is but a few miles off the coast," he said.
"Themistocles has his entire navy anchored there."
93 - "Yes, lord, he has hidden his ships out of sight ..." the commander bent and touched the map ... "here, behind this small island."
93 - Xerxes looked at the map and thought. "The channels between the mainland and Salamis are very narrow."
93 - "Very narrow, lord."
93 - No one spoke. The commnader knew not to interrupt his master with such a look on his face.
And the Greek spy had already said everything he had been told to say.
93 - Xerxes moved silently around the chart, always staring down, his dark eyes bright and thoughtful, his face calm.
"Very narrow channels," he repeated.
"So when they try to flee, they will have to exit through either the channel on the west or to the east.
If we divide our forces, we can guard both means of escape.
If we position our best naval forces here," he indicated toward the western channel, "we can stop the Greeks from escaping to the west.
The Egyptians proved themselves very worthy at the battle of Artemisium. Send them there.
At the same time, we will position other naval squadrons to attack and keep them from fleeing to the east."
93 - The naval commander thought, then nodded.
There were great risks in dividing his forces, he knew, but it seemed like a reasonable (94) plan.
94 - And even if it weren't, there was no way he was going to argue with the king.
94 - Xerxes looked around at his commanders, all of whom were itching for a fight.
"Wait until dark," he commanded, "then send the Egyptian ships to cover the western channel of escape.
Position our other forces on the east.
Tell them to row into position and wait there.
Keep their oarsmen at the ready.
I care not how cold or tired or hungry they become.
Tell them if they let a single ship escape, I will have that captain's and his oarsmen's heads!
I want to destroy them all, you undertand that? Not a single Greek ship survives!"
94 - The commander nodded, his head low.
94 - Xerxes looked at the top of his head and smiled. "Tomorrow, this war is won," he said.
94 - The orders given, the Persian commanders prepared their ships and men for battle.
Night came and they slipped into the channel, their oars forming white lines of wake that were barely illuminated by the moon.
94 - Soon after the dark had settled, the Greek traitor slipped away as well.
Before midnight, he was back at the camp of Themistocles, giving his report.
His reward for such bravery was worth the personal risk that he had taken, for Themistocles awarded the loyal slave not only his freedom but also great wealth.
94 - Early in the morning, as the sun was just beginning to turn the eastern horizon gray, Themistocles walked among his battle-ready ships.
The truth was, he had understood, even from the very beginning of the Persian invasion, how it would more or less unfold.
He knew that Athens would eventually be taken and so had ordered its evacuation well before the battle at Thermopylae.
He knew that the primary benefit of his action at Artemisium was to learn what he needed to know for a decisive confrontation at Salamis.
Still, he could hardly believe his good fortune.
The Persians, believing the words of his planted spy, had chosen to split their forces, and inimaginable foolish thing to do!
The only advantage the Persians had was their superior numbers.
Once they split their naval forces, they threw that advantage to the wind!
94 - So it was that, as morning broke, he stood upon the beach and (95) pictured in his mind where the Persian forces now lay.
95 - The Egyptians were far to the west and no threat to him any longer -- not for a time, at least.
The other Persian ships were lined up in almost single file, ready to attack through the narrow channel to the east.
95 - The gods had given just what he had asked for, which was only a level battlefield.
95 - Expecting a great victory and wanting to see it for himself, Xerxes had ordered his gold throne positioned on a high point overlooking the Salamis Channel.
The sight of his powerful fleet made his heart skip a beat.
Though the number of ships he still commanded had been reduced -- many had been lost in preivous battles or storms at sea -- he still looked upon a mass of sails. Many hundreds. Maybe still a thousand!
Lined up to enter the channel, his ships were packed so close together they looked like ants on a trail.
And what did the Greeks have to stand against him?
On the high side, his commanders had estimated the Greeks might have between three and four hundred ships.
Being so outnumbered, the Greeks would be destroyed.
The Final Battle
95 - The exact details of what happened that fateful day are not certain.
One historian has said of the battle that "despite its momentous importance, Salamis must be regarded as one of the worst-documented battles in the whole history of naval warfare."
But the following seems to be generally agreed upon.
95 - Xerxes ordered his fleet into the channel from the east, a narrow enough body of water that the fleet had to deploy strung out in a long line.
As they entered the channel, they saw about fifty Greek ships under sail, apparently trying to escape to the west.
95 - The Persians might have assumed that these were the last of the Greek Ships.
Surely the others had escaped to the west during the night and even now were being destroyed by the Egyptians!
96 - But the truth was very different. The rest of the Greek fleet was still hidden behind the small island off Salamis.
96 - Encouraged by the sight of what appeared to be the last of the fleeing Greeks, the Persians continued up the channel after them.
96 - From behind the island, more Greek ships appeared. Perhaps these were the last of the cowards running?
96 - The Persians entered farther into the narrow channel.
96 - Suddenly, a third group of Greek ships emerged from behind the island.
But these did not run! They struck at the flank of the Persian fleet, now well strung out.
Then, as if on signal, the Greeks at the far west of the channel suddenly turned and attacked the Persians from the front.
96 - The Persians were trapped. Unable to maneuver in the narrow channel, their ships began to run into each other.
Pressed from the front and the side by the Greeks, and from the rear by their own ships, mass confusion ensued.
96 - The Greeks quickly circled the mass of Persian ships.
Working together, they attacked at will, picking them off one by one.
96 - All of this unfolded as the mighty king of Persia watched from his throne atop the hill.
It is believed that his courtiers were assigned the task of keeping track of which Persian captains fought and which ones fled.
96 - Xerxes' fleet included a contingent of Phoenicians, believed to be the greatest sailors of their time.
Several Phoenician captains were forced to run their ships aground.
Foolishly, they made their way to Xerxes, who had them beheaded on the spot.
96 - One description of the last of the battle reads:
96 - A vast mass of Persian ships -- many of them badly crippled, with trailing spars and cordage, oars broken off short, timbers sheared or sprung by those terrible bronze-sheathed rams, went streaming away past Psyttaleia towards Phaleron.
The water was thick with corpses and wreckage.
96 - Mercifully, the night eventually came.
• • • • • • •
97 - From the records, it appears that about forty Greek triremes had been destroyed, against two hundred Persian ships.
Those numbers, however, did not reflect how much the Greeks had inflicted in both physical destruction and psychological damage to the Persians.
97 - In fact, the Persian fleet was now in dire straits.
Most definitely, it was badly demoralized.
The Phoenicians, humiliated by the defeat at the hands of the Greeks and angry at the treatment of their captains by Xerxes, revolted and left.
The remainder of the navy attempted to repair their ships and look for replacements for lost crew members, but their hearts were never in it.
97 - Xerxes was in a deadly predicament.
He understood how badly his navy had been beaten.
He also understood that September was moving on and soon it would be impossible to count on shipping safely across the Aegean Sea.
Remembering how dependent he was upon the critical bridge at Hellespont, he worried that the Greeks might destroy it, leaving him with no way to retreat to Asia.
97 - Having little option, Xerxes sent his navy home.
Shortly thereafter, he followed, accompanied by a large force for his own protection, returning to his capital in Susa.
He left behind the bulk of his army under the command of his cousin, instructing him to carry on the occupation of conquered Greece.
97 - Little did he know that his conquest would be of short duration.
97 - One year later, the Persians were defeated at the Battle of Plataea.
Led by the Spartans, the Greek army mustered a unified force of perhaps seventy thousand men, the largest ever assembled in Greek history.
The unity that they displayed, while unusual, was not so remarkable in light of what they had learned at Thermopylae and Salamis.
Throughout the battle, they fought with the confidence of winners, while the Persians' memory of Thermopylae and Salamis was very different.
97 - The same day that the Persian army was defeated at Plataea, Xerxes' navy suffered a decisive defeat at Mycale, across the Aegean Sea.
The survivors of the Persian army hurried back across the Hellespont.
97 - It would be the last Asian army to invade Europe for many centuries.
Why It Matters
98 - The Greeks won the great war.
Some have declared that fact to be a miracle in and of itself, especially in light of the deceit of so many Greeks and Greek city-states.
Many of the Greeks were cowards. Many had their loyalty easily purchased.
Some have suggested that even the religious icons at Delphi, those oracles who supposedly revealed the will of the gods, had been bought off by Xerxes and told to send unusually dire or misleading messages.
Political in-fighting between city-states and within the political structure continually weakened the cause.
98 - Simply put, there is no way to paint all of the Greeks as noble and brave and full of high purpose, which makes the story even more remarkable.
And it puts those true heroes of this extraordinary victory in an even more exalted light -- King Leonidas and Themistocles in particular.
98 - But it must be understood that the most important element of the Greeks' victory had little to do with their military success.
What mattered most was not the fact that a brave and freedom-loving people struggled against a tyrant and won -- though that message is of great consequence.
Far more important was the survival of the Greek city-states so that they could continue the development of a belief in the importance of the individual, self-government, reason, and all of the advances in the arts and sciences that came from adoption of those values.
98 - The Persians, for all their grandeur and might, left very little to the world of lasting value.
Theirs was a static society with one goal: the maintenance of an absolute, theocratic state.
Had the Persians been victorious, the world would have been very different.
98 - As one historian has said:
98 - Against this monolithic opposition the Greek achievement stands out all the more clearly, an inexplicable miracle.
We sometimes take it for granted that democratic institutions should have evolved in the city-states from Solon's day onwards, reaching their apogee in the Persian Wars and the (99) fifty years which followed.
Nothing could be further from the predictable course of events.
Free scientific enquiry, free political debate, annually appointed magistrates, decision by majority vote -- all these things ran flat counter to the whole pattern of thought in any major civilization with which the Greeks had to deal.
99 - When Alexander the Great and his army spread the Greek ideas of knowledge and self-government throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and to the East, they became the dominant culture of that part of the world.
Later, the Romans carried the Greek culture even farther, spreading the Greeks' love of learning and recognition of the individual and self-government to what is now Europe.
99 - That much is indisputably true.
Had the Greeks not survived, all of us living now -- even though we represent but a tiny fraction of all the people who have lived upon this earth -- likely would not have the fruits of freedom that we enjoy today.
99 - Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis claims that "the accessibility of Hellenistic culture, Jewish religion and Roman polity all helped to prepare the way for the rise and spread of Christianity, and that
99 - the Roman State and the Christian Churches were profoundly affected by Greek culture.
Both of them contributed to its wider dissemination ...
In their religion, too, the early Christians were concerned with philosophical subtleties of a kind that had long preoccupied the Greeks, but had never much troubled either the Romans or the Jews.
The Christian scripture, the New Testament, was written in a language ... unmistakably Greek.
Even the Old Testament was available in a Greek translation, made centuries earlier in the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria.
100 - Such assistance, influence, and help would not have been there had Thermopylae and Salamis not happened:
100 - We may have forgotten, that had Greece become the westernmost province of Persia, in time Greek family farms would have become estates for the Great King ....
In place of Hellenic philosophy and science, there would have been only the subsidized arts of divination and astrology, which were the appendages of imperial or religious bureaucracies and not governed by unfettered rational inquiry.
In a Persian Greece, local councils would be mere puppet bodies ..., history the official diaries and edicts of the Great King. ...
100 - ... We would live under a much different tradition today -- one where writers are under death sentences, women secluded and veiled, free speech curtailed, government in the hands of the autocrat's extended family, universities mere centers of religious zealotry, and the thought police in our living rooms and bedrooms.
100 - Such were the stakes in the battles of the Persians over Greece.
The development of freedom and self-government hung in the balance.
100 - So it is that, as another essayist has said, "A little Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like and write what I like. He contributed to set us free.
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13 - Self-government. The right of the people to govern themselves, and the right of the people to form the type of government that they choose.
This includes an acknowledgment that those who govern do so only by the consent of the governed.
It means the right of the people to (14) choose those who will make and enforce the laws and the right of the people to refuse to be governed by those that are not so chosen.
14 - Fundamental rights. All people are born with certain fundamental rights.
It is understood that those rights include the right to life and personal liberty, and the right to keep one's property and the fruits of one's labor.
These personal liberties would include freedom of speech, religion, thought, the press, and movement, among others.
We believe it is understood that these rights, or liberties, are inherent and unalienable and do not come from a constitution or laws or any government, but from God.
14 - All are created equal. A belief in the equality of all at birth, including the belief that a major role of government is to assure that everyone, regardless of status, is treated equally by the law and that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed or fail.
14 - Commitment to justice. By justice we mean that condition wherein each man or woman is rendered that to which they are entittled; that is, they should receive their earned rewards or punishments regardless of how rich or powerful they are or what class or race they may belong to.
14 - Commitment to the rule of law. All people are subject to the same law -- be they president or common citizen.
This means that no man or woman can ignore the rightful laws of the land without being punished.
Battle of Tours, also called Battle of Poitiers, (October 732), victory won by Charles Martel, the de facto ruler of the Frankish kingdoms, over Muslim invaders from Spain. The battlefield cannot be exactly located, but it was fought somewhere between Tours and Poitiers, in what is now west-central France.
