Additionally, there is a modern monument at the site of the Battle of Thermopylae, called the "Leonidas Monument" in his honor. It features a bronze statue of Leonidas. The hero cult of Leonidas survived at Sparta until the age of the Antonines. Recent blog posts Forum. Helping Out. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Leonidas I. Edit source History Talk 0.
Behind The Scenes - King Leonidas. Cancel Save. Fan Feed 1 Artemisia 2 Gorgo 3 film. Universal Conquest Wiki. General Information. Other Information. She bore Leonidas a son and heir, Pleistarchus. It is said that the king visited the Oracle at Delphi, which was consulted about important matters of state throughout Ancient Greece, and the Oracle delivered a grand verse that essentially told him that he must lay down his life to prevent his kingdom from being laid waste by Persia.
He had with him just elite Spartan soldiers and slaves, to which he added as he marched cross-country through other city-states, ending up with a total army of between 4, and 7, men. Various explanations have been put forward as to why the force was so small; Herodotus theorised that the Spartans marched straight out so they were seen to show no fear, with the expectation that a larger army would be mustered and would follow soon after, but modern historians believe internal strife or even the fact that the Olympic Games were being held at the time could have been to blame.
The Persian army they faced was vast in number. A four-day stalemate followed, then the Persians attacked on the fifth day. On the seventh day, a traitor named Ephialtes contacted the Persian general Hydarnes and showed him a hidden path that he could take to get behind the Greeks.
Knowing that he was now outflanked, Leonidas sent away all Greek troops, choosing to remain in the pass with his Spartans and the slaves, Thebans and Thespians. The Thespians were supposed to have been sent away with the other Greeks, but stayed behind of their own will. The men then fought a bitter last stand against the Persians, and all were killed except the Thebans, who surrendered to the Persians without a fight. The dirt of battle is probably still upon Leonidas, and there is a dark purple bruise on his chin from the pooling of what little blood is left.
Ragged bits of tissue and bone hang from his severed neck, and flies and beetles have landed on his skin. The time is August b. A vast army of Persians was on the march to conquer Greece. A small force of Greeks had been all that stood in their way. And yet, in a pass that narrows to a space smaller than a baseball diamond, the impossible almost happened.
For three days, just over seventy-one hundred Greeks, spearheaded by an elite unit of three hundred Spartans, gave a savage beating to a Persian army that outnumbered them by perhaps to About , men willing to die for the glory of Xerxes, the Persian Great King, came up against the most efficient killing machine in history.
Leonidas son of Anaxandrides, commander in chief of the Greek resistance to Persia at Thermopylae, died in a heroic last stand. In the slaughtering pen at Thermopylae — as the narrow killing fields might be called — a king died and a legend was born. Led by Leonidas, the three hundred Spartans stood and fell and took the pride of the Persian Empire down with them.
Sparta the steadfast and self-sacrificing, Greece unflagging in its fight for freedom, Xerxes the flummoxed, Demaratus the traitorous: These are the images left in the summer heat. Thermopylae is the prototype of many a last stand, from Roncesvalles to the Alamo to Isandlhwana to Bastogne. The gantlet at Thermopylae had punished the Persians. Xerxes had learned how high the price of victory would be, if he could pay it at all. How hard to think that so few men could devastate so many. Yet Thermopylae is no ordinary place — or rather, was no ordinary place.
The silting-up of the land over the millennia leaves the ancient scenery hard to recognize today. Yet what a landscape it was. It was a gateway region, a pass — actually, three passes — containing the main road between northern and central Greece. Mountains lie to the south, and to the north is the sea, here known as the Gulf of Malis.
Thermopylae is narrowest at its two ends, the so-called East and West Gates, while the mountains are sharpest in the center of the pass, at the so-called Middle Gate all modern appellations. It was here, at the Middle Gate, that the Greeks defended the pass. Taking advantage of a dilapidated old wall, which they rebuilt, they took their stand between the sheer cliffs and the sea.
The land was less than twenty yards wide here in b. As far as the Greek defenders knew, the mountains were impassable. Glory and revenge brought Xerxes to Thermopylae. Greeks and Persians had been at war for more than a generation. Now the Persians sought to settle the score. Xerxes was bent on adding Greece by force to what was, without exaggeration, the greatest empire in the history of the world to that date.
His domain extended from present-day Pakistan in the east, westward through central and western Asia to Macedonia in the north, and across the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in the south.
It took roughly four thousand miles of roads to travel from one end of the empire to the other. The realm covered nearly three million square miles, which makes it about as big as the continental United States of America, and contained perhaps as many as twenty million people.
Yet with an estimated total world population in b. In June the Persians had begun their march on Greece from the Hellespont. Xerxes commanded a huge army of about , combat soldiers and a massive fleet of about twelve hundred warships. Greece would become a Persian province. That the Great King led the invasion of Greece in person should not have been a surprise. And he followed in the footsteps of Cyrus the Great, founder in b.
Every king since Cyrus had led an invasion, and every king had conquered new territory. Xerxes had marched his army through the northern regions of Greece in Thrace and Macedonia and past Mount Olympus into Thessaly.
He then led them into Central Greece, through Phthia, the legendary homeland of Achilles, and into Malis, where myth had it that Heracles spent his last years. Meanwhile, the Persian fleet sailed nearby, along the coast. The army halted at the pass of Thermopylae, which it found blocked by the Greeks. The navy stopped about fifty miles to the north, at Aphetae, opposite the Greek fleet at Artemisium.
The Great King hoped to win the war in central Greece. He planned for his army and navy to overwhelm the Greeks there through Persian numbers and Greek defections. But in late August, when the Persian army reached Thermopylae, the Greeks were ready for him. Only about three dozen Greek city-states rallied to the cause of defense against Persia. Most of Greece either supported the invaders or sat on the sidelines. Yet Greece had several things in its favor, among them superb infantrymen, a competitive navy, brilliant strategists especially the Athenian commander, Themistocles , and — in southern Greece — knowledge of the terrain.
But did the Greeks have the iron will needed to stand up to Persia? That was the question that Thermopylae would test. Formal defensive preparations began in spring , when members of the Greek alliance against Persia — the Hellenic League — met at the Isthmus of Corinth to chart strategy.
Their plan had three basic elements. First, since Persia would attack both by land and sea, the Greeks would respond with an army and a navy. The Peloponnese would provide most of the infantrymen, since Athens would devote all its manpower to its big navy.
Second, since Persia was attacking Athens via northern Greece rather than by island-hopping across the Aegean, the allies would mount a forward defense in the north. It was better to try to stop Persia there than at the gates of Athens. For political reasons, the Persian king wanted a quick victory, and for practical reasons, the Persian quartermasters could not supply their huge invasion force for very long.
Therefore the Greeks had an incentive to drag out the war until the Persians gave up. In June or July, the Greeks sent an army of ten thousand men to hold the mountain pass known as the Vale of Tempe, which runs between Macedonia and Thessaly. But their leaders discovered two other passes nearby. Since it would be impossible to close all three passes to Persia, they withdrew southward. Tempe had been a failure of intelligence, a sign of how little the Greeks knew about their own country and how much darkness ancient strategists often worked in.
But Thermopylae was a better choice. Leonidas reasoned that in its confines a small number of men could hold off the Persians. Besides, Thermopylae was close enough to the harbor at Artemisium to allow a coordinated land-sea strategy. The Greek fleet at Artemisium would keep Persian reinforcements from arriving by sea and cutting off the Greek army holding the pass at Thermopylae.
Although they had not planned matters quite so precisely, the land and sea battles there turned out to be fought on precisely the same three days in late August b.
But having established that, modern historians run up against a series of mysteries. Numbers, first. The Greeks sent only a small force to Thermopylae, fewer in fact than at Tempe a month or two before. A closer look only compounds the puzzle.
The approximately seventy-one hundred Greeks at Thermopylae were made up of about four thousand Peloponnesians from nearly a dozen different states as well as about thirty-one hundred soldiers from central Greece. Some of the more noteworthy contributions, besides the three hundred Spartans, were four hundred men each from the great states of Thebes and Corinth. Yet they were each easily outstripped by the seven hundred men from the tiny city-state of Thespiae.
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