Episode 2 | What really happened at The Battle of Thermopylae in 300?
The Spartans are on the march to block the ceaseless advance of Xerxes’ great army. Will they be in time to stop them? Find out in this weeks instalment of History vs Hollywood.
North march the noble Spartans, through their sun-beaten homelands, towards the hot gates and destiny. Shadowed as they are by the memories of those they leave behind, children and wives, never to be seen again, a spectre of their undoing follows them also. Turned away from his home and people, Ephialtes, monstrous and despised, will call forth his vengeance against the Spartans in time.
Along the way, friends and allies swell their ranks. However, Arcadians and Spartans are not the only ones to haunt these lands. Persian scouts leave destruction in their wake, a sign of what is to happen to all of Greece should the Spartans fail. Sleep comes not to Leonidas, the king of noble Sparta, he alone must shoulder the weight of destiny.
Into the hot gates slip the scarlet clad few. Here they know Xerxes’s numbers will count for nothing. As good a place as any to make their stand, or so they think. Greece itself knows the approaching Persians are an affront to the Gods. Zeus and Poseidon unleash their fury. Winds crash into the Persian Armada and dash them against the rocks. Raising their voice to the heavens, the Spartans glory in the Persian’s ruin.
Morning breaks with the storm and luckily for the Spartans, most of the Persian fleet has come through unscathed. Enough have survived to give the Spartans what they crave, a glorious death.
Within days, the Persians unleash their assault on the happy few who oppose them. With shield and spear, they do battle, facing the varied hordes of the great Persian empire. Warriors and beasts, slaves and sorcerers, nothing the King of Kings throws at the Spartan lines tells.
Leonidas’ actions though will come to haunt him. The rejected Ephialtes brings news to Xerxes that guarantees the Spartan’s undoing. A path through the mountains, a path into Greece. His legions fly forth, outflanking the brave warriors of Sparta. All is lost, and the Spartans are overcome. Leonidas falls, and with this death, the road to Sparta lies open.
First, a little bit about the newsletter. We are a film/history enthusiast newsletter, where each week we delve deep into the real history behind some of our (and hopefully your) favourite historical films. We’ll dissect the narrative of each film, act by act, and give you the truth (as far as the best historians have gathered) behind the movie. I’m no historian myself, but I’ll be using the works of the best historians as my sources, hoping to bring to you each week a light and entertaining look at what really went on and inspired these great movies. This is a passion project for myself, but I would greatly appreciate your support by following me, giving it a clap (see the button below) and sharing this with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks for now, and I hope you enjoy this instalment of History vs Hollywood.
The Real Historical Narrative
Before we get started, let me give a big shout-out to my main source for this series, Persian Fire, by the fantastic historian and podcaster, Tom Holland. A fountain of knowledge, as well as a great read, please get hold of a copy if you want more details about this whole slice of history. I am in no way affiliated, but you can follow this link to get hold of a copy here.
In last week’s instalment, we gave you the background on why the battle of Thermopylae needed to happen in the first place, and we left you with Leonidas and his 300 marching north towards battle and destiny. If you would like to catch up, you can find last week’s article here. This week we will pour over the calm before the storm of, an actual storm, the battle itself and finally the great betrayal that led to Leonidas and his men being defeated.
Let’s get into it. By now, Leonidas has left Sparta behind, never to return, and has begun his march to head off the Persian assault. As in 300, treachery does indeed follow Leonidas on his march, however, not in the form of a rejected Spartan hoplite called Ephialtes — more on him later. The Spartans had always been difficult neighbours. Their culture, being what it was, meant that they were essentially always trying to murder you or enslave you if you lived within shouting distance of their arrogantly wall-less city. This, naturally, bred a lot of enemies. Not one to shy away from them though, and in typically Spartan fashion, on his way north, Leonidas stopped in each of the city-states he assumed to be treacherous and tried to shame them into joining him in the fight. A more likely reason for the visit though, in my opinion, was that he wanted to make them feel bad about siding with the Persians. This was called Medising, and was, in the Spartans’ opinion, effeminate and worthy of scorn. As you know by now, a Spartan likes nothing more than the opportunity to scorn people he thinks are effeminate. I am not entirely sure this is the best way of rallying people to your cause, but it certainly was a Spartan way of going about it.
Leonidas’ travelling belittlement circus did manage to swell his forces to around 5000 men amazingly. He even managed to get a contingent of Thebans, as even Thebes, a city firmly in the Persian pocket, was so Greek in their interminable bickering, that there were around 500 Thebans who decided to switch teams at the last minute and help out.
It was early August when Leonidas and his merry gang arrived to await the Persian onslaught at Thermopylae. But why Thermopylae of all places? Well, as far as the Spartans had been told, it was tough to outflank (In the end it turned out to be incredibly easy to outflank, but hey, it’s only all of their lives at stake, so who cares), would stop the Persians from being able to bring their superior numbers to bear, and was close enough to the sea to allow the Spartans’ flank to be defended by the combined Greek navy. The Greek navy did a fairly admirable job and will feature more heavily in the next instalment, but for this episode, I will focus on the Spartans, as it ties in better with 300.
As in 300, a great storm crashes into the approaching Persian navy shortly after Leonidas’ arrival. The Greeks are convinced that Poseidon has come to lend them a hand, which is always good for morale. Rumour had it that when the Persians were building their massive pontoon bridge to cross the Hellespont, a storm had hit, and washed it away. Incensed at this blatant treachery from the sea, Xerxes had the sea branded, whipped, and even threw a pair of shackles into it to get it to behave. As funny as you might find that now — giving the sea a little spanking for being naughty — the Greeks were pretty outraged. Yet another affront to the gods by the Persians. So, when the winds came and gave the Persian fleet a pretty good drubbing, they saw it as a great omen: the gods were on their side.
The Spartans quickly got to work fixing an old wall that had been built across the pass. Unlike in 300, however, it’s unlikely they used the bodies of dead Persians as a stand-in for mortar. Once the wall was done, the Spartans and their allies settled into the 60-foot-wide pass, did their hair, and generally kept busy working out and having a good time. I mean, who wouldn’t want to look their best when facing almost certain death?
Interestingly, for a people so focused on bravery and manliness, like the Spartans, they were almost unique in Greece for their luscious long locks — a hairstyle the rest of the Greeks considered terribly effeminate. Not that I imagine anyone would have said that in front of the Spartans.
In 300, Leonidas spends an awful lot of time talking about how they were all free men and the Persians were slaves, which was very much a justification for why they should vigorously defend their homeland — a classic good vs. evil tale. However, considering the Spartans deemed it beneath them to do anything besides fight, it’s more likely they used their considerable supply of slaves, known as helots, to rebuild the wall.
The Greeks, who claimed to be exceedingly freedom-loving, actually had absolutely no problem with slavery, except that they considered it unsuitable for true-born Greeks. They were far too important and special to be slaves, but they were more than happy to enslave just about anyone they could beat in a fight. I’m sure the irony was lost on them. In fact, the Persians were not solely facing free-born men of Greece on the battlefield, as the Spartans often used their helots as light infantry. A task I am sure their slaves were thrilled about.
Unfortunately for the Spartans and all those depending on them, Leonidas lost the battle before it even began. As glorious a figure as he is made out to be, he would come to be completely out-generaled by the approaching Persians. If the Persians were good at one thing, it was intelligence gathering. The sophistication of their network of spies was far beyond what Leonidas could hope to counter.
On top of this espionage advantage, the sheer size of Xerxes’ army meant that wherever it went, it may not have quite drunk the rivers dry, but if it stayed too long, it could certainly eat the larders empty of any local dignitaries appointed to play host to the great King of Kings. This was ample encouragement for local lords to keep their unwelcome house guests on the march.
This would work against the Spartans, and within only a few days of the battle’s beginning, the locals, so sick of the all-consuming presence of the Persians, exposed the fatal flaw in the Spartan plan to the King of Kings. The frustrating thing about this is that Leonidas knew all about the path around his rear. He even sent a large group of hoplites to defend it — a group of 1,000 Phocians of questionable experience and quality were stationed to block the path, and Leonidas sent absolutely no Spartans to lead or bolster them.
Supposedly, Leonidas felt he couldn’t risk losing any of his elite men from the line. Strange, considering that he had already sent away two men for an eye infection and one as an emissary to request reinforcements from nearby. Surely, he could have spared one or two to help cover his rear. Leonidas did not do this, so we will never know his true thinking behind the decision. Within a few days of arriving at Thermopylae, he and his companions would be stone dead.
Before carrying on further and getting into the juicy good bits, I want to discuss a scene from the film: Leonidas’ rejection of Ephialtes when he asks to join his phalanx and redeem his name. In the scene, Ephialtes shows all the courage and skill with a spear required to kill the Persians. However, when Leonidas asks him to raise his shield, Ephialtes is unable to do so. As a result, he is deemed unfit to hold his place in the phalanx (for the uninitiated, the phalanx is the classic Greek hoplite fighting formation — a big wall of shields and spears running at you. Scary stuff!) The phalanx was the cornerstone of Greek battle but also, arguably, the foundation of ancient Greek society. Two major political and social revolutions happened in ancient Greece: the Spartans becoming the way they were, and the Athenians inventing democracy. Both, it could be argued, stemmed from concerns about the strength of the phalanx in battle.
Both city-states had been plagued by inequality and social tensions between the ruling elites and the progressively more destitute masses. The hoplite class became so concerned about whether they could trust the man next to them in the battle line that it triggered radical overhauls in both Athenian and Spartan societies. Admittedly, they went in two very different directions, but the end goal was similar: to create a more just and fair society (for some, at least — let’s not forget about the slaves and women in Athens, who remained exceedingly unequal in most cases). The aim was to reduce the chance of being next to someone in battle who harbored deep resentment towards you. The phalanx had to stand united or face ruin.
Leonidas, unfortunately for Ephialtes, could not risk any disruption in the shield wall, so he turned him down. Cruel as it may seem, Leonidas was a king and had to think of the many, not the few. Not that any of this actually happened, but some context can show that Leonidas made the correct decision. Demaratus, a traitor Spartan king and colleague of Leonidas’ brother Cleomenes, once told Xerxes, the King of Kings, that the Spartans feared their laws more than they feared him. Leonidas really had no choice but to turn Ephialtes away.
The Persian forces would soon mount their assault. Once they had dried themselves out and recovered from the shock of the storm, they began to scout out the Greek positions. Their initial forays demonstrated that they may be facing a rather different enemy than they were used to. On approaching their lines, it seemed to the Persian scouts that the Greeks were far more focused on wrestling each other, working on their abs, doing callisthenics and brushing their hair than quivering in their sandals about the imminent Persian approach.
Following this, the Persians sent a formal embassy to negotiate with the Spartans, which gave rise to some of the greatest one-liners in ancient history. The term “laconic” derives from “Lacedaemonian,” or Spartan. They were famed for their cool delivery of cutting remarks in the face of the enemy. The worse the situation, the cooler a Spartan was expected to be. This time was no different. When asked by the Persians to hand over their weapons, Leonidas replied simply, “Molon labe,” or “Come and get them.”
It reminds me of an American response during the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War, where, when asked to surrender by the Germans, the Americans replied, “Nuts!” The Spartans were as cool as Clint Eastwood. On another occasion, when one of the locals pointed out the vast superiority of Persian ranged weaponry and the fact that their arrows would “blot out the sun,” one of Leonidas’ bodyguards thanked the Persians, saying, “Then we shall fight in the shade.”
It was not long before the Persians arrived. The Medes, the elite core of Xerxes’ army, were sent in first to clear the Spartans out of the way. A frontal assault was their only choice in the pass — exactly what the Spartans wanted. The Medes may have been brave, but they were not suited for this type of fighting. All day, the Spartan shield wall held firm. Wave after wave broke against the Greeks’ iron resolve. Close-quarters combat was not the Persian way; they preferred to use cavalry and archers to maneuver and rain death from afar. The Greeks turned the hot gates into a charnel house. Imagine, in modern warfare, dying is often the result of a relatively impersonal bullet or explosion; here, every man felled by the Greeks at Thermopylae died within spitting distance of his killer. Brutal, hot, bloody murder ruled the pass all day. The hoplites killed the enemy without mercy, again and again, until finally, the Persians broke and fled back to their camps. Despite the odds, the Greeks had done the impossible — they had held the gates. They would need to do the same tomorrow.
The fighting continued throughout the next day. Overnight, a vicious rain had lashed the battlefield, turning it into a bloody quagmire through which the Persians were forced to assault the Greek lines. The narrowness of the pass allowed Leonidas to easily rotate his men from the front, attend to wounds, take on water, and recover, while fresh troops took their place in the line. It seemed that nothing the Persians could throw at the Spartans hampered their battle effectiveness. Employing a tactic possibly familiar to the Persian contingent of nomadic horsemen, the Spartans would feign a breakdown in discipline, stagger, and turn to flee, provoking a wild charge from the Persians who believed they had finally broken through. Then, with precision that would impress a Royal Marine drill sergeant, the Spartans would turn and re-form the line, ready to skewer the oncoming Persians. The hoplite equivalent of the Parthian Shot. This was an effective way to demonstrate that they could literally do this all day. Even Xerxes’ fabled Immortals could make no dent in the Greek lines. By the end of the second day, the Greeks still held the gates.
Pressure began to build in the Persian camp. Although they had been fighting for only two days, they had already spent six days camped near Thermopylae. Feeding 250,000 men is no small task, and by the sixth day, supplies were beginning to run short. Something had to give. As the frontal assault proved unsuccessful, Xerxes needed to change tactics.
He resorted to the Persians’ old standbys: intelligence and bribery. We previously mentioned Ephialtes, the treacherous Spartan reject. In reality, he was no Spartan at all, but a local who was understandably sick and tired of the Persian army camped on his doorstep. Combined with the usual lavish gifts of gold from the Persians, this convinced him to reveal a secret path that could be used to outflank the Spartans. It was a small path, unsuitable for cavalry but fit for Xerxes’ elite troops, the Immortals.
The Immortals stole into the night, following Ephialtes up and around the Hot Gates. The moon was bright, so the Persians had no need for fire to guide them or give away their approach. As dawn was breaking, they stumbled into a rather surprised group of Phocian hoplites whom Leonidas had sent up to guard against such an incursion. Seemingly not expecting company, the Greeks on guard briefly panicked, fled to a nearby hill, and decided to make a valiant last stand. They likely didn’t want the Spartans to get all the glory.
The Immortals, however, simply bypassed them, leaving the group of hoplites holding the hill to feel somewhat sheepish, I imagine, as they stood idly by and watched their one job go undone. Down the hill the Immortals descended, and so far, everything was going to plan.
You may be wondering what Leonidas was up to during all of this. Fortunately for him, he had received word that they had been betrayed and should expect an attack from behind shortly. This is where the truly brave part of the story comes together. With his army, which still numbered about 5,000 amazingly, Leonidas ordered the retreat. He would stay and hold off the Persians to give the bulk of the hoplites time to flee before the Persian cavalry could be unleashed on them.
Leonidas quickly had a goat killed, checked its entrails, confirmed that all was lost, and then told the remaining Greeks to head home. Some of the others gallantly volunteered to stay, including the Thespians and, surprisingly, the loyalist Thebans. 1,500 men remained. Saying farewell to comrades in arms for the last time, they turned and grimly awaited their death, determined to take as many Persians with them as they could.
After a leisurely breakfast, Xerxes gave the order to have his cannon-fodder-style troops whipped onto the Spartan spears. The strategy was to use sheer numbers to overwhelm the Spartans, hoping that the relentless waves of troops would eventually break through. Once the Spartans’ spears were engaged and the defenses weakened, the Immortals would attack from behind while the Persian elite launched a frontal assault. This was the beginning of the end.
This was truly the climax of the battle. Persian royalty fell like leaves from a tree as the Spartans cut them down. Among the fallen were two sons of Darius the Great, Xerxes’ predecessor and father, and one of his brothers. Inevitably, the overwhelming numbers of the Persians began to take their toll, and Leonidas was cut down. Soon, it was all over. The Greeks were all dead, and the road to Greece was open. The Persians, cutting off Leonidas’ head and placing it unceremoniously on a spear, prepared themselves for the march south.
Fun Facts
I mentioned earlier about the Spartans sporting long locks. As much a part of their culture as being hostile to their neighbours, the long hair was a sign that a Spartan was a man and a full citizen. Until the age of 30, both men and women had to keep their heads shaved, had no control over their personal finances, and in the case of men, lived in barracks. They could marry but were not allowed to live with their wives, so they had to sneak out of the barracks at night for hurried trysts in the dark alleyways of Sparta. Once a man had three sons, he was relieved of sentry duty, and upon turning 30, he was allowed to grow his hair out.
The Immortals, so terrifyingly portrayed in 300, were not called Immortals for any esoteric reason. There were 1,000 Immortals, who served as Xerxes’ personal bodyguard. They wore some seriously impressive gear, and their spears were adorned with a golden apple. They were known as Immortal because there were 9,000 others who had spears decorated with silver apples. Any time someone with a golden apple died, they were immediately replaced by someone from the silver apple rank. In this way, the regiment was immortal, rather than those who served in it.
In 300, David Wenham plays Dilios, the sole survivor of the battle who, due to an eye injury, is sent back to Sparta to tell their tale and rally Greece to avenge them. Unfortunately, Dilios’ hero’s welcome was far from what the character who most likely inspired him actually received. Aristodemus had been one of Leonidas’ 300. On the way to Thermopylae, he had contracted an eye infection and was ordered home to Sparta. He went, as ordered — big mistake. The other man who had a similar affliction ordered his slave to lead him blindly into the battle line, where he died swiftly. This is how a true Spartan should have behaved. Whether or not he was ordered to return by his King, the Spartans branded him the “Trembler” and mocked him viciously for having survived. He had patches sewn onto his cloak, so that all who saw him immediately knew what he had done. He was ignored by old friends, had to give up his seat for anyone who asked, even children, and his daughters were banned from marrying, presumably because the Spartans believed cowardice was inherited. This was not, however, the end of Aristodemus’ story, and we will meet him again in the next episode.
Conclusion
Next week, we will dive into Act 3 of 300, and the aftermath of the battle of Thermopylae. Join us then for naval battles on an epic scale, double agents, and the exciting finale to this epic tale. If you have enjoyed this, have any comments, requests for clarification or would just like to chat about this newsletter or the subject of this series, please let me know in the comments below. If you have enjoyed this, give it a share, follow me so you get notified when the next chapter is released, and hit the clap button. All very helpful things to juice up the Medium algorithm. Finally, thank you to my brother Charlie for contributing his highly entertaining sketches, perhaps they will become a feature of this newsletter going forward.