Thermopylae, Part 8-The Thermopylae Legend

A thermoply today stands a monument to Leonidas and the 300 Spartans. Directed in 1955 by the Greek government with financial support from Greek Americans, it is dominated by a bronze statue of the Spartan king who is depicted heroically naked except for a Corinthian helmet, hoplons, sheathed sword, and upraised spear. On the statue's plinth are carved the words "Molonglabe" come and take them. Leonidas's reply to the Persian demand that he and his men give up their arms. On a wall behind and below the statue is a freeze depicting the Spartans in battle. A nearby explanatory plaque reads, "In the year 480 BC, in this sacred place called Thermoply, was carried out the most astonishing and unequal battle between few Greeks and a million of Persians." This battle is a landmark in the world's history, 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians, under the orders of Leonidas king of Sparta, decided to fight against the Persians and winner die defending the freedom of their country. According to this historian Herodotus, the Persian army consisted of about 1,700,000 soldiers who were under the command of King Zerxes. The Persians asked the defenders to give their arms up, but Leonidas replied to them with heroic phrase "come and get them." This phrase has been, and always will be, a bright example for the generations to come of ones doing his duty for his country. This official monument reproduces all of the essential characteristics of the Thermoply legend. The legend was launched by the Spartans themselves almost as soon as the second Persian invasion was over. In the course of preparing his histories, Herodotus visited the battlefield sometime in the middle of the 5th century. He recorded that the Spartans had already sponsored the erection of four monuments. The first and most prominent was a stone lion at the top of the hill of the last stat, meant to honor Leonidas. A lion was a traditional grave marker in ancient Greece, but this one was especially appropriate because of the parallel with the Spartan king's name, which means lion-like, or image of a lion. In addition to the lion were three stellar, or stone columns, each inscribed with an epigram by Simonides, the greatest Greek poet of the day. The first stellar's epigram commemorated all of the defenders killed at the Thermoply in the three days of battle. The third stellar marked the grave of Magistias, the seer, who chose to stay and die with the Spartans even though he had four knowledge of their doom. The second stela was raised just for the Spartan dead, and bore perhaps the most famous of all ancient Greek couplets. Who stranger, tell the luck of Dimonians that here, we lie dead, obedient to their commands? The Spartans sponsored monuments, not just at Thermoply itself. They built others in their own city. One was a collective war memorial, resembling a modern cenotaph. On it the fallen Spartans were individually identified. The travel writer Posanius the Paraguete saw it in the second century CE. The memorial deviated radically from normal Spartan practice, which was to bury the dead at the spots where they had fallen. It demonstrated that the Spartans held the Thermoply 300 in particularly high esteem. Unsurprisingly, the Spartans singled out Leonitis for even further marks of honor. In the immediate aftermath of the battle of Thermoply, the Spartans could not recover his body, according to Herodotus, they instead fashioned a simulacrum of it, an idolon, and brought it to Sparta for burial. Forty years after the Persian Wars, the Spartans returned to the past and discovered what they were convinced were the remains of the king. These were brought back to Sparta and re-barried with all Dupompin circumstance. Most importantly, while all Spartan kings were worshipped as semi-divined heroes after their deaths, the Cult of Leonitis was something special. Over his grave was raised an impressive temple, the substantial remains of which can still be seen today. In addition, he became the focus of a religious festival, the Leonida, which the Spartans celebrated for centuries after Thermoply. There were two final monuments in Sparta connected to Thermoply. One was a religious sanctuary dedicated to all of the Greeks, the Hellenian. The other was a portico, known as the Persian Stoa, which was made from spoils taken during the Persian Wars, and featured remarkable figures carved in white marble of notable Persians, including Mardonius and Queen Artemisia of Holikarnasus. Taken collectively, all of these memorials sent a clear message, the Spartans of Thermoply had died for the freedom of all the Greeks. These monuments were neither the most enduring nor most influential element of the Spartan legend of Thermoply. Rather, it was the Spartan oral tradition that ancient writers like Herodotus then set down on paper and preserve. This tradition certainly included all of the memorable stories I've quoted about the Spartans at the battle, including Leonitis's reply to the Persian demand to surrender, and Denechese's quip about fighting in the shade of the enemy arrow storm. But at its heart was a prophecy from the Oracle of Delphi. At the beginning of the war, the Spartans, like the rest of the mainland Greeks, had consulted the priestess of Apollo. As recorded by Herodotus, the pithy as reply was, "Faded it is for you, he dwellers in wide-waid Sparta. Either your city must fall that now is mighty and famous, wasted by Persian men, or the land of Pharaoh Lassa Dimon mourns for a king that is dead, from Heracles' line descended. For your foe neither bulls nor lions can conquer. Mighty he comes as Zeus, and shall not be stayed in his coming. One of the two he will take, and brand his quarry asunder. According to the prophecy then, either the Persians would destroy Sparta, or a Spartan king would die. Knowing it, Leonitis chose to stay behind on the third day of their mobily, certain that his and his men's deaths would save Sparta and by extension all of Greece. The even more far-reaching interpretation is that Leonitis had the prophecy in mind right from the moment when the resistance Greeks were making their plans to face the Persians. He and his men willingly went to their mobily, with the knowledge that their deaths would save their city and their country. The Battle of their mobily then was not an advanced guard. It was a suicide mission. For the ancient Greeks, the story of the prophecy was powerfully convincing. Herodidus himself states that he was convinced Leonitis chose to remain at their mobily because of it. Moreover, numerous other stories recorded by other writers reinforced the idea that Leonitis not only expected, but intended to die from the outset. Plutarch records several in his collection of sayings of the Spartans. One has other Spartans asking the king if he indeed plans to block the Persians at the pass, and he replies ostensibly that, but in reality to die for Greece. Another famous even today has Leonitis when his Spartans were having breakfast on the third day of the battle to clear "Eat well for tonight we dine in Hades." Yet there are also important reasons for us to be skeptical of the prophecy's story. Herodidus stresses that the resistance Greeks planned their mobily Artemisium to be their main effort to block the Persian invasion. All of the Greeks' actions during the land sea battle, including on the fateful third day, were consistent with the actions of a blocking force. In fact, their mobily Artemisium was the linchpin of the Greek resistance's entire strategy. They were at a loss about what to do next after the Persians forced the past far sooner than they expected. In this, I think that the Spartans invented the story of the prophecy after the battle of their mobily, in order to give a new and different meaning to the event. By the time Herodidus was making his inquiries just 30 years or so after the battle, the prophecy story had become widely known and accepted. So why did the Spartans create the legend of a glorious, even necessary defeat? I can think of two reasons. First, they wanted to repair the damage that their mobily had caused to their military reputations. The Persian victory had badly hurt the Spartans' image as the greatest warriors of the Greek world. In the Spartans' new narrative, the third day of their mobily was no longer a failed rearguard action. It was a last stand by warrior heroes who preferred death to defeat. Second, the Spartans wanted to assert their claim to be the leaders of the Greek world. As soon as the Persians had been beaten, Sparta and Athens had begun vying for this leadership. They base their claims on the contributions they had made to the defeat of the invaders. The Athenians could make a strong case they had played the decisive part by pointing to their brilliant victories at Marathon and Salamis. The Spartans countered with Plattia and the legend of their mobily. By the time Herodidus was writing his histories around the four thirties, the rivalry between the two great city-states was at its height. In 431, they would plunge into the long devastating conflict called the Peloponnesian War. On the question of which Greek city-state did most of the defeat Persia, Herodidus himself was in no doubt. In spite of the Spartans' feats of arms at their mobily in Plattia, it was he writes, "The Athenians, who, choosing freedom, roused the Greek states that had not yet prevailed, and it was they, who, after the gods, repulsed the Great King. Yet, in the twenty-five centuries since the Greek Persian Wars, it has been the Spartans and their thermopolee who have won out. In the second century BCE, mainland Greece fell to the new superpower of the ancient world, Rome. The Romans, however, regarded the conquered Greeks as cultural models to emulate. An important part of this process of emulation was an enthusiastic embrace of the thermopolee legend as constructed by the Spartans. For Roman writers of rhetorical and philosophical works, thermopolee became the purest example of heroic courage and patriotic self-sacrifice. By far the most important of these writers was the Orator and philosopher Cicero. In the first century BCE, in a major work, the Tuscalan disputations, he compares the valor of the early Roman legions favorably to the thermopolee 300, then follows up with mentions of Leonidas' advice to breakfast well and dine in hell, then finally Deanichese's boast to fight in the shade. Most importantly, he translated Simonides' epigram on the Spartan dead at thermopolee into Latin, commonly rendered into English as "go tell the Spartans passer by that hero-bedient to their laws we lie," Cicero's translation would have an enormous influence right up to the present. Most notably, he places Putriai, Fatherland, at the center of the second line for emphasis. He therefore accomplishes a critical reworking of the thermopolee legend, emphasizing heroic death in the service of one's country. The Roman's embrace of the thermopolee legend ensured that it would become embedded in the classical heritage that has been passed down to us. By the time the Renaissance of the 14th to 16th centuries brought a new enthusiasm for classical culture and learning, thermopolee had already become, for educated Europeans, the byword for glorious noble defeat. In 1580, the great French essayist, Michel de Montagne, perceptively wrote, "Thus, there are defeats which are triumphs, the equal of victories, even those four sister victories – the most beautiful the eye of the sun has ever gazed upon. Salamis, Plattia, my Collins, Sicily, would never dare to set all their combined glories up against the glorious defeat of King Leonidas and his men at the pass of thermopolee. Strikingly, these lines appear in an essay titled "Of Cannibals" and Montagne was favorably comparing the fortitude of the indigenous peoples of the new world, confronted by European colonists to the Spartans facing Great King's Erxes. The thermopolee legend reached new heights of prominence during the age of revolutions that closed the 18th and opened the 19th century. In the Spartans stand for freedom against the tyranny of Great King's Erxes, the French revolutionaries saw an exemplar of their own struggle against the monarchies of Europe. Furthermore, Leonidas served for them as the ultimate model for patriotic commitment. In the late 1790s, a spate of popular pamphlets, songs and plays, such as Joseph, Marie, L'Razelle, Préogats, le combat d'Automopilesse ou le code de guerre hier, the Battle of Thermopolee or the School of Warriors explicitly drew these comparisons in parallels. Unsurprisingly, the revolutionaries who made the most explicit use of the Thermopolee legend were those of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. The Greek cause was taken up by champions from all over Europe called Phil Helines, who combined a commitment to revolutionary ideals with passionate nostalgia for classical Greece. The most famous Phil Heline of all was the English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. In his wildly successful poem, Child Herald's Pilgrimage, Byron evoked Thermopolee to inspire 19th century Greeks and their supporters in the fight for freedom. Their Greece, sad relic of departed worth, immortal though no more, though fallen great. Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth, and long a custom bondage uncreate, not such thy sons, who alone did await, the hopeless warriors of a willing doom, in bleak Thermopolees Sepulchral Strait, O, who that gallant spirit shall resume, leap from Eurotus's banks, and call them from the tomb. Perhaps we should not be all that surprised that early 19th century revolutionary patriots should take up the Thermopolee legend, the comparisons and parallels with their own struggles, appeared clear, even obvious. But the legend would subsequently crop up later in the century in far more surprising places. One such place was the Dakota Territory in June 1876. At the Battle of the Little Big Horn, or, as Native Americans call it, the Greasy Grass, an army of Cheyenne and Lakota Braves annihilated a force from the United States Army's 7th Cavalry, led by George Armstrong Custer. This defeat, which shocked the American government and public, almost immediately underwent what the historian Chris Kerry-Dubbs Thermopolization. In July 12, 1876, just three weeks after the Battle, the New York Herald newspaper, wrote of Custer, "The deeds of our young captain are worthy of as much honor as those of Leonidus, and will be remembered as long." Just three days after that, the first epic poem about the Battle, Custer's last charge appeared. Many others quickly followed. On late September 1876, Galaxy Magazine published a short biography of Custer, which eulogized his death with these words. To Custer alone was it given to join a romantic life of perfect success to a death of perfect heroism, to unite the splendors of Osterlitz and Thermopoly, to charge like Murat to die like Leonidus. The process of Thermopolization would be applied to another even greater defeat of Western soldiers at the hands of so-called "primitive tribal warriors." On January 11, 1879, beneath a rocky hill called the Sandalwana in Zulu land, the Zulu army wiped out a column of British redcoats and their colonial exiliaries. Within a month of the battle, poems depicting the last stand of the British troops as an African Thermopoly appeared in newspapers in the Cape Colony and in Britain. After defeating the Zulu's, the British erected a series of memorials on the battlefield. The one to the Natal Carabiniers, a unit of colonial troops, bears a poem which reads, "In part, neither praise nor blame, add to their epitaph, but let it be simple as that which marked Thermopoly. Tell it in England those that pass us by, hear faithful to their charge, her soldiers lie." The last four lines echo Cicero's Latin translation of the epitaph by Simonides for the Spartan dead. At first glance, the little big horn in a Sandalwana appeared to map uneasily onto Thermopoly. After all, the Seventh Cavalry and the British redcoats were the invaders who were out to conquer the lands of indigenous peoples. George Armstrong, Custer, and Henry Pauline, the British commander at a Sandalwana were hardly the stuff of Leonidas, and the United States of America and Victorian Britain for the empires that were bringing overwhelming force to bear on the Native Americans and the Zulu's. Yet the Thermopoly legend did perform one indispensable service for the losers of these battles. It wiped away the shock and shame of an unexpected defeat at the hands of inferior enemies. In both cases, evoking Thermopoly acted like a kind of Philosopher's Stone that transmuted the lead of humiliating defeat into the gold of glorious patriotic self-sacrifice. The ease with which battles like the little big horn and a Sandalwana could be thermobilized for the benefit of imperial aggressors demonstrates the legend's astonishing malleability and adaptability. In the middle of the 20th century, the Spartans and the Thermopoly legend were dragged into the darkest and most sordid depths by the Nazis. Hitler and his followers, including not a few of Germany's finest classicists in ancient historians, regarded the Spartans as worthy precursors of the Aryan master race. They admired the Spartans' militarism, their systematic centuries-long domination and exploitation of their neighbors and their uncompromising xenophobia. Hitler reserved a particular fascination for the Spartan practice of eugenics. On the Spartans' custom of exposing, in other words flinging into a deep chasm, infants whom state authorities had considered too feeble and physically imperfect, Hitler wrote approvingly. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and, in truth, a thousand times more human than the wretched insanity of our day, which preserves the most pathological subject. During the Second World War, the Nazis liberally evoked the Thermopoly legend, especially on the Eastern Front. There the Germans were modern-day Spartans, making a do-or-die stand for Western civilization against the Asiatic hordes of the Judeo-Bolshevik Empire of Stalin. Nevermind that it was the Nazis would launch a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The NATO of the Nazis' exploitation of Thermopoly occurred during the Battle of Stalin Grat. For five months, from August 1942 to February 1943, the Germans and Soviets had been locked in a ferocious struggle for this strategic city on the Volga River. On November 19th, 1942, the Red Army had launched a devastating counterattack that had led to the encirclement of two German armies in and around Stalin Grat. All German attempts to rescue these troops had failed, and by January 1943, the end was in sight. On January 30th, 1943, Herman Gehring, the second most powerful figure in the Nazi hierarchy, addressed the surrounded German troops by radio. They explicitly summoned the Thermopoly legend, notably Simonides' famed epigram over the Spartan dead. One day it will be said thus, "When you come to Germany, tell them you have seen us lying at Stalin Grat, as the law has commanded the law of the security of our people. And this law each of you carries in your breast, the law to die for Germany, for the life of Germany is the hope of every law. And not just you, the young soldiers on your heroic mission. Your sacrifice is obligatory for the whole German folk. In its way, the speech was brilliant, concludes Chris Carey. It linked the Thermopoly legend of heroic, patriotic self-sacrifice to the survival of Germany and the Aryan master race. Yet, in the end, Gehring speech failed spectacularly. Far from interpreting it as a ringing summons to fight to the death, the troops in Stalin Grat heard the speech and abandoned any remaining hope of rescue. On February 2, 1942, the remnants of German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army surrendered. Far from heroically perishing in a final glorious charge like Leonidas, the German commander, Field Marshal Paulus, allowed Russian soldiers to drag him out of the fetid cellar in which he had set up his last headquarters. Finally, the Soviets arranged immediate blitz that showed 235,000 German troops and allies marching off to captivity. The Nazi attempt to thermobilize Stalin Grat was an embarrassing debacle. The troubling link connecting the Thermopoly legend with extreme right wing and neo-Nazi movements has persisted until today. North America, white supremacist groups regularly make use of Thermopoly imagery, such as stylized Corinthian helmets. Moulin Labé has become a common slogan on their t-shirts, bumper stickers, and flags. In Italy, the neo-fascist Alianza National Party has used the image of the Spartans at the pass on propaganda posters combined with the words "defend your values, your civilization, your neighborhood." But perhaps the most noteworthy, extremist evocation of the legend occurs in Greece itself. The avowedly neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party holds a torchlit gathering at Thermopoly every year. In 2015, the prominent Golden Dawn figure and member of European Parliament, El Fderios Sinadinos, an ex-Greek army general, declared to the gathering, the message of Leonidas Moulin Labé is as timely today as ever for everything tormenting Greece. For right wing extremists and neo-Nazis, the tormentors that today must be stopped by a Thermopoly-like stand include liberals, socialists, governments out to disarm their citizens, arc-skinned immigrants, refugees, and Muslims. Today, the Thermopoly legend is known to most people through mass media popular entertainment. Novels, comic books, and movies are of course meant principally to entertain, but they are also products of the cultural and political preoccupations of their makers, as well as the times in which they were made. This certainly applies to the most recent popular culture works on Thermopoly, which adapt the legend to the concerns of the 20th and 21st centuries. The first Hollywood treatment of the battle was a 1962 production, titled the 300 Spartans directed by Rudolf Mate, filmed with the full cooperation of the Greek government, which provided two battalions of the Hellenic army to serve as Xerxes' host, the 300 Spartans is a classic sword and sandal epic, full of melodramatic dialogue and lavish battle scenes. Yet, it is also a work of the Cold War confrontation between the West and the Soviet bloc, which was then at its height. Running through the entire film is the theme of a fight for freedom and democracy against despotic tyranny. This is driven home at the movies end when a voiceover and text crawl began with the famous epitaph of Simonides, and concludes with, "But it was more than a victory for Greece. It was a stirring example to free people throughout the world of what a few brave men can accomplish once they refused to submit tyranny." One of the most avid fans of the 300 Spartans was a six-year-old named Frank Miller. As an adult, Miller would become one of the most celebrated ever comic book artists and writers, but this is how he describes the effect on him of the 300 Spartans. I went and sat down and watched the end of the movie, and the course of my creative life changed, because all of a sudden, the heroes weren't the guys who get the medal at the end of Star Wars. Their people do the right thing, damn the consequences. In 1999, Miller, in collaboration with the Colorist Lynn Varley, created what he still considers the crown jewel of his career, a comic book series on the Battle of Thermopoly, titled simply 300. It was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, winning the most prestigious awards and comics. Miller made a number of artistic choices to make 300 work as an action comic. One was in the way he depicted the Spartans. Because the hope light panoply would have rendered his characters indistinguishable from each other and made dynamic comic book style action sequences impossible, Miller decided to render his Spartans armed with Corinthian helmet, spear and shield, but otherwise naked, except for what many have called a leather speedo. In other crucial respects, Miller's work is notable for its historical veracity. He clearly absorbed the ancient sources on the battle, notably Herodotus. Yet Miller also updated the legend by injecting into it his own politics and ideologies. Herodotus had portrayed the wars between the Greeks and Persians as a clash of civilizations, with the Greeks representing the ideal of a free citizen in an autonomous palace and the Persians standing for subordination under despotism. But it was never just a simple mannequin division of light versus darkness. The Greeks could act in vicious, stupid and cowardly ways, while the Persians could behave with intelligence, courage and humanity. In 300, Miller banishes all such nuance. The Spartans, or at least Leonidas in his hope lights, are always outstandingly courageous and honorable. The Persians irredeemably corrupt and depraved. And his most significant innovation was to cast Spartans as defenders of reason, law, justice and freedom, while the Persians represent superstition, religious obscuritism and tyranny. This is absurd for many reasons. The Spartans were, of course, famous among the ancient Greeks for their conspicuous piety. Moreover, Sparta was a militaristic state, based on the systematic oppression and terrorization of its population of Helott's subjects. It's ironic then that the cause of Greek freedom was championed and sustained by the most unfree Greek polis of them all. In 2007, Frank Miller's comic book Masterpiece became a movie directed by Zack Snyder. It features the Scottish actor Gerard Butler as Leonidas leading a cast of bodybuilders. A massive box office hit, The Movie 300, is single-handedly responsible for introducing the Thermopy legend to new generations. Whenever I teach Thermopy, many of my students quote bits of dialogue from the movie, complete with Gerard Butler's Spartan accent by way of Glasgow. Other than a superfluous and historically baseless subplot involving internal Spartan politics, the movie hues fairly closely to the Frank Miller comic, not just in plot, but in look and comic book style action. The movie has provoked a great deal of argument about its historical accuracy. The Battle Rhino and the so-called Uber Immortal have been particularly frequent targets for a derisive sniping. Zack Snyder initially tried to defend his work by claiming the events are 90% accurate. It's just in the visualization that it's crazy. I've shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it's amazing. Indeed, Paul Cartlage and Victor Davis Hanson have both stated that the movie does accurately portray the Spartan martial ethos and heroic code. However, I think that historical veracity is rather beside the point when discussing 300. Retreating from his earlier quote, Snyder has characterized his movie as an historical fantasy and even an opera, not a documentary. What I think does matter is the movie's effect on the development of the thermoply legend. Snyder takes the ideological themes introduced by Miller and pushes them still further. We see this in two ways. First, Snyder's visuals further exaggerate the religious bigotry and despotism of the Persians. Zerxes is regarded by himself and his subjects as a god-king. He is a giant, but also strangely effeminate, bedecked in rows of gold chains and improbable body piercings. Second, Snyder fills the movie's dialogue with motifs of freedom versus slavery. At the end of the movie, the character Delios gives a rousing speech to the Spartans at Platea, which begins by quoting the epitaph of Simoni Days and culminates with the words, "This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine". In Snyder's hands, we have certainly come very far from the original thermoply legend, much less what actually happened at the middle gate in the summer of 480 BCE. The thermoply legend has now been part of Western culture for 25 centuries. Yet, for just as long, the legend has had its critics. As we've seen, Herodidus himself did not believe that the Spartans had made the greatest contribution to the defeat of the Persians. That honor belonged to the Athenians. In ending this episode of the podcast, I'd like to add my own small criticism. The thermoply legend has been as much about forgetting as remembering, but most recreations of the legend have neglected, and here we can conspicuously include 300 in both its graphic novel and movie forms, is that the 700 Thespians made up most of Leonidas's force on the third day of thermoply. Little Thespii contributed its entire hope-light phalanx to the battle, so that its losses in the last stand amounted to 100% as compared to 3% for the Spartans. What's more, the Thespians were militiamen. In the Spartan king Agisaleus's derisive terms, they were farmers, shopkeepers and craftsmen. They are, at least for me, far more relatable in sympathetic figures than the Spartan professional hope-lights, products of the brutalizing militarization and regimentation of the Yagoge. No Thespian mother ever told her son, "With it or on it." Yet, they chose to stay. Only in 1997 was a monument to the Thespians unveiled at thermoply. The story of the battle belongs to them, just as much as it does to the Spartans. This is the end of thermoply, the first episode of the Great Battles in History podcast. My name is Darrell D. I produced this podcast with the indispensable assistance of the Laurier Center for Military Strategic and Assarmament Studies. I'd like to thank the center's company of immortals, Matthew Morden, Matt Baker, Eric Storey, and Kyle Falcon. Thanks also to Great King Mark Humphreys, director of the center. Thank you very much for joining me. I hope you'll join me for the podcast's next episode, The Battle of Can I, which will be out later this year.