The Battle of Thermopylae is one of the all-time great true stories. Greece is the gateway to an empire wishing to straddle multiple continents. A narrow pass between two mountains is the gateway to Greece. So at that one spot, a tiny band with discipline and conviction can hold off an empire. They can’t hold them off forever, but they can die giving others a chance. They can’t win the battle, but they can win the war, right there, if they hold the pass for long enough. It’s the ultimate test of a martial culture, on both sides. Do the defenders have enough people with the zeal to knowingly give their lives, not for victory, just for hope? Can the attackers maintain their own will, when for the first time in their campaign, all their advantages are rendered useless, and they start dying like anybody else?
I’m not even much of a war buff, and I’m still obsessed with Thermopylae. There’s the first battle, by far the most famous, between Sparta and Persia. But the battle was a product of geography, and geography changes slowly. This epic story of heroism recurs six more times, each one deciding the fate of a different empire.
480 BCE - Achaemenid Persia
In central Greece, on the coast of the Malian Gulf, the way is blocked by limestone mountains. Limestone mountains themselves are an awe-inspiring testament to just how old life on Earth is. To get mountain-scale amounts of limestone, you need millions of years of the debris of organisms slowly settling to the bottom of an ocean. Then, you need the collision of tectonic plates to separate earth and water. Even before humans showed up, the landscape was defined by death and violence.
Another lingering effect of tectonic violence gave the place its name. Right near the only gap in the limestone wall, there are hot, sulfurous springs, heated and polluted by a fault in the Earth’s crust. Local legend, as one might expect, said this place was a gateway to the underworld. However, since Greece’s Hades isn’t particularly hot, they needed a separate legend to explain that aspect. So Thermopylae, the Hot Gates, is also where Hercules washed off the poisonous blood of a monster he’d just slain. That’s not heat you’re feeling, that’s the lingering venom of the Hydra.
The first known battle here was a defense led by three hundred Spartans, supported by forces from other Greek city-states. It’s been kind of defined in popular culture by the 2006 Zack Snyder film 300. Snyder’s movie, an adaptation of a Frank Miller comic book series, is deliriously over-the-top. It’s not historically accurate, nor meant to be—I think it’s more meant to be the way the one surviving Spartan chose to tell the story afterwards, shown as though it were true. I’m going to try to be a little more realistic, although our main source for the “real story” is the notoriously exaggeration-prone historian Herodotus.
In 491 BCE, Greece consisted of loosely-affiliated independent city-states. Two of them, Athens and Sparta, each had aspirations of uniting the rest under its control, and the two were therefore almost always in a state of hot, cold, or proxy war. Meanwhile, the first Persian Empire, the Achaemenids, had been slowly trying to assert control themselves, issuing an ultimatum to one city-state at a time so that its choice was to submit, or fight an empire on its own. The problem with this strategy was that Athens could see it happening, and realize that it was in its own long-term interests to support other city-states trying to resist or revolt. Emperor Darius I decided it was time to get more efficient. He sent messengers to every Greek city-state, offering each one an individual choice—make a token gesture of submission, or die. Almost everybody chose “submit.” And why not? Refusal meant near-guaranteed war, and a token submission kept all their options open.
Athens and Sparta, though, were in a prisoner’s dilemma. If only one of them submitted, the other would seem stronger, and could represent itself as the leader of the fight for independence. For these two, making an empty gesture to keep the peace might lose them the war they were already fighting.
They also seem to have each figured that they needed to reject the request with extreme prejudice, to make sure they didn’t seem any less courageous than the other. So they killed the messengers. Athens had a show trial, as was their way, and Sparta just executed them on the spot.
So Darius invaded. Persian forces made their way towards Athens, but were unexpectedly defeated at the Battle of Marathon, 26 miles away. According to legend, one Athenian soldier saw a single Persian ship heading for Athens as the battle turned against them, and realized that if they got there before the news of the victory, they might be able to bluff the city into surrendering. So Pheidippides ran the full distance home, staggered into the capital, gasped out “We have won, take joy—” and died, joy still in his throat. Modern marathons are a tribute to Pheidippides.
The Persians retreated, vowing to return with the full might of the Empire and raze Athens to the ground. Thanks to some sort of courtly skulduggery (one version has someone assassinating Darius and framing his son), it was Darius’s grandson, Xerxes the Great, who made good on that vow.
The Spartans, via Herodotus, give a dubious, but possibly true, account of why they decided to come to the defense of Athens. It’s too good not to include. Sparta at the time had two separate hereditary lines of kings, both said to be descended from Hercules. They were a Constitutional Diarchy, with an elected legislative body and a formal system of checks and balances among these three state powers. One of their kings, Leonidas, went to the Oracle at Delphi, asking her what Sparta needed to do to survive. The Oracle answered that there were two possible futures. In one, Sparta was sacked by Persia. In the other, one of the Spartan kings would die. Leonidas, a product of Sparta’s hyper-martial culture, decided that he would be the one to die, and that he would make it count. He selected three hundred soldiers, all of whom had fathered sons, under the theory that they could die at his side without making a long-term dent in the population. Together, they traveled to Thermopylae, gathering support along the way from other city-states. By the time they set up camp at the pass, they numbered more than seven thousand.
Then the Persians showed up. Millions of them, according to Herodotus and his contemporaries. Hundreds of thousands of them, according to skeptical later historians. Either way, Persia really had sent everyone. But the Spartans had had time to prepare. They’d adapted the phalanx tactics that had won the surprise victory at Marathon for the unique terrain of the Hot Gates. With each soldier shielding his neighbors, arrows were useless. While the pass was theoretically wide enough to permit a cavalry charge, the terrain rendered it impossible. So the Persians were reduced to sending waves and waves of increasingly elite troops, each getting cut down. Meanwhile, the Greeks just cycled soldiers in and out as they got tired, all trained in the same role. They killed thousands of attackers and took only two or three casualties.
Then they were betrayed. Almost all sources put the blame on someone named Ephialtes, a Greek motivated by promises of money or power. He told the Persians about another path through the mountains, long and awkward, but guarded only by untrained soldiers. The Persians sent a force of maybe 20,000 along the path, allowing them to surround the Greeks after three days of fighting.
Leonidas, who had maybe been warned by a traitor of his own, told his allies to retreat. The battle was doomed. But he, his troops, and about two thousand others remained to make a last stand, meeting the Persians in open battle and dying almost to a man.
The Persians then passed through the gates, and fulfilled the second part of Darius’s vow. They razed Athens to the ground. However! Athens had been completely evacuated by the time they got there. Those three days may have made all the difference. Probably not. But, in the manner of all defiant last stands, the losing side treated it as a victory. The Greeks banded together and drove Xerxes out. Sparta, just as foretold, was never sacked.
“Walls are for wusses,” the Spartans were fond of saying. Sparta never had a wall around it. They relied entirely on their warrior culture, and their reputation, cemented at Thermopylae, for never ever backing down.
There’s a darkly comic epilogue concerning the fate of the traitor Ephialtes. Sparta put a bounty on his head, but he fled and was killed in another city by someone with an unrelated personal grudge. His killer then heard about the bounty, and there was a court case about whether he was entitled to collect. He won.
323 BCE - The Macedonian Empire
Neither Athens nor Sparta ultimately took control. The Greek kingdom of Macedon, under Phillip II and his son, Alexander the Great, took revenge on the Achaemenid Empire, ultimately conquering all of Persia and creating an empire of their own, which for a time included all of Greece…except for the city of Sparta itself, which not even the Macedonians wanted to try to take on. When Alexander conquered Persia, he did it in the name of “all Greeks except the Spartans.”
After Alexander’s death, the Athenians put together a coalition to try to shake off Macedonian rule. This was the Lamian War. The Athenians and their Aetolian League got to Thermopylae first. With the bulk of Macedonian strength now in Asia, the Macedonians were in a similar position to their old foes the Persians. Thermopylae was the gate between their armies and Greece. This time, the defenders knew to guard that secret path. The Macedonians could not break through, their allies switched sides, and they were pushed back.
The Lamian War was the beginning of the end for the dominance of both Athens and Macedon in Greece. When it was all over, Athens had surrendered and been humbled, but the rest of the league had not. Macedon pulled out to deal with other conflicts, leaving the League, a federated group of smaller city-states, as the new dominant force.
Here too, the optics of the battle mattered. The Greeks saw the Aetolian League winning the ground battle at Thermopylae, and the Athenians losing their naval battle later, and concluded that their strength wouldn’t lie in any one city-state, but in an alliance of many. It’d be too much to call this the beginning of Greek nationalism, but it’s part of the story of it.
279 BCE - The Gauls
Never heard of the Gallic Empire? You’ve got Thermopylae to thank for that. The Gauls were a loosely-interconnected group, originally Celtic, living all over mainland Europe. The Greeks had dismissed them as harmless, because every so often a Gaul would show up bearing a token tribute, asking to present it to their leading general. In hindsight, these were probably scouting expeditions—the tribute was an excuse for a Gaul to visit Greece military bases, take a tour, and report back on their strength. Whoops.
When the number of Greek troops was at a low point, the Gauls invaded. Some of them, anyway. They had even less of a coherent national identity than the Greeks did, and the whole concept of an organized military was pretty new to them. They were probably there more to loot than to conquer. Still, it could’ve been the beginning of something.
But at Thermopylae, they were met by the Aetolian League, now the dominant power in the region. The treacherous ground of the narrow pass swallowed up the invaders—sometimes literally. They made the rookie mistake of sending in cavalry, which slipped on the water-slick limestone and sank beneath the mud.
The Gauls tried to make their superior numbers relevant by sending raids against Aetolian towns, to draw the defenders away. But the Gauls soon discovered they only had more troops, not more fighters. Greek civilians, of all ages and genders, defended their hometowns with hit-and-run tactics, giving better than they got.
The Gauls eventually got around the Greeks, but failed to surround them. They pushed on, but they’d taken far too many losses at Thermopylae and in the diversionary raids. The Aetolians defeated them for good at Delphi, which in gratitude pledged itself to the League.
191 BC - The Seleucid Empire
Less than a century later, Thermopylae was deciding the fate of empires yet again. The Seleucid Empire, at around the same time it was battling the Maccabees and the Nabateans, was fighting a cold war with a new, upstart power—Rome. Each wooed the various powers in Greece, each with some success.
In a similar overreach to the one that lead to the Maccabean revolt, the Seleucids sent troops to “liberate Greece from Rome.” Greece, largely, wasn’t buying it. The Aetolian League backed the Seleucids, but Macedonia and most other major Greek powers chose Rome, which had been cultivating a reputation of keeping its word when it promised autonomy to client states. The invading Seleucid army, led by King Antiochus himself, found itself in the middle of Greece, heavily outnumbered. Well, what do you do when you’re outnumbered in Greece?
The Seleucids and Aetolians retreated to Thermopylae. With the benefit of even more history, they knew about even more places to build extra fortification and place extra guards. They were committed to holding every possible way through.
This proved to be their undoing. Trying to defend so many positions, strategically important though they were, allowed the attackers to take partial advantage of their superior numbers. The Macedonians and Romans sent raids simultaneously against multiple points. Most held, but one was caught by surprise. When that one victorious raid broke through, the defenders saw enemies appear behind them and, having over-learned the lesson of previous battles, panicked and tried to retreat in all directions, not realizing how tiny the raiding force was.
The battle determined the war, opening the gates for Rome to invade Asia. It was a key moment in the fall of one empire, and the rise of another.
The leader of that one victorious Roman raid, whose success swung the battle by panicking the enemy, was named Cato. He, and his great grandson of the same name, became a powerful conservative political dynasty. Cato the Elder, during the rise of the Roman Republic, and Cato the Younger, during the rise of the Empire, can both be seen, as Buckley put it, standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” Cato’s fame came from defeating a doomed last stand, but his political legacy is one long series of defending them.
254 - The Roman Empire
In 254 CE, the Goths came to Thermopylae. History barely bothers to record what happened. They weren’t there as part of any grand plan, they just wanted to pillage Greece. The Roman soldiers stationed nearby rallied the local Greeks, told them the old stories of Thermopylae, and together they defended the pass. The Goths returned home, grumbling.
This was the state of the Pax Romana, during the Crisis of the Third Century. A hundred and fifty years earlier, the Goths wouldn’t even have tried it. A hundred fifty years later, they could’ve swept through unopposed. Moments like this don’t just track the decline of the Roman Empire. They are the decline. The Roman Empire wasn’t a flag on a pole, or a drawing on a map. The Roman Empire was its laws and its power. Here and now, it was strong enough to defend Greece, but not strong enough to keep the peace altogether. Thirteen years later, another group of raiders, the Heruli, was able to break through a rag-tag defense at Thermopylae and ravage Greece.
(Also, around this time there actually was a Gallic Empire for all of 14 years, until the Romans reconquered it.)
1821 - The Ottoman Empire
For most of the next two millennia, Greece was ruled by an emperor in Constantinople, including after it became Istanbul. Constantinople becoming Istanbul, in addition to inspiring a great song, is another moment that some historians say is when the Roman Empire actually fell. I dunno, though. The Ottoman Empire that ruled from Istanbul was in some ways more Roman than the empire they’d displaced. Mehmed II was titled both Sultan of the Ottomans and Caesar of Rome.
Muslim empires face a dilemma. Islam is all about the rule of law, but empires thrive on pluralism and decentralization. The only stable solution is legal protection for minorities. In addition to the dhimmi contract, the typical arrangement for Jews and non-crusader Christians in Islamic states, the Istanbul Ottomans introduced millet, a kind of religious, cultural, and political federalism. Non-Muslims were far from equal to Muslims, but they did have some level of autonomy.
There were scattered revolts in Greece throughout this period, but for the most part Greece was content to enjoy the relative peace provided by the empire. Or at least resigned. But under the millet system, they were allowed to develop a national culture that considered itself very different from their rulers. So when revolution began to sweep the world, the Greeks wanted in on the action. Some were nationalists, while others were more interested in creating a new Greek Orthodox Empire.
Greek expats in Western Europe and the U.S. took up common cause with the same radicals who had helped spark the American and French revolutions. They knew the playbook by now: spread news about all Ottoman atrocities, downplay anything on the other side, use secret societies to link up regional resistance cells, use art to promote nationalism, and get help from rival empires. Lord Byron was their Lafayette (um, as in his role in the U.S. revolution, not his own country’s). He rallied support in Britain, sent money, guns, and ships, and ultimately died fighting in the revolution, a martyrdom that helped impel his country to intervene. He also, being Byron, wrote poems about it. The Isles of Greece, published in 1821, called for “a new Thermopylae:”
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
The pass itself doesn’t seem to have been militarily significant this time, probably due to shifts in the terrain. But there was indeed an early battle at Thermopylae, a heroic last stand by Athanasios Diakos, who was a Byronic enough figure to thereby become another valuable martyr for Greek nationalism. Greece lost the battle and won the war.
1941 - The British Empire and the Third Reich
World War II was the end of many empires, on both sides. Two of them were there at the most recent battle at Thermopylae. Italy had been ineffectually trying to conquer Greece for a few years already. As it became clear that this was turning into an important front in World War II, the British Commonwealth sent British, New Zealand, and Australian troops to help. However, when the Germans showed up on the other side, the exhausted Greeks folded pretty quickly, leaving their erstwhile allies in a tough spot—the Greeks had been 90% of the army and 99% percent of their knowledge of the territory. But if foreigners know one thing about fighting in Greece, it’s that you’re supposed to make a defiant last stand in Thermopylae.
None of the tactics used to bypass Thermopylae work very well for tanks. The Axis invaders were forced to try to take them all through the gates. And there, they met the Māori, the original culture of New Zealand. While the other Commonwealth forces set up an orderly withdrawal, with fallback positions and escape routes for most of their troops, the Māori Battalion, among a few others, stalled the invasion for two critical days, destroying fifteen tanks in the process and allowing the bulk of the Commonwealth forces to escape.
Having failed to rout their enemy, the Germans ended up taking a month more to fully occupy the country. Hitler would later blame this delay for his failure to conquer Russia—he’d planned to get there before winter, but then those darn Kiwis got in the way. (This narrative was mainly attractive to the Nazis because it let them blame Italy for not getting the job done earlier.)
The forces defending the pass, even the officers, were only somewhat aware of how they were fitting into this larger context. There were vaguely-worded and contradictory orders coming down about whether this was an orderly retreat or a “300 Spartans” situation. Plenty of them thought they were going to just all spend a couple weeks, at best, getting slowly killed off.
And not all of them knew about the historical context, about the ghosts from six armies fighting at their side. Private J.E. Brookes, who did, wrote a great poem about the experience. While waiting to die for his country (he thought), he tried to get an Australian soldier, whom he called Bluey, interested in historical fun facts about Thermopylae. Bluey was aghast that the Spartan soldiers had long hair, and braided flowers into it before every battle. Brookes notes that the Persians had a similar reaction. It’s meant as comic relief, I think, at the expense of the ignorant lower-class colonial, but you can also see a bit of the fall of the British Empire in Bluey’s disgust. In the end, the British were colonizers, not empire-builders. They didn’t want to subjugate other cultures, they wanted to erase them. So they never quite learned pluralism until it was too late, including the skills to notice that “long hair and flowers” might mean different things in different places. Or, in this case, the same place and different times. When their power was broken by the war, the empire had nothing else to keep itself together. It lasted a fraction of the time the Ottomans’ had.
Brookes writes that when he was ordered to retreat, it felt a little like a desertion. As though everyone defending the pass, across the ages, was on the same side, and he was abandoning them. He wrote those words in a prison camp, having fought to the bitter end of the invasion of Greece, finally captured in Crete. And yet something in him still felt like he hadn’t given enough.
In Popular Culture
There’s an exchange in the nineties Star Trek: Deep Space Nine about Thermopylae. It starts with Doctor Bashir arguing that “apoptosis is really just part of the normal cardiac renewal process.” His date, not into this topic, abruptly changes it to discussing what they should simulate that evening in a holosuite. They settle on reenacting the first battle of Thermopylae, where they’ll take the roles of two doomed Spartans. Bashir, whom we’ve previously seen reenacting the Battle of the Alamo and reciting The Charge of the Light Brigade, seems to be into that sort of thing. “These are annihilation fantasies,” his date muses, mildly concerned. He’ll go to therapy tomorrow, they agree, lightly. Tonight, they defend the pass.
I struggle with my own fascination. I’m mostly a pacifist in creed and temperament. Framing these battles as though the defenders were automatically the good guys was a deeply uncomfortable writing exercise—I’ve abandoned this post and come back to it multiple times. It’s not too hard to celebrate the defeat of the Nazis, or the Gallic or Goth pillagers for that matter, but the Persians were pretty cool! Even back then! And Sparta was pretty brutal.
And yet.
This isn’t an annihilation fantasy for me. To me, the fantasy of Thermopylae is the hope of having an outsize impact while being nearly powerless. You don’t have to die, to do that, although at Thermopylae you do have to be willing to die. You just need to be at the right place, at the right time, with comrades you trust and a cause you believe in. I certainly don’t judge Private J.E. Brookes for surviving the battle and the war. What matters is your choices and your impact, not how much you end up sacrificing. If you choose to fight a doomed last stand, and save thousands of lives in the process (if not more), miraculously surviving shouldn’t count against you.
I’ve seen Buckley’s characterization of conservatives like the Catos (“standing athwart history yelling stop!”) used mockingly, but Buckley himself was using it to try to romanticize conservatism. Conservatives are usually defending the powerful from the newly-not-completely-powerless. But it’s more romantic to paint them as underdogs contending against vast impersonal forces. Strom Thurmond filibustered for a record 24 hours straight in a doomed attempt to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It was a racist, hypocritical, misguided, and very impressive feat.
Bashir is probably right about apoptosis and cardiac renewal, although it doesn’t seem to be settled science (no surprise, since apparently we’ll still be arguing about it in four hundred years). Apoptosis is when a cell causes its own death for the good of the organism. It’s rare for a heart cell to decide to do this, but it’s probably sometimes necessary to allow for what the literature calls “cardiac remodeling” in response to other changes in your aging body. But on a human scale, we don’t, or shouldn’t, need to sacrifice lives whenever our civilization needs remodeling. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Jefferson. I’m more optimistic. What needs to die, sometimes, is empires. Tyranny, not tyrants.
In my wildest fantasy, there will be more battles at Thermopylae, but nobody will die. There will be a peaceful protest, people occupying the pass to make a point. There will be high-stakes political debates held there. Maybe even a critical scientific discovery about the nature of the hot springs, one that changes the course of history. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. Most things that move us forward aren’t.
In embracing that hope, we don’t need to condemn or abandon those who shed actual blood at the Hot Gates. Violence doesn’t need to be core to who we are, but it is core to how we got here. These seven defending armies really were fighting on the same side, in a way. Each drew inspiration from the heroism of the ones before. Each helped shape the world of the ones who came after.
History can’t tell us what to stand for. But it can help us find a place to stand.
Bonus: Thermopylae Returns To New Zealand
In the Brookes poem, the Colonel gives the order to stand, shouting “THEY SHALL NOT PASS!”
World War II was a significant influence on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which he wrote off and on between 1937 and 1949. (He fought in World War I). Gandalf, sacrificing his life (he thinks) to give the rest of the fellowship time to escape, shouts “YOU CANNOT PASS!” The scene also evokes the 1821 Thermopylae, when Athanasios Diakos sacrificed himself to hold a bridge. Later in the series, King Aragorn leads seven thousand soldiers, about the same number as Leonidas had, to fight an unwinnable battle at the Black Gate of Mordor.
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was filmed in New Zealand, the home of many of the defenders in 1941. In some scenes, the adaptation strengthens the ties to Thermopylae. Gandalf’s line becomes “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” rather than “cannot.” Legolas gets a line before the defense of Helm’s Deep subtitled “Three hundred against ten thousand!”
I can’t definitively link any of these directly to Thermopylae, though. Tolkien would have read Herodotus, but he also probably read World War I propaganda, which was full of similar rhetoric. The same laws of military strategy (and, sometimes, plate tectonics) have led to many more versions of this story, scattered in space and time.
Probably some of the ANZAC troops who fought in Greece have descendants in the movies, but I don’t know of a specific son who played a Baby Boomer orc extra, or granddaughter who played a Gen X elf. At least one World War II veteran shows up in person, though—Christopher Lee. Lee and his government have never gone into detail about some of his service, which seems to have involved some ungentlemanly warfare. In one of the versions of the films, Lee’s character dies of a literal backstab by his advisor. Lee declined to take direction from Peter Jackson on how to play the moment. “Have you watched people dying after being stabbed in the back, Peter?” he said.