300 Spartans and history

The movie "300" hammers home the moral that real men are willing to strip to their speedos and face the enemy come what may. The battle of Thermopylae is presented as a type of Alamo, where Leonidas leads his men knowing they are simply a sacrifice to the struggle against the tyranny of the evil Persian Empire but one that will provide the rallying cry for all of Greece to unite together for democracy, the rights of man, heroic nudity and olive oil. Or something like that.

The problem is, we will never know exactly what happened because we really only have one complete source: Herodotus' history of the Persian Wars. Keep in mind that one of Herodotus' nicknames was "the father of lies." Only fools would attempt to explain what actually happened.

So here is my explanation. What did the battle of Thermopylae and the sacrifice of a 300 Spartans and about 1,500 other Greeks who stayed that last day?

Absolutely nothing. They held up the Persian army for two days. Xerxes spent more time resting his dancing girls than that. Rallying cry? Most of the Greek city states north of the Peloponnese other than Athens went over to the Persians. The Spartans were so worked up over the noble example of their king that they called for a total abandonment of northern Greece, including Athens, to defend Sparta herself.

The Persian army was large, but also well organized, well supplied, and well led (best book would be Peter Green's The Greco-Persian Wars - also check out this site for some maps). The Greeks were disunited, with many of them being part of the Persian Empire and more than willing to fight bravely for the King of Kings Xerxes. Others, even Spartans, betrayed the cause - guess who shows that Persians how to clamber over the mountains to come down behind the Spartans at Thermopylae. The Greeks guarding the pass simply high tail it. And all those evil Spartan councilmen like Theron who want to betray the resistance? Every single one of them was a Spartan warrior who had gone over exactly the same training as the 300 who follow Leonidas on his walk to the north. Where is the 'warrior ethic' that the original graphic novel was supposed to be about?

So what did save the day? The Athenian fleet at the battle of Salamis. They had no choice - everyone else, including the Spartans, had left them to face the Persians alone. It was the shop keepers, potters, carters, farmers, sail makers, and other craftsmen, the type of Greek warrior Leonidas openly derides in the movie, who man the Athenian fleet and against all odds destroy the Persian fleet while Xerxes watches from his throne.

But even that did not save Greece. Xerxes went home with what was left of the fleet and left the army, perhaps 40,000 men, to winter in northern Greece surrounded and protected by their Greek allies. It was the next spring that the last scene of the movie takes place: the battle of Plataea. A huge army of Greek hoplites (the heavy infantrymen) that was nearly as big as the Persian army attacked head on. The Persian resistance was ferocious and lasted most of the day. The Persian general, Marbodus, was killed fighting at the head of his troops. For a military buff like myself that shot of the Greek army going into combat was the single most disappointing scene in the movie. You get no idea of the deadly beauty of an articulated hoplite army moving into phalanx formation.

The Spartans did the best job that day, they were after professionals. But without all the other hoplites, most farm boys from the coalition of city-states that rallied to the cause after the Athenians had forced the Persian fleet to retreat, their would have been no victory.

And the Persians would have come back.

Thermopylae was a small scale fiasco due to treachery and as far as I can tell, did virtually nothing for the cause until after the war, when old men like Herodotus sat around the fire and crafted the noble tale of heroic resistance to all the unleashed forces of tyranny.

That's history folks. And now, I have been sick all day, it is after 2am, the cats are afoot in the house and I am off to bed.