The New Criterion

Paul Cartledge
Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World.
Overlook Press, 376 pages, $30

Thermopylae is legendary, its story is simple: three hundred Spartans stood in a narrow pass, where the mountains came down to the sea, and tried to stop a huge Persian army of invasion. For two days the Spartans savaged the enemy, but on the third day, the Persians surrounded them. The Spartans had advance warning that they would be cut off, but rather than escape they chose to hold their ground and to die to the last man, including their king, Leonidas. Their heroic stand for freedom lit a fire that rallied all Greece to drive out the invader. A year later, after overwhelming victories at Salamis and Plataea, Greece was free.

The reality of Thermopylae was different. The Spartans did not fight alone—they had about 7,000 Greek allies. Their mission was not merely a beau geste; it had a strategic purpose, however opaque that purpose now is, and however poorly the strategy was executed. Nor were the three hundred Spartans the only Greeks to die at Thermopylae (to say nothing of the Persians). There were also as many as seven hundred soldiers from Thespiae and also some Thebans. The last class of the fallen were Greeks but unfree: Sparta’s serfs or Helots, who died alongside their masters.

We don’t remember the men of Thespiae or the Helots, but then they didn’t have the formidable Spartan propaganda machine working for them. “The Spartans themselves inaugurated and sedulously developed the Thermopylae legend,” writes Paul Cartledge in his new book. No army in history has ever been more image-conscious than the Spartans. Fear, as they understood, is a force multiplier, so they took pains to frighten the enemy. It was to the Spartans’ military advantage to hog the limelight. So the famous epigram inscribed after the war at Thermopylae reads:

Go tell the Spartans, thou who passeth by, That here, obedient to her laws, we lie.

And not:

Go tell the Spartans, the Thespians, the Thebans, and the Helots… .

Thermopylae, then, was a stand for freedom and serfdom; a combination of tactical virtuosity with strategic blundering; and an example of marketing, ancient style. And yet, the skeptics do not get the last word. The more we look at Thermopylae, the harder it is to let go of it.

Paul Cartledge wisely realizes this. Our leading historian of Sparta, Cartledge is second to none in the ability to subject myth to the cold light of scholarship. Yet Thermopylae, as he understands, is greater than anything that might appear in the footnotes. Thermopylae is about why men fight to the death. As Cartledge writes:

the ancient ideal encapsulated in the myth of Thermopylae still resonates today: it is the concept that there are some values that are worth dying for, as well as living for.

But not all values are equally worth dying for, as Cartledge points out. He is aware, and troubled, that suicide bombers too have values that are worth dying for. Yet the Spartans were different. They followed the laws of war and fought soldiers, not civilians. And they fought for freedom—a more limited but more intense version of what that word means today.

Sparta, as Cartledge amply demonstrates, was a unique culture and society. Like other Greeks, Spartans were highly competitive and prized freedom enormously. On Spartan competitiveness, consider an item in our main ancient source of information about Thermopylae, the historian Herodotus. According to Herodotus, one of the reasons why King Leonidas stayed at Thermopylae when he could have fled was that he wanted to win glory for Sparta.

Spartan freedom meant that Spartan citizens were freed from having to do any productive work except warfare, thanks to the serfs. And it meant that Spartan citizens were free to govern themselves, by a system of checks and balances, assertion and obedience—but not by democracy, a system of government ill-suited to Sparta’s military discipline. For the Spartans and some (but not all) other Greeks, freedom was an all-or-nothing affair: either you were free or you were a slave.

The Persian invasion, therefore, offered them a stark choice between freedom and slavery. Hindsight questions that judgment. In 480 B.C., slaves were bought and sold, chained and tattooed, whipped and raped. Nothing like that would have been in store for most Greeks if they surrendered to Persia. Scholarship shows that the Persian Empire was, by ancient standards, tolerant and progressive, a point that Cartledge underlines.

So when the Spartans and Athenians called surrender to Persia slavery, they did not mean literal enslavement. They meant the loss of autonomy: the ability to choose how they would be governed at home and whom they would fight or befriend abroad. There would be no more Spartan independence, no Athenian democracy. And this the Greeks considered to be as good as slavery. So did the American founders. No one knew the reality of slavery better than the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies; they knew that George III and his ministers had no intention of putting them in shackles, and yet they called it slavery when London merely reduced their political freedom. “Give me liberty or give me death,” said Patrick Henry.

Such stands are arguably unreasonable; they are certainly uncompromising. But perhaps that is what the defense of freedom sometimes takes. What made the Spartans choose to make their stand?

In answer, Cartledge points to Sparta’s unique customs and practices, which differed from those of other Greeks. In addition to Sparta’s famous austerity (hence our word “spartan”) and its educational system (which was more public and militaristic than elsewhere in Greece), he emphasizes the relative freedom of Spartan women, who could wrestle in the nude, inherit property, and, if they were married, publicly insult bachelors at an annual festival. He also cites Sparta’s unusual sexual customs, such as polyandry (wives having more than one husband each), socially acceptable wife-sharing, and institutionalized pederasty between a young male citizen warrior and a teenage boy. Any of these customs would make an anthropologist’s field day, and much about Sparta was not merely odd but cruel or oppressive. Yet the overall effect was admirable.

As Cartledge argues, Spartan values, both the good and the bad, produced a remarkable spirit of self-sacrifice for a larger cause. And that, he maintains, is what made Thermopylae possible—and what makes it immortal.

He proves his case. And that alone is reason to read Thermopylae. In addition, Cartledge offers a lucid overview of Greco-Persian relations at the start of the war, an elegant description of Sparta in a nutshell, and a prudent introduction to the work of Herodotus. There is also a witty and erudite tour of Thermopylae allusions through the ages.

And yet one may take issue with some of the arguments in the book. Two questions come to the fore: Exactly what were the Spartans trying to do at Thermopylae? And what effect did their self-sacrifice have on the Greeks’ war with Persia?

Cartledge argues, as have others, that from the first, the Spartans’ “mission was suicidal self-sacrifice.” He may be right but we don’t know. The Spartans were always a secretive people, and it suited them to have others think that Spartans fought to the death and so should not be crossed. But the pragmatic Spartans made unlikely kamikazes. It is clear that they considered the Thermopylae mission to be extremely dangerous. It was not, however, hopeless—at least not given the information the defenders were working on.

The stand at Thermopylae was risky but reasonable strategy. By blocking a pass in central Greece in August 480 B.C., the defenders hoped to stop the Persian army from attacking the Greek heartland to the south. But how? Even in favorable terrain, 7,000 Greeks could not bottle up about 150,000 Persians for good. The Spartans knew that, and they planned to send reinforcements on the double, as soon as that month’s twin religious festivals were over. (A fine excuse, you might say, but war tends to make men more religious.)

What the Greeks didn’t know was that there was a wrinkle in their plan. It turned out that a path in the hills above Thermopylae would allow the Persians to outflank the defenders and close the pass. Even so, a bigger Greek army might still have held off the Persians long enough to increase the already terrible casualties that the small Greek army cost Persia.

They could not have destroyed the Persian forces, but the Greeks did not have to do so. Merely delaying the enemy, bloodying him, and demonstrating Greek resolve would have constituted a strategic victory. The Greek goal at Thermopylae was as much political as military. By fighting in central Greece, the Spartans might have brought more allies to the patriots’ cause while weakening the invader’s determination. They might have prevented the wavering Thebans from collaborating with Persia. And most important, they showed their main ally that they would fight. That ally was Athens; without Athens’ ships, the Greeks would have no fleet; and without a fleet, they could not stop the Persians. The Greek fleet, by the way, was stationed forty miles away from Thermopylae, and fought the Persian navy to a draw at roughly the same time as the land battle took place. As it turned out, Sparta lost Thebes but it kept Athens, which was more important.

But if Thermopylae wasn’t meant to be a suicide mission, why did 300 Spartans and their allies stand, fight, and die? Again, we don’t know. The most prosaic possibility is a blunder, that is, Leonidas meant to escape after a fighting retreat, but he miscalculated. Herodotus, our best source for the battle, thinks otherwise. Besides his desire for glory, a sense of propriety and a prophecy that only the death of a king could save Sparta are what motivated Leonidas. But Herodotus concedes that his explanation is controversial.

In any case, Leonidas and his men did die, and not in vain. It is worth remembering this in the context of Cartledge’s argument about the battle’s strategic importance. It’s a useful corrective to historians’ tendency to forget that Thermopylae had any strategic significance, since we tend to focus on the operational details. In fact, the stand in the pass shaped the war: it bloodied the Persians and delayed their advance southward. It increased the pressure on Xerxes to win a clear victory, which in turn nudged him into committing his forces foolishly at Salamis, a month later. And it arguably galvanized Greek resistance by embodying the spirit of sacrifice.

But wars are not won by defeats. Greek strategy relied on a one-two punch, first by sea and then by land. A naval victory would deny Persia mobility while cutting its seaborne supply line; in turn, that would force the enemy to reduce its forces to a size that could live on local provisions. And a smaller Persian army would not find it easy to stand up to Greece’s heavy infantry. After Thermopylae, the Athenians evacuated Attica and lured Xerxes into sending his fleet into the fatal straits at Salamis in September 480. And that in turn, set the stage for the Spartan-led victory on land at Plataea in 479.

We could argue about whether Salamis or Plataea was the decisive battle. Truth in advertising: Cartledge and I do, in fact, argue this very point. Rather than belabor the matter, I’d rather hope that the reader finds it charming that anyone could argue over events that took place 2,500 years ago—and that it encourages the exploration of this book and many other books about the ancient world.

Thermopylae was not the decisive battle of the Persian Wars. But it may well be the decisive battle of our imagination. Thermopylae grips us because men chose to stand there and die for the sacred cause of freedom. That alone is reason to remember.