There’s more to the history of this famous narrow pass than the legendary 300 Spartans
The Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE was propelled into the pop-culture stratosphere by Zack Snyder’s 2006 hit movie 300. Based on the 1998 comic by Frank Miller, it sticks fairly closely to the tale told by Herodotus, writing some 50 years after the battle. Herodotus’ story, sometimes mistaken, sometimes exaggerated, and now and again entirely false, is almost universally accepted. It is the standing narrative everyone knows about what is arguably the most famous battle in human history.
This narrative is almost certainly common knowledge to readers of this magazine: that the Spartan Agiad king Leonidas boldly advanced to hold the pass with just 300 Spartans, fated to die by the pronouncement of the Oracle at Delphi. He bravely held the pass against unimaginable odds, facing down the numberless army of Xerxes, the king of kings, lord of Achaemenid Persia. Leonidas and every man with him were killed, but their legendary last stand inspired the Greeks to defeat the Persians the following year at Plataea, saving the Western world.
In our forthcoming book, The Killing Ground: A Biography Of Thermopylae, we put much of this narrative to the historical test, which more or less shoves the tale through a metaphorical woodchipper. If you want to know exactly how we do it all, we invite you to read the book, but below we provide five of the things you probably didn’t know about Thermopylae.
THERMOPYLAE IS NO SINGLE PASS
The standard narrative makes constant reference to the pass of Thermopylae, ignoring the fact that there were multiple routes through the topography, and that all of them had a major impact on the fighting in 480 BCE. In fact, we believe the entire battle unfolded as we know it specifically because Xerxes didn’t cooperate with Leonidas’ plan, and the battle unfolded in another pass from the one where he originally intended to make his stand. The multiplicity of the passes in the area — and the mountains, rivers, and seashores around them — were critical to the action that unfolded.
THERMOPYLAE SAW MANY OF THE WHO’S WHO OF HISTORY
Thermopylae is a name synonymous with the struggles of the Achaemenid Persians and the classical Greeks, but the battlefield drank the blood of many nations and peoples across its more than two and a half millennia of near unrelenting battle. The Greeks indeed fought the Persians (and other Greeks) here. But so did the Macedonians made famous by Alexander the Great, and the diadochoi (successor) dynasties that divided up his empire after his death: the Antipatrids, Antigonids, and Seleucids. The Romans fought here, as d
