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After the Persian wars, the Spartans transformed the Battle of Thermopylae from a defeat into a heroic last stand that paved the way for final victory. The legend of Thermopylae then became part of the cultural heritage of the western world. It has proven astonishingly useful and malleable, being taken up for strikingly different ends by people as varied as French revolutionaries, Texan rebels, British imperialists, and Nazis. Today, popular culture entertainments such as Frank Miller’s award-winning comic 300 and the movie version of it by Zak Snyder ensure that the Thermopylae legend remains vividly alive. 

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Thwarted by Leonidas and his advance guard at Thermopylae, the Persians faced the failure of their invasion. Their mastery of intelligence and espionage now came to their rescue when a Greek traitor informed them of a way around the Greek position. The climax of the Battle of Thermopylae saw the Persian army overwhelm and wipe out Leonidas’ force. Following their victory, the Persians swept down into southern Greece and occupied Athens. But then came the turning point: the Athenian admiral Themistocles lured the Persian navy into the narrow straits of Salamis and destroyed it. The next year, the Greek resistance won two more battles at Plataea and Mycale. The Persian invasion was over.

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As the Persians bore down on Greece, the city-states of the resistance decided to use their army to block the pass of Thermopylae. At the same time, their fleet would confront the Persian navy in the nearby waters off Artemisium. Before the Greek forces could set out, disaster struck: the Olympic and Carneian religious festivals imposed a taboo on war-making. At this moment of supreme crisis, King Leonidas of Sparta led out an advance guard to hold Thermopylae. In two days of intense fighting on land and sea, the Greeks managed to stop the Persian advance.   

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During the second half of the sixth century BCE, Persian expansion encroached on the Greek world. In 499 BCE, Athens sent military aid to Greeks rebelling against the Great King. In retaliation, Great King Darius mounted the first Persian invasion of Greece. In 490 BCE, the Athenians defeated this invasion at the Battle of Marathon. Darius’s son Xerxes then planned to conquer all of Greece with a massive army and a huge fleet. Just thirty Greek states, led by Athens and Sparta, banded together to resist the invaders.

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Originally just a minor tribe from the southern mountains of Iran, the Persians embarked on a spectacular career of conquest that led to the creation of the superpower of the ancient world. The Great Kings of Persia were masters of grand strategy, logistics, and espionage. At their command was a vast army of dazzling ethnic diversity and imposing fighting power. Yet this army had a fatal weakness: it could not withstand a hoplite charge.  

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By the fifth century BCE, the Greek world stretched from the Black Sea to the shores of southern France. It was divided into thousands of fiercely independent city-states. The major Greek city-states had developed a distinctive way of fighting based on heavily armed and armored infantrymen called hoplites arrayed in the serried ranks of the phalanx and closing with their enemies to fight in hand-to-hand combat. The unquestioned masters of this Greek way of war were the Spartans. 

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Around 431 BCE, Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote up his Inquiry—in Greek, Historia—in which he sought to explain the origins and course of the conflicts between the Persians and the Greeks. This work inaugurated the western historical tradition and earned for its author the title Father of History. We’ll examine who Herodotus was, how he came to write his History, and why it is the indispensable source for the Persian Wars and the Battle of Thermopylae.  

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In the late summer of 480 BCE, a Greek force of 1,000 hoplites from Thebes, Thespiae, and, most famously, Sparta, under the command of the Spartan king Leonidas, was surrounded and wiped out in the pass of Thermopylae by the invading Persian army of Great King Xerxes. The Battle of Thermopylae is the most well-known battle of the ancient wars between the Greeks and the Persians. It is also the most famous last stand in history. This episode examines the Greeks and the Persians, how they came into conflict, the events that led to their clash at Thermopylae, the three days of fighting in the pass, and the consequences of the battle. It concludes by tracing how Thermopylae was transformed into a legend of heroic sacrifice that resonates in Western culture right down to the present day.

A note to the listener: This episode is available either as a single recording or in eight shorter parts. 

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The introduction to the podcast.