Go Tell The Spartans! // On site at Thermopylae FULL DOCUMENTARY / the last stand of Leonidas

In 480 BC, an allied Greek force would face off against the mighty Persian Empire, leaving behind the legacy of one of the most famous battles in history, the Battle of Thermopylae. Under the leadership of King Leonidas, the Greek coalition force would position an army of around 7,000 troops in the pass of Thermopylae, a bottleneck holding mainland Greece from Xerxes' expansion of his mighty empire. It was here, in the summer of 480 BC, that two remarkable civilizations would face off and leave an everlasting echo which continues to be heard today. But what really happened at the Battle of Thermopylae? Well, that is what I'm going to find out. I am here at the battlefield of Thermopylae, which over 2,500 years ago saw that very Greek coalition force face off against the vast and Persian Empire. With this battle being legendary in our histories, there are many misconceptions and myths which are being propelled about this battle. Today, we're going to walk through the battlefield and visit many of the historical landmarks which still survive today to try and show you and give you the most up-to-date and accurate information that we can on the battle. So come with me today as we revisit the Battle of Thermopylae on site. There's an almost eerie feeling here, like I am standing in the same place that Leonidas and his Greek coalition force did over 2,500 years ago. And here on Colonus Hill served as where they took their final stand. And the memory of them still echoes here, inscribed in stone at their final resting place reads approximately, Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, Adhere obedient to their laws, we lie. And talk about echoing throughout history, just the soundscape here is just really something else. It is dry and hot and the cicadas just sort of make it feel almost eerie and surreal. So the camp at Thermopylae would have looked something like this, though much bigger. And it was here that the approximate 10,000 Greek force would have been, from slaves to hoplites, from Theban Ctespians and Leonidas and his 300 Spartans. Now, on the topic of Leonidas and his 300 Spartans, there's sort of one pressing question. That is, why did Sparta send so few? Well, for that, I'm going to send you to someone else who knows a lot more than me. So we're told from the beginning, there are two different versions of this story. In one, they only send 300. And in another, they send 1000. And it seems like the 1000 story is actually older. So initially, they sent 1000 men. Later on, this story started to focus so much on the Spartiate citizen element within that 1000, the 300 full Spartan citizens who took part, which means that, as Herodotus already told the story, there seemed to be only 300 Spartans. But they are just the Spartan core of a much larger army. So there's 1000 Spartans, alongside almost 4000 other Peloponnesians. And then there are the others that are joining them from the local region where this battle will be fought. So there are Boeotians joining them, there are also Phocians and Locrians. So the really odd thing about that number is it's very small. Like we hear the year that follows, they send 10,000 hoplites, along with possibly as many as 40,000 light armed troops. So they had a large army that they could have sent. But to Thermopylae, they only sent 1000. So the question is why? And the Spartans told different stories to try and explain this. The interesting thing is that you really only should have needed one story, which is the real reason. But instead, they told several different ones. So the one that we get from Herodotus is that they had a festival going on, they had the Carnea, which is an annual festival that happened at the end of summer. And during that month in which that festival took place, the Spartans weren't allowed to wage war. Now we know that happens in other periods as well, it prevented the Spartans from taking part in the Battle of Marathon, for instance. So there are other occasions where they pleaded that they had this festival going on. The problem is that we can date that festival fairly securely. And we can read in Herodotus, if we follow his account, that it happened weeks after the army marched out. So there is actually no reason for them to prevent their army marching out when they did. The Carnea only comes in when Leonidas arrives at the pass and asks for reinforcements. So the initial sending of such a small force is not explained by the Carnea. That is not a good reason for them to have sent such a small force. We're talking about an excuse here, probably. So the other story, which Herodotus also knows, but he downplays it, other sources to make much more of this, is the story that the Spartans received an oracle around the time that the Persian wars of the Xerxes invaded, which said that they could save their entire state and their community if they sacrificed one king. So they had to lose a king to save everybody else. And interpreting this oracle, trying to figure out what they meant, they realized that when the Persians came to Thermopylae, they would have to go and send one of their kings to die in order to have the gods on their side and win a victory. So in that story, the sending of such a small force to Thermopylae is because it's a suicide mission. They knew they were going to die. They were going to sacrifice themselves on purpose. And as a result of that, they only sent a few men. The problem with that story is why send so many? Because in that case, if this is a suicide mission, if they know they're going to die, then suddenly 300 full citizens and a thousand hoplites is a huge number. That's a tenth of their full strength if we believe that what they sent to Plataea the following year is the whole of their militia. So that would be a very large force to just kind of sacrifice to appease the gods. So neither of those stories are quite satisfactory. And I think increasingly historians seem to think that these are both pretexts. These are both excuses. What's really going on, which we can see also from the relatively small scale of the other detachments that are sent along with the Spartans, is that they just didn't want to send more men. They sent a very small force either because they believed it was enough to hold this pass or because they didn't want to commit everything they had to this early fight when what the Spartans were really interested in is defending the Peloponnese much further south. And they didn't really want to risk losing a very large number of their own men fighting for Greeks further north before they had secured their own backyard. Let us now venture forth and get a look at the holy sites of Delphi. The Oracle of Apollo spoke here at Delphi. Delphi served as a religious and cultural stronghold for archaic and classical Greece, however it had its origins far earlier. Evidence of Delphi's significance goes all the way back to the Mycenaeans, some 1,000 years before Leonidas, and development of the Sanctuary of the Oracle began in the 8th century BC, and its influence over the Greek world would only grow stronger from there. To get to Delphi from Sparta was a massive distance, would have taken several days. It was here that Herodotus reports that the Spartans were given a prophecy which went something like this. For you, inhabitants of wide-weighed Sparta, either your great and glorious city must be wasted by Persian men, or if not that, then the bound of Lacedaemon must mourn a dead king from Heracles' line. So if this version of events is correct, Leonidas' fate was sealed. Either he would have to die, or Sparta would be destroyed. So currently we're sort of trekking up a path heading to where the remainder of the Phocian wall still stands today. The Phocian wall has an interesting sort of twist to it, as the word wall can also be translated to its fortress, and when we come to it, it might be more obvious that it should be called a fortress as opposed to a wall. So the Greeks send a force to Thermopylae, led by Leonidas and his Spartans. In total there are about 10,000, give or take, however the number of the Persians they were fighting against was significantly higher. Though Herodotus tells us that the Persian army spanned from sunrise to sunset and numbered in the millions, which is almost definitely an exaggeration, modern estimates place the army at around 150 to 200,000, which outnumbers the Greeks approximately 15 to 1. This is also where Greece herself comes into play. Thermopylae itself acted as a form of bottleneck, separating Greece from the rest of the mainland, and it was one of the only ways that the Persian empire could actually expand into Greece. The formation of the mountains, which has changed a lot today, but it was ideal at the time for the phalanx warfare of the Hoplites, and Herodotus explicitly mentions that it meant it was very difficult for the Persians to utilize their famed and feared cavalry. So here we are at the remains of the Phocian wall, and as you can see it continues along this whole mountain pass, and you can really sort of see why it's a fortress as opposed to just a mere wall. It really is very long, it continues down there and even goes across to Kolonos hill, so you can sort of see how the Greeks could hold this position with a relatively small number of troops if they're stationed very smartly around the fortifications of both the Phocian wall and the Kolonos hill. And it almost looks like that they're sort of surviving multiple walls, which could indicate that the Persians sort of had to maneuver around lots of obstacles and lots of walls that the Greeks used to their advantage, not only the terrain of Greece at the same time. The effects of the mountain pass, the Phocian wall, and the sea itself, which has now receded greatly, it used to come all the way forward past this road and almost down to Kolonos hill, but now it's several kilometers back that way. But all together in combination forced the Persians to fight in a far more condensed and clustered formation, which allowed the smaller Greek force a greater fighting chance, and seeing it now it's changed a lot. Let's now get a better look at what Thermopylae would have looked like back in 480 BC. The thinnest part of the pass at the time of Leonidas was around 15 meters or 50 feet, and that, in collaboration with the Phocian wall, forced a very large Persian army to be filtered into a very narrow bottleneck, which could be defended by less troops. You can imagine that with the presence of peltasts and light troops on the walls, it would have made the Persians' task of uprooting defending Greeks much harder. Yet another important surviving part of Thermopylae is here, the hot spring. Thermopylae was actually called the hot gates at the time, and got its name due to this thermal spring that runs through it. And it was here at the hot gates that two remarkable civilizations faced off against each other in one of history's most famous and memorable battles. So Thermopylae is a geographical bottleneck. The land gets narrow there, and it's one of the only ways to move from the north into central and southern Greece. And that is historically true. There have been many battles at Thermopylae. The one, the famous one, is only the second one that we know of, but there may have been others before that, which is basically just because that is the most likely place to try and stop someone who is trying to march an army from the north into central Greece. A number of different Greek states had gotten together because they had agreed to fight the Persians, so they were the allies against Persia, and they had agreed to send their army north to try and stop Xerxes and his invasion army at one of these bottlenecks. Initially they sent an army up to Tempe, which is on the foot of Mount Olympus, so further north. But they realized that pass could be turned, there were other ways around it. So they decided to retreat from there, think again, and their second attempt was to march to Thermopylae. At the same time, and alongside Thermopylae, there's quite a narrow strait between the mainland and the island of Euboea, that was where the fleet was gathering. So they sent an army to Thermopylae and the fleet to Artemision, which is where the Athenians and the other allies who had more ships were fighting at the same time to stop the Persian fleet. So the Greeks choose Thermopylae, and soon after the Persians arrive. Now Herodotus tells us that the battle did not ensue immediately, in fact Xerxes waited about four days thinking that the Greeks would flee, seeing his vast and impressive army. Upon realizing that this maybe wasn't the case, he sent out scouts to sort of survey the Greek camp, to which they reported that the Greeks were exercising and working out and combing their long hair. Confused by this, he actually consulted Demaratus, who was an exiled Spartan king, who essentially acted as an advisor to Xerxes on the Greeks, and especially the Spartans. He informed Xerxes that the Greeks would do this before risking their lives in battle, to essentially duty themselves up and make them look good if they died in battle. Xerxes still didn't believe this, and still assumed that the Greeks would flee. However, to his surprise, they did not. Another activity that we were told took place was a game called Episkeros. The game, which was highly focused on teamwork, was played with a leather ball called a Fulis, which was painted with bright colors, and saw two teams of around 12 to 14 players. The team's objective was to throw the ball over the heads of the other team. There was a center line between the teams, and another line behind each one. They would pass the ball back and forth until a team member reached the marked line, pushing the enemy team past their line. This was yet another activity that the Greeks took part in, whilst waiting for the Persians to make their move. Eventually, however, Xerxes would send his first attack, which Herodotus reports was mainly made up of Medes and Scythians, and it was here, at the hot gates, where a small coalition force of Greeks attempted to halt the very mighty Persian empire. Let's now take a look at the arms and equipment of both of these warriors. Something that's important to remember when it comes to the ancient Greek hoplite is that they were not a professional force, they were more akin to a citizen militia. This meant that every individual have to afford all of his own kit, which of course caused quite a lot of disparity within the force, as each piece of armor would have been quite expensive, and many of them wouldn't be able to afford every piece of kit. What I'm demoing here is roughly the most heavily armored you would be in the time of Hoplite, that is with greaves, a bronze cuirass, helmet, shield, spear, and sword. The first piece of armor you'd put on are your greaves, which are arguably one of the most important pieces of armor, as they are what protect your lower half. For that, you just have to take off your sandal, which can be a little bit frustrating, and the most common way that we see them attached is with a self-clamping method. So you essentially slide them onto your feet, your leg, and they will self-clamp. It was very important that this type of armor was made for the individual, as especially legs have a very unique shape, and if it didn't fit you, you'd be a little bit in trouble. So they're quite quick, very simple, but they are incredibly important, as they are what protect under your shield, arguably more important than the cuirass. Next up is your torso protection. In this case, this is a bronze muscle cuirass, which seems to just sort of come into play around 490 BC, so this is possible to have definitely seen at the Battle of Thermopylae. More common would likely have been the earlier, more archaic bell cuirass, however very similar, a bronze thorax. Another option, which seems to be the most common in the Greek world, was what's commonly called the linithorax, the tube and yoke of likely a linen or leather construction of the shoulders over the top and the tube in there. This, through tests, has proved very effective and was likely the most upper-class and wealthy option that a soldier could wear, and you need two people to sort of help you put that on. Now how the cuirass fits is essentially through a pinning system, supported by ties if you really wanted to. After the cuirass is put on is when we go to our sidearm, which may look very insignificant and, well, very small, however this weapon in close quarters was incredibly ruthless, and you can understand how you go from a very long spear to closing a distance with a very short sword, this short sword becomes more effective than a longer weapon at getting over shields and through gaps in armour, and this sits quite comfortably and also quite high up on the hoplite, and that also helps you grab it easily when you're holding the shield, so it's tucked up right there so you can get it. Next is perhaps the most characteristic part of the hoplite being the helmets. Now down here I have an example of a more archaic era Corinthian, which is likely the style of Corinthian that you'd be seeing around Thermopylae, however this was not the only helmet available to the Greeks, in fact we see many others, some of which possibly more popular than the Corinthian, such as the Illyrian helmet and the Chalcidian helmet, however this was definitely a popular helmet and favoured by the Greeks as it was so represented in their artwork, and this obviously protects the soldier's head. So as you can see I'm incredibly well armoured, and that's without my shield, which is what we go to next. The shield and the spear were really what made the hoplite the hoplite, as hoplite really just translates as meaning man at arms, or man who bears arms. This would have seen, you know, a lot of disparity in the equipment available to the hoplites. I would have been an incredibly well armoured, likely very upper class member in my society to be able to basically head to toe myself in bronze, and you can see that with the shield and the spear you were incredibly well covered. Not too dissimilar to the Greeks, the Persian force at Thermopylae was also made up of a wide variety of cultures under the banner of the Persians. From the Medes and Scythians to the famed Persian Immortals, these warriors all fought in their own way and styles, which allowed the Persians to have a wide selection of tactics and methods to defeat their enemies. For now, let us turn our attention to the most famous of these Persian units, the Immortals. Very little is actually known about the Immortals, as Herodotus is the only source we have on them that has survived. This leaves many questions, however we can still unpack this warrior. One prevalent theory is that the Immortals act as a personal bodyguard to the king. The name is likely of Greek origin, due to the number of the force, 10,000, always getting replenished after every loss. What the Persians called this unit is unknown. Herodotus writes that, when any one of them was forced to fall out of the number, by death or sickness, another one was chosen so that they were neither more nor fewer than 10,000. The Persians were educated, trained, and were masters of multiple weapons, from the bow and arrow to the spear, and from unmounted to mounted warfare. These troops were really a package deal when it came to ancient warfare. Let us now take a closer look at the arms and equipment of these soldiers. Herodotus gives us many details, such as them carrying spears, utilising tall shields, scaled armour. However, we do not have a complete description of these men. That being said, we can still craft a decent image of what they would have likely looked like. The Immortals seem to have been the heavy Persian infantry elite. For torso protection, it is likely that they wore something very similar to the linithorax or tuban yoke that Greek hoplites wore, adorned in scales. Evidence for helmets is lacking, and it seems that there really isn't much evidence to suggest that they had them, which is an interesting detail. For their primary defence, they utilised a tall wicker shield, which was not too heavy and offered excellent protection. The tall and rectangular design could serve multiple purposes, one of which is likely for archery. We see this type of tower-shield-bow combination throughout history, and it was effective. Another option is the smaller beatian type shield. For offence, apart from the bow and arrow, in close quarters they would likely have used a spear, and according to Herodotus, acted as the identifier and staple of the Persian Immortal, with Herodotus explaining that the spear outfitted the famous pomegranate butt spike. However, they could have also been outfitted with a Persian battleaxe, which has been proven to be ruthless against armour through testing, not too dissimilar to the spike on a medieval Bector Corbin, and again, similar to the hoplites, a short sword as a sidearm. As you can see, the immortals were not short of equipment and the skill to use them, and didn't gain their fame for nothing. So the Persian army at this point is still the imperial show army, so we hear from Herodotus in great detail all the different peoples that were part of this army. There's a huge train of ethnicities who all sent their attachments to Xerxes because they owe him military service. So this is a vast army, this is bigger than almost anything the ancient world had seen up to that point, but it's a very disparate force. All these people are fighting in their own native fashions, and many of those are very different from the kind of way that the Greeks fought. The core of this army is the Persians themselves, so they have 10,000 immortals, 1,000 royal guards who are spearmen, or an elite force of armoured spearmen, and then you have the cavalry. So the Persians themselves have cavalry, and then many of their allies also fight as a fight on horseback. So their tactical system is to use these forces in combination. On the one hand, to use this large force of armoured spearmen, who also have bows, who can fight as a mixed infantry force, to block the enemy, to hold them in place, to shower them with arrows, and then to use the cavalry to move around and deliver the decisive blow. As for the Greeks, at this time, their armies are essentially just levies of citizens. So the Persians have a professional corps to their army, and then add to that by drawing on all the different peoples they've subjected. For the Greeks, the way that armies are mustered, basically all adult male citizens owe military service to their state. When they're called up for war, they all get together and they try to fight that war together. Now, the thing about that is the state doesn't provide anything, right? People have to buy their own weapons, which means that the kind of composition of these forces depends entirely on how much wealth there is within a society. At this point in time, however, a lot of these Greek states have been getting a lot wealthier in recent memory. So in the last, say, two generations, many of these Greek states had become much larger in terms of population size, and much wealthier in terms of the number of people within those societies who had at least enough disposable income, at least enough wealth, that they were able to afford heavy hoplite equipment. That is to say, the shield and spear and helmet, and possibly other things like cuirass and greaves, of the heavy spearmen that formed the backbone of these Greek armies. They existed in very large numbers on Greek battlefields. They were supported by the rest of the population, which couldn't quite afford that heavy armour, who fought as light-armed troops. With a large part of the Persian army being dedicated to archery, and due to the large amount of arrowheads found here at Thuopoly, it's possible that the Persians started off by sending a volley of arrows to try and disrupt the Greek lines. And how well would a hoplite's panoply have fared up against that? Well, let's take a look. The test of this isn't to see what the do to the armour, it's to see out of how many shots would have hit an unarmoured part or a non-shielded part. So I'm going to do somewhere where I'm just standing up, and somewhere I kneel down. So far I'm feeling decently safe. Okay, so that would have hit a greave, but again, likely, as we sort of saw happen there, they would have deflected off. So it's really unlikely that an arrow would have gone through a piece of armour, as much of it is, for one, it's decently thick metal, but also lots of its glancing surfaces. So as you can sort of see there, the arrow would have glanced off. And we can really see how much of an obstacle that shield was for the archers, would have made really the world of difference. And just like that, the sun's gone down, we are truly fighting in the shade. So now what I'm going to try and do is shrink myself down even lower, so that there's really very, very little of me showing. And really there isn't that much for our archer to hit, apart from that shield. So we can really see how the arrows would have had a lot of trouble getting through. Now obviously the head on this arrow is bigger for safety reasons, I don't actually want to get shot. But we can really see that there's very, very limited exposed parts of my body for my archer here to shoot. And another thing that could be interesting about the crest here, is that it being higher, probably makes Cid want to naturally aim higher because she sees that crest being so high. So that could be a practical use of the crest as well, it could almost act as an anti-missile sort of deflector. It makes you want to aim high because you see something sticking up higher. Something else to note actually about the shield blazons itself is that, especially mine, sort of looks like a very inviting target for an archer. So this blazons could also have a practical... That was close to a headshot. I think that literally hit the rim, I'm pretty sure. These blazons could also have a practical purpose in themselves, that they almost distract missile troops to aim for the largest sort of centre of mass. That hit a crest I think. And after successfully not being killed, I was feeling quite safe and went to go and join the others at Thermopylae. So as we could see, the hoplites panoply fared up decently well against archery. Unless you got one through an eye or a weak spot, you were pretty safe. We have also tested the Greek aspis or the shield, and out of various different construction methods, sometimes arrows poke through, however not really enough to reach the person on the other side. Now the battle actually still has much debate, and even though Herodotus wrote about it, he was not physically here taking notes, so the way that the Greeks fought isn't explicitly known. Now Herodotus does mention that the fighting was almost constant, and that the Greeks fought in almost relays, and he explicitly mentions a tactic which the Spartans adopted, that being a false retreat. He says that the Spartans would fake retreating, so the Persians would push them forward, and then they'd turn around and slaughter the unsuspecting attackers. It is highly unlikely that the Greeks ever pushed out to their defensive position, as where they were stationed was the best place for their battle formations, and some scholars suggest that the was more like a siege, with the Greeks taking position behind or beside the Phocian wall. However the battle looked, one thing is for certain, that being that the possible Persian hour of fire and the first wave of their troops did not succeed. With the first day over and not successful for the Persians, Xerxes would send in his most elite troops, the so-called immortals. So the Persian immortals, I mean they're a little bit obscure. Herodotus is really the only source who describes these troops to us, but he describes them in some detail, and especially the way they fight. So these are the crack troops of the Persian army. They are something like a standing force that travels with the king when he goes campaigning. There are 10,000 of them. They're called immortals probably because of a translation error. Their actual name may be apple bearers, but we're not quite clear on that, because they have pommels on the back of their spears that are shaped like apples. But they are technically a mixed infantry force. Their front line consists of spearmen with large tower shields. The rear ranks also have spears, but they don't have their shields. Instead they have bows and other weapons they use for close combat. So their function is essentially to have that front line with big tower shields to set down a shield wall, behind which all the other ranks with their bows and arrows start shooting at the enemy in waves. So they whittle down the enemy, they weaken them, they break up their formation, and if the enemy tries to come forward, the shield barrier will stop them. The spears come out, the swords come out, and there will be a fight at close quarters. But if not, then the enemy will either be whittled down by those arrows or will be overrun by cavalry. That is the way the Persian army is supposed to work. Even the famed immortals failed to push back the Greeks, and this small coalition force has shown Xerxes they were here to stay, and they were holding. Casualties were piling up on both sides, but the Greek position was strong and worked for their advantage. After sectioning off his army by geographical region, Xerxes decided to send contingents of all of his army. Perhaps all at once they could push back the Greek force. So according to Herodotus, and all the other sources actually kind of agree on this, there's different waves of Persian attacks on the Greek position at Thermopylae. It's a very strong position, but it also makes the Greeks immobile. They are just going to stay in place, which leaves the Persians all the initiative to maneuver as they wish, and to select troops to make the attack. So the first troops to attack are the Medes, which are other Iranian peoples that have been subjected to the Persians for a long time, and they fight in a very similar way. The Medes and the Kisians. Later on, the Persians themselves get involved, which is when the immortals attack. So that is the second wave attacking the Spartans and the other Greeks that are defending the pass. But when they also fail, on the second day, the solution that Xerxes seems to come up with is, instead of throwing different nationalities at them that he thinks are maybe less reliable than his Medes and his Persians, he chooses pick troops from all the different detachments. He goes around, we are told, and asks each commander to give him the best of their men, you know, to pick out the most reliable, the best fighters, the strongest, the bravest, and he uses them all together from all the different nations of the Greeks. So that is how the second day unfolds of this fighting. He sends more and more different specialists, and we have to imagine that many of them will have been fighters at close quarters, that might be their local style, there are many peoples in the Persian empire that do that, but also, for instance, bowmen, javelin men, and cavalry men, and other kind of fighters from all corners of the empire. Wave after wave of Persian assault had failed to push back the Greeks, but on the third day, that would change. Leonidas was made aware of an old goat path which encircled around the mountain, and led behind a defensive position, to which he stationed a small detachment of Phocians to guard it. However, after the second day, a local man, Ephialtes, which literally translates as nightmare, went to the Persian camp and told them about the path in return for wealth, which he supposedly never ended up getting. After word of his betrayal got around, the Spartans actually put a bounty on his head, and he was later killed, but not because of the bounty. He was murdered over something completely different, but the Spartans were said to have still paid his murderer. So this is actually said to have been the very path which the Persian general Hydarnes took the immortals through to outflank the Greeks. The Phocians reportedly saw them coming and moved to higher ground, believing that they were going to be the target, and there actually is a hill here which could quite possibly be in the same geographical area that the Phocians retreated to. However, the Persians were not interested in the Phocians and ran straight past. So when Leonidas hears that Hydarnes and the immortals are coming down the mountain, I mean he hears about that quite early. He has sentries posted there, and he has his Phocian allies trying to hold that pass. So he gets the message in the middle of the night, but weirdly he does nothing about it. And it's only in the morning when another messenger comes that signals him and tells him exactly what's going on. He confers with his allies and he says, if you don't want to stay, you can just go home. And all the allies at that point, of course, or most of the allies, wisely pack up and leave. They say, okay, well, this is a lost fight. We have been outflanked. The pass is no longer tenable, so we must retreat and fight or see what we want to do and fight another day. Leonidas, however, himself decides to stay, and a couple of other Greeks decide to stay with him. So we hear about the Thespians, the Thebans as well, although they later surrender. And finally, another source, Pausanias, tells us that the Mycenaeans, who only have about 120 hoplites in this fight, also decide to stay behind. So there's a couple of different Greeks who decide they should stay and the rest leaves. Now, this has often been explained by modern authors as maybe a deliberate tactical move. It's been argued that Leonidas is trying to cover the retreat, or he's trying to delay the Persians, or he's trying to do something that makes strategic sense within a wider Greek plan. The sources are completely silent on this. They absolutely don't confirm this. In fact, the account we get suggests that these allies have plenty of time to get away. In fact, Leonidas himself would have had plenty of time to get away and wouldn't have needed to sacrifice his troops for any reason. We are told that he did this partly because of that oracle. This is where Herodotus brings that in and suddenly mentions this oracle, which he hasn't mentioned before. He says, oh, he received this oracle. He knew he had to die. So that's one reason why Leonidas may have stayed, is because he genuinely believed that this would save Greece, not in a direct sense by saving his army, but in this religious sense, because he believed that the gods would make that happen. But the alternative, and this is something that Herodotus is much more confident of, this is what he says, is that Leonidas thought it was fitting for a Spartan to stay in place. He thought that it was his duty to keep the station to which he was assigned. So when the e-force sent him out to hold this pass, he had to hold it. He was not allowed to withdraw. And in fact, Herodotus says he also just really wanted the glory. We have to imagine that this is something that the Spartans are quite motivated by, quite obsessed with. The idea of fighting a good death that brings you glory in the afterlife, that makes your name remembered among your people. You fought a glorious death. You did something extraordinarily brave. That is what will allow your name to live on. And so Leonidas decides that for the sake of that glory and for the sake of obeying the Spartan law, he must stay behind. He cannot retreat. The others who stay behind, especially the Thespians and Thebans, is much easier to understand. They very likely wanted to do as much damage as they could to the Persians, because their communities are right behind the pass. So if this pass falls, Boeotia, in which both Thebes and Thespia are located, are very likely to fall to the Persians more generally. They will be lost. So the Spartans and a few other Greeks stay, including the Thebans and the Thespians. However, not all Spartans stay. Herodotus actually tells us that two Spartans survived the battle, Pentates and Aristodamus. Pentates was sent away as a messenger, however, later hung himself out of shame for surviving. And Aristodamus and another Spartan named Eurytus were infected by a very severe eye infection, so much so that Eurytus ended up tying himself to his helots and being dragged into battle, where they both perished. But Aristodamus returned. Upon returning to Sparta, he was labeled a trembler and disgraced in Spartan culture, and later tried to redeem himself at the Battle of Plataea by breaking rank and charging into the Persians, supposedly killing many of them before being struck down. However, this unfortunately for Aristodamus did not work out in his favor, as the Spartans also disgraced breaking formation to seek individual glory. Now, during the last day of fighting, we were actually told that Leonidas fell decently early on. From then on, the fight ensued over his body, where the Spartans courageously fought to bring his body back to their lines. Upon being surrounded and overwhelmed by the Persians, the remaining Spartans fled back to where they made their final stand, and it is here that their plaque still sits today. After the battle was over, Xerxes reportedly had his men hide many of his fallen bodies, and behead Leonidas and mount his head on a spike, which is uncharacteristic for the Persians who typically showed great respect for warriors who stood up against them. The purpose of hiding the bodies was to show his army that, well, here they are, the fallen mighty Spartans and their allies, with fewer Persians to be seen. Thermopylae had fallen, and Persia was now moving in the rest of Greece. This battle has often been glorified as this great heroic stand that inspired the rest of the Greeks, and even if the Spartans lost their lives, we're still talking about something that rallied the other Greeks, maybe even gave them time to build up the resistance that they needed. In fact, if we read Herodotus, it's very clear that nothing was done in the meantime, this didn't help at all, and in fact the Athenians and the other Greeks were very disappointed with what the Spartans had done, because when they withdrew from Artemision, because that place was no longer tellable once Thermopylae fell, they had to withdraw their fleets to Attica, at which point they sat there and waited for the Spartans to turn up in force to send the rest of their army, but the Spartans didn't do that, and so the Athenians had no choice but to evacuate their land and to complain to the other allies that the Spartans had stabbed them in the back, had not lived up to their reputation. So instead of, and in fact far from, inspiring the other Greeks, the failure at Thermopylae was a huge blow to the alliance and almost caused it to crack. At this point the Athenians actually threatened the other allies that they would say, well we have our ships, we've evacuated our population, we are all on these boats, we can just sail to Italy and settle a new city and leave you to deal with the Persians. So at this point actually there's huge fissures in the alliance, because the Spartans are seen to have failed as leaders of the allies. They haven't committed what they could, they failed tactically, and they've sacrificed a great deal of central Greece essentially to the Persian advance. The Athenians in particular, but also the Boeotians and the Phocians who suffer terribly from the Persian invasion which does horrific damage to their population and their cities. So for all these Greeks it's actually a disastrous result. For the Spartans themselves however, it turns into something they can spin into a really good story, and that is what they do and that is what most people know. The story that they hear of Thermopylae is the story that the Spartans told afterwards. It is not the story of them sending a small token force north which ends up losing and fighting to the death for no reason. It is the story of Spartans being willing to go further than anyone else to fight this Persian threat, of standing and fighting to the death in a position that they were told to defend. For the sake of the whole of Greece, they gave their lives. That is the story the Spartans told, and that is the way in which they clean their reputation after their failure. So here we are, Thermopylae, the area where one of the most famous battles took place in all of history, and it really is a different experience to be here. And though the sea would have been here and the strawberries would have been different, you know, this is really where the Greeks fought against the Persians, and this is really where Leonidas died, and where all of this really happened, you know, this is where the Greeks were over 2,500 years ago. And we can all see it now, today, and we can see many of the historical landmarks and aspects of the battle that still survive the dawns of time and the harshness of the elements, and it's all still here for us to see and still hear the echoes of those men that fought so many years ago. Thank you very much for joining me on this documentary, I hope you enjoyed it as we've enjoyed filming it, and if you ever have the chance to visit Thermopylae, definitely do it. It really is a special, just eerie sort of feeling, you know, almost the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you take in this massive, massive valley of mountains. And, you know, Leonidas is represented still standing there today at the but it really is a different experience, and to see this is Thermopylae, this is the Hot Gates, this is where Leonidas made his final stand.