Leake, Grundy, Hignett , but this has two problems. First, the Asopos river gorge is too rocky to be negotiated at night without numerous broken ankles; second, Herodotus says that the path began from the Asopos river "which flows through the gorge" and not, as the standard view insists, "where it flows through the gorge" 7. Two other main candidates have been put forward: the Vardates route favored by Myres, Burn, and Wallace ; and the Chalkomata spring route, favored by Pritchett.
Whichever of these two it was may never be known for certain, but both would bring the Persians to the peak of Sastano Kallidromos near ancient Drakospilia by dawn.
From there the paths converge. Now, according to Herodotus Leonidas had been aware from the beginning of the existence of the Anopaia path.
He stationed Phokians there to stop any encircling movement. The Phokians, according to Herodotus, were taken by surprise and put up little resistance. But word got through to Leonidas that the position had been outflanked, and there seems to have been time to abandon the position and withdraw to the south before the Immortals under Hydarnes arrived.
Why did Leonidas refuse? There have been various answers to this question. Herodotus represents it as an act of deliberate self-sacrifice carried out in accordance with an oracle, which had said that the death of a Spartan king would save Sparta from destruction.
One may observe that the pronouncements of the oracle in the late 's have a distinctly pro-Persian cast; it seems likely that the priests, whose job after all was to predict the future, simply believed that the victory of the Persian army, whose immense size was known well in advance of its arrival, was inevitable. It may be that this oracle, if genuine, actually meant that the recommended course of action was for the Spartans to depose one of the sitting kings and take back Demaratus as the vassal of the Persians.
Alternatively it is possible that the oracle is a post-eventum falsehood, put out by the oracle and its partisans to make it appear that Apollo had successfully predicted the outcome.
There is also available the so-called "military" solution to the question, as formulated by Dascalakis. He argues that Leonidas remained in order to give the allied contingents, whom he dismissed with the exception of the Thebans and the Thespians , time to get away. There is an interesting sidelight here which sheds light on the interstate politics of the Persian Wars. Thebes had officially surrendered to Xerxes, and in the years after the was the Thebans had a very hard time living this down.
Herodotus says that the Theban contingents who remained with the Spartans did so under compulsion, but moderns have seen that this makes little sense. At so crucial a time, Leonidas would be insane to choose to have hostiles in his midst. It is more likely that the Theban contingent consisted as Diodorus says, There is a final dispute to be noticed concerning the identity of the hill to which Herodotus says the defenders retreated before finally being overwhelmed 7. Until the excavations by Marinatos, it was generally assumed that this was the westernmost of the hills, Hill 1 by the remains of the Phokian Wall.
However, the excavations proved that Kolonos Hill must be identified with Hill 2, due to the discovery of a large number of arrowheads similar in type to those found at Marathon, in a well at the Agora, and on the north slope of the Acropolis. The stone lion, the memorial to the heroism of the defenders, has never been found though there is a modern restoration in the wrong place for the tourists nor have the bones of the dead.
Burn, A. Robinson , vol. I, ] St. Louis, Schachermeyer, New York, ] Dascalakis, A. Leonidas achieved lasting fame for his personal sacrifice. Hero cults were an established custom in ancient Greece from the eighth century B. Dead heroes were worshipped, usually near their burial site, as intermediaries to the gods.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Battle of Marathon in B. The battle was fought on the Marathon plain of northeastern Attica and marked the first blows of the Greco-Persian War.
With the Persians closing in on the Greek capitol, Athenian general Herodotus was a Greek writer and geographer credited with being the first historian. Sometime around the year B. One of the greatest ancient historians, Thucydides c.
The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the years B. Archaic Greece saw advances in art, poetry and technology, but is known as the age in which the polis, or city-state, was The two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta, went to war with each other from to B. The Peloponnesian War marked a significant power shift in ancient Greece, favoring Sparta, and also ushered in a period of regional decline that signaled the The classical period was an era of war and conflict—first between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the The story of the Trojan War—the Bronze Age conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greece—straddles the history and mythology of ancient Greece and inspired the greatest writers of antiquity, from Homer, Herodotus and Sophocles to Virgil.
Since the 19th-century By turns charismatic and ruthless, brilliant and power hungry, diplomatic and The so-called golden age of Athenian culture flourished under the leadership of Pericles B.
Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Robert Wilde. History Expert. Robert Wilde is a historian who writes about European history.
He is the author of the History in an Afternoon textbook series. Updated October 22, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Wilde, Robert. Did Spartans Hold Thermopylae? The Heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome. Persian Battle at Thermopylae in Movie.
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