Greece: Thermopylae

During our road trip through mainland Greece, we passed by Thermopylae which is best known for a battle that took place here in 480 BCE.

In 480 BCE the Persian King Xerxes invaded Greece with the plan to expand his empire, he brought with him more than 700,000 troops and many ships. Many Greek city-states either joined Xerxes or remained neutral, while Athens and Sparta led the resistance alongside several other city-states behind them.

Xerxes led his vast army overland from the Dardanelles, quickly seizing northern Greece, and then began moving south. The Greek resistance tried to halt Persian progress on land at the narrow pass of Thermopylae and at sea in the nearby straits of Artemisium. The Greek army was led by Leonidas, who was estimated to have had around 7,000 men. Despite the disparity in numbers, the Greeks were able to maintain their position. Their strategy involved holding a line only a few dozen yards long between a steep hillside and the sea. For two days the Greeks defended against Persian attacks and suffered light losses as they imposed heavy casualties on the Persian army. Only when the Greeks were betrayed did the battle take a detrimental turn for them. Ephialtes, a Greek citizen desiring reward, informed Xerxes of a path that went around Thermopylae, thus rendering the Greeks’ line useless in preventing the forward advancement of the Persian army. Xerxes took advantage of this betrayal and sent part of his army along this path, led by Ephialtes himself. After reaching the other side, the Persians attacked and destroyed a portion of the Greek army. Much of the Greek army retreated leaving only Leonidas, his 300 bodyguards, some helots (people enslaved by the Spartans), and 1,100 Boeotians. Leonidas remained because retreating would defy Spartan law and custom. They held their ground against the Persians but were quickly defeated by the vast enemy army, and many (if not all; sources differ) were killed, including Leonidas.

Today, it is hard to see why this place was chosen by the Greeks to defend. It does not seem to be somewhere you’d choose to fight. On one side there is a strip of three to five miles before you reach the sea and on the other, there are some hills that do not seem overly steep and are covered with scrubby bushes. 2500 years ago, it would have looked very different, with the shoreline advanced by as much as 9 km in places, eliminating the narrowest points of the pass and considerably increasing the size of the plain.

As in most cases with battlefields there is not much to see. There was a monument which was worth a photograph and close by there was a visitor centre. In the centre, there was not much in the way of exhibits, but they did have a great animated movie which told the story of the battle. It also explained why the Greeks were initially successful against the Persian advances. The Persians favoured long-range assault using archers, followed up by a cavalry charge, while the Greeks favoured heavily armoured infantrymen, arranged in a densely packed formation called a phalanx, with each man carrying a heavy, round bronze shield and fighting at close quarters using spears and swords.

Although the Persian tactic of rapidly firing vast numbers of arrows into the massed enemy must have been an awesome sight, the lightness of the arrows meant that they were largely ineffective against the Greek’s bronze armour.