The Battle of Thermopylae is a cornerstone of western culture, garnering mentions in films like The Last Samurai, video games like Halo: The Fall of Reach, and books like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. We all know the story: a plucky group of warriors face overwhelming odds and perform exceedingly well against it because they fight cleverly. As many people understand it, although the Spartans eventually lost, the Persian Army (as The Last Samurai puts it) “lost the taste for war soon after.” At least, that is the official story.
While Democratic government is a product of Athens, Sparta certainly occupies more pop culture real estate these days. They spent their lifetimes training to be fierce warriors, to win when the other cities dared to fight them. It is no surprise that the only soldiers popularly remembered at Thermopylae are those 300 Spartans we imagine so bravely facing death and accepting their duty, rather than the (possibly) 2,700 other Greeks who defended the pass. Yes, you read that correctly – almost three thousand troops from the other city-states were there, standing at post and dying to defend Greece while getting almost zero recognition.
Okay, fine, I can hear some of you already thinking, so the Spartans weren’t the only soldiers guarding Thermopylae. The Persians were still kicked out of Greece shortly thereafter because they were so demoralized, right? It’s a nice thought, all of those soldiers losing the battle so that their people could win the war quickly and avert disaster. While the word “soon” is a relative term, I cannot imagine that most of us would use the term to describe a span of 2 years. During that time, Athens was evacuated and the Persians burnt it to the ground – twice. It is tremendously lucky for the Greeks that the Persians didn’t actually have a million soldiers in their army, and that the Athenians and others were wise enough to conserve their ships for later naval victories against the Persian fleet or else Greece might very well have been conquered completely.
Through collective effort from the Greek allies, these victories at sea were coupled with victories on land that drove the invaders away. In fact, the reason there were only three hundred Spartans on hand at Thermopylae was because an oracle told King Leonidas that Greece could only be saved from Persia’s wrath by the death of one of Sparta’s kings. He and his bodyguard did not go to the fort just to obstruct their enemies, but to purposefully give their lives so that the rest of their land might be saved. This was not a defiant alpha male strategist like we see in the movie 300, but a superstitious warrior who wanted to appease the gods with his life so that he might preserve the slave-trading, dystopian nightmare they fondly called home.
That’s right, we’re going to talk about the sheer hell-on-earth that Sparta and its surrounding land (called Laconia) was for most of the people who lived there. We have a tendency to remember history only as it was told to us by the most privileged group in any given culture because they were literate and self-important enough to write things down. Through the use of archaeology, among other historical analyses, we can sometimes catch a brief glimpse of life for those lower rungs on the proverbial ladder. What we know about the slaves in Sparta (called Helots) is that their lives were filled with hardship and misery. Every year, the strongest among the helots would be killed, purged as the Spartans employed the same proto-eugenic measures meant to make themselves strong in order to keep the helots weak.
Something that bothers me in the hero-worship which we so often render to the Spartans is a lack of examination regarding these darker parts of their society. We see the gleam of the spear and shield and forget the bent backs of their slaves, the broken bodies of the Spartan children born with birth defects or imperfections. Classical Greece was filled with city-states that did not engage in such behavior, and many of those places were represented at Thermopylae.
The fierce and momentarily effective defense of that narrow pass should not be seen or taught as the work of three hundred brave Spartans alone, but of three thousand brave Greeks. Let us do away with the fetishization of military power and instead admire the power of cooperation and coalition. It was by the strength of many peoples that the Persians were delayed at Thermopylae and ultimately it was the power of those many peoples united in one purpose that finally drove them out two years later. Not by the strength of one nation, but by the cooperation of many.