Leonidas and Thermopylae: the Spartan King Battle That Outlived Him

In the summer of 480 BC a Spartan king marched north with three hundred men to hold a narrow coastal pass against the army of the Persian king Xerxes. He held it for three days and died there, along with most of his escort and hundreds of allied troops whose names have rarely made it into the story. Almost everything known about Leonidas comes from a single source, written decades after his death by a historian who never claimed to have met a survivor.This book follows the evidence as far as it goes and stops exactly where it runs out. It reconstructs the geography of Thermopylae from geological surveys rather than film sets, sets Sparta's rigid, slave-holding society against the myth built around it, and gives the Achaemenid Persian empire its own administrative reality instead of treating it as a faceless horde. It follows Leonidas from a disputed succession to the throne through two decades of Spartan politics to the three days at the pass, and then traces what happened to his memory afterward: a battle turned into a slogan by Roman-era writers, revived by nineteenth-century nationalists, quoted in a 1943 German radio speech about the army encircled at Stalingrad, and reproduced by modern films and political movements that have little to do with the events of 480 BC.The result is a portrait of a man who is almost entirely obscured by what has been built on top of the little that can be verified about him, and an account of how a defeat at a mountain pass became one of the most reused stories in Western political culture.