Spartan Sacrifice

...Indeed, "Herodotus gives even higher figures," Cartledge writes, "such that the total number on the march with Xerxes numbered over five million souls— 5,283,220 to be (im)precise...

...Knowing their position was no longer viable, Leonidas dismissed his allies...

...It is difficult to compare the Spartans to anybody in the war on terror...

...For a colorful description of what fighting in the ancient Greek world was like, the most colorful modern source remains Victor Davis Hanson's The Western Way of War...

...Maybe it was the Battle of Salamis, which occurred between Thermopylae and Plataea, in which the Greek navy routed Xerxes' fleet, destroying some 200 ships, while losing only 40 Greek vessels...

...The military engagement was little more than a holding action so the Greeks could assemble a full army further south, and the majority of the Hellenes treated it as such...

...All were killed...

...Cartledge's primary contribution to the Thermopylae narrative is his examination of the actions of the 300 Spartans in a modern, post-9/11, light...

...Without naval supremacy, Xerxes was unable to supply his troops or defend the bridge he had constructed to carry his men into Greece...

...The Spartans died to the last man, and Leonidas' body was mutilated by the Persians...

...Regardless of Herodotus' reason for increasing the Persian troop count, the effect was the same: It made the Spartan feat that much more amazing...

...While the larger Greek force assembled, the Spartans and their allies faced certain death—and held it off for two days...

...Yet this battle is considered one of the finest hours in Greek history...

...Led by their king, Leonidas, the Spartans knew they were marching to their death from the moment they left home...

...Where Cartledge is better is in his deconstruction of Herodotus' claim that the Persian army was nearly 1.7 million troops strong...

...rather, he mistook the Persian word myriarchs (defined as a "commander of 10,000 men") for other commanders who had smaller numbers of troops...

...Thermopylae makes a good companion to Herodotus...

...After two days of grueling combat, the Greeks were betrayed by a villager named Ephialtes, who showed the Persians a hidden trail behind the Spartan line...

...Cart-ledge suggests this exaggeration was caused by Herodotus comparing Greeks and Persians "as if to imply that size was not everything" and that "any serious reduction [in the Persian force] would have the effect of putting the Greek coalition's achievement in a somewhat different light, and that, I suspect, is one of the major reasons why Herodotus was so keen to maximize the enemy numbers...

...This seems a far more likely figure in view of the populations (as far as they can be conjectured) at the time...

...And comparing the 300 to modern Westerners is not quite right, either: As Cartledge points out, "For most Westerners the point of war is to win—and survive...

...He also highlights one major difference between Americans of today and Spartans of yesteryear, suggesting that "the support of the American public for war, and especially the war in Iraq, was conditional on [President Bush's] demanding only little of that great public...

...the natural chokepoint of Thermopylae would not be enough...

...but even without the Spartan example at Thermopylae, the Greeks would have fielded the full Spartan force (some 6,000 strong) along with the armies of the rest of the Greek city-states (another 100,000 or so troops) at Plataea...

...Because the Persians used the decimal system, explains Bradford, "If one removes a nought from all of Herodotus's figures one comes up with an army of 170,000 infantrymen...

...It was this item above all that made a hoplite a hoplite, a close-order phalanx fighter...

...currently in theaters, now is as good a time as any for complacent Western audiences to reacquaint themselves with the history behind this 2,500-year-old sacrifice...

...A force of 300 against a legendary army of millions, the Spartans knew that whatever allies they could rally in their march from Laconia to Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at The Weekly Standard...

...But was this really, as Cartledge puts it, the Battle that Changed the World...

...Surrounded and armed with blunted swords and broken spears, the Greeks fought to their dying breaths, according to Herodotus: "Here they resisted to the last, with their swords, if they had them, and if not, with their hands and teeth, until the Persians . . . inally overwhelmed them with missile weapons...

...BY SONNY BUNCH One of the key moments in Herodotus' chronicle of the Persian wars comes at the narrow mountain passage of Thermopylae...

...Was this holding action really more important than the encounter that followed it, a rousing victory for the Greeks over the Persians at Plataea...

...Combining those numbers with their superior technology, the Greeks would still have easily outclassed their Persian enemies...

...And with 300, a popular movie based on the events of 480 B.C...

...Written for the layman, Thermopylae: The Battle that Changed the World is an accessible introduction to the Greek stand at the Hot Gates...

...He suggests that Herodotus was not intentionally misleading readers...

...Paul Cartledge has taken this brief account and expanded it into 300-plus pages of exposition and analysis...

...Though accompanied by almost a thousand fellow Greeks, the Spartan 300 came to symbolize the suicidal stand that comprised the third and final day of the battle...

...While you get a sense of how a hoplite functions, a little more detail would have been nice: The mash of bodies, the intense physical struggle, the sheer brutality of hand-to-hand, shield-to-shield combat is something we cannot imagine in today's warfare of smart bombs and sniper rifles...

...Perhaps the Spartan sacrifice had inspired the Greeks to fight more ferociously at Plataea...

...The contrast with Sparta in 480 B.c.E...

...Though prepared to die for their cause, the Greeks were fighting against an enemy combatant, not killing civilians...

...could not be starker...

...This explanation is somewhat different from the one that Ernle Bradford gave in his excellent Thermopylae: The Battle for the West...

...When their position was no longer tenable, only the Spartans (and a group of Thespians and Thebans) remained...

...Picking up troops during the march, the Spartans arrive with almost 6,000 additional hoplites...

...The great Persian king Xerxes watched the battle from afar, and Herodotus reports that "in the course of the attacks three times, in terror for his army, he leapt to his feet...

...Then again, perhaps the most important battle was neither of these land engagements...

...Thousands of poorly equipped Persians crashed upon the bronze shields and sharp spears of the hoplite wall in front of them...

...In all, the battle occupies only six pages or so in the English translation of Herodotus' Histories...

...Hopelessly outnumbered, but never outclassed, 300 Spartans led a contingent of Greeks in defense of the pass for three hellish days, beating back wave after wave of their "barbaric" Persian enemy from the East...

...These numbers are clearly exaggerated, and Cartledge notes that "there is not a single professional historian today who believes in the accuracy of Herodotus's reported figures...

...Forbidden by religious obligations to field an army during the festival of the Carneia, the polity would not commit its full fighting force to the battlefield until the celebration was over...

...Cartledge explains what, exactly, a hoplite was and how he was armored: "His shield was the single most crucial element of a hoplite's armour, since it was rightly said to be worn for the good of the line as a whole as much as, or rather than, for the benefit of the individual wearer...

...Instead of fighting to win, the Spartans were merely fighting for time...

...As such, he declared a hasty retreat, leaving a (still very large) force in Greece to hold what he had captured...