And regarded by Greeks everywhere, despite Hipparchus’ best efforts, as the birthright of them all. The Spartans, for instance, those countrymen of Helen and Menelaus, hardly needed to stage poetry readings in order to parade their affinity with the values of Homer’s epics. If the letter of their military code derived from Lycurgus, then its spirit, that heroic determination to prefer death and “a glorious reputation that will never die,”1 to a life of cowardice and shame, appeared vivid with the fearsome radiance of the heroes sung by the “Poet.” And of one hero more than any other: Achilles, greatest and deadliest of fighters, who had traveled to Troy, there to blaze in a glow of terrible splendor, knowing that all his fame would serve only to doom him before his time. True, the pure ecstasy of his glory-hunting, which had led him to squabble with Agamemnon over a slave girl, sulk in his tent while his comrades were being slaughtered, and return to the fray only because his beloved cousin had been cut down, was a self-indulgence that could hardly be permitted a Spartan soldier. Nevertheless, that death in battle might be beautiful, that it might enshrine a warrior’s memory, even as his spirit gibbered in the gray shadows of the underworld, with a brilliant and golden halo, that it might win him “kleos,” immortal fame: these notions, forever associated with Achilles, were regarded by the Greeks as having long been distinctively Spartan, too. Others might aspire to such ideals but only in Sparta were citizens raised to be true to them from birth.
When Leonidas, leading his small holding force, arrived in early August at the pass of Thermopylae, then, the example of the heroes who had fought centuries previously in the first great clash between Europe and Asia could hardly have failed to gleam in his mind’s eye. From Homer, he knew that the gods, “like birds of carrion, like vultures,” would soon be casting invisible shadows over his men’s positions—for whenever mortals had to screw their courage to an excruciating pitch of intensity, whenever they had to prepare themselves for battle, “wave on wave of them settling, close ranks shuddering into a dense, bristling glitter of shields and spears and helmets,” they could know themselves passing into the sphere of the divine.2 Certainly, it would have been hard to imagine a more eerie portal to it than Thermopylae—the “Hot Gates.” Steaming waters rose from the springs that gave the pass its name; the rocks over which they hissed appeared pallid and deformed, like melted wax; a tang of sulfur hung moist in the August heat. All was feverish, dust-choked and close. So narrow was much of the pass that at two points either end of it, known as the East and West Gates, there was room for only a single wagon trail. On one side of this road there lapped the marshy shallows of the Gulf of Malis; on the other, “impassable and steepling,”3 the cliffs of Mount Callidromus, tree-covered over the lower crags, then rearing gray and bare against the unforgiving azure. It was a strange and unearthly spot—and one seemingly formed for defense.
As the locals had long appreciated. Men from Phocis, the valley-scored country that lay between Thermopylae and Delphi, had once built a wall across the pass, blocking off not one of the two bottlenecks at either end but rather a stretch some sixty feet wide, the so-called “Middle Gate.” Here the cliffs rose at their sheerest and most unflankable. Leonidas, bivouacking beneath them, immediately set about having the Phocians’ wall repaired: no great challenge, for he had brought with him, in addition to his bodyguard, some three hundred helots and five thousand further troops.4 These, alternately cajoled and bullied into joining him, had come mostly from the Peloponnese—but not all. Seven hundred were volunteers from Thespiae, a city in Boeotia that, like Plataea, had long been resentful of Theban weight-throwing and had willingly donated manpower in support of the allied cause—and four hundred had come from Thebes herself. Leonidas, uncomfortably aware that central Greece was rotten with medizers, had made a point on his way to Thermopylae of calling in on the chief conspirators and bluntly demanding their support. The Theban ruling classes, not yet bold enough to refuse a Spartan king, had responded with silken evasions. Confident, however, that Leonidas was embarked on a suicide mission, they had cheerfully permitted “men from the rival faction,”5 those opposed to their medizing, to leave with him; and Leonidas, desperate for every reinforcement, had received these loyalists gratefully. Even so, he could have had no doubts, as he gazed out at the shimmering emptiness of the flatlands beyond Thermopylae, scanning the horizon for smears of dust, awaiting a first glimpse of the Great King’s monstrous hordes, that there were plenty to his rear who were willing him to fail.
Nor was that the limit of his anxieties. Even as his men were busy digging themselves in, a delegation from the nearby city of Trachis, in whose territory Thermopylae lay, came to Leonidas with some most unwelcome news. The pass, it appeared, was not quite as secure as the strategists back on the Isthmus had cared to presume. There was, skirting the mountainous heights of Thermopylae, a trail. While hardly suited to cavalry or heavy infantry, it was, the Trachians reported, perfectly negotiable by anyone lightly armed. If the barbarians discovered this route, they would surely take it. There was no choice for the defenders of the Hot Gates, but to plug it. Simple enough, it might have been thought—except that Leonidas, with the full strength of the Great King’s army about to hurl itself against his position, could ill afford to spare so much as a single hoplite. In the event, as he had little choice but to do, he compromised. A thousand men from Phocis, whose loathing for the medizing Thessalians had prompted them to side enthusiastically with the allies, volunteered to guard the trail. Leonidas, banking on their local knowledge and on the likelihood that only light infantry would be sent against them, accepted their offer. No Spartans, not so much as a single officer, were sent to leaven their inexperience. Bracing himself for the coming storm, Leonidas wanted all his elite alongside him. Understandable, perhaps—but a hideous gamble, even so.
Not that the Spartan king was the only commander having to make some awkward calculations. Forty miles to the east, across the Malian Gulf and beyond the narrow straits that separated Euboea from the mainland, the allied admirals were fretting over the state of their own flank. True, the station they had chosen appeared, like Thermopylae, to be a strong one. In contrast to the bleak aspect of the facing coastline, where scrub-covered slopes loomed up from the sea like olive teeth set in gums of naked rock, the northernmost tip of Euboea consisted largely of pebbles and dirty sand. Level and long as this beach stretched, it had been a simple matter for the Greeks to haul their warships onto the shingle, hundreds upon hundreds of them; and since there were no shoals or reefs offshore, only a sudden, precipitous deepening of the sea, it promised to be an equally simple matter, once the Persian fleet was sighted, to launch the fleet again. Where, though—and this was the question gnawing at the self-confidence of the Greeks—would the barbarians be heading? If westward, toward the straits that led to Thermopylae, then the allied battle line, pivoting like a door upon a hinge, would be well placed to block their access; but if eastward, down the outer coast of Euboea, either to strike onward at Attica and the Isthmus or to swing back up the opposite side of the island and aim for the Greek fleet’s rear, then the danger would be grave indeed. The Great King commanded so many triremes that he could easily afford to divide his armada in two and still bring overwhelming force to bear on separate fronts. The allied admirals therefore risked finding themselves, not barring the straits that separated Euboea from the mainland, but bottled up inside them. As in the pass, so on the beach, forward defense carried the risk of obliteration.