Why the legend of the Spartan '300' still inspires us today

At the pass of Thermopylae 2,500 years ago, 300 Spartans plus the one essential commander, King Leonidas, defied the uncountable ranks of invading Persians. The heroic episode has inspired the centuries since – but the meanings plucked from it have been contradictory. (Pedants, by the way, insist that as there was no Year Zero, the true anniversary is next year. But no one listens.)

Greece has struck a €2 coin, dated 2020, showing a Corinthian helmet on the obverse with a stiff horsehair ridged plume. The map of Europe on the reverse includes the United Kingdom. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the prime minister of Greece, called Thermopylae a “unique moment of unity, as the Greek city-states put aside their differences and united to defend their freedom”.

But, as Peter Jones, co-founder of Classics for All (which provides funding to teach classics in state primary and secondary schools), says, this is historically wrong. Only 31 of the hundreds of Greek city states actively joined the war against the invading Persians, led by Athens and Sparta. There was much hatred of the growing Athenian empire. “Our empire is now like a tyranny – perhaps wrong to have acquired, but certainly dangerous to let go,” the statesman and orator Pericles admitted to his fellow Athenians a generation later.

The Battle of Thermopylae, it must be stressed, was a defeat. The Spartans died. But it was a holding operation, not a suicide mission. The stand by the 301 allowed about 7,000 soldiers to retreat and fight another day. Meanwhile a sea battle proved a stalemate. The Persians overran Athens, but weeks later the naval battle of Salamis saw a Persian defeat. It was a turning point in favour of the Greeks after more than a decade.

That pass at Thermopylae didn’t look like the computer-enhanced landscape of the 2006 box office hit 300. There were no high cliffs to topple the enemy into the sea. The name Thermopylae means “hot gates”, after thermal springs, and these made the ground boggy around a narrow path between the mountains and the sea. Today the sea has receded and a visitor is bound to be disappointed. In 480BC, the narrow pass would certainly have blocked the way of an army of two million (as Herodotus numbered it). Even if the Persians were “only” 300,000 (Parthians, Elamites, Assyrians, Egyptians and what not) there was no room for them. The Spartans behind their shield wall held out for three days.

Were the Spartans fighting for freedom? They were a strange lot, trained for war having been taken away from their families as boys. Spartan society was martial because it was ruled by a cast outnumbered by serfs (“helots”) left over from a conquered population. To free-minded Athenians, this was a narrow kind of society.

Nor was the culture clash between Greeks and Persians at all like that depicted in the film 300. There, the Persian army was made alien – not just foreign but from another planet – and King Xerxes a threatening homosexual monster. In reality, it was the Spartans who practised paederasty.

A E Housman, the poet and bachelor don, took up a celebrated detail from Herodotus (our only source close to the time). A Persian scout reported back before the battle that the Spartans were combing their long hair. Xerxes laughed, convinced they could be no great warriors. He soon learnt.

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there’s no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.

A different attempt to portray heroism had been made by Jacques-Louis David, the painter who apotheosised Napoleon. He spent 15 years on Leonidas at Thermopylae, filling a canvas 17ft across with trumpeters and tastefully nude men putting on sandals and offering wreaths to Hercules and Aphrodite. In the centre sits beefy Leonidas, pensive, a scabbard by chance concealing his genitals. On the horizon the Persians loom.

David’s trouble was that French revolutionary politics would not stand still. The painting was finally finished in time for Napoleon’s exile to Elba, soon followed by the Hundred Days War and Waterloo. King Louis XVIII ended up buying it. It’s now in the locked Louvre, but visible online.

In David’s canvas a cloaked soldier is shinning up a suitably steep bit of Thermopylae to carve out the epitaph for the doomed 301: “Go, passer-by, to Sparta tell/ Obedient to her law we fell.” The author was said to be Simonides, a busy poet in the decade from Marathon to Salamis – for the correlative of honour, which drove men to die rather than be shamed, was fame. The poets sang of fame.

That translation of the couplet is by William Lisle Bowles, a poet valued by Coleridge, despised by Byron, unknown today. So much for fame. But is the Thermopylae legend itself remembered? Once heard, some details stick. When Xerxes sent a demand to Leonidas for the Spartans to lay down their weapons, Leonidas replied: “Come and take them.” That was a truly laconic remark, so called from the Laconians or Spartans.

Britain has its own Thermopylaes. On the Isle of Dogs, the street called Thermopylae Gate is named after the tea-clipper that raced the Cutty Sark. On Bidston Hill in the Wirral, Thermopylae Pass skirts the ladies’ golf club. People remember playing there decades ago. “At the time we didn’t know its real name,” recalled Joan Grey on a virtual noticeboard. “We called it The Moppoly Paths.”

I suspect Edward Lear presumed a greater familiarity with the historic battle, or his limerick would not have seemed as nonsensical as intended. He had visited the spot in Greece in 1848 before an epidemic of cholera drove him back to Constantinople. Under his own beguiling ink sketch of two men in fustanella skirts, with a curly-toed shoe for the egg-boiling, he wrote:

There was an old man of Thermopylae,
Who never did anything properly;
But they said, “If you choose to boil eggs in your shoes,
You shall never remain in Thermopylae.”