The mother of
Leonidas, while pregnant dreamt that she was going to give birth to a lion,
thus when her son was born he received the name Leonidas; Lion. He had two
older brothers, plus a younger brother. Leonidas would become king of Sparta,
the 17th of the Agiad line. He succeeded, probably in 490 B.C., his
half-brother was Kleomenes I, whose daughter Gorgo would become his wife.
He may infact have
been involved in a plot to kill his half-brother King Kleomenes I, who had been
convicted of bribing the Oracle of Delphi into proclaiming that the EurypontidKing Demaratus was an illigitimate
child and therefor not entitled to be king. In dishouner he fled and was trying
to stir up trouble against Sparta to try and reclaim his kingship. On hearing
this, Sparta asked him to return as king, which he promptly did only to find
'his kindred imprisoned him'. While in prison Kleomenes I ask the helot jailer
for a knife and 'beginning at his legs, he horribly disfigured himself, cutting
gashes in his flesh, along his legs, thighs, hips, and loins, until at last he
reached his belly, to which he likewise began to gash, whereupon in a little
time he died' . This far out story of self mutilation is slightly
reiminiscent of a television series called Black Adder, when asked what had
happend to a certain person his reply was 'he accidently brutally cut his head
off while shaving'. It seems more likely that his half brother Leonidas ordered
his death and claimed the throne for himself, probably with the blessing of the
ephors.
At the isthmus of
Corinth it was voted that the King of Sparta would lead the allied forces of
Greece at Thermopylae against the barbarians. This is only the second time in
history, Hellas united under one military commmander, the only other previous
time was under Agamemnon for the invasion of Troy. Leonidas may have been
chosen out of the two kings for the roll he played in his half-brothers murder.
The 'sacrificial lamb' being led away from
Sparta as a sacrifice to clean Sparta of the evil it allowed in the murder of
his brother. Though it has to be said that the Agiad line of kingship was the
stronger of the two, which Leonidas represented.
We must also consider
that due to Leonidas' uncle, King Kleomenes' part in dismissing the
Eurypontid Spartan King Demaratus, and his subsequent defection to Persia. That Sparta
believed that Demaratus needed some
kind of revenge for the gods to be satisfied, and that Leonidas' who inherited
kingship from his uncle, was the 'lion' to be sacrificed for it.
Leonidas
was the youngest of three children: Dorieus, Cleomenes (or Kleomenes) and
Leonidas, so he was never expected to rise to the throne, therefore he took
part in theagoge, the unique training of Sparta
usually spared from the royal heirs. Dorieus was born after Cleomenes but was
fully legitimate, Cleomenes dealt with him and gained the throne. He ruled
successfully for many years before going mad and mutilating himself to death.
Thus Leonidas beacame king much to his suprise. He didn't last long. With the
impending attack of Xerxes force on the peloponese, Leonidas consulted the
oracle and got the answer: 'either a king dies at the walls of Thermoplyae or
Sparta falls' a no-brainer really. Leonidas couldn't take all his army as the
ephors refused to allow him to interrupt Carniea, a festival to Apollo.
Leonidas held out for three days at thrmopylae with 300 Spartans and a
collection of men from thespia, Athens, thebes and however felt like helping
numbering about 7000 in all. In the morning of the second day, Leonidas sent
all but the Thebans home, but the Thespians stayed. He told them (as features
in the feature film) to 'eat a full and hearty breakfast, for tonight we dine
in Hades'.
According
to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus in The History of Herodotus, Leonidas was
in command of the now famous 300 Spartans who were sent, in advance of the main
Spartan body of troops, to engage the Persian horde in order to arrest and
defeat its intended invasion of Greece. The Spartan troops of only 300 men at
arms were augmented by troops sent by several other city-states who seemed
determined to engage the Persian forces, but Leonidas had picked up and
accompanied the delegation of troops from Thebes, because the Thebans had
already hinted that they might desert the Greek alliance and unite themselves
with the Persians. In order to shore up the flagging hopes of their allies,
therefore, the Spartan advance guard made camp in a narrow mountain pass at a
place now made famous by the battle fought there — Thermopylae (the Hot Gates).
Leonidas (Greek:
Λεωνίδας - "Lion's son", "Lion-like") was a king of Sparta,
the 17th of the Agiad line, one of the sons of King Anaxandridas II of Sparta,
who was believed to be a descendant of Heracles. He succeeded his half-brother
Cleomenes I, probably in 489 or 488 BC, and was married to Cleomenes' daughter,
Gorgo. His name was raised to a heroic and legendary status as a result of the
events in the Battle of Thermopylae.
In 480 the ephors
sent Leonidas with the 300 men of an all-sire unit (soldiers who had sons to carry
on their bloodline) and 6700 allies to hold the pass of Thermopylae against the
hundreds of thousands of Persian soldiers who had invaded from the north of
Greece under Xerxes. Contemporary accounts claim Leonidas took his small
personal fighting unit because Spartan religious customs forbade sending an
army at that time of year. In addition, he was deliberately going to his doom:
an oracle had foretold that Sparta could be saved only by the death of one of
its kings, one of the lineage of Hercules. Instead it seems likely that the
ephors supported the plan half-heartedly due to the festival of Carneia and
their policy of concentrating the Greek forces at the Isthmus of Corinth.
According to
Herodotus, Leonidas' wife Gorgo asked him how she could aid his mission. He
responded "marry a good man, bear good children, and live a good
life."
Several episodes
demonstrate the laconic matter-of-fact bravery that famed Leonidas and the
Spartans. On the first day of the siege Xerxes demanded the Greeks surrender
their arms. Leonidas replied "Come and get them" ("Molon
Labe"). This phrase has been re-used by generals and politicians
throughout history and often repeated in popular culture. On the third day, the
king exhorted his men to eat a hearty breakfast, because that night they would
dine in Hades.
Leonidas' men
repulsed the frontal attacks of the Persians for the first two days, but when
the Malian Ephialtes led the Persian general Hydarnes by a mountain track to
the rear of the Greeks, Leonidas divided his army. The King himself remained in
the pass with his 300 Spartans and 400 Thebans, along with 700 Thespians who
refused to leave. Leonidas' intent was to delay the Persians, sacrificing
himself and his men.
The little Greek
force, attacked from both sides, was cut down to a man except for the Thebans,
who surrendered. One theory is that Leonidas sent the remainder of his men home
to preserve troops for future battles. The soldiers who stayed behind were to
protect their escape from the Persian cavalry.
Leonidas fell in the
thickest of the fight, but the Spartans retrieved his body and protected it
until their final fall to enemy arrows. Herodotus says that Leonidas' head was
cut off by Xerxes' order and his body crucified, due to his alleged hatred
towards the Persian King. This was considered sacrilege towards Leonidas, and
unusual action on Xerxes' part.
The reason why
Leonidas appeared with only a token force was that Sparta was at that time
celebrating a religious festival; the reason why the other Greek forces were so
scanty was that their cities were celebrating their Olympic games. Neither
Sparta, famous for the quality of her fighting men, nor her allies thought that
the battle of Thermopylae would be engaged as soon as it was, so the matter
stood and there was nothing to be done about it: The Greek forces were
hopelessly outnumbered, the Persian forces were upon them and in command of the
pass through which they were penetrating the country, and there was Leonidas
with his 300 Spartans camped in front of the enemy's first wave.
Xerxes, the
tyrannical ruler of the Persians and their huge conglomerate of allies, was —
like many tyrants of his time and later — an unstable and arrogant person.
Earlier in the war, having enthroned himself upon a vantage point overlooking
his entire war host, he had alternately laughed at the earthly military might
he saw displayed before him and then wept at their mortal mutability and
evanescence. At any rate, Xerxes the tyrant was resolved to tolerate no
insolence from the effete and intellectual Greeks who called him a barbarian,
and the appearance of a mere 300 Spartans to engage his host in hand-to-hand
combat must have seemed insolent in the extreme.
Xerxes was at the
same time angered and intrigued by these men called Spartans, so he had the
Greek ramparts scouted out. On the day that Xerxes sent his scout to
reconnoiter the Greek camp, the Spartans had been assigned as perimeter guards
outside the camp's ramparts. There, Xerxes' scout saw them, counted them, and
then returned to report to his master what he had seen.
And this is what the
Persian scout saw at the place of the Hot Gates so long ago: He saw the Spartan
warriors engaged in oiling their bodies and dressing their long hair outside
the ramparts of Thermopylae. He saw others of the Spartans exercising at
gymnastics and swordplay and general forms of leisure activity. He saw the
Spartan warriors sunning themselves. And he saw that the Spartans did not seem
to consider his presence worthy of much notice.
When Xerxes heard his
scout's report, so says Herodotus, the king found it laughable that the
Spartans were engaging in such antics when they were, under his sway, in doubt
of present peril. The Spartans were after all in a fix, and it was a fix of
Xerxes' making. But then Xerxes called in a man named Demaratus who, having
been deposed from a joint-kingship of Sparta, had become a turncoat and allied
himself personally to Persia; hence, to Xerxes. And after the king recounted
his scout's report on the activity of the Spartans, Demaratus explained to
Xerxes: This is the way Spartans prepare to go into battle and almost certain
death. They exercise, oil their bodies, and dress their hair. They go into
battle shining.
Demaratus then warned
Xerxes that the contingent of Spartans sent out to engage his vast armies was
but a sample of Sparta's military enterprise, and he advised the king to attack
and conquer Sparta herself, since Sparta was herself so arrogant and timocratic
that no other nation would care to aid her. But Xerxes, being ignorant, ignored
Demaratus' advice.
Xerxes, for whatever
reason, permitted the Spartans and their allies a four-day recess from the
rigors of battle, but on the fifth day he attacked, ordering his Medes and
Cissians to capture the Spartans and bring them as captives to his camp. The
Persians suffered horrendous losses in their offensive because the Greek allies
fought so courageously in the narrow defile, employing their long battle lances
to great effect. Xerxes then sent in his crack troops (his
"Immortals") against the Greeks, who proved the "Immortals"
to be inaptly named by killing so many of them. Thus the Persians and the
Greeks fought for three days in the Hot Gates, and the Greeks grimly refused to
concede defeat. But the next day a traitor to the Greeks, a person named
Ephialtes, came and whispered in the king's ear. And again Xerxes laughed.
Xerxes laughed
because Ephialtes told him of a secret passage through the mountain, which
would bring the Persian troops down behind the Spartan ramparts. So that night
Xerxes sent his "Immortals" on their way to attack the Greeks from
the rear while another wave of his troops would accost them from the front. As
the "Immortals" ascended the mountain, they encountered a contingent
of Greeks (Phocians) who were stationed in the Persian line of march. The
Phocians fled up the mountain; the Persians advanced down the mountain to fall
upon Leonidas and his Spartans as the new day dawned.
So as false dawn
appeared, the Greeks at Thermopylae held a war council, where some of the
allies voted to stay and fight and some voted to flee. It is said that Leonidas
himself ordered the allies to vacate the Spartan ranks, but that the Spartans
themselves had no intention of ducking an opportunity to fight. But Leonidas
did permit the Thespians to stay and fight alongside him because they wanted
to, and he made the Thebans stay and fight because they certainly did not want
to. And so most of the allies left; the Spartans remained; and the day came on.
The beleaguered Greek
force of Spartans, Thespians, and their hostage Thebans were now of course
aware that the Persians had them bottled up in the place of the Hot Gates, and
the Greek scouts coming in from the heights confirmed the case. Thus it was
that, once the troops engaged on this fatal day, the Spartans sallied forth
from their ramparts and flew in the face of the Persian forces ascending in the
narrow pathway. By this time, the Greeks had shivered their battle lances and
were fighting with swords, battle-axes, daggers, bare hands, and teeth. Theirs
was the heroism and desperation of doomed men as they gathered back to back on
a hillock in the pass where the Persian bowmen inundated them with flight upon
flight of heavy war arrows. Immediately prior to the day's engagement, a
Trachinian scout had told Dieneces, a Spartan swordsman, that the barbarians
were so many that their arrow-flights would darken the sun. Dieneces replied:
"These are excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have
our fight in the shade."
By the time the last
of the Spartans had retreated to the hillock, Leonidas had been killed in
action, and so had Xerxes' two brothers. Apparently the Spartans carried
Leonidas' body with them to the hill, where they all went down in a shambles
together. Thus the three hundred Spartans perished at Thermopylae, and with
them fell their faithful Thespians.
Shortly before the
last of the fighting Greeks fell, the Thebans had tried to surrender to the
frustrated and enraged Persian front line, who executed the Thebans as they
tried to give themselves up. Xerxes did permit most of the remaining Thebans to
surrender to his tender mercies, whereupon he branded their bodies with the
royal mark, thereby granting them perpetual infamy.
As for Xerxes'
capacity for tolerance and the Platonic concept of international law, it seems
to have been null and void. The tyrant was so confounded by the manly conduct
of Leonidas that Xerxes searched out his body from the piled dead, severed the
head from the lifeless corpse, and caused the trunk to be nailed to a wooden
cross.
And the rest, as we
say, is history. There are many stories of men who for one reason or another
survived the Battle of Thermopylae; their lives and the manner of their deaths
await the curious reader.
In time Leonidas'
countrymen would erect a stone lion to his memory at the place of the Hot
Gates, and there too the Greeks placed a votive stone which reads:
Go, stranger, to
Lacedaemon and tell
War is a fascinating subject. Despite the dubious morality of using violence to achieve personal or political aims. It remains that conflict has been used to do just that throughout recorded history.
ReplyDeleteYour article is very well done, a good read.
War is a fascinating subject. Despite the dubious morality of using violence to achieve personal or political aims. It remains that conflict has been used to do just that throughout recorded history.
ReplyDeleteYour article is very well done, a good read.